Didysis Nerimas
Introduction
Didysis Nerimas (The Great Unrest) is a substantial Lithuanian-language philosophical and religious work by Dr. Pr. Gaidamavičius, published in 1961 by the Immaculata Press in Putnam, Connecticut, a major center of Lithuanian diaspora Catholic publishing. The book examines the deep human restlessness that drives the soul toward or away from God, drawing on an exceptionally wide range of Western philosophers, writers, and theologians from Augustine to Camus and Dostoevsky. With a formal Catholic imprimatur and cover art by the distinguished Lithuanian-American artist V. K. Jonynas, the volume stands as a serious work of Catholic philosophical anthropology produced within the mid-twentieth-century Lithuanian diaspora intellectual tradition.
Community and publication context
Community and publication setting
Context and significance
Significance
Didysis Nerimas represents a high point of Lithuanian diaspora philosophical and Catholic theological writing, demonstrating that Lithuanian intellectuals in exile were active participants in mid-twentieth-century Western philosophical debates—engaging Camus, Jaspers, Marcel, Bergson, Berdiaev, and Dostoevsky alongside Lithuanian writers and thinkers—rather than merely preserving a static heritage. The volume's five-part structure moves from human nature through religious restlessness, drama, fulfillment, and loss, offering a synthesis of existentialist anxiety reframed within a Catholic anthropological vision.
The book also documents the vitality of the Putnam, Connecticut Lithuanian Catholic intellectual community, which sustained serious scholarly publishing in Lithuanian throughout the Cold War decades when such work was suppressed in Soviet-occupied Lithuania. The cover art by V. K. Jonynas, one of the most significant Lithuanian-American visual artists of the twentieth century, places the volume within the broader Lithuanian diaspora cultural renaissance. The wide name index preserving page references to European and Lithuanian figures alike makes this a useful primary source for the history of Lithuanian Catholic intellectual life in exile.
How this record carried memory
Diaspora scholarly publishing: production by the Immaculata Press in Putnam, Connecticut, a known Lithuanian Catholic diaspora press, enabled sustained Lithuanian-language intellectual and theological discourse outside Soviet-occupied Lithuania.
Record connections
People, places, and institutions linked in the catalog