There is an obvious difference between the modern nation of Lithuania and the Lithuanian ethnic community that lived in the 18th century in a socially and legally disjunct estate society with a tendency to break the ethnic community. The Polish language prevalence in the public life of Lithuania in the 18th century affected the above-mentioned disjuncture as well. Although it is assumed that language is not the key phenomenon in organising the nation, still our discussion of the condition of the nation will start from the status of the Lithuanian language and then move on to ethno-social links. Lithuanian was both a spoken and a written language in the 18th century. Nevertheless, the written monuments of Lithuanian from the 18th and previous centuries are not large in number; the 18th century in particular left us a sparse yield of factual (oaths in courts and estate administration, tenure regulations of courts) and fictional literary materials in the Lithuanian language. Referring to just these we cannot obtain a systematic image of Lithuanian language use. Luckily, we have more abundant writtings in Lithuanian serving Lithuanian Catholic pastoral needs, in printed or manuscript form. In the 18th century, religious books of the 17th were reprinted up to a dozen times as well as new ones written and published. A new genre of Lithuanian literature appeared: primers or elementary textbooks, for example. The fact that they were printed in many copies and editions testifies to the language‘s being used in schools. The leadership of the 1794 Insurrection in Lithuania used the Lithuanian language in its appeals to the populace: this was the high point of its use in public.[...]

In the present article, the information is collected about the attempts of Kaunas residents (18th century) to rhyme and to serve the poetry muses. A part of the issues discussed are already known in historiography, while a part of them are presented from the repositories of historical sources. The object of the research, i.e. rhymed works are analysed from the perspective of a historian rather than a literary critic. The most important aspects are the circumstances and the time when the work was written, its authorship, and its social significance. The present article discusses the information by Ruigys (the end of the 17th century) about the song created by Kaunas burgomaster O Apwyneli Žallukieli. For the first time, the poetry written in Polish by an unknown author is presented; it mourns the consequences of the fire in Kaunas in 1732. It also discusses the panegyric of Kaunas magistrate members created in 1781 by Andrius Noreika in Latin and Polish; the circumstances of the poetry for the festivities on May 8, 1791 in Kaunas are analysed. The article also adds and revises the information about the time of the 18th century rhymed texts Iszpażynimas / Wyznanie and Asz Łuczynskas known in historiography (1791–1792 and 1799, respectively), their authorship (the opinion that the author is the scribe of Kaunas City Council is supported), and the circumstances of writing them. The inclination to rhyme is a very personal feature, but it can be encouraged and developed by the conception of cultural life during one or another period. In the 18th century, in Kaunas and the whole Lithuania, poetry was one of the most important subjects in the schools of Jesuits and other monasteries, as well as in the schools of the Education Commission. Rhyming was one of the means of developing rhetoric, and the skills acquired at school influenced writing on various occasions. [...]