Gitana Vanagaitė (Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Folklore, Vytautas Magnus University)
The painting of St. Mary of the Gate of Dawn (more commonly known as Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn) has had a great significance in Lithuanian history, culture and religion. It is difficult to determine the first time Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn was mentioned in a literary work; however, the legends about her and her miraculous powers had been recorded in oral tradition around the 17th and 18th centuries. The presentation discusses the representations of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn mentioned in the literature of the early 20th century in the poems of Adam Mickiewicz, Maironis, Pranas Vaičaitis and Kazys Bradūnas and in the memoirs of Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas. It focuses on the image of Vilnius as the religious center of Lithuania, which emerged in the poems written after the Polish occupation of Vilnius and its region in 1922. In those poems, the image of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn was used as a metonymy of occupied Vilnius.
The presentation also attempts to highlight the perception of the figure of Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn, the various meanings emphasized in the literary interpretation of her life, and the importance of the Gate of Dawn and its landscape in those interpretations. The emphasis on redemption and the journey to the holy place that occupies a particularly important place in Tumas Vaižgantas’s memoirs about Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn shares common characteristics with the image of Our Lady in the literary works of other authors.