About the work
Ričardas Gavelis’s cult novel Vilnius Poker was written in the period 1979–1987. The first Lithuanian edition of 50,000 copies, considered “huge, even in those days,” was published in 1989. The novel was reprinted four times and garnered numerous and contradictory reviews that demonstrate its pertinence and vitality. In 2009, Vilnius Poker was published in the United States and was recognized as one of the twenty-five best translated books of that year. The translation was done by Elizabeth Novickas. More recently, M. Le Borgne’s 2015 French translation has received rave reviews: the magazine Philosphie described Vilnius Poker as effroyable et génial (terrible and awesome).
Structure and plot
The novel is composed of four unequal parts with different narrators. On one hand, these narrations expand and supplement each other ; on the other, they deny a detailed and consistent reconstruction of the plot, as the same events are described with contradictory details. In this work Gavelis continues the tradition of the polyphonic novel —there are many narrators in Vilnius Poker, and each has his own truth.
The location of the action is the Vilnius of the period of Soviet stagnation; the action’s present is in the fall sometime during the 1980s. The basic personae include Vytautas Vargalys and his beloved Lolita Banytė-Žilienį, Vargalys’s colleague Martynas, and his former lover, the tuteiša Stefania, all of whom work in the library, as well as Vargalys’s dead friend Gediminas Riauba, a mathematician and jazzman who created the composition “Vilnius Poker.” They all become victims of Vilnius, which in this novel embodies the social and metaphysical evil of the world.
There are several plot lines in the novel: the first and most important is Vytautas Vargalys’s life story. A former partisan and gulag prisoner who was brutally tortured by the KGB, in the narrative’s present he searches for the secret of the power of evil. The culmination of his life is the love between him and Lolita, which ends with the woman’s mysterious and bloody death. The reader learns several different witnesses’ versions, but never learns the “truth” of who really murdered Lolita.
Vytautas Vargalys, a mysterious and at the same time powerful and infinitely complex character who is unusually talented, cannot realize his talents because he lives in the “Ass of the Universe,” as Martynas calls Vilnius. All of his ambitions lie in the metaphysical sphere: to understand THEM, the rulers of Vilnius and the world. THEY are an anonymous force, responsible not just for the evils of society, but all the absurdity of human life.