Vilnius : three short stories
by Kristina Sabaliauskaitė
Description:
A journey across time and space. A journey into the soul, despair and the meaning of art. A young polish woman finds solace in art and the company of Wehrmacht troops in occupied Lithuania. The girl's school where she studies is opened by the influence of art to a wider world she is forced to inhabit and must learn to love.
An elderly KGB agent is confronted by an ideological past which crosses time to haunt his last days. Soviet Man is a long dead dream killed by the descendants of those oppressed because of art. Soviet monolith art and culture is once again overcome by the new past overcoming the old new. The KGB man stares at an IV bag as he ponders mortality and the resurrected God culture he tried to kill.
The Vilnius ghetto becomes an old movie from the memory shadow of an elderly Jewish man returning to the new old neighborhood vanished by the old new communist state and the totalitarian war that leveled the decorated past. Even the bread he loved has a new name and yet the shadows are stubborn and persist. His true love lies in the mass graves outside the city-a Nazi victim and the ethnic hubris still haunting the present. His modern girlfriend, a creator of bad art, connects him to the dead with her art strangely appearing in his old neighborhood. The spirit of the genuine old love is ignited by the corrupted new love.