Okronoskovy lapálie – Landsbergis Vytautas V. (2025)

A collection of short stories, poems, and experimental texts by the prominent Lithuanian creator Vytautas V. Landsbergis introduces readers to a comical-sarcastic world where animals and other creatures serve as heroes. They behave in a suspiciously transparent way like human beings forced to live in a manipulated socialist society full of artificially and illogically established values and unwritten rules.

Through the main character, the teddy bear Okronoska, along with his friends and enemies, the reader experiences the worries and woes of an ordinary person trying to make sense of the absurd logic of his world, yet can never succeed. With childlike transparent humor that tickles both the imagination and the diaphragm, the reader, alongside Okronoska, becomes both a child and an adult, a dissident persecuted by the regime and a successful writer. He visits the center of Soviet-occupied Lithuanian society and experiences exile in Siberia, living through years of success, degradation, and even the dual atmosphere of his homeland after it gained independence following long decades of occupation.

Teddy bear Okronoska, who nevertheless remains in his soul a naive and truth-seeking child, touches with his simple simplicity, behind which lies confusion over...