Less is Less

 

The phrase “less is more” can be traced to a Robert Browning poem of the 1850s, though most of us associate the sentiment with the modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; it's a shorthand summary of his minimalism and hostility to ornamentation.  But anyone who has ever had the privilege of touring a Charles Rennie Mackintosh house or tea room, or savored the sensuous paintings of the pre-Raphaelites, will not be immune to the charms of Art Nouveau architecture.

Jane and I have just returned from a weekend in Riga, the capital of Latvia, and a most intriguing city.  We enjoyed a highly skilled and entertaining performance of The Barber of Seville by the Latvian National Opera.  We ate well.  We stumbled upon a statue in the park paying homage to Karlis Ulmanis, a prime minister and president of Latvia during the interwar period who is described as a “victim of the Soviet totalitarian regime,” a characterization that must rankle in some quarters of Riga.  Best of all, we took a self-guided walking tour of the city’s Art Nouveau district. 

We started out at the Riga Art Nouveau Museum (see top photo, above), which is a stunner.  According to Riga’sofficial website, the structure was “built in 1903 as a private property of K. Pēkšēns” with the assistance of “his architecture student Eižens Laube.”  “The museum interior has been restored to its authentic look of 1903.  A thorough inspection of the premises began in 2007, discovering and taking note of the original interior makeup.  The renovation work was carried out in 2008-2009 under the guidance of master renovator Gunita Čakare.”  The interior was “designed by architect Liesma Markova.”  A well-informed docent told us that during the Soviet period the flat was occupied by five different families.

Most of the facades and architectural details depicted in the attached photos, like the museum itself, are on Alberta Iela.  At the other end of the street, we came across an apartment building with a plaque declaring that the social philosopher Isaiah Berlin lived there as a child.  Here’s the remarkable thing:  according to our Lonely Planet guide, there are some 750 art nouveau buildings in Riga.

Enjoy.

 

 

Between Shades of Gray

A few weeks ago here on Baltic Avenue I posted an essay (“The House that Rūta Built”) about Antanas Gricevičius (1877-1949), the candy company he started a century ago, and the chocolate museum that serves as a continuing tribute to the man and his family.  The Soviet occupation of 1939 robbed Mr. Gricevičius of his business, which was subsequently nationalized, and of his wife and young son, who were deported to Siberia.

I made an effort at the museum to find out what charges were filed against Mrs. Gricevičius and her son, but I had no luck.  One suspects that they were among the millions who were guilty mainly of harboring bourgeois aspirations in a proletarian paradise.  Ruta Sepetys, in her book, Between Shades of Gray (New York:  Philomel Books, 2011), writes that the Kremlin “drafted lists of people considered anti-Soviet who would be murdered, sent to prison, or deported into slavery in Siberia.  Doctors, lawyers, teachers, military servicemen, writers, business owners, musicians, artists, and even librarians were all considered anti-Soviet and were added to the growing list slated for wholesale extermination” (p. 339).

If you ever have wondered what it meant to be swept up in a dragnet and deposited in Siberia, Between Shades of Gray is for you.  It’s a novel, but the book is based on careful research.  It’s the harrowing tale of a mother and her two children conveyed thousands of miles from Kaunas, Lithuania, to a desolate port on the shores of the Laptev Sea, not far from the North Pole.  It’s a story featuring cattle cars, NKVD bullies, forced confessions, scurvy, head lice, slave labor, maggoty porridge, the ravages of permafrost-bite, bullets in the back of the head, and resiliency and courage in the face of terror and indignity—in short, the best and worst of the human condition. 

No doubt you have read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and you imagine that it constitutes the last word on this morbid subject.  But Ms. Sepetys, who was born in Michigan and currently resides in Tennessee, has produced a magisterial work of her own, a novel written with a teenaged audience in mind, and one that will resonate with older readers as well—“a brilliant story of love and survival,” according to Laurie Halse Anderson in her book jacket blurb. 

The plot revolves around 15-year-old Lina Vilkas, who reveres her remarkable mother, Elena, and the father, Kostas, from whom they have been separated by the authorities.  Lina is an impressive young woman.  She watches out for her little brother, Jonas; steals files and firewood from the NKVD every time she has a chance; and expresses her emotions through drawings inspired by the paintings of Edvard Munch.  I confess that I found it difficult not to see Lina in my mind’s eye as the subject of a Munch painting called “Puberty” (see image above). 

