Born into an impoverished Polish-speaking family with aristocratic roots and affectations, as a child the Lithuanian novelist Žemaitė (real name Julija Beniuševičiūtė-Žymantienė, 1845-1921) was forbidden to speak Lithuanian, at the time the language of the common people. Inquisitive and defiant, the young Žemaitė made friends with local serfs and was soon fluent in her mother tongue, the language in which she was eventually to write in. Self taught and unusually political for a woman at the time, Žemaitė’s sombre tales concentrate on issues surrounding the miseries of peasant life and family squabbles, all written in a vernacular style as spoken by rural Lithuanian-speakers of the time. Her statue, the work of the architect brothers Algimantas and Vytautas Nasvytis who are also responsible for the interior of the Neringa restaurant and the Seimas among other things, was unveiled somewhat strangely at the height of the Cold War in 1970.
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Žemaitė
Born into an impoverished Polish-speaking family with aristocratic roots and affectations, as a child the Lithuanian novelist Žemaitė (real name Julija Beniuševičiūtė-Žymantienė, 1845-1921) was forbidden to speak Lithuanian, at the time the language of the common people. Inquisitive and defiant, the young Žemaitė made friends with local serfs and was soon fluent in her mother tongue, the language in which she was eventually to write in. Self taught and unusually political for a woman at the time, Žemaitė’s sombre tales concentrate on issues surrounding the miseries of peasant life and family squabbles, all written in a vernacular style as spoken by rural Lithuanian-speakers of the time. Her statue, the work of the architect brothers Algimantas and Vytautas Nasvytis who are also responsible for the interior of the Neringa restaurant and the Seimas among other things, was unveiled somewhat strangely at the height of the Cold War in 1970.