Įsikūrimas
Settlement · 1950–1955
Published in 1952 during the Settlement period.
This is the first Lithuanian-language translation of Pär Lagerkvist's Nobel Prize-winning novella 'Barabbas,' published in Chicago in 1952 by the diaspora press TERRA, translated by Stasys Vainoras with cover and interior artwork by renowned Lithuanian-American artist Romas Viesulas. It represents the Lithuanian diaspora's remarkable cultural ambition — not merely preserving Lithuanian heritage but actively translating world literature into Lithuanian during the bleakest years of Soviet occupation, keeping the language alive as a vehicle for universal literary culture. With only 1,500 copies printed and distributed across a scattered global diaspora, surviving physical copies are extremely rare and constitute an irreplaceable record of early Cold War Lithuanian-American literary publishing.
What It Is
This publication reveals the extraordinary cultural ambition of the early Lithuanian diaspora in Chicago, which refused to limit itself to preservation of pre-war Lithuanian culture alone but actively engaged with world literature, translating a work that would win the Nobel Prize in 1951 — just one year before this edition appeared — into Lithuanian for a community scattered across the globe. The choice of Lagerkvist's 'Barabbas,' a philosophically sophisticated meditation on faith, doubt, and identity, speaks directly to the existential condition of displaced Lithuanians: a people who had survived occupation, exile, and cultural erasure, grappling through literature with questions of belonging, witness, and what it means to live in the shadow of great historical events. TERRA's publication program demonstrates that the diaspora did not see Lithuanian merely as a domestic or folkloric tongue but as a full literary language capable of carrying universal human themes. The involvement of Romas Viesulas as cover and interior artist adds another layer of cultural significance. Viesulas went on to become a celebrated American printmaker and art educator, and this early diaspora work represents his contribution to Lithuanian cultural survival. The colophon page, with its mirror-reversed title stamp 'BARABAS' — likely a printing artifact from the press block — is a charming physical trace of the production process at M. Morkūnas spaustuvė, documenting the material culture of diaspora printing. The named printer, publisher, translator, and artist together constitute a micro-directory of the Chicago Lithuanian cultural infrastructure of the early 1950s.
Why It Matters
Culturally and historically, this book is a time capsule of the Lithuanian diaspora at a precise and desperate moment — 1952, seven years after the displacement of nearly 100,000 Lithuanians, with Soviet occupation now entrenched and no near-term prospect of return. That in this context the Chicago Lithuanian community chose to translate and publish Pär Lagerkvist's meditation on a man who witnessed the crucifixion but could not believe — a man defined by what happened to him rather than what he chose — speaks with extraordinary eloquence to the diaspora's own condition. This is not a book that needed to be published for community survival in any practical sense; it was published because the community refused to stop being a full literary culture.
The de facto capital of Lithuanian America for half a century.