Exiled from Lithuania because of war, my father spent his life thinking about his country. He had a habit of making grandiose claims about it, one of which was calling Vilnius “the Venice of the North.” I never understood that; Vilnius is not a city of canals, and its architecture, while Italian in influence, is not remotely Venetian, owing far more to Rome and the Lombard-Ticinese lake country.1 But the very incongruity of the phrase came back to me four years ago and led to my Lost Canals of Vilnius, a counterfactual history of a city that never existed, rebuilt around canals after the Great Fire of 1610, documented in a narrative punctuated by vedute and photographs.
Exile was not an abstraction in my family. It was the ordinary fact around which everything else was organized. My parents understood themselves as refugees, not immigrants. My father (Kazys Varnelis, like his father before him) was born in 1917 in Alsėdžiai, a small village in German-occupied Lithuania, still, for the moment, part of the world Arno Mayer called the “old regime.” Agriculture remained labor-intensive, industrialization touched only scattered enclaves, and the church was a major force, even as the ghosts of the old nobility were still present. The world my father was born into would not have seemed strange to someone from the sixteenth century.
His father, the first Kazys Varnelis in this lineage, was a farmer and religious artist. He attended the local school in Alsėdžiai, a small village in Samogitia, wrote well, and showed enough talent as a boy that the parish priest proposed supporting him for art study in Petersburg. But his mother was widowed and needed him on the farm, so he remained in the village and became a dievdirbys and maliorius: a carver of saints, a painter of chapels, a repairer of church interiors, and a maker of Užgavėnės masks. Shortly before the Great War, he tried emigrating to the United States, staying with relatives in Chicago and working as a railroad-station laborer while thinking he might bring the family over. He hated the metropolis, returned horrified, and never again left Alsėdžiai.2
Modernity—what Marshall Berman describes as an environment that promises transformation while threatening to destroy “everything we have, everything we know, everything we are”—arrived for my father’s family not as enlightenment or progress but as war and plague.3 The Spanish flu killed more than the Great War itself, circling the globe in four months. In Alsėdžiai, it arrived amid the collapse of the German occupation and the chaos of armies passing through a countryside where the infrastructure of daily life had already broken down. My father was the youngest of four (or five, the actual number is lost in fog) children, but when the disease swept through the household in the winter of 1918-1919, he alone survived. The old regime, whatever its oppressions, had at least been stable for centuries. It gave way to war, disease, and death—the ongoing disaster that would define the rest of my grandfather’s life. He would survive the Lithuanian Wars of Independence, the brief interwar republic, the first Soviet occupation, the Nazi years, and die in 1945, in the aftermath of yet another cataclysm, as the Red Army returned.
My father came of age in modernity. He became familiar with electricity, the automobile, and even the airplane, but also with the museum, the camera, and the archive. To pay for his high school education, he worked on a railroad construction crew, then took a wagonload of wooden dievukai from the area—small figures of Christ, Mary, and the saints carved for roadside shrines and crosses—to Kaunas, where historian Paulius Galaunė bought them for the Čiurlionis Museum and encouraged him to collect more folk art, buy a camera, and photograph it in situ. By the time he entered the Kaunas Art School in 1936—and certainly by the time he completed his studies in 1941 and briefly became director of the Museum of Ecclesiastical Art—such objects had become museum pieces. The world he was born into was now consigned to history.
