First Lithuanian Museum – Baublys in Dionizas Poška’s Garden

This article discusses Baublys – a nineteenth-century garden pavilion in Lithuania, Samogitia, established in the trunk of an oak tree by Lithuanian boyar and writer Dionizas Poška. Because of its ambiguity, Baublys has attracted considerable scholarly attention and, for the same reason, remains forgotten, generating a relatively small number of texts. Although interpretations vary, the place of Baublys in Lithuanian culture is still unclear. What is it? Is it a regional curiosity or a proto-museum? This article looks at Baublys through its function and aims at demonstrating that Baublys is not only a proto-museum, but also a prototype of today’s interactive museum, containing the analogues of modern practices of museology: interactivity, communicational features and performativity. My methodology is constructed invoking the conceptual metaphor of the mask and referring to the theories of Hans Belting and Mikhail Bakhtin. According to the Bakhtinian dialogic imagination and literary concepts of the epic and the novel, the analogy of the mask and the monument is used. The research question is what Baublys does as a mask during Poška’s lifetime and what it does as a monument today. How did its semantics and agency change after “becoming” a monument? The article shows that for Poška Baublys is a theatre of historical and personal memory, activated by structure, a set of finds, analogues (Sibile Temple, other garden pavilions) and performance. An empty Baublys is a monument – a reference to the past, which lacks the collection of the museum – Poška’s finds. Baublys is not only a museum, but might be perceived as a monument to museums, even a monument to the idea of a museum.