Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis

The subject of this research is feminine gender roles in Kristina Sabaliauskaitė’s Silva rerum and Kerstin Thorvall’s The Story of Signe. The aim of the thesis is to identify the most common traditional and non-traditional gender roles of women in historical literary narratives by two women writers. The study identifies six gender roles of women: four traditional (mother and wife, daughter and care-giver/housewife), and two non-traditional (adventurer and competitor). The research shows that in historical literary narratives, despite the space-time of the novels, the main semantic axis remains the traditional gender roles of women. The failure to fulfil traditional gender roles determines the emergence of non-traditional gender roles, and a negative impact on the state of women in the novels.

In 1944, as the Eastern Front was approaching Lithuania, which was then still occupied by Nazi Germany, and the Red Army retook the country, a substantial number of civilians and former members of paramilitary organisations joined the armed resistance to sovietisation. For a long time, the history of the anti-Soviet armed resistance, or guerrilla war, in Lithuania has been told as a story of men, dominated by descriptions of their combat action and stories of the dead. The memories of women, mainly helpers and messengers, have been treated as a supplement to this image, but not as a formative factor. Insufficient attention has also been paid to the role of women who fought with weapons in their hands, and the narratives of those who acted simultaneously as partisans and wives and mothers. The aim of this article is to take a multifaceted look at the experiences of women who contributed to the armed anti-Soviet resistance in Lithuania. It aims to discuss the changing attitudes of the partisan leadership towards women’s participation in action, to show the diversity of female activity in the partisan war, and to reveal how their involvement in the war contributed to changes in their family roles.

Between 1944 and 1953, the Soviet security forces sought to suppress the armed resistance in Western Ukraine and Lithuania by applying similar kinds of measures. These resistance movements were not directly related to each other, but there were similarities and differences. In Western Ukraine, the movement covered a bigger area, with a correspondingly larger number of people living there, and the fighting, especially in the initial period, was fiercer compared to Lithuania. The article compares these anti-Soviet resistance movements according to several criteria. The author puts the main focus on issues of the suppression of the resistance, comparing the situations in Western Ukraine and Lithuania at the time. He examines critically the material left by the Soviet security forces, and analyses the use of the agency and military actions against the partisans. The research is based mostly on Soviet security agency documents preserved in the Haluzevyĭ derz͡havnyĭ arkhiv Sluz͡hby bezpeky Ukraïny (Sectoral State Archives of the SBU, the Ukrainian Security Service) in Kyïv. This material has not yet been widely used by Lithuanian historians, although it is relevant for understanding the mechanisms of the activities of the Soviet security forces, not only in Western Ukraine, but also in Lithuania.

Over the 20th c., the city of Grodno changed its political dependence more than once; at the end of World War II and in the postwar period, it experienced cardinal changes in the composition of its population. By interpreting the city as a palimpsest, the author examines the process of re-reading and rewriting of the meanings in the palimpsest that took place in Grodno in the 20th c. The author highlights the breaks and the continuity in the maintenance of the meanings and discusses the strategies applied to legitimate one’s presence in the city. The article discloses the meanings in the course of studies how the processes of cultural appropriation of Grodno changed the area of the city as a system of references consisting of the symbolism of a network of city streets, squares, individual buildings, religious sites, and other.

The paper gives an overview of military developments on the final stage of Second World War in the East Prussia territory. The events in this area had been sticked in collective German memory as an Apocalypse. The extensive crimes committed by the conqueror, the motives for the mass criminality in East Prussia are examined as well. These events left a collective trauma in the culture of German remembrance, but the consequences for the Soviet Union were also negative.