Bandymas "perskaityti" Vilnių (Ričardo Gavelio romanas "Vilniaus pokeris")

In his novel "Vilniaus pokeris" Ričardas Gavelis encourages to engage into a discussion about Vilnius as a spiritual substance. The past provides the writer with lots of various texts about Vilnius that belong to different cultures and were written in different languages. Gavelis knowingly and expediently incorporates these texts into the context of the topic. The special object of attention of the author of this article is the attempt to compare the image of the city with the Polish cultural tradition where Vilnius is functioning under special conditions. The author seeks to prove that Gavelis could take a lot of elements out of this tradition and confront his literary image of the city with the images of this tradition. The writer also leans upon stereotypes formed by many generations which become certain reference points. Those parts of Vilnius that are walked by the characters of Gavelis are the determinants of the myth, image that is deeply ingrained in the minds of the Polish people. Moreover, the periphery is a territory where the problem of the identity can be seen very clearly. Vilnius is not a "legible" space for the characters of Gavelis, they are not capable to decipher the signs and symbols that are encoded in it. This space is hard to understand and describe and it steps into the world of the characters of the novel as a destructive force. The city, where the dialogue between its citizens is impossible, brings only a metaphysical fear. And the degraded space does not allow the subject to reconstruct its unformed identity. In the novel of Ricardas Gavelis the past is not related to the present, but it cannot be ignored. The past with all its layers becomes a background to the present