The Snake in the Vodka Bottle: Life Stories from Post-Soviet Lithuania Twenty Years After the Collapse of Communism

Twenty years after participating in Lithuania's independence movement as a student, Laima Vince returns on a Fulbright grant to post-soviet Lithuania with her three children. Over the course of four years, while living and teaching and raising her children as a single mother in Vilnius, she conducts interviews with a diverse range of people. In this book she records the life stories of traditional healers, who treat their patients using ancient verbal incantations; trafficked teenage girls and the activist social workers who shelter them; Baltic gay rights activists who fight, and win, the right to hold the first Baltic Pride March in Lithuania; Chechen war refugees and their Ambassador in Exile; a contraband butter smuggler; an unemployed ex-KGB informer; and the forgotten heroes and dissidents of the Cold War. This book illuminates one woman's personal odyssey into the sometimes tumultuous society of post-Soviet Lithuania.

Laima Vince (Sruoginis) is the recipient of two Fulbright grants, which enabled her to travel around Lithuania’s provinces and cities collecting oral histories of resistance fighters, Holocaust survivors, exiles, victims of human trafficking, and war refugees. Laima has additionally received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in Literature and a PEN Translation Fund grant. She has an accomplished career in education spanning two decades, and is a published writer and playwright with professional literary ties in Europe, Hong Kong, and the United States. Laima is an award-winning literary translator who has translated and published two collections of poetry, five works of literary nonfiction, and two plays, in addition to writing numerous essays, articles, stories, poems, and academic papers. Laima holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts in New York, and in 2014 earned a Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction from the University of New Hampshire. Laima previously served as the faculty director of the Stonecoast Summer Writers’ Conference, and currently serves as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, where she teachers creative writing.