Miglė Anušauskaitė. Geriausias žodis: komiksas apie Sirvydą, žodyną ir žiurkę (The Best Word: A Comic about Sirvydas, a Dictionary, and a Rat), Anykščiai: Public Library of Anykščiai District Municipality, 2025. – 36 p.

The main character of this comic is a curious and well-educated Baroque rat – a scholar who studies humans. In the year 1610, humans still seem rather primitive to rats: they have not yet discovered the laws of the universe, they exploit one another, and women do not enjoy equal rights. Through a twist of circumstances, the rat begins observing the educated priest and Jesuit monk Konstantinas Sirvydas (1579–1631), a nobleman from the Anykščiai region. Sirvydas was one of the most significant figures of Lithuanian Baroque literature and is considered the founder of Lithuanian prose and lexicography, as well as the author of the first dictionaries of Lithuanian and other Baltic languages. The rat-narrator follows Sirvydas to Vilnius, which the comic presents as a layered and multicultural seventeenth-century city – the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. She observes the young priest’s passion for scholarship, his interest in the Lithuanian language, and his work on compiling a Lithuanian dictionary. At the same time, the rat herself is preparing a dictionary meant to describe the human world. Thus, both the observer and the person she observes share the same goal: to discover the most beautiful and precise word. At the end of the story, readers are introduced to the results of the rat’s research: the Dictionary of Human-Rat Languages. The comic integrates explanations of unfamiliar or rarely used words as well as descriptions of social roles from the Baroque era. By incorporating authentic typefaces from early dictionaries, the author playfully and engagingly introduces young readers to the field of philology while also presenting the cultural and historical environment of seventeenth-century Vilnius and Europe.

Miglė Anušauskaitė (b. 1988) is a comics artist, translator from English and Yiddish, and a scholar of Jewish studies. In addition to illustrating books by other authors in a comic style, she has created a number of original comics about historical figures from Lithuania, Jewish culture and history, and feminism. Her works include Dr. Kvadratas. Greimas ir jo semiotika (Dr. Square. Greimas and His Semiotics, 2017), Štetlas – kas tai? (Shtetl – What Is It?, 2019), Vilniaus Gaonas – kas jis? (The Vilna Gaon – Who Is He?, 2019), Kas išsigando Šliūpo? (Who Was Afraid of Šliūpas?, 2021), Panelė su lape (The Lady with a Fox, 2023), Daugiau, nei mato akys: komiksas apie Praną Domšaitį ir meno sroves (More Than Meets the Eye: A Comic about Pranas Domšaitis and Art Movements, 2024), Agento byla „Ivanov XII“ (Agent File “Ivanov XII”, 2025), Žydų šventės (Jewish Holidays, 2025), and others.

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