Jurgis Kunčinas - This remarkable love story, told by an unnamed narrator and at times in the shape of a bat, takes us through a world that was closed to the West, and furthermore, into a part of it we would have been unlikely to know even in our own society: the world of drunks, vagabonds, drifters, the mentally ill.

Jurgis Kunčinas, Tūla, Trans. by Elizabeth Novickas, Pica Pica Press, 2016.
excerpt


The unnamed narrator of Jurgis Kuncinas's Tula is our tour guide through the infamous poverty-stricken bohemian quarter of Vilnius known as Uzupis (literally, "beyond the river"), living his life on the fringes of society, including his journeys through various institutions for alcohol treatment. On the way we meet a number of curious inhabitants of this unique district, everyone from a chemistry professor with an exhibitionist problem to the descendant of a 15th-century Lithuanian hetman obsessively carving wooden masks all night long. It's a place where you're likely to encounter people walking both sides of the moral line, where one is just as likely to run into great kindness as unfeeling evil, and where the complex history and mix of cultures that make up the city of Vilnius constantly intrude into the present. But at the very heart of the narrative is the narrator's tragic love for the equally misfit Tula, a love the narrator carries with him, both figuratively and literally, throughout his chaotic existence. The action, which sometimes takes the form of the narrator's fantastic visions of visiting his love in the guise of a bat, includes a hitchhiking trip through Ukraine and Crimea, and takes place over a number of years spanning a good part of the late Soviet era.
Considered a modern-day classic of Lithuanian literature, Tūla won the Lithuanian Writers' Union award for the best book of 1993 and is now in its third edition in Lithuania. It has previously been translated into Russian, Swedish, and Polish.


The main actor and narrator is a discarded, washed-out man, a hopeless alcoholic and a tattered student. He's not the first in the literature of the world, and one aspect of his particularly brings Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov to mind-namely, that like that other searcher, he is a human-metaphor, depicting a human as a loving creature in the tragical existential-crisis world it falls to him to live in. This hero and his loved one, Tūla, not only live in that world, but personalize it, turning, through the human metaphor, into its direct children ... the entire book, all of the events, the hero's wanderings, separations, and short encounters with Tūla, is really only the boundless hunger of the soul, transformed by an agony of longing into things, birds, beasts, blossoms, and a vision of the loved one. - Rimvydas Silbajoris


You may have heard of Užupis, that run-down artists’ pocket of Vilnius, Lithuania, cut off from the Old Town by a bend in the Vilnelė (Vilnia), a pleasant little river if ever there was one and not too deep to wade across, as happens several times in Jurgis Kunčinas’s novel Tūla. You may have read about the Republic of Užupis, declared in 1997, in a travel magazine, or on the internet; the Wikipedia article gives a nice summary of the wackiness. At that time, capitalism, seeing the potential in its location, was gaining a foothold, and whoever could grabbed a bit of real estate, cheap. The handwriting was on the wall, but the residents revolted, and to this day fight encroachments as best they can. When you visit it now, it’s a charming place, a mix of lovingly restored buildings and the remains of old wrecks (though fewer and fewer of those). And no McDonald’s.

Užupis courtyard, unrestored, in 2000.
Photograph by the author.Earlier, though, in Soviet times, it was a considerably rougher place. It is this version of Užupis that figures in Tūla. Or at least, Kunčinas’s fiction of a place called Užupis. It’s not particularly pretty, and at times can feel quite threatening, although there is a love story, a beautiful one, at the very heart of it. It could also quite accurately be classified as a bohemian novel, albeit of a bohemian life in Lithuania at a time when Lithuania was completely subsumed under the Soviet yoke. It’s not just that there are Party slogans and Russian phrases everywhere; it’s also things like the blue milítsiya jeeps the unnamed narrator finds so terrifying. That word milítsiya, incidentally, has no English equivalent; it’s neither police, who are subservient to a local civilian administration, nor what we think of as militia, which is a volunteer defense force. Military police would perhaps be closest, but what country uses military police to keep order among its citizens?

A building used as an artists’s canvas. Photograph by the authorLike every place anyone has lived, the narrator finds himself simultaneously attracted and repelled by it. It is the site of both suffering and of happiness; the place where he spends the memorable week with his lover Tūla and years wandering the streets (or working perforce at a conveyor belt). Although the novel’s time frame is the declining years of the Soviet empire, the still-older history of the city intrudes everywhere, from an electric transformer left over from the days of Pilsudski’s rule to the remains of Sigismund Augustus’s water pipes. It’s a graceful interweaving of the many presences still wandering Užupis’s streets amidst a doomed love affair, alcohol (lots of alcohol), and poverty.

