His life is told in flashes, some of which Tūla is a part of and others that she isn’t, and the whole only comes into view slowly. The narrator himself is an almost comically stereotypical bohemian type: an alcoholic and a vagrant given to poetic soliloquies. The novel’s opening words, “Speak to me, Tūla, whisper to me”, set the desperate tone of the work and again and again the monologue returns to such melancholy pleas addressed directly to the character. Tūla consists of the loosely structured, first-person recollections of its unnamed male narrator, where the titular character Tūla, his one hopeless and lost love, provides the thematic through-line that binds the whole together.

Yet perhaps the most evocative depiction of the capital can be found in Jurgis Kunčinas’s 1993 novel Tūla, which shares some of Gavelis’s fascination with Vilnius’s dark underbelly, its literal and metaphorical viscera, but remains more grounded in the city as a rich, lived experience through its narrow, almost solipsistic focus on a single character. It is constantly beating in the background in the ambivalent nostalgia of Antanas Škėma’s White Shroud its intricacies occupy a central position in the more sober histories of Kristina Sabaliauskaitė and the apocalyptic textures of Vilnius Poker unfold the city into something more, a metaphysical, nightmarish dreamscape.

Read through its multiple iterations in Lithuanian literature, it’s difficult not to notice how the city of Vilnius has come to wrap itself in a thick, persistent fog of its own phantasmagorical and multifaceted mythology. LRT English presents a series of articles about seminal works by Lithuanian authors – all of them are available in English.

Jurgis kuncinas tula