Orthodox Cathedral of the Assumption, in Vilnius
by: Paul Jaskunas
Paul Jaskunas writes about some of the inspiration of place behind his new novel, "The Atlas of Remedies". All photos here were taken by the author in 2001.
When I first arrived, the city was bright with snow; every breath hung frozen in the air. In a dream some nights before my flight, I’d envisioned Vilnius to be a winter wonderland of sorts, and so it first impressed me, over two decades ago, long before the Baltics were brought into the E.U. fold, before the euro and skyscrapers arrived. In the winter of 2001, Vilnius still appeared to be iced in, suspended in frosty limbo between east and west. You half expected to see sleighs gliding along the Old Town streets.
It was not uncommon then to hear foreigners like myself marveling at the shabby novelty of the city, its wintry fairytale quality. Though on more than one occasion, I heard a Lithuanian friend remark that to discover the real Baltic winter, one had to visit the village. Which village? Oh, any village would do, for only outside the slush-driven streets of the larger town, only in the pastoral quiet of snow-laden orchards, of birch-lined lanes and forests could the real magic of Lithuanian winter be felt.
An arch in the Old Town of Vilnius
Many denizens of Vilnius then and now had parents or grandparents in remote villages. They would visit on holidays, in summer, and for the fall potato harvest, and would return to their urban flats with wicker baskets full of jars of pickles, blocks of farmers cheese, apples, pears, and wild mushrooms and berries from the forest. The village remained, for many new urbanites, an alternative home, the land they or their parents had left behind for opportunities elsewhere. The village could be mocked for its backwardness and ignorance, but because it had been left, because the family tie to the land was growing tenuous, the village became an object of sentimental affection, too.
The longing for a forsaken home and the allure of a city still discovering itself – these would become the magnetic poles around which my short novel The Atlas of Remedies revolved. My attraction to the subject had something to do with my family’s history. My paternal grandfather’s parents had abandoned their own villages at the turn of the twentieth century in exchange for new lives in the United States. Their journey aroused my curiosity. What had they left behind? How had it felt to pass from such a pastoral and comparatively simple way of life to the complexity of a place like Manhattan, where they first lived, or Chicago, where they eventually settled?
Inside the Cathedral of the Assumption
Such questions had led me to Lithuania in the first place, and would keep me there for the next two years. Not for another two decades, though, would I begin to publish much writing related to my time in the country. I could attribute the delay to many factors, though all have something to do with the distractions of youth and early middle age. In those decades, I met and married my wife Solveiga; we had two children; I began life as an academic and chased after other book ideas. In short, life became cluttered. For a long time, when I tried to the write the story that would become The Atlas of Remedies, it too became cluttered.
Growing older allowed me to see and feel more keenly what was and was not essential. It allowed me to clear out the clutter and focus attention on the people caught between those poles: the village and the city, home and adventure, innocence and experience.
In writing such a story, one risks slipping into sentimentality. Just as the city-dweller may romanticize village life from afar, a writer approaching the distant past may succumb to his own gauzy illusions. I was well aware of these dangers, though one can become exceedingly fearful of them. The writing in Atlas, as well as in some of the Lithuanian-adjacent poems in my chapbook Mother Ship, does risk sentiment; it plays with fantasy and illusion. For so too do our hearts, as we pass from one homeland to another. So too do our longings as we form families, or say goodbye to them, and rush headlong into uncharted futures.
In a sense, my friends were right about winter in the villages. On a snowy day, such distant clusters of homes ringed by forests and fields may kindle in the visitor visions of a past not quite within reach, a human story almost in plain sight, yet now gone, irretrievably gone from this earth. From such inklings, Atlas was made.
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Paul Jaskunas is the author of two works of fiction: The Atlas of Remedies (Stillhouse Press) and Hidden (Free Press), which received the Friends of American Writers Award. He has also published two short volumes of poetry: Mother Ship, a chapbook, and Drawing Lessons, a collection of ekphrastic poetry in conversation with the art of Warren Linn. His writing has appeared in numerous periodicals, including the THINK, Tab, America, Spiritus, and the New York Times. He edits Full Bleed, a journal of art and literature published annually by the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he has taught literature and writing since 2008.
Find out more about his writing here.
January 22, 2025