Maironis Lithuanian Literature Museum (MLLM) was founded in 1936 in the house of the poet and priest Jonas Mačiulis-Maironis (1862–1932), which he had bought in 1909. The poet lived in eight rooms on the first floor of the house.
The apartment was decorated by the artist Tadas Daugirdas. Four years after the poet’s death, three memorial rooms were furnished and opened in it.
From 1940 to 1944 the poet Bernardas Brazdžionis served as director of the museum. On his initiative the museum began to collect the archives of other writers as well, and in time it became the Republican Museum of Literature.
On 1 March 1989 the Lithuanian SSR Museum of Literature was renamed the Maironis Lithuanian Literature Museum, and the statue of Christ demolished in 1976 was restored to Maironis’s garden.
The whole of Maironis’s apartment was restored in 1992, and in 1998 the authentic wall decoration was recreated for the first time.
In 2016 Maironis’s rooms reopened after a new restoration: the ornaments by the artist T. Daugirdas in the Great Drawing Room, the Art Deco drawings in the study and the early Rococo decoration of the Red Drawing Room were renewed. The memorial apartment was reconstructed for the first time, so that visitors can walk through the rooms in a circuit and see the kitchen once run by the poet’s sister, