Theme:
Society

19-20th

	Catalog of the Exhibition

Russian culture in Lithuania is part of the polyphonic culture of the  country. It is characterized by professional forms of modern urban culture - theater, music, and art. Two stars of Russian theater are connected with Lithuania - Vera Komisarzhevskaya and Vasily Kachalov. 

Vasily von Rotkirch. Memoirs of Teobald. Title page. Vilnius, 1890.

Pavel Kukolnik

The painter Ivan Trutnev was the head of an art school and trained a pleiad of famous artists. Literature occupies a special place. It was created by people of different aesthetic orientations, religious backgrounds, and ethnic origins: Pavel Kukolnik, who was of Austrian ancestry, Vasily von Rotkirch, who was descended from a line of German knights, Aleksander Navrotsky, who was born in St. Petersburg, and Aleksander Zhirkevich, who was an heir to nobles of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Diverse in genre and theme, fables, tragedies and dramas, poems, novellas and short stories, sketches and memoirs make up a rich library. Between the world wars important contributions were made to the cultural development of Lithuania by the artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, the opera singer and director Teofan Pavlovsky, the writer and journalist Arkady Bukhov, the culture historian and philosopher Lev Karsavin, and the historian Ivan Lappo. Also noteworthy in the Russian literary life of Vilnius were such celebrities as Vyacheslav Bogdanovich and Dorofei Bokhan as well as the poets Vasily Selivanov and Konstantin Olenin.

This heritage is being discovered anew by the Russians of Lithuania (roughly 308,000 people, who make up 8.7 percent of the total population of the country). It is valuable as a fruitful experience of cultural interaction.