Petras Vileišis (25 January 1851 – 12 August 1926) was a prominent Lithuanian engineer specializing in the construction of railroad bridges. He was very active in Lithuanian public life and together with his brothers Jonas and Antanas became one of the key figures of the Lithuanian National Revival.
He studied mathematics at St. Petersburg University and railroad construction at the Emperor Alexander I Institute of Transport Engineers. For about two decades, Vileišis designed and constructed various railroad bridges across the Russian Empire amassing a substantial personal fortune. In 1899, he returned to Lithuania and settled in Vilnius where he built Vileišis Palace and established the first Lithuanian-language daily newspaper Vilniaus žinios as well as a Lithuanian printing press, bookstore, and ironwork factory which later became Vilija. None of these activities were profitable and by 1908 he had exhausted his savings. He then returned to Russia to work on railway bridges for another decade. After World War I, Vileišis returned to now independent Lithuania in 1921 and briefly served as the Minister of Transport in the government of Prime Minister Ernestas Galvanauskas. Vileišis died suddenly while on vacation in Palanga in 1926.
Vileišis was very active in Lithuanian public life. Already as a student, he published a handwritten four-page newsletter Kalvis melagis which is the first known Lithuanian periodical in the Russian Empire. Due to an error by the state censors, he managed to get approvals to publish four Lithuanian booklets despite the Lithuanian press ban. When the censorship office caught on the error, Vileišis published at least 55 books in East Prussia and United States that were smuggled into Lithuania. Most of these books were educational texts for the common people. He also continuously petitioned and lobbied various Russian officials, including Minister of Finance Sergei Witte and Governor-General of Vilnius Pyotr Sviatopolk-Mirsky, to get the press ban lifted. His brother Jonas even claimed that Vileišis spent considerable sums in bribing Russian officials to get the ban lifted in 1904. When the ban was lifted, Vileišis hurried to establish the daily newspaper Vilniaus žinios and a Lithuanian printing press. The newspaper's staff was instrumental in organizing the Great Seimas of Vilnius in 1905. Vileišis also supported other Lithuanian activities, including the first exhibition of Lithuanian art which was hosted at his house.
Biography Education Vileišis was born on in the village of near Pasvalys into a family of Lithuanian royal peasants who were free of serfdom. According to family history, they owned one volok of land and frequently traveled to Riga to sell flax, grain, fruits. Vileišis was the eldest of eleven children, but only six sons and two daughters reached adulthood. All sons received education; Petras became an engineer, Anupras assistant to Petras, Antanas a doctor, Juozas a Catholic priest, Jonas a lawyer, and Kazimieras inherited the family farm. Vileišis family hired a tutor (daraktorius) who prepared Petras for Panevėžys Gymnasium. However, the gymnasium was closed after the Uprising of 1863 and Vileišis enrolled into the Šiauliai Gymnasium in January 1866. He was a gifted student, particularly in math, and took additional private lessons in French and German. After the uprising, the gymnasium implemented various Russification policies, but according to future playwright Gabrielius Landsbergis-Žemkalnis who studied at the gymnasium at the same time it was Vileišis who encouraged him to speak Lithuanian. According to the memoirs of his brother Jonas, Vileišis would rather use a French prayer book than a Lithuanian prayer book printed in the Cyrillic script. He graduated in 1870 with a golden medal for academic excellence.
Vileišis was then admitted to the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of St. Petersburg University but only as an audit student. He became a full student in the second year. His tuition fees were waived and he received several stipends. Unlike many students, it appears that Vileišis did not struggle financially and made a decent living tutoring others. After graduation in 1874, he applied for a job as a gymnasium teacher position but was rejected because of his Roman Catholic faith (various Russification policies discriminated against Catholics who were deemed to be unreliable after the Uprising of 1863). Vileišis earned a living as a freelance tutor and translator. Vileišis knew several foreign languages, including Greek, Latin, French, German, English, in addition to "local" languages of Lithuanian, Russian, and Polish. After two years of such living, in August 1876, Vileišis was admitted to the Emperor Alexander I Institute of Transport Engineers. At the time, Russian Empire was investing into its railway network and the diploma promised a well paying engineering job. Vileišis chose the specialty of building caissons used to work on the foundations of a bridge pier. He graduated with distinction in 1881 and was assigned as assistant to the director of the .
Bridge engineer
In May 1882, Vileišis was sent to work on the railway drawbridge across the Don in Rostov-on-Don. A year later, he was reassigned to work on the Vilnius–Rivne line of the . As part of this assignment, he was sent to Belgium to inspect rails and other metal products that were ordered for the construction of the railroad. He found almost half of the product to be inadequate and spent about eight months arranging replacements in Belgium and England. This gave him time to travel, including to France. Over three years, Vileišis oversaw completion of about of railway and construction of a bridge across the Pripyat. In March 1885, he was transferred to work on the Samara–Ufa line of the Kuybyshev Railway and build the Ufa Rail Bridge across the Belaya. The bridge spanned and was completed by the end of 1888. For this achievement, Vileišis was awarded the Order of Saint Stanislaus (3rd class). In May 1889, he moved to work on the Ufa–Zlatoust line. At the time, his annual salary was 3,360 Russian rubles, which was a huge sum. He described the results of his experiments on the use of cement mortars and the processing of iron in Polish in two articles published in Przegląd Techniczny in 1889.
