Klaipėdos universitetas

In the last decades of the 19th century in several Warsaw journals were published (in reviews, chronicles and letters) critical opinions about lifestyle and hierarchy of values represented by rich Lithuanian gentry, spending winter months and carnival in the capital of the Kingdom of Poland. In the whole journal critics especially visible was argument concerning the absurdity of the system of value well-known by Lithuanian gentry. My article does not decide veracity and first of all facts concerning mocked and ridiculed by journalists style of behaviour of created by Lithuanian gentry system of value. Accepting however negative image as possible for some part of gentry, I raise a question (for the long time interesting for the social historians) about mechanisms of modernization of the social structures.