This is an automatically translated description

Richardas Gavialis's novel Vilnius Poker is a watershed in Lithuanian fiction. Written "in a drawer" in 1979 and 1987, and published in November 1989, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it marked a different kind of literature - an independent and self-reliant literature that looked at the world critically and ironically.

This is a narrative that is intricate in its structure, similar to the famous film Rashomon by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Here, in four different versions of events, the life of Vilnius controlled by the omnipresent totalitarian system in the late 70s and early 80s of the twentieth century, in the grey days of Leonid Brezhnev's rule, is revealed. In the novel, the reader will find not only a detective intrigue in the spirit of "who did it", a suspicious atmosphere or a gloomy grey everyday life, but also a peculiar background of the novel - metaphors of the late Soviet period that made R. Gavialis famous. Gavialis and which conceptually permeate the entire work: konachi, Oni, homo sovieticus, homo lituanicus, camp.

Dear reader, who picks up the Ukrainian translation of Vilnius Poker, can only recall the words of Richard Gavialis himself: «This book is not intended for those who seek entertainment and pleasant rest in literature.