Novel
Vilnius Poker
Vilniaus pokeris
Ričardas Gavelis · 1989
Synopsis
In Soviet Vilnius in the seventies, Vytautas Vargalys, a survivor of the gulag, works in a library where no one comes. A limousine nearly runs him over, and he sees in it proof that "they" want him dead: he investigates these invisible forces that drain the people around him of their humanity, his wife Irena, his friend Gedis, the young Lolita. Four voices take turns over one week in October, among them a failed intellectual, a library employee and a dog who speaks for the city.
Context
Sketched as early as 1980 and hidden, even from those close to him, the manuscript was handed to the publisher Vaga at the turn of 1988 and 1989; the book appeared in November 1989, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a print run of fifty thousand copies. A satire of totalitarianism, it names with a coined word, kanukai, the forces that drain people of their moral vigour. It made the author's reputation, and he gave it a sequel in 1993. Translated into English by Elizabeth Novickas in 2009, it appeared in French in 2014, translated by Margarita Barakauskaïté-Le Borgne.
Who it is for
For a dense and haunted novel, close to Kafka and Dostoevsky, about inner life under a totalitarian regime.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a landmark of Lithuanian modernism, it was compared in France to Céline, Dostoevsky and Kafka when it was translated.