ABSTRACT
In the past, during different periods, the Neman marked the official (or symbolic) border between the Teutonic Order and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; the Kingdom of Prussia and the Russian Empire; the Duchy of Warsaw and Tsarist Russia, and served as the demarcation line between Poland and Lithuania in the interwar period (1920-1939). Today the Neman forms a small section of the border between Lithuania and Belarus, and in its lower reaches, it marks the border between Lithuania and the Russian territory of Kaliningrad – thereby making it an external border of the European Union. The cultural history of the Neman can be readily pursued through an extensive canon of Lithuanian, German, Yiddish, Polish and Belorussian literature; to date, however, there is a distinct dearth of systematic, comparative research into this unique cultural landscape. The Neman valley is briefly discussed in several recent studies, including Andreas Kossert’s East Prussia. History and Myth (2007); however, historical or literary studies, especially those using a monodisciplinary approach, rarely focus on the river itself. The only overview dedicated to the cultural history of the Neman is Uwe Rada’s Die Memel: Kulturgeschichte eines europäischen Stromes (2010), which, in some fragments, describes the human life on both banks of the river from the medieval period until modern times, from its upper reaches to the delta. This chapter will concentrate specifically on the border of its lower reaches, and will discuss this region from a cultural historical perspective through literary texts. It aims to explore the question of the different forms of representation that authors use to achieve the aesthetic modelling of space, and consider the extent to which they reflect the multi-cultural diversity of the river’s space. The object is not the river as a concrete place or a literary motif, but rather as a structural element within a
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