In the course of their expedition to the ends of the earth, Lina and Jonas befriend a spirited young man called Andrius Arvydas and his mother, who subsequently agrees to be a sex worker in the cabin of the work camp’s commandant.  The great virtue of this book is that the author simply refuses to pass judgment on Mrs. Arvydas or any of the other characters, all of whom are imperfect in one way or another.  Her ambivalence extends to the most selfish and churlish of the deportees, the ones who sign confessions in return for enhanced rations, and even one of the guards, Nikolai Kretzsky.  Elena Vilkas makes an appeal to Kretzsky’s better nature—who knew that he had one!—and the NKVD brute winds up saving lives in the camp, including that of young Jonas.  As for Lina and Andrius, their relationship is a testament to the proposition that love is powerful enough to humanize even the most unpromising circumstances and make them almost bearable.

So, yes, Between Shades of Gray helps us to understand what happened to people—ordinary people who lived ordinary lives—whose middle-class values marked them for arrest and resettlement in the wastelands of Siberia.  This novel represents, as someone once said about second marriages, the triumph of hope over experience, which is why I highly recommend it as an inspiring read.

A Stroll Down Memory Lane, a.k.a. Tilžės Street

 

The origins of the city of Šiauliai go back to the thirteenth century and to the efforts of the Teutonic Order to convert the not-always-entirely-grateful locals to Christianity.  Another of the key dates has to do with the conferring of urban rights upon the city in 1568.  The cathedral, one of the few architectural treasures to survive the two twentieth-century world wars, dates from 1625.

But this chronology probably exaggerates the antiquity of the place.  It was not until the eighteenth century that modern industry—in the form of a textile mill, a tannery, and a brewery—appeared in the city.  And my informants tell me that it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that several key transportation links opened this corner of the world up to trade and modern commerce.  Arguably the most important of these was a road that was cut southwest from Riga, the Latvian capital on the Baltic coast, through Šiauliai and onward to the East Prussian town that the Germans called Tilsit.  This road still exerts an influence on this part of Eastern Europe.  Within the corporate limits of the city of Šiauliai, the road is called Tilžės (the Lithuanian version of Tilsit) gatvė, and it is the city’s main NE-SW traffic artery.  I learned most of this from my colleague, Aiste Lazauskiene, the author of Miestai ir Miesteliai, a very fine book of photographs documenting the modern history of Lithuanian towns and villages.

Jane and I are living in the city center here in Šiauliai.  In fact, our flat is on the fourth floor of a building situated on a pedestrian street—one that attracted quite a lot of attention back in the 1970s, when it was celebrated as the first pedestrian district in the U.S.S.R.  As it happens, our flat is some three blocks from Tilžės street, and that’s where I go in the morning to catch a #12 bus that takes Tilžės Street to the southern edge of the city, home to the Šiauliai University Social Sciences Fakulty.

In Europe, instead of municipal street signs, they hang plaques on the sides of buildings (see photo #1, above)—clever little signs that tell you the street address, but also (by means of that little triangular thingie underneath the number), the direction of the street numbers’ ascent and descent.  During my first few trips on the #12 bus, I noticed what I thought were a great many street signs that had been defaced—usually by rubbing out the street name while leaving the number itself intact.  You probably can see where I’m going with this (see photo #2, above).

I figured that after 1940, during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, the name of Tilžės street was changed to something more politically correct, and that in turn had to be undone when Lithuania restored its independence as the Soviet Union was dissolving in the early 1990s.  I’m assuming that city officials on both occasions thought it more important to install up-to-date street signs in the city center, rather than on the periphery, where it would have been easier to make allowances for obsolete street signage (most of the old ones seem to be blue; the newer ones are mostly green) with rubbed-out street names.  And that would explain the increased rate of defacement as one approaches the outskirts of town.  I proposed this hypothesis to Aieste, who seemed to think it plausible.

So, all I needed to test my idea was a detailed street map printed sometime between 1940 and 1990.  Unfortunately, these do not appear to be lying around just anywhere.  I still haven’t found one!  And so I put out a call to the Šiauliai University library, and the librarians there, led by the redoubtable Vilija Montviliene, managed to turn my hunch into a real research project; she even got her family involved!  A few days ago, Vilija confirmed my hypothesis.  As the Big Enchilada of Šiauliai streets, Tilžės gatvė was accorded the honor of being rechristened (so to speak) Lenino Street.