In 1944, he received a draft notice from the occupying German army that would have sent him to certain death on the Eastern Front. He escaped to Vienna, where he had been admitted to the art academy to study painting. His would go back to see his parents once more, in 1945 for a last visit as the Soviets advanced. As his mother made a last meal for the family, they could hear the sounds of artillery in the distance. After dinner, he fled west again. His father died later that year, reputedly of asthma. He had been a lifelong smoker and he would have been 74. After years as a displaced person in Austria and Germany, he moved to Chicago where he met my mother, also a Lithuanian refugee, and opened a studio designing church interiors for Lithuanian parishes. But seeing commissions drying up amid Vatican II reforms, he turned to fine art as a career. His early work was surrealist abstraction—biomorphic sculptures and bas-reliefs influenced by Arp, Giacometti, and Moore, forms that suggested archetypes or hieroglyphics. My mother had studied psychology, and they shared an interest in Jung; the work tried to reach something beneath individual consciousness, images from the collective unconscious. Later, after a brief foray into optical art, he returned to simpler, stronger forms in the 1970s, now through hard-edged geometries and shaped canvases. He saw himself as part of the European artistic diaspora, the tradition of the Bauhäusler who had also washed up in Chicago: László Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe. But unlike his most accomplished Lithuanian-American contemporaries—George Mačiūnas, Jonas Mekas, Aleksandra Kašuba—he did not see himself as an avant-gardist or an outsider. They were younger, their educations interrupted by the war; they became who they were in America and claimed marginality as a position from which to work. My father had already been someone in Lithuania; he had already made the transition from the old world of peasantry to the new world of the city. A critic called him “fundamentally conservative,” a classicist—finding order in geometries even as the world around him was chaotic.4
If his art sought order, his Lithuania remained unstable, a country remembered, collected, reconstructed, and imagined. Vilnius was the most unstable object of all. During the interwar period, Poland held the city after Żeligowski’s staged mutiny, and he visited it only once, briefly, on an expedition after the Soviets returned the city to Lithuania in 1939, before swallowing the entire country. In the US, every day was filled with thoughts of Lithuania, the lost country. He returned in 1998, at the age of eighty, to start his museum, which he intended as a gift back to his homeland, but he found Lithuania different from what he imagined, a culture foreign to him. My father left as a refugee, but he was an exile, unable to return to a place that no longer existed and that he had barely known.
Born in the United States, raised with Lithuanian as my first language, and given a name that marks me not just as ethnic but as foreign, I am also an exile. Lithuania meant little here, when it meant anything at all. Without the widespread cultural infrastructure that the Irish, Poles, Italians, or Germans had, Lithuanians assimilated quickly, leaving behind names that sounded strange without becoming legible. Mine was one of them. When people had heard of Lithuania, it was usually as the place where the German genocide of the Jews had local accomplices, a fact made to stand for the whole country in a way it does not for Germany or Poland. In America, being Lithuanian was to have a negative identity, or none at all.
So, too, I am also an exile in Lithuania, identifiable by my American accent and unreliable grammar. I learned Lithuanian from my parents, which meant I learned the frozen language the diaspora preserved after independent Lithuania disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. My speech is littered with archaic words like “aerodromas,” analogous to the English “aerodrome,” as well as with Polonisms rather than the Russianisms that survived the occupation. I can be understood, but I do not pass as a native: my speech is wrong enough to be corrected, and haughty hotel clerks love to speak to me in English, pretending they can’t understand me, which is rather strange, since government ministers can.
In Lithuania, the diaspora is regarded as an anachronism: sentimental, stubborn, carrying a Lithuania fixed before occupation and return. This is understandable. In the diaspora, prewar Lithuania hardened into kitsch: folk costumes in parish halls, amber, stylized crosses, straw Christmas tree ornaments, heavy food, and even the church interiors my father designed before abandoning that world. Once he left the church interiors, my father also left the diasporic world behind, but he could not help but be associated with it.
Diaspora artists often meet the same impatience unless, like George Maciunas or Jonas Mekas, they were already well known outside the country. My father’s museum entered under that cloud. In presenting the project to the government, he focused on his collections of antique furniture, much of it nineteenth-century reproductions, and lituanistica, because promoting his own work would immediately provoke jealousy among local artists. When the museum opened in 2001, the small rooms and risks to the collection required visits by reservation, which meant contacting staff who often did not respond to emails or phone calls. For the first 15 years, fewer than a hundred people came annually. With the art downplayed, the museum looked less like a living artistic project than the private fantasy of a returned émigré like Mykolas Žilinskas’s strange, postmodernist gallery in Kaunas. Only with my 2017 exhibition at the National Art Gallery did that begin to change. My return helped make his return visible.
