COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The Vilnius University Party Committee collection reflects the official policy and attitudes towards teachers, researchers and students. The university administration and Party Committee tried to control the educational process and the creative expression of scholars and students. On the other hand, documents from the collection help us to better understand the creative ambitions of Lithuanian researchers and even students, which did not always comply with the official ideology.

The collection of the writer Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas holds various documents: notes, correspondence and manuscripts. The documents illustrate very well the situation of intellectuals and writers in Soviet Lithuania. The government considered Mykolaitis-Putinas to be a famous Lithuanian writer, but on the other hand it tried to control his creative work. During the Late Stalinist period, the writer was often criticised by Party officials.

The collection contains the personal papers of the émigré writer Vinko Nikolić and the archives of the literary quarterly Croatian Review, which the communist authorities banned in Croatia in 1945. Nikolić re-established the review in Argentina in 1951 and was its editor-in-chief until 1990. Additionally, the collection contains the archives of the Library of the Croatian Review, a publishing house founded by Nikolić in 1957. This rich collection is essential for researching the transnational network of post-war Croatian political émigrés, whose literary works were strictly prohibited and labelled as "hostile propaganda" in socialist Yugoslavia.