Then Vilija unveiled the results of her own research.  There were many streets that changed names under the Soviets, and what I learned from Vilija was that the street names jettisoned by the Soviets—the street names of interwar Šiauliai—serve as eloquent reminders of the importance of journalists and the literati in the national language and culture movements of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.  Here are what I regard as some of the highlights of Vilija’s research (by the way, gatvė is the Lithuanian word for street):

·        Aušros alėja (Dawn Avenue) was named for Lithuania’s first newspaper, Dawn (1883-1886); the street was rechristened V. Kapsuko gatvė by the Soviets.  Kapsukas, a revolutionary politician, was one of the founders of the Lithuanian Communist Party.

·        J. Basanavičiaus gatvė was named in honor of the first editor of Dawn, signer of the Declaration of Independence, scientist, and medical doctor; the Soviets changed the name of the street to Taikos, meaning peace.

·        V. Bielskio gatvė was meant to honor an engineer, journalist, and underground book distributor who also was a Šiauliai resident; when their turn came, the Soviets countered with K. Preikšo, a Communist party activist.

·        Dvaro gatvė is a reference to a formidable 19^th-century estate (dvaras in Lithuanian).  The Communists had no use for estates, so they turned the street into a tribute to Marytė Melnikiaitės, a young Soviet partisan who was tortured and killed by the Nazis.  (See photo #3, above.)

·        As a place of residence, Russian aristocrats sometimes preferred Lithuania to Mother Russia.  One such was Count Zubovo, a celebrated philanthropist.  When the Soviets had their innings, they countered with Alexandr Pushkin, the romantic poet and writer.

·        Vincas Kudirkos was a Lithuanian doctor, novelist, poet, critic, translator, editor of a newspaper called the Bell, and composer of both the music and the lyrics of the Lithuanian national anthem; he was, in short, a renaissance man.  When it came time for the Soviets to demote Kudirkos, they did so by putting in his place a Communist Party functionary named Karolis Požela.

·        Lukšio street was named for Povilas Lukšys, the first Lithuanian soldier to die in the independence movement at the end of the Great War; his successor on the street signs was the month of October—Spalio in Lithuanian—a reference, of course, to the October Revolution in Russia.

·        Miglovasos gatvė was named for a Lithuanian writer and book distributor; the Soviets changed it to Sportininkų gatvė, i.e., Sportsman’s street.

·        J. Šliūpo gatvė was named for Jonas Šliūpas, another doctor and all-purpose publisher who was born in the Šiauliai region.  His replacement on the street signs was I. Michurin, a biologist who rejected Mendelian principles of genetic inheritance as being insufficiently Marxist.  The Soviets, who intended to build the human race anew, found Michurin’s logic irresistible.

·        Meanwhile, Mariiampolės gatvė, named for a non-descript Lithuanian town, was scrapped to make way for T. Lysenko, the “geneticist” who, inspired by Michurin’s theories, conducted crackpot agricultural campaigns that resulted in mass famine all over the Soviet Union.  (Comrade Lysenko believed, in short, that dogs raised in the woods give birth to wolves.)

·        When it came time to rechristen Trakų gatvė, a tribute to the original Lithuanian capital of Trakai, near Vilnius, the Soviets came up with A. Kleinerio gatvė; Alteris Kleineris was Secretary of the Communist Party in Šiauliai.

·        Varpo Street, which is very near our flat in the city center, is a reference to Varpas, or Bell, the national newspaper of the early twentieth century.  After World War II, the Soviets changed it to Komunarų gatvė, a reference to generic communards or communes.

·        Vasario 16 gatvė, also in the city center, is a reference to the day—February 16, 1918—that Lithuanians celebrate their independence; the Soviets substituted Gegužės gatvė, International Labour Day.

Those are the ones that I found most interesting.  In the post-World War II era, other streets in Šiauliai were renamed for Maxim Gorky, May Day, the Soviet Cosmonauts, and locally prominent communist mayors or other politicians.  A city is a palimpsest, some more so than others.

There is an irony here.  The town that the Germans used to know as Tilsit—the city that Šiauliai honors with the street it once again calls Tilžės gatvė—currently lies just across the Lithuanian border in the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad (they call it an exclave, by which they mean a non-contiguous enclave, an interesting idea in itself) and it is now called Sovetsk.  So much for Tilsit, and East Prussia, for that matter.  The victors get to write the histories—and name the streets.

