Senasis Vilniaus Universitetas

This volume exemplifies the highest tier of diaspora intellectual production: a full-length scholarly monograph by a founding-generation national figure, published by an organized diaspora press infrastructure in London, circulated to Lithuanian communities worldwide as both a scholarly resource and a political instrument. The Nidas Knygų Klubas, operating from London in the 1950s, functioned as a transnational Lithuanian academic publisher without a state — commissioning, printing, and distributing serious scholarship to a scattered exile community. The fundraising broadside inserted into this copy reveals the human cost of this cultural survival: Biržiška himself, the author, was left destitute in old age, and the Lithuanian community organized a transnational relief effort through the same channels that distributed his books.

The book's central argument — that Vilnius University was fundamentally a Lithuanian institution whose Lithuanian character was systematically obscured by Polish and Russian historiography — carries enormous political weight in the diaspora context. Published while Vilnius was under Soviet occupation and Lithuania's independence was unrecognized, this scholarly reclamation of Vilnius served as a form of legal and cultural evidence: Lithuania's capital had always been Lithuanian, its university had always produced Lithuanian scholars, and therefore the Soviet occupation was an aberration against history. The detailed index of names (Vardų ir Veikalų Atranka) and bibliography function as archival testimony.

The layered materiality of this specific copy — ownership inscription, library sticker, yellow corrigenda slip, and loose fundraising broadside — transforms it from a book into a document of diaspora community life. Each layer was added by different hands at different moments: the publisher inserted the corrigenda, a community committee inserted the fundraising appeal, a reader inscribed ownership, a librarian added the catalog sticker. Together they record the social biography of a diaspora artifact moving through community hands over decades.

Identity preservation; Continuity statement explicit; Ideology stripped/softened — the original 1940/1942 Vilnius publication was backdated specifically to evade Nazi censorship, and the diaspora reprint explicitly continues this act of scholarly resistance; the book asserts Lithuanian ownership of Vilnius intellectual heritage against competing Polish and Soviet narratives