The Man Who Is Playing for Time

Few Lithuanians boast a finer nationalist pedigree than Vytautas Landsbergis. Descended from a long line of intellectuals, the new President is only the latest Landsbergis to agitate for an independent homeland. His maternal grandfather produced the first grammar of modern Lithuanian, while his paternal grandfather was exiled to Russia for his opposition to czarist rule. Landsbergis' father Vytautas, one of Lithuania's leading architects, was a volunteer in the fight for independence in 1918 and, with his elder son Gabrielius, took part in an attempt to create an independent Lithuania during World War II.

Now the younger Vytautas, 57, is spearheading the effort to disentangle Lithuania from a union that it never sought. "National feeling is strong and deep in Lithuania," Landsbergis wrote last month. "For centuries our land has been dominated by grasping neighbors."

Yet until the birth in 1988 of Sajudis, the nationalist movement that now dominates the local parliament, Landsbergis was not an activist. "He was no more of a dissident than the rest of us," recalls Jonas Vruveris, a former colleague at the Vilnius State Conservatory, where Landsbergis used to lecture on the history of music. Landsbergis quickly gained a reputation as a shrewd strategist and within months emerged as Sajudis' chairman. "No one else has been so capable of forging a united position out of the multitude of positions that exist here," says member Eduardas Potasinskas.

Still, Landsbergis seems an unlikely conductor of Lithuania's symphony of defiance. With his brown beard, wire-rim glasses and brown corduroy jacket, he looks every bit the egghead that he is. A pianist at heart and a professor of music by trade, Landsbergis is more comfortable before a keyboard than a crowd; the music he sends up from the ivories is far more lyrical and moving than the political articles he pens. He is married to a fellow pianist, Grazina, and is proud that his family is caught up in the struggle for independence. "All of them are emotionally tied to this movement," he told a reporter last year, then went on to boast that his eldest grandson, at age seven, wags a national flag at Sajudis meetings. In the grand tradition of the Landsbergis family, the boy, he said, "feels himself a fighter for Lithuania." As Landsbergis matches Mikhail Gorbachev wit for wit, Sajudis colleagues watch the man they affectionately call "maestro" with admiration and fascination. "He is a superb chess player," says Jurate Gustaite, a teacher at the Conservatory. "I have been reminded of that a lot lately as I watch him maneuver so deftly, always thinking several steps ahead."

Landsbergis invites comparison with playwright Vaclav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia. Like Havel, Landsbergis has determined that the needs of a nation must supersede his love of his art. Still, he misses his beloved music. His aides speak of moving a piano into his office in the Supreme Council. Says Tadjuga Mackeviciene, one of his assistants: "He is able to raise people's spirits with his music." The question is whether he will be able to persuade Gorbachev to hum along.