 

NATO Briefing in Šiauliai

 

The nearby NATO base looms pretty large here in Šiauliai, and not only because it means jobs for the locals.  It also makes everyone feel a little more secure, given recent events in nearby Ukraine.

Today Jane and I attended a briefing conducted by NATO officials for the Šiauliai community, held at the university library in the city center.  A little background: NATO was formed at the height of the Cold War in 1949; the east bloc responded with the Warsaw Pact in 1955.  Lithuania joined NATO in 2004, a little more than a decade after restoration of its national independence, and after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991.  The end of the Cold War seemed to rob NATO of its principal mission,  but perhaps it is time to reconsider the hypothesis of NATO’s 21^st-century irrelevance.

There were approximately 60 people at the briefing, which began with some welcoming remarks, some of them delivered by a member of the Šiauliai city council.  Then a Lithuanian soldier briefed us on the structure of NATO and on what is required of its 28 member states (see photo #1, above).  Afterwards, we heard from Lt. Col. Mark Sadler of the United States Air Force (photo #2), who explained the way that NATO monitors air space in the three Baltic countries from its base here in Šiauliai, where a squadron of ten F-15s can be airborne in a matter of minutes, any time of the day or night.  He said that policing the Baltic airspace is a little like being a fireman.

Afterwards, a panel discussed related issues and fielded questions from the audience.  Photo #3, above, shows (from left to right), a representative of the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a military attaché from the Republic of Poland, a high-ranking Lithuanian officer from the Šiauliai base, the U.S. military intelligence officer based at Šiauliai, and Lt. Col. Sadler.

The Cat Museum

I think I have implied here on Baltic Avenue that Šiauliai has perhaps more than its fair share of quirky little museums, of which the cat museum is by far the most eccentric.

The short version of the story is that there was an old lady, Vanda Kavaliauskienė (1923-2011), who loved cats.  Over the course of her lifetime she acquired every conceivable kind of cat collectible:  cat photos; cat pictures, including 3-D paintings; ceramic cats, porcelain cats; amber cats; marble cats; wooden cats, fur cats; cat dolls; stain-glass window cats (see photo #1, above); and every other kind of cat you could imagine from all four corners of the inhabited world.  The museum makes Mrs. Kavaliauskienė’s collection readily accessible to the general public; we walked there on a beautiful sunny day this week. 

The Katinuų muziejus (see photo #2, above) is housed in Mrs. Kavaliauskiene’s former apartment at Žuvininkų gatvė, 18.  When we arrived and paid our entrance fees (3 litas apiece for seniors), we were told to look for “the director,” who we were told has a fearsome countenance but is “friendly to a fault.”  Sure enough, “the director” (see photo #3) made his appearance straightaway and toured the museum with us, jumping occasionally into my lap when I was seated and flopping down on the tops of my feet whenever I stood. 

In addition to the cat museum, there is in the same building a “mini-zoo” that features multiple rabbits; colorful parrots; a monkey; several snakes, including an enormous albino python; an iguana; a gecko; and other assorted caged animals.  Nice, but somebody needs to change the litter boxes in there.

 

The House that Rūta Built

 

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned that Šiauliai has a wonderful little chocolate (they call it šokoladas here) museum, which has become one of our favorite places, and which I had been planning to highlight in a brief post.  But that was before we discovered that the history of Šiauliai’s chocolate factory is the history of modern Lithuania writ small, which is to say that a strong element of tragedy lies at its core.  The subject required a little research.

It turns out that Šiauliai had a chocolate genius, and his name was Antanas Gricevičius (1877-1949).  He started a candy company here 1913, just in time for World War I.  During the war, Mr. Gricevičius suspended his chocolate-making operations and took the family off to Saint Petersburg, where he undertook formal study of the science of confectionary making.  After the war, Mr. Gricevičius brought his family back to Šiauliai and undertook to revive his candy company.

And he did, though it took some time.  The brick building in the photo above is the Rūta Confectionary Plant that Mr. Gricevičius built in 1928-1929; it was designed by Kārlis Reisons, a celebrated architect of the time.  During the interwar period, when Mr. Gricevičius had over 100 employees turning out over 300 different types of candy, Rūta won numerous international awards for excellence and established itself as Lithuania’s premier candy company.  Click here to view a documentary film showing Mr. Gricevičius and his candy-making staff at the factory.

