A Short History of Vilnius University

After a year of struggling with this book I have finally finished it. I would've abandoned it ages ago, if it weren't for the magic of putting me to sleep during nights when I have insomnia. It didn't used to be like this, though. It all started with enthusiasm (both the book itself and me reading it).

‘Look what I found', said my friend to me, as we were browsing the English language section of a second hand book store in Leipzig. Were we in Vilnius, I doubt this book would've spiked my interest, but I was over a thousand kilometers away from my hometown, and this book was a peace of it.

I gave this book two stars because the first period it covered, from 1579 to 1773, was the part I read with enthusiasm. It felt like an actual history book, had good English (the book was written in the Soviet Union), and many of the facts stated there coincide with what I read in a book about the history of Vilnius written in 2016. But that was only the first 40 pages. The second part took of on a similar note, yet slowly degraded into what I would call a listicle.

Why I call this book a listicle

Different parts were written by different people. A. Šidlauskas, who wrote the first 40 pages, happens to be one of the general editors of the book, and these 40 pages were the only thing he wrote. I don't know if the quality is solely due to his writing skills, or to the fact that he didn't have as many names as the writers of other parts to put into never ending lists of names you will never remember.

I don't know if I can call it a listicle, since it doesn't follow the structure of listicles we encounter online, but the majority of the text is comprised of lists. Imagine a list. Let's say, scholars, their publications and years of publication:

Name Surname 1 - Name of publication 1 - Some date
Name Surname 2 - Name of publication 2 - Some other date

In some date, Name Surname 1 published Name of publication 1, where he discussed topic. Name Surname 2 published Name of publication 2 in Some other date. [...] Name Surname 5 worked extensively in Name of Field and published Name of publication 5 in some date 5.

but

The Lithuanian literary criticism of the first decades of the present century was discussed by Prof. Vanda Zaborskaitė in her book Problems of Realism in Lithuanian Literary Criticism 1905-1917 (1957), whilst the year 1956 saw the publication of Critical Realism in Lithuanian Prose (the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century) by Irena Kostevičiūtė and The Works of Jonas Biliūnas by Meilė Lukšnienė. the latter gives a vivid account of the life and work of the well-known Lithuanian prose writer, Jonas Biliūnas, showing the importance of his works, quite novel in themselves, for the development of critical realism.

actual

An important event in this respect was the publication of the treatise Teoria jestestw organicznych by the above-named professor of chemistry, Jędrzej Śniadecki.

Surely among all those names and dates you learned something useful

bourgeoisie

Should you read this book?

not