PUBLICATIONS OF MYKOLAS BIRZISKA IN VILNIUS PRESS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY: FEATURES OF THE INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

Mykolas Birziska (1882–1962) was a prominent Lithuanian scholar and politic, a signatory of the Act of Independence (1918), a member of Lithuanian Council (1917–1920), director of the first Lithuanian Gymnasium of Vytautas the Great in Vilnius (1915–1922), professor and rector of Kaunas and Vilnius universities. This articles deals with his early journalistic activities and editorship in the press in Vilnius before the outbreak of the First World War, and seeks to analyze the formation of his intellectual and political attitudes. In 1905, being a member of the Party of Lithuanian Social Democrats, Birziska began his journalistic career in socialist press. In 1906 heedited a party newspaper “Echo” in Polish language, where his specific interest in cooperation between different nationalities first became vivid. At the same time he began contributing to theliberal and antinationalist newspaper of the Polish krajovtsy movement “Gazeta Wile ska” (edited by Michal R mer), that argued for the political equality and tolerant cultural coexistence of allthe national groups in Lithuania. After the closure of “Gazeta Wile ska”, Birziska in 1907–1908 cooperated with another liberal daily in Russian language “Severo-Zapadnyj Golos”. Writing in threelanguages and simultaneously contributing to Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian press, Birziska exercised a specific role of a publicist as a mediator between different cultural groups in the multinational city. Professional analysis of the national conflicts, the principals of cultural tolerance and liberal antinationalist outlooks became the dominant features of his trilingual journalistic texts. Consequently, Birziska seeked to realize these intellectual attitudes working at the Lithuanian daily “Vilniaus zinios” in 1908 and especially editing the journal “Visuomene” (1910–1911) for the Lithuanian leftist intelligentsia. Birziska’s journalistic activities and his early intellectual biography carried features of specific cultural liberalism that was characteristic to the entire group of multinational intelligentsia in Vilnius before the First World War (Michal R mer, Tadeusz Wróblewski, Anton and Ivan Luckievich, Uriah Katzenelenbogen, and others).