PAULIUS SAUDARGAS

Research field: biophysics.

DOI: doi.org/10.35321/all84-15

FROM PASTOGĖS, TROLLS’ TEETH

Algirdas Patackas wrote: „In the sixth and seventh decades of the last century, a group of young people, unable to endure the stench of the system that had already begun to rot, gathered into a community. <...> When one of them, Mindaugas Tomonis, died or was killed, they fulfilled his behest – they began publishing the underground cultural journal Pastogė (Pastogė is intended for those who wish to create freely), and when it was suppressed, they continued the work they had begun by publishing the collection Ethos.“^¹ It would seem that these two sentences contain a retrospective of the struggle waged at that time by A. Patackas and his underground comrades. Later, A. Patackas himself also suffered at the hands of the regime: in 1986, he was arrested by the KGB and, in his own words, „lowered into the ranks“. From the underground Pastogė to the KGB basement… Why Pastogė? The underground, after all, should gather beneath the floor, in a basement or bunker, as the partisans hid. In the context of the building allusion, there are indeed two possible choices. Both the basement space beneath the floor and the attic space above the ceiling fall outside the prosaic world of the home. People do not usually live there; rather, parallel things concealed from everyday domestic life take place there. Those same partisans, caught by the NKVD, often hid not only beneath the floor but also „upstairs“, where, if a thorough search was not conducted, unwelcome guests might not stray. From the attic one can see farther – yes, according to A. Patackas, the name was motivated by Mindaugas Tomonis himself. Thus, a claim resounds not to crawl into the „traditional“ underground, but to act somehow differently. What does „to see farther“ mean? To notice the approaching enemy from farther away? It is doubtful that the „attic-dwellers“ wanted to encode a level of self-preservation in the title; apparently, they were speaking about an intellectual gaze. According to A. Patackas, Pastogė was meant to fill the missing cultural, intellectual niche of the underground press. LKB Kronika was a fact-based publication that, with its naked truth and elusiveness, drove the KGB to despair. Kronika, having performed fundamental work, essentially met the needs of the Lithuanian underground press in this segment, but it did not aspire to either literary or philosophical heights, since it was a chronicle of repression.

^¹ Patackas Algirdas 2011: Pastogės Lietuva, Aidai, 170.

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From Pastogės into the trolls’ teeth

A. Patackas wrote: „[…] one had to choose: either to enter the culture of lies or not to enter it. And what should one do then? If you do not enter it, you have to lie; if you do not enter it, you cannot express yourself, you can carry everything only within yourself, because you are very constrained. You remain without lying, but you remain unrealized.“ Thus Pastogė becomes a medium for dissident youth wishing to create. For those who yearn not only to set out their views but also to leave their mark on literature, poetry, and philosophy. To be above, to be in the attic. In the basement you tap out a message in Morse code; in the attic you speak in verse. The content is similar, but the form is different. The idea is very strong – underground information is intended not only for exchanging information or declaring a struggle against the system, but also for creating a world of intellectual creativity, an alternative to the empire of lies. You can write and publish in the official press, but then the texts will have to be sterile of politics and religion; you can write for the drawer, or you can write nothing. Yet you can also write for an underground publication that will not have a broad readership, but which, as we now see from a greater historical perspective, will remain inlaid in history with great dignity. To stand with one’s head held high, to be above, to be in the attic.

Strange, however, the need for such an intellectual attic and for bold „attic-dwellers“ did not disappear even after three decades of freedom... A. Patackas’s thoughts, already voiced during the period of Independence, resonate anew in our own day. „Now there is no direct coercion, but there is another kind of coercion, one with a much more refined form.“

^² Can all intellectuals even now truly write and speak what they think freely? The fear of being sent into the ranks or to Siberia is replaced by the fear of being ridiculed by fashionable „influencers“. The fear of physical reprisal is replaced by the fear of public condemnation. The fear of remaining a white crow zombifies the intellect itself, and we become obedient, no longer merely silent but also thinking mankurts. This is the price of solitary freedom. The price of freedom that dominates at the expense of other values. An immature and intellectually vulnerable society that has won freedom can very quickly turn it into chaos or simply another regime. A. Patackas wrote: „Morality and freedom are inseparable; without the former there is no latter. To exchange these concepts is to make a fatal, unforgivable mistake. This applies especially to Lithuanians, as people of an ethical culture.“ ^³ Having thrown off the tyrant from our necks, we may fail to notice how an entire guard of false prophets and Pharisees will gradually take his seat there, worshipping no longer the ideal of the freedom already won, but only its idol in the kingdom of crooked thinking. A. Patackas wrote: „For those who have a vice want the whole world to acknowledge their vice as not a vice – then it is easier to live. Instead of fighting that vice within oneself, whether winning or losing. If they fought the good fight, as St. Paul says, perhaps it would be forgiven, perhaps they would ultimately win. But no, on the contrary, they want to rearrange the world so that that vice would be recognized as not a vice.“^⁴ A. Patackas himself, more than once

^² Ibid., 28.

^³ Ibid., 42.

^⁴ Ibid., 31.

Language and destiny / Language and destiny

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harried by modern „influencers“ and „trolls“, answers them through the poet and brother Gintaras Patackas in „Algirdas Patackas’s speech, delivered at his own funeral through the lips of his brother Gintaras“:

My brothers are not broilers, I did not roost with them in a henhouse, Falcons are my brothers In the Heights...

What can I say to you, trolls, Hang on the trolleybus wires: – You were clods and will remain clods, You are merely food for hyenas!^⁵

A. Patackas was a man of straightforward speech and courageous action. A unique combination, when a bodybuilder’s muscles conceal a sensitive soul and a profound intellect. His self-taught yet highly insightful expeditions into ethnolinguistic strata will one day place A. Patackas beside the most perceptive geniuses of linguistics, while his uncompromising duel with the Soviet repressive structures has already inscribed Algirdas in the granite of the pantheon of Lithuanian dissidents.

Into faith, into flow, Into the streaming of fresh divinity, For we are going, as we went – Not into death, but into life.^⁶

Submitted on 25 May 2021.

PAULIUS SAUDARGAS

Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania Gedimino Ave. 53, LT–01109 Vilnius, Lithuania [email protected]

⁵ Patackas Gintaras 2015: Algirdo Patacko kalba, pasakyta per savo paties laidotuves brolio Gintaro lūpomis, 2015–04–03–08.

⁶ Ibid.

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