This is a book about the marvelous city of Vilnius in the eyes of the great poet Tomas Venclova, a Nobel Prize runner-up, about whom Harold Bloom has said, “One believes Mandelstam and Babel might have rejoiced” in his writing. As an essayist, Venclova writes that he has been occupied by Vilnius, his native city, “through whose example one could easily trace all of the complexity and tragedy of ethnic and national relations in Eastern Europe.” He has, for a quarter of a century, been one of the lonely representatives of the conscience of Lithuania.

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