Vileišis received an offer to work for the Moscow–Ryazan Railway Association at an annual salary of 6,000 rubles and left his government job at the in July 1891. He directed the construction of the Ryazan–Kazan section and built bridges across the Pronya, Moksha, Oka, Sura, Kazanka. After the completion of this line in 1893, Vileišis again was employed by the Ministry of Railways but not as a full-time employee but a contractor from early 1894 to April 1896. He left the ministry as a court councillor. He then worked as contractor for various private railways and information about his activities is fragmentary. He worked on bridges for the Riga–Pskov line as well as numerous bridges, including across the Narew near Warsaw, Donets near Luhansk and Lysychansk, Daugava in Vitebsk and near Jēkabpils, Dnieper near Zhlobin, Lielupe in Jelgava. According to Jonas Basanavičius, Vileišis also worked on the Green Bridge in Vilnius (completed in 1894) but there is no documentary evidence to support the claim.
While profitable, his railroad career led to a nomadic lifestyle as he had to frequently relocate to be closer to the construction sites. He returned to Lithuania in 1899 and settled in Vilnius. Vileišis then worked less on railroad matters as most of the work was handled by his brother Anupras. The brothers worked on the reconstruction of a bridge across the Volkov in Veliky Novgorod in 1901 and construction of a section of the in 1902–1906.
Attempts at legal publications
While a student in Saint Petersburg, Vileišis was a member of an informal group of Lithuanian students that used to gather in the apartments of graf Vladimir Zubov. Vileišis and the group established the Lithuanian-language newsletter Kalvis melagis (Smith the Liar) in violation of the Lithuanian press ban. It was a primitive 4-page publication – handwritten and then mimeographed in secret. While only about ten issues appeared between December 1875 and March 1876, it was the first known Lithuanian periodical published in the Russian Empire.
Encouraged by the experience with Kalvis melagis, Vileišis started writing and publishing separate booklets. In 1875, Vileišis wrote a 47-page popular science work on earth and weather which was approved by the state censor and 2,000 copies were published next year. Before the censors discovered their error, Vileišis hurried to complete two other booklets based his writings in Kalvis melagis. They were approved in May and September 1876. In 1877, he published another booklet about the life of George Stephenson, pioneer of rail transport, and Industrial Revolution in England. He prepared many other educational and didactic booklets, including a prayer book, for the common village folk but the state censors rejected all of them due to the Lithuanian press ban. Vileišis was persistent and kept petitioning state censors and other Tsarist officials. His arguments ranged from narrow technicalities (that the Lithuanian alphabet was different from the prohibited Latin–Polish alphabet) to broad policy reasons that the Lithuanian press ban was harmful and should be lifted. He also planned to send a Lithuanian delegation to the new Tsar Alexander III. In March 1883, Vileišis received one final rejection of his petitions to publish Lithuanian texts in Russia.
When his job took him to Moscow, Vileišis met several Lithuanian students, including Jonas Basanavičius, Jonas Šliūpas, Jonas Jablonskis, Vincas Pietaris. In 1880, together with Šliūpas, he prepared a project for the Lithuanian Philological Society (a learned society similar to the Lithuanian Literary Society in the German Empire) and enlisted support from several linguists and university professors, including Vsevolod Miller, Fyodor Korsh, Vatroslav Jagić, Filipp Fortunatov, Yakov Grot. However, the Tsarist officials did not approve the society. In 1892, Lithuanians succeeded in establishing the Lithuanian and Samogitian Charitable Society in Saint Petersburg to provide assistance to Lithuanian students and organize Lithuanian cultural evenings. Vileišis was an active member and briefly became its chairman in 1894–1895.
Illegal Lithuanian publications After failing to persuade the Tsarist officials to allow Lithuanian publications, Vileišis turned to printing various educational texts abroad. According to studies of Vaclovas Biržiška, in total Vileišis published 59 books: four in Saint Petersburg, five in United States, and 50 in East Prussia. Vileišis in his memoir later wrote that he authored about 25 books himself, and others were commissions financed by him. It is difficult to determine the accurate number because these booklets were published under various pen names to confuse the Tsarist police. Many of these texts were published by Martynas Jankus in Bitėnai or by Otto von Mauderode in Tilsit and then smuggled into Lithuania. Most booklets had 2,000 copies published, and many saw additional editions. Vileišis made no money from the publications – he paid for the printing costs and then often gifted the printed books to the publishers for free. For commissioned works (mainly translations), Vileišis paid substantial commissions thus in a way subsidizing many poor Lithuanian students studying in Russia. In addition, Vileišis supported Lithuanian periodicals, including Aušra, Varpas, Garsas, Nemuno sargas, both financially and by contributing articles for publication.