In the years since my parents’ passing, I have continued to visit Vilnius frequently—in part because of the needs of my family and the museum, but also because the city has become part of my life. I have friends there, as well as projects that have tied me to the city. Yet repeated return has not become belonging. In Lithuania as in America, I remain an outsider, attached to Vilnius but unable to claim it. I have often thought about moving to Vilnius, but that would hardly change my position. I will always be both American and Lithuanian, and neither. I, too, am an exile, haunted not by the loss of a place, but by never having had a sense of home to begin with, in either country.
Vilnius is a haunted city. It has been Vilna, Wilno, Vilnius; it has belonged to Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, Russians. Vilnius demands a literature of exile and return: Czesław Miłosz, Tomas Venclova, and Jonas Mekas each approached the city through memory, wound, and invention, through languages and histories that no longer coincide. The Jews who made up a substantial part of its population before the war fled or were murdered at Paneriai. The Poles were expelled or assimilated. What remains are traces, palimpsests, names of the dead. Jacques Derrida called this condition hauntology: the presence of what is absent, specters that are neither alive nor fully dead. The ghost is not simply what is gone; rather, it continues to make claims on the present.5
In July 2022, I found myself in Vilnius, having dinner with my friends, architect Gintaras Kuginys and filmmaker Giedrė Genkevičiūtė, in her flat, designed by the late Valdas Ozarinskas. Gintaras had just opened The Golden Ratio at NDG, a gilded concrete paving block set into the pavement, a nearly silent intervention that turned the gallery’s forecourt into a problem of value and attention. In the first months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the gold also carried another question: what still had value, and what could be stepped on without consequence? The invasion of Ukraine, of course, prompted thoughts about a Russian invasion of Lithuania. Valdas’s ghost also haunted us. His post-Soviet Vilnius was a city of loss as well, but for different reasons: the promised utopia never arrived, either under Communism or under capitalism. Valdas’s Vilnius was less a stable city than a field of objects that had survived some unnamed catastrophe, like the Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, as I argued in my essay on his work. Ordinary life felt provisional there, as if the flat were only a temporary shelter for artifacts recovered from elsewhere.
The AI image generator DALL-E 2 had just been released to beta testers, and we spent the evening prompting it. This was before AI panic hardened into cultural reflex, when the technology still felt less like a threat than an opening. The possibilities were dazzling, even if the results were often comically flawed. Still, where earlier image generators produced distorted, half-legible scenes, DALL-E 2 could conjure images that cohered. We imagined the golden brick being stolen by thugs; envisioned a future Vilnius, perhaps one in which Valdas’s visions had taken over the city; put land art in 1970s Vilnius; and placed Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s masked families in the Lithuanian countryside, a reference to the Užgavėnės masks my grandfather had made, another form of image-making between folk ritual, fantasy, and fear.
Later that week, I remembered my father’s phrase “Venice of the North” and thought of Canaletto’s famed capricci, fantastic images of Venice in which buildings by Andrea Palladio from Vicenza, a town considerably inland, mysteriously appeared in Venice or, in Canaletto’s London years, along the Thames. What if, I thought, we saw Vilnius as Canaletto might have seen it? Soon I was trying to generate images of a Vilnius with canals, as imagined by Canaletto. It did not go well. Until recently, AI image generators could produce convincing Venetian scenes in Canaletto’s idiom—the Grand Canal, the gondolas, the particular light of the lagoon, the confident brushwork—but when asked to make Vilnius the site, they did not look like Vilnius, drifting instead into a mixture of Venice and, at best, generic Eastern Europe. Venice, the city, was deep in the training data; Vilnius was legible only in more recent images. With enough prompting, I could coax images that looked like Vilnius with canals, but they had a thick impasto and the air of the late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century work one would have seen in Vilnius. Useful, but not Canaletto.