Between the narrator’s fanciful flights in the shape of a bat and his unforgettable lovemaking in a field of burdock, Tūla did its part, too, to create the legend of Užupis. The three mottos declared by the Republic of Užupis, “Don’t Fight,” “Don’t Win,” and “Don’t Surrender,” could very well be the mottos of this novel. The narrator, despite being besieged from every direction, continues to reject the “normal” life:

The vagabonds and brodyagi shake my hand, rock me by the shoulder, crush my bones, thrust tattooed fists under my nose, and others—their relatives and the blue coats—chase me out of the stairways. They threaten to call whom and where needed, promise to stuff me into a windowless cell, but I’m still alive, I’m walking with Tūla and I spit at your furnished apartments with a bidet and life-sized stuffed animals! From the highest roof in Vilnius!

The door handle of St. Anne’s Church in Vilnius. Photograph by the author.Appalled as the reader may be at the conditions the narrator lives under or his forced incarcerations for alcoholism, and as dismayed as she might be sometimes at the narrator himself, she still finds herself drawn into this bleak little world, with cats jumping in the windows and crazy landladies using the kitchen sink for a toilet. Chatty, digressive, lyrical at times, this book offers a companion whose moral failings are offset as much by his openness and self-effacement as by his irony and erudition. When the reader finds herself being judgmental, the narrator reminds her of what his Uncle Hans used to say: “We’re just feeble creatures, there’s no need to be ashamed of our weakness, physiology, or the flaws we’ve inherited from unknown ancestors!” It is in the narrator’s own willingness to forgive himself those weaknesses that the reader, too, finds her own weaknesses forgivable. - Elizabeth Novickas

http://vilniusreview.com/articles/145-adrift-in-uzupis


excerpt:

MY sensitive nostrils, overstrained by the city, quiver, but I no longer have any spare exits, I have no spare feelings, no spare parts in my imperfect little bat body; perhaps that’s why my love is so short—so intoxicating and so simple—a love that can neither lose anything any more, nor overcome anything; so that’s why I watch over you, together with the lilacs, on the ceiling above your shallow cot: I see you, in your dreary sleep, throw your arm aside, uncover the trembling expanse of the heart, and then, then, entirely unexpectedly, a bluish cluster of lilac with two green leaves falls on your chest. I wave my little leathery wings, and now the lilac falls like rain—in clusters, tufts, twigs: violet, greenish, hardened into clots of blossoms; soft lilacs, you know, the kind that bloom and wilt in the overgrown garden plots outside the city where farmsteads used to stand, next to the woods, on foundations that have already crumbled.

     The lilacs fall, spinning around in the cold air, spreading blossoms over your hair, falling into your unwept tears, sticking to your barely open mouth, winding in strands around your slender neck, darkening on your belly, falling over your bed, the floor, the boxes with dusty albums and memories, descending into the pitcher with water left for the night, while other clusters, bouquets, blooms, failing to find a place to settle, spin a bit longer, and then disintegrate into tiny stars, so much like the fantastic creatures in the depths of the sea. And I dive into the darkness and crash painfully into the window—that would never happen to a real bat! I smile and curl my lip, while black blood oozes from the tiny mouse snout. No one sees where it drips... And where is that? The black blood drips on your bed, unwillingly soaks through the fabric, and now it’s dripping onto the black clinker tiles under your eternal cot, Tūla, Tūla...

     Lying on my back on the grayish window sill, I see that the cloud lying on Békés Hill suddenly stirs and descends, whistling, at an impossible speed, straight at the house with an apse on the bank of the Vilnelė, straight at us, at you, Tūla, at me...

VIOLETA DAVOLIŪTĖ: THE CITY AND THE CITYSCAPE IN TWO LITHUANIAN NOVELS: JURGIS KUNČINAS' TŪLA AND RIČARDAS GAVELIS' VILNIAUS POKERIS


Jurgis Kunčinas (1947-2002) was a prolific writer and translator whose work includes poetry, novels, essays, short stories, and children's books. His works have also been translated into German, Latvian, and Estonian and are particularly popular in Russia; a number of his works have been translated and there is even a fan site (in Russian), kuncinas.com.