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 the local vernacular. Her statue, the work of the sculptor Petras Aleksandravičius and architect brothers Algimantas and Vytautas Nasvytis, was unveiled, somewhat strangely, at the height of the Cold War in 1970.