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Vilnius Diary
Old Europe. Vilnius is just recovering from Soviet occupation. A scientist travels to the country of his parents and digs into the stories and numbers of the Holocaust and Gulag. His personal world begins to fall apart. Things happen that he cannot explain. Someone is leaving strange drawings in his apartment. Why? A story of travel, family, and loss. Art by Tadas Gutauskas. 40 photo illustrations. Cover design by Holly Russell. Kindle book on amazon.
110 pages, Paperback
First published February 9, 2011
8 people are currently reading
8 people want to read
About the author
Ruta Sevo
12 books34 followersSee my website for all my books, available as ebooks and paperbacks.
We read to enter the realities of other people. We want to feel their emotions and hear their secrets. We want to know what really happened; what was under the surface. My fiction will probably involve foreign travel, spirituality, and finding yourself.
A couple of principles guide my writing. First, we all want to break out of conventional and routine life. The proper surfaces of life are often hiding truths and secrets. Most of us wish we were more free and did things that we couldn’t because they were not permitted, or we didn’t have the money, or we didn’t have the chance.
Second, Sanskrit poetics say that works of art are designed to evoke one or two key emotions: love, humor, anger, sorrow, disgust, fear, energy, and wonder. (These are called “rasa” which means “essence.”) The pleasure of art is the pleasure of having the experience of one of these feelings. In literature, the story and characters are designed to bring the reader into the predominant emotion.
Writing has to work for the author and for the reader. We find compatible authors to take us to places that are interesting, happy, enlightening. A story is like a friend: you like something there and you want to spend some time there.
Some of my favorites: Salinger, Hemingway, John Barth, Karen Blixen, Annie Proulx, Paulo Coelho, Jorge Luis Borges, George Orwell, Thomas Mann. Recently I was gripped reading Alexandra David-Neel, a Victorian woman who walked out of China into forbidden Tibet in the 1920s. I love being taken places by Paul Theroux.
We read to enter the realities of other people. We want to feel their emotions and hear their secrets. We want to know what really happened; what was under the surface. My fiction will probably involve foreign travel, spirituality, and finding yourself.
A couple of principles guide my writing. First, we all want to break out of conventional and routine life. The proper surfaces of life are often hiding truths and secrets. Most of us wish we were more free and did things that we couldn’t because they were not permitted, or we didn’t have the money, or we didn’t have the chance.
Second, Sanskrit poetics say that works of art are designed to evoke one or two key emotions: love, humor, anger, sorrow, disgust, fear, energy, and wonder. (These are called “rasa” which means “essence.”) The pleasure of art is the pleasure of having the experience of one of these feelings. In literature, the story and characters are designed to bring the reader into the predominant emotion.
Writing has to work for the author and for the reader. We find compatible authors to take us to places that are interesting, happy, enlightening. A story is like a friend: you like something there and you want to spend some time there.
Some of my favorites: Salinger, Hemingway, John Barth, Karen Blixen, Annie Proulx, Paulo Coelho, Jorge Luis Borges, George Orwell, Thomas Mann. Recently I was gripped reading Alexandra David-Neel, a Victorian woman who walked out of China into forbidden Tibet in the 1920s. I love being taken places by Paul Theroux.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 23, 2019
This epistolary novel, using emails, set in Vilnius, Lithuania is similar to the two other books I read on Lithuania, in that there a lot discussion on that country's experience during WWII.
Displaying 1 of 1 review