Lituanistica

Title

Lietuvos mokslų akademija — 2025-07-07

Lietuvos mokslų akademija — 2025-07-08

Seals of the Lands of Kyiv and Chernihiv in the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries: Between Law, Tradition, and Historical Memory

Oleg Odnorozhenko — 2025-07-08

The development of territorial sphragistics in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was based on a legal framework documented in relevant statutes, privileges, and Sejm resolutions. These acts regulated both the procedure for using land seals and their iconographic features. In practice, however, there are numerous examples of significant deviations from these provisions. Sometimes this can be explained by imprecise wording in the decisions, but more often it was due to the broad rights of local self-governing institutions that had the final say on the iconographic content of the respective seals. Despite the very clear provisions of Volhynia and Kyiv incorporation privileges of 1569, according to which the Crown eagle was to be depicted on land seals, local sphragistics continued to use heraldic motifs created before the Union of Lublin for a long time.
In the Volhynian Voivodeship, this situation changed only with the Sejm resolution of 1589: from then, various combinations of the old Volhynian cross symbol and the Crown’s single-headed eagle replaced the Lithuanian Vytis (Pogonia) on land seals. At the same time, Kyiv’s seals continued to use the image of the Lithuanian Vytis. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that it was finally replaced by the symbols of the Kyiv land – an angel and a bear combined with the coat of arms of the Crown. Despite all political realities and direct legal decisions, such a prolonged use of the coat of arms of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on the seals of the self-governing institutions of Kyiv nobility, indicates not only the continuity of the heraldic tradition but also the long-term political loyalty of the Kyiv nobility to their old homeland.
However, even this heraldic-sphragistic conflict between law and tradition in Kyiv, which lasted for over a century, cannot compare to the unexpected iconography of the land seal of the Chernihiv Voivodeship, newly established in 1635. The depiction of the Lithuanian Vytis in its field occurred contrary to the actual political situation: the incorporation of the voivodeship into the Crown of Poland and not into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It is true that a state-political connection existed between Lithuanian and Chernihiv lands in the second half of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, which most likely influenced the decision of the local nobility to use the Vytis motif to represent their region.

The Vanitas Stance in the Baroque Culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania A Search for Trajectories of Consciousness

Vaiva Kubeckienė — 2025-07-08

Starting from the origins of vanitas in the Old Testament and reviewing the vanitas wave in the Baroque period in Dutch culture, the article examines how this posture was expressed in Baroque Lithuania. It considers whether it was a mass phenomenon with self-evident meanings, or it should be referred to as discourse promoting reflective awareness. These questions are answered using a comparative hermeneutic analysis and the category of consciousness emphasised in the works of the sociologist Vytautas Kavolis.
Tracking consciousness trajectories helped to reveal three cultural areas: the biblical vanitas, the epicentre of Baroque vanitas in the Netherlands, and the specifics of vanitas expression in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. We noticed that the human posture in the Book of Ecclesiastes is very similar to the one that Kavolis described as a new ‘moral imagination’. As it questioned all the main aspects of human life, it was distinguished by a high level of consciousness-reflectivity. Ecclesiastes’ conclusion is the enjoyment of life, no matter how fragile or unjust it may be.
The visual art of the Netherlands, which became the epicentre of vanitas during the Baroque period, was a widespread discourse with its own symbolic expression and self-evident images that spoke of the proximity of death. These self-evident things are not necessarily reflective and internalised; they correspond more to the definition of collective consciousness rather than consciousness. However, reflectivity appears in the artist’s ingenuity: pictorial play, irony, compositional solutions.
In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania of the Baroque period, vanitas is a discontinuous discourse, which did not have much continuity with the culture of the Netherlands. In many cases, vanitas merged with the narrative of good death (bene moriendi), in which there is not much room for radical doubt, but which contains quite strict institutional frameworks of thinking. Also, in many cases, the statements and visual elements of vanitas extended the stance of the Book of Job. However, we found several ‘erosions’ in the prevailing trend: the use of the homo bulla allegory in the theme of funerals and the conscious suppression of vanitas in raising the theme of enjoyment of life. In this way, vanitas becomes an interesting indicator of the trajectories of consciousness and their change.

On the Sources of the Life of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski by Jan Poszakowski

Darius Antanavičius — 2025-07-08

De viris illustribus provinciae Lithuaniae Societatis Iesu, a huge collection of summaries of the lives of deceased members of the Lithuanian province of the Society of Jesus compiled by Jan Poszakowski SJ (1684–1757) in the middle of the eighteenth century, exists in manuscript till date and has not yet been thoroughly investigated from the point of view of the sources used by the compiler. This article is the first attempt to initiate such research in the form of a case study.
In 2024, a brief description of the life of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski SJ compiled by Poszakowski in the middle of the eighteenth century was published in volume 52 of Senoji Lietuvos literatūra [Early Lithuanian Literature]. Darius Antanavičius and Živilė Nedzinskaitė promptly responded to this publication with the article on the original necrology of Sarbiewski, which was published in Lituanistica (2024, vol. 70/4), in which the most plausible cause of Sarbiewski’s death (i.e., tuberculosis) was suggested as well. The actual paper deals with the problem of written sources, which Poszakowski used while compiling his description of Sarbiewski’s life. Ona Dilytė-Čiurinskienė considered it being an authentical text written by Poszakowski and reflecting his views about Sarbiewski, while it appeared that Poszakowski merely translated the text about Sarbiewski published in the famous Korona polska (vol. 4, pp. 38–39) by Kasper Niesiecki in 1743 from Polish to Latin. In addition, Poszakowski copied two sentences from Bibliotheca scriptorum Societatis Iesu by Nathanael Southwell. As a result, the conclusion is drawn that Poszakowski’s text is of no significance in terms of independent bio-bibliographical source on the life of the famous poet. The similarities between the two texts examined are presented in Table 3.

What the Locations of Settlements and Textual Data Reveal about the Tatars

Rita Baranauskienė — 2025-07-08

The Tatars of Lithuania are one of the oldest ethnic minorities residing in the Republic of Lithuania. Ethnically and culturally distinct from the dominant majority of the country’s population, the Tatars have preserved their culture, national identity, and religious traditions.
This article aims to discuss the historical and cultural situation of the Tatar minority in Lithuania, analyse their settlements, examine place names associated with Tatars, and explore the conceptualisation of Tatars. The research material was collected from the Lithuanian Spatial Information Portal (https://www.geoportal.lt/), the Catalogue of Lithuanian Place Names at the Institute of the Lithuanian Language, and the texts from the press included in the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language. The semantics of place names referring to settlements were studied using semantic analysis, considering the semantic features and motivations of these names. The representation of Tatars in the corpus was analysed using corpus linguistics, interpretative, and descriptive methods.
The semantic analysis of place names with the root totor- indicates that these names are often linked to Tatar settlements, history, and culture. The data from the Contemporary Lithuanian Language Corpus, examined from semantic perspectives –
psychological, social, physical, locational, demographic, national, and religious – provide a deeper understanding of the formation of the Tatar image in the Lithuanian language, reveal existing stereotypes, and highlight the Tatars’ cultural heritage.

A Monograph or a Recurrence of Earlier Articles?