Novelist Antanas Sileika on the Traku - Pylimo street corner in Vilnius – with his book Underground.
Photo Aage Myhre

Why this perpetual
return to Lithuania?
Standing on the corner
of Traku and Pylimo

A writer muses about the foreign sources for his work and what it means to be a Canadian

By Antanas Sileika, novelist

For the fourth year in a row I’m standing at the crossroads of Pylimo and Traku Streets in Vilnius, Lithuania, worrying the place, trying to sift the stories that lie like dust between the cobblestones. I’m slightly sick of this baroque, labyrinthine city - the strangulated cries of the swallows at dusk make me think of the dead souls of forgotten citizens.

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