HINSEY: What was your situation after you graduated from university in 1960?

VENCLOVA: I graduated in the spring. In addition to earning all the required credits and writing a senior paper, we had to undergo two months of full military training—one month before the start of our final year (in my case, the summer of 1959), plus one month after graduation (the summer of 1960). After that, every male student was given the rank of junior lieutenant as a mandatory supplement to his diploma. We spent our first month of training as privates in the Kaunas barracks, and the second month as sergeants in the so-called Kaliningrad region. The experience was, on the whole, comical, bordering on the absurd. Our superiors, mainly officers who had served in the Lithuanian division during the war, were Lithuanian speakers, but all the training was conducted in Russian. They had orders to harass everyone and work us as hard as possible, thus giving us a taste of combat; in reality they were less than demanding and turned a blind eye to many of our escapades. It was rather like Good Soldier Švejk with a touch of Catch-22. Actually, we even produced a wall newspaper with the title Twenty Švejks, which caused an extraordinary scandal because of its ideological incorrectness. We would sometimes go off base for an entire day, drinking heavily and acquainting ourselves with the local prostitutes who tended to flock around the barracks. I boasted that I was a record-holder in such samovolkas (absences without leave), especially in Kaunas: there, I could easily reach my grandfather's house and change into civilian clothes, which made me less conspicuous on the street. Perhaps that means at least some of the various military techniques I learned, such as camouflage, weren't wasted on me. In the Kaliningrad region, we served in the old, completely ruined city of Insterburg (Cherniakhovsk); each of us had to give orders to a detachment of Russian privates, which led to new farcical adventures.

HINSEY: What happened after the end of your military training?

VENCLOVA: Our training ended in August 1960. Following graduation, we were each assigned a job. As a rule, this involved teaching Lithuanian language and literature in a remote village, which was viewed as repayment to the state for the generosity of our education.