When the Red Army occupied Lithuania in 1940, Mr. Gricevičius’s business was seized by the state, and he was relieved of his duties as CEO.  In short order, he was charged by the authorities with embezzling company funds, charges of which he was just as quickly acquitted.  The Rūta website confirms that he died in 1949, but to learn more about this sorry episode of 20^th century history, you have to visit the museum, and you have to pay close attention to the story related by the exhibits and English-language labels.

It turns out that after his factory was nationalized by the Soviets, Mrs. Gricevičius, whose name was Juzefa (1881-1970), and the couple’s youngest son, his father’s namesake, were bundled off to Siberia.  Back in Šiauliai, two grown sons emigrated, leaving a broken-hearted Mr. Gricevičius and daughter Marija to carry on as best they could.

The unlikely denouement of this story is that in 1993, following the successful reassertion of Lithuanian independence, the chocolate factory was returned to the Gricevičius family—specifically, to young Antanas, back from Siberia, and two grand-daughters—who undertook to upgrade the facility and modernize production techniques that had been allowed to languish under the Soviets.  The former factory buildings were renovated, and the chocolate museum opened in 2012.  It’s a fascinating place to spend an afternoon—and not just because of the chocolate, but for the lessons in family history, and European history, also.

 

Lithuanian Independence Restoration

Lithuania has a glorious history, intertwined at times with that of Poland, and reaching far back into medieval times.  The modern state has two independence days, both of which are understood to be “restorations” of a former condition, and both of which we have recently celebrated.

The first commemorates a proclamation of February 16, 1918, that reasserted Lithuanian independence at a moment when the stars were aligned in just the right way—Germany was about to be defeated in World War I and the Russian Revolution was in high gear—for them to make it stick, though doing so also required a fair amount of bloodshed on Lithuanian soil.  Jane and I celebrated this year with faculty colleagues from Šiauliai University at a musical program featuring professional singers who performed in both operatic and folk traditions; the event was held in the Chaim Frenkel country house, one of Šiauliai’s grand old homes. 

Then there is the holiday celebrated on March 11, which commemorates the re-establishment in 1990 of an independent Lithuania just as the U.S.S.R. was participating in its own demise.  Yesterday we joined a thousand or so other celebrants who gathered at the beginning of the parade route, which happened to be just outside our apartment house.  See photo #1, above.  We marched from there to the civic square near the cathedral, where celebrants prepared to raise a flag (photo #2) and hear speeches accompanied by military music and a fly-over by F-15s from the nearby NATO base.  Jane enjoyed a bowl of military porridge dispensed by officers (photo #3) at a mess tent.  My suspicion is that, all things considered, the citizens of Šiauliai are glad to have a NATO base in the neighborhood.

Silent Spring

Given the gridlocked state of the U.S. government, I have become curious about two occasions during the twentieth century when our government was inspired—by books!—to step up to the plate and take some mighty cuts against intractable public problems.  I already have posted a brief review of Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, which inspired passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in the same year—1906—and which I am embarrassed to admit that I read for the first time last month. 

Now I have finished another famous book, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which, in 1962, argued against the indiscriminate use of insecticides and herbicides.  Carson’s book promoted an understanding of ecology and helped create a climate sympathetic to environmentalism, though it would take another decade for the EPA to be created and for the agricultural use of DDT to be banned.  Even this is remarkable, considering how difficult it has been in recent years for the United States government to do anything constructive on any front—climate change being perhaps the most pertinent case in point.

I found Silent Spring challenging is a number of ways.  First, of course, there is the science.  I am not a quick study when it comes to science, and as a result I am probably not as patient as I should be with scientific subjects.  So even though Carson is a terrific writer, I didn’t completely grasp all of Silent Spring, such as her treatment, in chapter 3, of the creation of various chemical compounds by manipulation of carbon and hydrogen atoms.

I thought, too, that her exposé was marred by its many references to early-1960s concerns about the fallout of atomic radiation in a world plagued by atmospheric nuclear testing.  “We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation,” she writes.  “How, then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in the chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?”  Are we still rightly appalled by atomic radiation?  It seems to me we’ve moved on to new outrages.  

I thought further that some of Carson’s complaints about the status of chemistry atop the scientific pecking order—at the expense of biology—sounded like special pleading for her field of study.  I am much more sympathetic to her argument for interdisciplinary study of the physical and natural world than to her insistence on the superiority of a specifically biological perspective.

