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Born in 1937, Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian scholar, poet, author and translator. He lectured at University of California, Berkeley, where he became friends with the poets Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky. He is currently a full professor at Yale University. [Listener: Andrzej Wolski; date recorded: 2011]

TRANSCRIPT: Once I was in Vilnius I had to go to a grammar school. I had gone to a primary school for a couple of years in Kaunas. I was a primary school pupil in Kaunas. Since I already knew how to read and write when I started primary school, I found learning very easy, easier than the other children and I also found the grammar school in Vilnius easy as well. That was probably in '47. And so I went to the grammar school, it was then a 10-year school, called the Antanas Vienuolis School. And it’s still there, it has now been returned to the Jesuits, during the war it was... it was a Jesuit grammar school. Now there is a Jesuit grammar school in the same building. Under the Soviets, of course, there were no Jesuits there – there wasn’t even, so to speak, a church there, on top of which that school was closed. The Church of St Casimir was later turned into a museum of atheism, well, and now it’s open again, Mass is said there. And I attended that grammar school, and that’s where I made some of my best friends, whom I even now... whom I still like, and see frequently when... when I’m in Vilnius. People, in fact, who are the closest friends I have. There’s Ramūnas Katilius, the physicist, with whom I was in the same class, who later worked for the Soros Foundation in Vilnius. Then there’s Pranas Morkus, he was in the class below me, he’s a screenplay writer. Zenonas Butkevičius, he’s a quite well known journalist, he writes on ecology and environmental protection, he also publishes on the internet. They are, so to speak, the people closest to me. I’ve been friends with them now probably for about 60 years. I’m now 73 years old, well, when I first met them I was perhaps more than 10, perhaps 13, perhaps 14, 15 years old.

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