Lietuvių Tautos Kelias į Naująjį Gyvenimą
Įsikūrimas
Settlement · 1950–1955
Published in 1953 during the Settlement period.
This is Volume II of Mykolas Biržiška's monumental historical-cultural study of the Lithuanian national awakening, published in Los Angeles in 1953 by one of interwar Lithuania's most distinguished scholars and former Vilnius University rector. Written in exile, it documents the deeds, campaigns, and actors of the awakening Lithuanian nation — a definitive scholarly synthesis produced under diaspora conditions by a man who lived through the events he describes. As both primary testimony and rigorous scholarship, it occupies a unique position at the intersection of historical documentation and diaspora intellectual production.
What It Is
This volume exemplifies the diaspora intellectual's counter-archival mission: in the absence of access to Lithuanian institutions now under Soviet control, Biržiška reconstitutes the narrative of Lithuanian national becoming from memory, prior scholarship, and documents he carried into exile. The very existence of a rigorously footnoted, multi-volume scholarly history produced in Los Angeles in 1953 testifies to the extraordinary institutional density of the early Lithuanian-American diaspora — that such a work could be typeset, printed, distributed, and read demonstrates a community with functional publishing infrastructure, literate audiences, and shared commitment to scholarly standards even in displacement. The content itself is a primary record of the cultural survival mechanisms Biržiška himself participated in: the press ban resistance, the role of Catholic clergy as language vessels, the proliferation of underground periodicals, the formation of youth organizations, and the emergence of a secular intelligentsia alongside religious leadership. His discussion of figures like Jakštas, Šliūpas, Valančius, Basanavičius, and the entire ecosystem of pre-independence Lithuanian cultural production is not merely historical narration — it is an act of transmission, ensuring that diaspora youth and future generations can trace the lineage of their cultural inheritance.
Why It Matters
Mykolas Biržiška is to Lithuanian cultural history what Michelet was to French national historiography — a scholar-patriot whose life spanned the movement he documented, and whose exile writings carry both the authority of participant witness and the discipline of rigorous scholarship. That Volume II of his capstone synthesis survives in a Detroit school library, having traveled from occupied Lithuania through DP camps to Los Angeles to Michigan, is itself a story of cultural survival. The book documents the precise mechanisms — underground press networks, Catholic organizational structures, youth societies, satirical journals, multilingual intelligentsia — by which a peasant population became a self-conscious nation, and does so with a specificity and biographical density unavailable in any other single source.
