I’m back in the archives this week looking for various bits of information to fill gaps in draft chapters. I discovered that the Vytautas Magnus University Library has a collection of Soviet-era newspapers and magazines so I am working there. The best part — the materials are all on shelves in the reading room, which means that I don’t have to request them and wait for delivery. Plus it’s a restricted reading room, which means a quiet place to work because I am the only one there. Now that I have permission to use the collection, I pick up the key from the main library and let myself into my own private archival work space.
One of my interviewees gave me an article from Mokslas ir Gyvenimas [Science and Life] that condemns hippies in the West. The article had water damage and the bottom corner of each page was torn away so I wanted to find and copy a complete version. I didn’t know the publication year but I knew that it was from the late 1960s or early 1970s and not later than 1972. I did find the article (1967) — plus I found several other interesting articles for my research.
I was quite surprised to see that the cover of the May 1972 issue of Mokslas ir Gyvenimas [Science and Life] featured a large flame with a cityscape behind it. In a bizarre coincidence, that is the month and year that Romas Kalanta set himself on fire in Kaunas.
Amanda in Lithuania 
May 12th, 2011 at 4:11 pm
“…that condemns hippies in the West….”
Haha. I remember that article. Because of it, i got fascinated with hippies since my very very early childhood, and later at school was obsessed too (same like others) 😀 . I lost that magazine and couldn’t find for many years, later when i found it, it was not that interesting already, punks were rocking on horizon by that time :D. (There was 1 article about punks in “Literatūra ir Menas”, with 1 cool photo, and later 1 another article was published in “Nemunas” magazine, and that’s all).
“…featured a large flame with a cityscape behind it….”
City behind it obviously is Moscow (see Kremlin), the flame is ‘eternal fire’, well there were 2 very serious days on May: May 1 and May 9, one had expect live translation of military parades on May 9 (until the noon) and very serious reports about rotting capitalism and blooming socialism (since noon till evening) 😀 😀 .
May 26th, 2011 at 6:42 pm
Hmmm, maybe I can study Soviet punk rockers for my next project… 🙂
I didn’t think about May 1 and May 9 — that makes sense to have the eternal flame and now that I look again, I can see that it is Moscow. Thanks as always!