Published on 07 June 2017
On September 21, 2016, as his colleagues at the MIREES program (University of Bologna-Forli, Vytautas Magnus University, St. Petersburg State University) gathered together in Forli for thesis defenses and a graduation, we received word of the tragic death of our dear friend, colleague, and beloved Professor Leonidas Donskis. The following text contains a few modest words of tribute to an irreplaceable scholar and teacher, a polymathic mind, a fearless defender of human rights, a public intellectual for all of Europe, an extraordinary lover, supporter, and performer of music, literature, and the arts generally, and – above all – a warm and generous-hearted friend to so many in so many places around the world.
On the 11th and 12th of May, 2017, Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, hosted a conference in honor of the late intellectual luminary of Eastern and Central Europe, Leonidas Donskis. The conference, entitled “The Interdisciplinary Intellectual Practices and Moral Imagination of Leonidas Donskis,” brought together an internationally and intellectually diverse group composed of eminent scholars from Donskis’ own fields of study, university colleagues from all over the world, friends from both his local and global spheres of social and intellectual influence, and admirers from his beloved home country of Lithuania. The two-day event consisted not only of academic speakers, panel presentations, and round-table discussions, but also a reception, a photo exhibition about Donskis (held in the university’s main library, now named in his honor), and a public music concert in the city’s renowned city-center pedestrian walkway. To honor his legacy, the MIREES program (University of Bologna-Forli, Vytautas Magnus University, St. Petersburg State University) announced the creation of a graduate student fellowship in Donskis’ name, to be awarded annually to a MIREES student whose thesis topic addresses Donskis’ own work or the topics and issues that he held dear. The breadth of the conference’s topics and events were a fitting tribute to an extraordinary man who will always be remembered for his synergy of intellect and heart.
The following is a slightly altered version of an encyclopedia article on Donskis: to be published in French in Pensées et penseurs de l’Europe mediane.
Leonidas DONSKIS (1962-2016) was a Lithuanian philosopher, historian of ideas, social analyst, political commentator, and public intellectual. One week before this article was to be submitted, one of Central and Eastern Europe’s bright lights went out, tragically transforming the guiding tense of this text from present to past: on September 21, 2016, Lithuanian intellectual luminary Leonidas Donskis died unexpectedly at the age of 54. He left behind a wealth of intellectual production: he authored or edited more than thirty books in both English and Lithuanian, with translations in thirteen languages, and his articles and commentaries were seemingly ubiquitous in the publishing organs of the Central and Eastern European public sphere. Donskis was Renaissance man: a cosmopolitan-minded promoter of empathy, understanding, and liberal values; a lover of the arts, music, and literature; a champion of human rights and civil liberties; a scholar of the cross-pollination of politics, philosophy, literature, and history; a proud Lithuanian, European, and global citizen in equal measures; a prolific individual and collaborative scholar and essayist, unusually gifted as both a written and oral stylist; a caring and conscientious teacher; a steadfast colleague with the utmost professionalism; and a generous, compassionate friend—a true mensch. The synergy of his interests and accomplishments assure that the light of his legacy will burn brightly into the future, despite the shadow of his recent passing.
His teaching, research, and political advocacy took him all over Western, Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe, as well as the United States and Great Britain; in the first part of his career he often referred to himself as a wandering scholar. But he was also firmly rooted in all three major urban centers of his native Lithuania: Klaipeda, Vilnius, and Kaunas. Born and raised in Klaipeda, Lithuania, the son of Holocaust survivors, he received his first doctorate in philosophy at Vilnius University, later earning a second doctorate in moral and political philosophy from the University of Helsinki, Finland. In his final fifteen years his visibility increased as a public intellectual in Lithuania and across Central and Eastern Europe. He also put down personal and institutional roots in Kaunas, Lithuania: from 2002 he was Professor of Political Science at his beloved Vytautas Magnus University, serving from 2005-2009 as Dean of the Faculty of Political Science and Diplomacy. In 2009 be brought his role as a tireless defender of human rights to Brussels, where from 2009-2014 he was a Lithuanian Member of the European Parliament. Following this term Donskis returned eventually to Vytautas Magnus University as a Professor to continue his academic pursuits, where he developed the university’s "VDU Academia Cum Laude" program. Further unique biographical highlights include his honorary doctorate from Bradford University in Great Britain, roles as Honorary Consul of Finland in Kaunas and deputy chairman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, as well as his award in 2004 by the European Commission of the title Ambassador for Tolerance and Diversity in Lithuania.
Leaving aside his prolific writing for the public sphere (e.g. popular and cultural periodicals, magazines, and newspapers), most of which remain archived on the internet in various publications and sites, in terms of scholarly production Donskis achieved more in his twenty years of active writing and scholarship than most could ever hope to achieve in twice that time. His powerful, creative, and curious intellect produced more than 30 books and well over 200 articles of the scholarly variety.
Despite the massive scope of his work, Donskis’ scholarly oeuvre submits to a narrative that establishes three related but discrete periods in his intellectual production. From his earliest academic publications in 1993-1995 to his works-in-progress still to be posthumously published, we may characterize him vis-à-vis his research themes as an intellectual cartographer—a maker of idea maps, of a sort. His first ten years of scholarly work (roughly 1993-2002) chart the intellectual terrain covered by philosophers, artists, cultural critics, linguists, poets, political scientists, and historians in an effort to map out Lithuanian nationalism and identity in the twentieth century. Sometimes this is a singularly focused view, but most often he presents Lithuanian politics and culture as a comparative point that both illuminates and is reciprocally illuminated by the broader intellectual maps he sketches of Central and Eastern Europe. Some of Donskis’ most beloved intellectual heroes reappear time and again in these works, such as Vytautas Kavolis, Aleksandras Shtromas, and Tomas Venclova—notably, all three are Lithuanian émigrés. The book Identity and Freedom: Mapping Nationalism and Social Criticism in Twentieth-Century Lithuania (2002) best exemplifies this thematic tendency.
From approximately 2003 to 2008 Donskis’ topical emphases shifted slightly, turning his maps of Western moral and political consciousness and ideologies (e.g. liberalism, conservatism) into genealogies. These works include an increased interest in how literature (e.g. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milosz, Orwell) reflects power relationships, and how stories and characters are prisms that reflect current issues in Central and Eastern Europe, especially in Forms of Hatred (2003) and Power and Imagination (2008).
In the seven years between 2009, when he began as a Lithuanian member of the European Parliament, until his death in 2016, Donskis inhabited the role of an intellectual lens grinder. From Troubled Identity and the Modern World (2009) to his two co-authored books with Zygmunt Bauman, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (2013) and Liquid Evil (2016), Donskis addressed the moral myopia clouding Europe’s future. Emphasizing both modernity’s perceived loss of empathy and the urgency to renew it, Donskis strove to help others see clearly the ambiguities and challenges.
His privileged intellectual compass point was the concept of moral imagination, influence by his mentor Vytautas Kavolis, and transformed throughout his work. Perhaps his greatest enduring influence is—by charmingly and trenchantly naming, explaining, problematizing, and universalizing it—to have intellectually mapped the Central and Eastern European moral and political imagination.
J.D. Mininger, May 2017