As I researched Canaletto, I discovered that his nephew, Bernardo Bellotto, who also used the name, had come tantalizingly close to Vilnius. In 1746, with the English Grand Tour trade disrupted by the War of the Austrian Succession, the elder Canaletto left Venice for London, leaving Bellotto in charge of the studio. The following year Bellotto accepted Augustus III’s invitation to Dresden, where the King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania, and Elector of Saxony, together with his chief minister, Heinrich von Brühl, had already imagined the Elbe as a second Grand Canal, its bridge recast as a “Saxon Rialto,” Venetian gondolas imported for masked water-festivals. Bellotto’s paintings would make that ambition visible to the court. Frederick II invaded Saxony in 1756, the Saxon army capitulated swiftly, Augustus and Brühl fled to Warsaw, court payments faltered, and in 1759 Bellotto left Dresden for Vienna to work for Empress Maria Theresa, then moved to Munich in 1761 to work for Maximilian III Joseph. He returned to Dresden later that year, where his wife and daughters had remained and where his house had been destroyed in the Prussian bombardment of 1760, but the old court did not recover. Augustus and Brühl both died in 1763; reduced to teaching perspective at the new academy, Bellotto left again in January 1767 with leave for St. Petersburg. He stopped in Warsaw and stayed, becoming court painter in 1768 to Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania.6 Unlike his uncle, Bellotto’s major Dresden and Warsaw city views were not capricci but vedute, although later, when demand for realistic city views weakened, he did turn to architectural fantasies and ideal views.7 The accuracy of the vedute mattered: when he etched some of his Dresden views years after painting them, he updated the plates to take in the buildings that had risen in the interim.
After the massive destruction visited upon Warsaw by the Luftwaffe, Bellotto’s panoramic vedute were used to help reconstruct the city center. The socialist government of the Polish People’s Republic argued that by turning back to the eighteenth century, they were reconstructing a pre-capitalist state; hence, the reconstruction was not a bourgeois project and could proceed under the regime. By the 1960s, the city historian would claim that “the old town now looks as it used to long ago.” But even an exact veduta is merely a picture; Bellotto composed and idealized, and the planners rebuilt his choices. The resulting Warsaw center has itself become a built capriccio, a city that never was. In enshrining it on its World Heritage list in 1980, UNESCO recognized not an untouched original but a city deliberately destroyed and then reconstructed, calling it an “outstanding example of a near-total reconstruction of a span of history covering the 13th to the 20th century.”8 Warsaw was not the only city his images would outlive. Bellotto’s Dresden was also partly reassembled from the topographic record his vedute preserved—a second capital remembered through the same hand. He had even rehearsed the catastrophe: after the Prussian bombardment of 1760 he painted the burnt shell of the Kreuzkirche, a ruin his biographer found indistinguishable from the ones Dresdeners would know after 1945.
In his Poetics of Cinema, the Chilean exile Raúl Ruiz recounts a scene from a novel by Kazimierz Brandys. The hero returns to Warsaw, reconstructed after the war as a carbon copy of itself, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, house by house. He seeks out his former home, burnt down in the air raids. The streets seem at once familiar and strange. He recognizes a street, a few trees, even a café, then confidently rounds a corner expecting to find his old home. Instead, he comes face to face with a blank wall, for here the planners have omitted a couple of streets, among them the one he is looking for.9
I have not been able to find this novel. Brandys wrote many books, few of which have been translated into English; perhaps it is among them. Or perhaps Ruiz, whose films repeatedly blur memory, invention, and fable, fabricated it. It hardly matters. The reconstructed Warsaw is already a parafiction: a documented invention, authenticated by its own materials, yet unable to restore the life whose form it repeats.
Over the thirty years that I have been visiting Vilnius, I have observed it, too, rise up from ruin. One day, there is a ruin; then, after I return from abroad, a Baroque building appears to have risen in its place, with a hotel or an Internet startup behind the facade. Most notable among these is the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, which was demolished in 1801 but was rebuilt in reinforced concrete from 2002 to 2018. Even now, there are proposals to rebuild the entire Upper Castle around Gediminas Tower. The architect involved argues that since the current tower—rebuilt in 1933—has only three stories instead of the original four, it is itself inauthentic, “not even finished,” and the long-gone castle should rise again.10
As AI image generators have matured, they can now produce more convincing images of Vilnius. Prompting them in the manner of Jan Bułhak or Sebastian Fleury, the early twentieth-century photographers who documented the city’s Baroque churches and crooked streets, can produce convincing results, even if strange artifacts often underscore the artificiality of these images. More than that, the inevitable breakdown of the image—an incomplete body, a three-story-tall street light, texture dissolving into probabilistic geometries—invokes, to me at least, the idea that these images are themselves haunted by the ghosts of history.
