ABSTRACT
The connection between the personal and artistic transformation of Marcinkevičius and his peers in the 1960s and the emergence of the popular movement Sajūdis in the 1980s is captured in the concept of the rustic turn. The rustic turn was a broad cultural reaction to the failure of Soviet modernity, which gathered speed through the 1970s and was expressed as a return to the rural, pre-modern roots of identity. It began as a vague sense of nostalgia for the lost way of life and grew into a politically explosive discourse of collective trauma.
