Rasa Aškinytė (born 1973) has a background in history and philosophy. Her main work is at a university, where she teaches philosophy, ethics and didactics and where she also writes and co-writes textbooks and other materials for schools and universities. She is the author of four novels and one children’s story. She has famously shrugged off repeated comments about her “unfeminine” style of writing with a request to say exactly what constitutes feminine writing so that she could change. Feminine or not, the voice of her fiction is definitely distinctive: emphatically crisp and short, often even slightly academic. Most of her novels (with the notable exception of her most recent, Glessum) are set in nameless ‘anywheres’, with no particular relationship to a place, time and culture, focusing instead on universal aspects of human existence. In the later ones she has put on her historian hat: Glessum deals with a 2nd century CE Baltic tribe, and the latest Istorija kaip upė connects particular events from Lithuanian history. 

Istorija kaip upė (History as a River). Vilnius: Lithuanian Writer’ Union publishing house, 2018, – 168 pp. 

The title serves as the main organizing metaphor: a river connects several women living in different times and cultures, seemingly bringing them always the same, something recurrent. Each in her own life and circumstances, the women repeatedly encounter and confront the same major questions about gods and religions, about love and relationships. It is also a book about welcoming or banishing the other, the stranger, the one who does not fit in and conform. And most importantly, about being a woman. The book is easy to read and rather short, but it is quite difficult emotionally. The lives of the women, are full of not just love and motherhood, but also suffering, and sometimes suffering because of love and motherhood. A mystical, hazy idea of sisterhood seems to underlie the whole story and its structure. But quite likely the sisterhood itself is what makes the reader experience the pain of others. 

Selected translations

German: Kleines Bernstein. Translated by Markus Roduner. Halle (Saale): Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2021

Latvian: Glesum. Translated by Dace Meiere. Riga: Janis Roze Publishers, 2021