Attitudes towards Emigration in Vincas Kudirka’s and Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas’s Journalism

Abstract

Mass emigration to the United States of America began in the last decades of the 19th century. It has been estimated that about 500 thousand people left Lithuania before WWI. Lithuanian elite of that time perceived emigration as a problem. The article examines the views on emigration and its dangers for the individual and the country, as expressed in the articles of two of the most prominent intellectuals of the late 19th century who had a decisive influence on the formation of the national and civic consciousness, Vincas Kudirka and Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas. It discusses the themes and problems of emigration highlighted by Kudirka and Vaižgantas, as well as similarities and differences in their attitudes towards emigration. Using the premise of cognitive linguistics that any type of discourse reflects the linguistic, social, ideological, and psychological attitudes of the author, the article shows that the language of Kudirka’s and Vaižgantas’s journalism is inseparable from their thinking and imagination, because language, as it exists in human consciousness, reveals the specificity of reasoning and the way of understanding the world. It concludes that the opposed worldviews of Kudirka and Vaižgantas determined the differences of the value-based attitude towards emigration manifested in their articles.