Insomnia: The Latvian Novel Unpublishable Under the Soviets
"The novel Insomnia ... possesses no artistic quality of any kind. In reality it is not a novel, but a pamphlet hostile towards Soviet rule."Continue Reading →
The Interwar Plan for a “Backup Lithuania”: An Interview with Karolis Kaupinis
"Searching for solutions on a large scale, he didn’t find any on the small scale. That’s pretty usual among people."Continue Reading →
Meming in a Minority Language: Young Latgalians and the Internet
Recent research has given an overview of what young Latgalian-speaking people want to see and hear online in their languageContinue Reading →
Between Two Shores: A Visual Love Letter to the Curonian Spit
Formed almost 5,000 years ago by sand deposits and barely a mile across, the Curonian Spit extends from the coast of Lithuania into RussiaContinue Reading →
An Eccentric Cold War Education: Revisiting the Lithuanian Gymnasium in Germany
"Perhaps we did not have science labs then, or a proper gym, or even art classes, or music — other than someone cranking out polkas on an accordion... Yet I…Continue Reading →
Searching for Nikolajs Hercbergs: the Mystery Man Who Photographed Riga
Nikolajs Hercbergs took thousands of pictures of Latvia's capital during the interwar years for reasons that are still unclearContinue Reading →
Sillamäe: Inside a Former Soviet Secret City in Estonia
Sillamäe was a ‘closed city,’ often referred to by codenames and guarded within a military perimeter – often it didn’t even appear on maps.Continue Reading →
Riga’s Cholera Curves: Visualising Past Pandemics
Riga's urban geography provided clues to the links between environmental conditions, social inequalities and public healthContinue Reading →
The Steps We Took to Remember: Lithuanian Dancing in Postwar Britain
“This festival,” wrote my mother, “is a means of promoting understanding and reconciliation amongst all the European countries who suffered so much during the War years.”Continue Reading →
The Shadow in the East: An Interview with Aliide Naylor
"When Trump ascended to the US presidency I started looking more about what the division of the world into the great power blocs again might mean for the Baltic states"Continue Reading →
Visions of the Future from Interwar Kaunas
‘In the evening, when dusk falls over Kaunas, their colossal bronze heads are illuminated with powerful spotlights. From here, one can see all of Kaunas.’Continue Reading →
The Chameleon West: Lithuania as a Set for Soviet Cinema
Vilnius and Kaunas often stood in for Western cities in Soviet films. Does this still fuel misperceptions about the Baltic states in the Soviet era?Continue Reading →