The museum was founded in 1974. The writer Satrijos Ragana- Marija Peckauskaite (1877-1930) lived in Židikai from 1915 until her death and wrote her best works there. The exhibition is devoted to her life and creative work.

SATRIJOS RAGANA

PECKAUSKAITE, Marija (pen name Satrijos Ragana; 1878-1930), educator and writer, born in Medingenai, county of Telsiai, on Feb. 24, 1878. Even though her parents were of the nobility who had adopted a Polish way of life, they permitted her to make friends with peasant children and to speak Lithuanian with them. In the bosom of her enlightened family she matured into a woman of democratic, humanist and religious disposition.

A friendship with Povilas Visinskis inclined her toward committed participation in the newly arising, distinctively Lithuanian literary and cultural movement. Visinskis translated her first works (written in Polish) and from 1895 on had them published in Varpas (The Bell) and Ukinikas (The Farmer), liberal Lithuanian  periodicals. But Peckauskaite could not accept Visinskis' liberalism and religious indiferentism, although she had come to share his patriotic enthusiasm and nationalist orientation. She began to publish her writings in Tevynes Sargas (Guardian of the Homeland) and other Catholic newspapers after meeting Rev. Juozas Tumas.

In 1905 she received a scholarship (through Visinskis) from the Ziburelis (The Little Light) society and travelled to Switzerland, where she studied pedagogy at the Universities of Zurich and Fribourg. While pursuing her studies she met Friedich Foerster, whose pedagogical ideas were to have a lasting influence on her subsequent literary and teaching endeavours. She translated a number of his works into Lithuanian. From 1909-14 she filled a teaching and supervisory position at the Marijampole girls' secondary school. After that she spent the rest of her life in Židikai, North-Eastern Lithuania, engaged in writing and charity work despite the fact that she herself was being supported by others. Peckauskaite died in Židikai on July 24, 1930.

A six-volume edition of her works appeared in 1928. Published separately were her most important pedagogical volume Motina aukletoja (The Mother as Pedagogue, 1936) and Lithuanian translations of Foerster's Jogendlehre (2nd ed. 1926), Sexualethik und Sexualpadagogik (1923), Schule und Charakter (1928), Christus und das menschliche Leben (1931), Lebenskunde (1934), and Hendryk Sienkiewicz's W pustyni i w puszozy (1921, 2nd ed. 1927-29).

Her prose, consisting of short stories and novellas, depicts: the shift of the social centre of gravity from estate to village, from a Lithuania of upper classes to a Lithuania of peasants, and from a Polish to a Lithuanian cultural orientation. The estate and nobility are shown in three embodiments. The first still clings to the old visions of a joint aristocratic Polish - Lithuanian commonwealth and is incapable of accepting or understanding the new way of life. The second has no idealistic aspirations at all, being concerned only with good times, leisure, partying, hunting, and opportunistic appeasement of the government. The third group embraces the new way of life, joining in with practical work in education, social  weaver, and agricultural improvement (Viktute, 1903). In portraying the common people, she prefers to focus on youth, its quest for learning, humanism and altruism; some of her most appealing characterisations are of children (Vincas Stonis, 1906).