While I was working with the images, I started on a parafiction to give the canals a historical motive. Lithuanian historian Norbertas Černiauskas’s Fado: A Short History of Lithuania That Never Happened came out in 2024, recounting a counterfactual history of a Lithuania that somehow survived outside Soviet occupation. Its importance for me was not the counterfactual premise alone, but its use of real plans and unrealized futures to make an invented Lithuania feel continuous with the one history cut off. I found that LLMs were effective tools for giving parafiction the evidentiary texture of the real, producing names, dates, captions, municipal works, fires, maps, and scholarly habits that make invention behave like documentation.11 Given a city, a century, a disaster, and a visual style, an LLM can produce the kind of prose that seems to have surrounded the image all along: an urban legend, a detail from civic history, a real (or invented) figure. If the image generator makes the canal visible, the language model supplies the administrative and historical residue around it: the engineer’s name, the reconstructed street, the decree after the fire, the caption under the engraving. The result is what I have elsewhere called a stochastic history, a fabricated past generated through probabilistic sampling, producing documentation intended to feel authentic by accumulating plausible details rather than by fidelity to anything that actually happened.12
But in developing the narrative, my main task was not so much a solipsistic game of prompting LLMs, rather it was historical research. As often happens, however, research uncovers truth that is, as the cliche goes, stranger than fiction. As I investigated the canals, I found that Vilnius is shaped by a series of watercourses that traced streets corresponding to the improbable locations I had sited the canals in, locations that today, like Pilies gatvė, seem utterly wrong for watercourses. I had fabricated a nonsensical idea of rerouting the Vilnia from its course behind the Cathedral and Castle Hill to flow in front of both. In fact, the very opposite had happened. The Vilnia had flowed in front of the cathedral and hill until the current channel was dug. Vilnius indeed had canals, and the great flood of 1931, which inundated the city, provided imagery of the city under water. Many of the historical documents I came across beggared belief as well. The account of the 1610 fire by Jesuit Alessandro Cilli seemed too strange, too florid. A reader of an earlier draft told me the Cilli quotes felt unconvincing—too obviously fabricated by AI. They are not. The real documents read like inventions; the inventions accidentally point toward what was real.
Even the phrase that began the project belonged to this confusion. “Venice of the North” wasn’t my father’s private fantasy of Vilnius; rather, it was a wandering cliché that he repeated, a phrase available to any northern city with enough water or civic ambition. In Bardadrac, Gérard Genette catalogs a Venice at every point of the compass—Bruges, St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Amsterdam.13 But the phrase worked for him because Vilnius is a city of many identities. The Jews called it Vilna and made it the Jerusalem of the North, a center of learning and printing. The Poles called it Wilno and considered it theirs by right. Russians, too, coveted it—and continue to covet it—hoping it can serve as a foothold for their futile European ambitions. For Lithuanians, it has been our capital city and our center of culture. These versions do not replace one another; they remain present as absences, specters that can neither fully arrive nor fully depart.
Laimonas Briedis called Vilnius a “city of strangers,”14 a place known through visitors, conquerors, exiles, travelers, and residents whose claims on the city never quite coincided. My father was one of them. He carried a city in his head that he had barely known, a city assembled from longing, maps, stories, and claims. The Lithuania he was haunted by was not the Lithuania that continued without him, developing its own culture, its own traumas, its own ways of being. He was a stranger to that Lithuania, that Vilnius. The canals embody the idea of a city that exists as much in the imagination as in physical form.
