When Lithuania pops up in The Waste Land, its occurrence seems no more than a social accident, as the unnamed female voice clarifies for the benefit of an unknown auditor that she is not Russian, but is from Lithuania, a true German – ‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.’ Whatever inspiration Eliot had for these lines – and his commentators have a few suggestions – this single, free-floating sentence is of a piece with Eliot's technique in the poem of attributing to various speakers a kind of social speech which veils or is blind to the world of inner suffering and isolation. It was not until the later 1920s that Eliot began to shape a public opposition to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet state, and at the time of composing The Waste Land the show-through of his anti-communism is minimal, usually said to occur in the veiled allusion made by the phrase ‘hooded hordes’ which, without Eliot's own footnote, might never otherwise have been connected to Herman Hesse's essay on Dostoevsky, ‘Die Brüder Karamasoff oder der Untergang Europas’ (1920), which argued that the desire for the downfall of Europe was part of the Russian psyche. Russia is also present, though, in the first paragraph of The Waste Land, and the configuration of nationalities refers obliquely to the events of the revolution.

Scholars agree that Eliot composed the first part of The Waste Land before his stay at a sanatorium near Lausanne, so there can be no pretence that the German voice he makes heard there is that of, say, an exiled Lithuanian at Lausanne, waiting out the war. Of course, the words are not dated in such a way as to peg them specifically to events of the war and the revolution, nor are they geographically located. The dispossessed snobbishness of the phrase ‘echt deutsch’ establishes the claims of the (apparently displaced) speaker to be a member of a dominant minority. The Germanness of the speaker does not link her to either the Lithuanian-speaking majority or to the powerful Russian or Polish minorities in Lithuania, nor does it have any connection to Germany's occupation of Lithuania during the war. The speaker is evidently associated with the governing Russian groups and hence now speaks German with a Russian accent.