Sartre and de Beauvoir encounter the pensive Christ

The isolation of the Baltic states from foreigners during the first decades after the war was one of the reasons why Simone de Beauvoir’s and JeanPaul Sartre’s visit to Lithuania in the summer of 1965 was considered an important event in the cultural life of Soviet-era Lithuania. This article aims to reconstruct the cultural circumstances of this event and to analyze the contrasting treatment of the visit as it came down in history, while including an examination of the new Lithuanian cultural self-awareness that materialized, the tensions that developed among the writers as a result of this visit, and it especially hopes to elucidate the long-term effects of the visit for Lithuanian culture. The meeting of cultures - of the "small" Lithuanian one and the "large" French one, of Europe’s east and west, of the residents of an occupied, totalitarian country who at first glance seem to have accepted their fate with representatives of a free democratic society, who openly sympathized with socialism is treated from a comparative perspective. The visit by two internationally acclaimed philosophers was examined not only in the documentation of 1965 - in the press, in diaries, and later, near the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, in memoirs and in literary works up to the present day. In evaluating Soviet culture we inevitably encounter the problem of the reliability of the sources. Although Soviet era publications are not reliable because of the ideological censorship they have undergone, and the egodocuments reveal the authors subjective reality, a critical reading of both source materials allows for the reconstruction of an unfamiliar culture’s reception as the recognitions of one’s own. The guests’ impressions can only be discerned in a few paragraphs on Lithuania in de Beauvoir’s autobiographical work, Tout comptefait (1972)