What has been lost isn’t just the old world my grandfather knew—the bishops, nobles, manors, peasants, little gods, and stability of centuries—but the world that replaced it as well. This is T. J. Clark’s point in Farewell to an Idea when he writes that the “modernist past is a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp.” With the full arrival of modernity, we cannot grasp the 15 Modernity came with promises and the clarity of categories: the world would be disenchanted, the real could be distinguished from the false, the document from the fabrication, the history from the fantasy. But the clarity of categories was always more a promise than a reality and certainly does not hold today. Russia’s war on Ukraine is waged as much through disinformation as through artillery; American politics has become a fever dream of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy; viral lies spread faster than any correction can follow. Even this project can’t help but play a role in the circulation of counterfactual information. Once released, these images are likely to float free of this project. They will circulate, be reposted, stripped of context, scraped into datasets, and returned by future models as part of the visual memory of Vilnius. This has already happened to me: the earlier project, in which I imagined the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard visiting Lithuania, was stolen by a viral poster who stripped my authorship and labeled the images “Real (not AI!).” The gullible believed it, and he received tens of thousands of likes. Exile is no longer only the condition of those cut off from a place; it is becoming a general relation to the past. The canals of Vilnius belong to that world—not quite real, no longer safely imaginary.
- Mindaugas Paknys, “How Artists from Small Italian Region Spurred Lithuanian Baroque,” LRT English, August 29, 2021, https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1478045/how-artists-from-small-italian-region-spurred-lithuanian-baroque; Tojana Račiūnaitė, “St. Teresa’s Church in Vilnius: Adaptation of a Baroque Model,” Orbis Lituaniae, Vilnius University, https://www.ldkistorija.lt/st-teresas-church-in-vilnius-adaptation-of-a-baroque-model/. ↩
- Dalia Vasiliūnienė, “Alsėdžių menininkas Kazimieras Varnelis,” in Žemaičių praeitis 10, ed. Adomas Butrimas and Liepa Griciūtė (Vilnius: Vilniaus dailės akademijos leidykla, 2002), 251–260, esp. 252–258. ↩
- Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 15. First published by Simon and Schuster, 1982. ↩
- Kazys Varnelis, “Abstraktusis klasicistas [Abstract Classicist],” in Kazys Varnelis, ed. Daiva Vaišnienė (Vilnius: Lietuvos nacionalinis muziejus / National Museum of Lithuania, 2022), 69–216. ↩
- Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994; Routledge Classics, 2006).↩
- National Gallery of Art, “Canaletto,” artist biography, https://ngabiographies.org/biographies/canaletto; Fritz Löffler, Bernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto: Dresden im 18. Jahrhundert, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 2009), 14–27; Angelo Walther, Bernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto: Ein Venezianer malte Dresden, Pirna und den Königstein, 3rd ed. (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst Dresden, 2004), 7, 14–21; Mieczysław Wallis, Canaletto: The Painter of Warsaw (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1954), 13–15, 35–36. ↩
- Walther, Bernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto, 26–27. ↩
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Historic Centre of Warsaw,” https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/30/. ↩
- Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, trans. Brian Holmes (Paris: Éditions Dis Voir, 1995), 25. ↩
- “Beautiful but risky idea: should Vilnius Upper Castle be rebuilt?” LRT English, January 10, 2022, https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1577360/beautiful-but-risky-idea-should-vilnius-upper-castle-be-rebuilt. ↩
- Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,” October 129 (Summer 2009): 51–84, https://doi.org/10.1162/octo.2009.129.1.51. ↩
- Norbertas Černiauskas, Fado: Trumpa neįvykusi Lietuvos istorija (Vilnius: Aukso žuvys, 2024); Lithuanian Culture Institute, “Norbertas Černiauskas. Fado. A Short History of Lithuania That Never Happened,” Lithuanian Culture Guide, December 12, 2024, https://english.lithuanianculture.lt/lithuanian-culture-guide/2024/12/12/norbertas-cerniauskas-fado-a-short-history-of-lithuania-that-never-happened/. ↩
- Gérard Genette, Bardadrac (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 426. ↩
- Laimonas Briedis, Vilnius: City of Strangers (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009). ↩
- T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 2. ↩