I was surprised that while Carson is usually credited with (or blamed for) the government ban on DDT, her book doesn’t exactly advocate that.  Certainly, Silent Spring is a strident argument against the indiscriminate use of DDT, but it does not argue for a ban on its use against malaria-carrying mosquitoes, as Carson’s critics state or imply, particularly if they are trying to blame her for the millions of human victims of malaria.

Carson lays out her fundamental metaphor—a world without birdsong in the spring—early in the book, a rhetorically effective overture.  Chapter 2 is about the chemical war against insects and unwanted plants, chapter 3 investigates the chemical properties of various poisons, chapter 4 focuses on surface and ground water pollution, and chapter 5 is on soil pollution.  To me this organization of the material is probably defensible, though it seems a little random.  It’s not that I find her argument unpersuasive.  It’s just that I don’t understand the order in which she takes up subjects that inherently have a circular logic; all of these variables strike me as being related to one another somewhat interchangeably as either cause or effect, or both.

For me the most affecting aspect of Silent Spring—the part that will stick with me—is its fundamental metaphor, the silence that falls over an imaginary community of the future, a vision that could well be based on her hometown, Springdale, Pennsylvania, in the outskirts of Pittsburgh.  This community loses its song birds, bees, and fish to mindless spraying campaigns against insects and plant life.  “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world.  The people had done it to themselves.” 

We are fast approaching spring here in Lithuania, but of course it can never come soon enough.  And reading this famous book has probably made me more aware than usual of the status of the local bird population.  We have noticed two kinds of birds that have been prominent over the winter:  pigeons and crows.  Lithuanian pigeons are distinctive only in that they occasionally chirp; I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered chirping pigeons before.  Once in a while, we have seen large gray birds that move a little bit like pigeons, but are a bit more streamlined in appearance; these may represent another species of pigeon (and I don’t believe that they go in for chirping).  And we have seen one magnificent black-and-white magpie, who likes to hang around in a tree directly across from our flat.  We have not seen any of Lithuania’s supposedly numerous storks, though on our walk to the Hill of Crosses we encountered an enormous nest that we assumed was home to a stork.

Lithuanian crows are big and noisy in all the familiar ways—except for the two that adorn the balcony of a nearby flat (see photo, above).  We figure that the purpose of these crow decoys is to keep away the pigeons, which produce prodigious quantities of nasty poop.  The silent sentries seem to be doing their job very well, but I’ll have to say that we’re hoping for a noisy, songbird-infested spring here in Lithuania.

 

Užgavėnės in Šiauliai

 

As a Latter Day Sinner, it’s been hard enough for me to figure out what Episcopalianism is all about, let alone Roman Catholicism.  Yesterday my Lithuanian language and culture teacher introduced us to the holiday known here as Užgavėnės, and I’ve been wrestling with the concept ever since.

Užgavėnės apparently is something like Mardi Gras, which for me conjures up images of beads and bangles on Bourbon Street, or maybe Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.  I think of it as a pre-Lenten throw-down, one that takes place on Shrove Tuesday, or what in some countries is known as Fat Tuesday, a binge that ends the following day—Ash Wednesday—the beginning of a long period of Lenten self-denial leading up to Holy Week. 

Lithuania is a Roman Catholic country, and yet this land, the Hill of Crosses to the contrary notwithstanding, is not all that well established as a bastion of Christendom, so its holidays often combine sacred with pre-Christian, or profane, traditions.  Here is the Wikipedia entry for Užgavėnės:

Užgavėnės is a Lithuanian festival that takes place during the seventh week before Easter (Ash Wednesday). Its name in English means "the time before Lent.” The celebration corresponds to Roman Catholic holiday traditions in other parts of the world, such as Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, and Carnaval.

Užgavėnės begins on the night before Ash Wednesday, when an effigy of winter (usually named Morė) is burnt. A major element of the holiday, meant to symbolize the defeat of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, is a staged battle between Lašininis ("porky") personifying winter and Kanapinis ("hempen man") personifying spring. Devils, witches, goats, the grim reaper, gypsies, and other joyful and frightening characters appear in costumes during the celebrations. The participants and masqueraders dance and eat the traditional dish of the holiday—pancakes with a variety of toppings, since round pancakes are a symbol of the returning sun.

One nice thing about Užgavėnės is that there’s never any doubt about the outcome; unlike Groundhog Day, Užgavėnės doesn't really give winter a fighting chance.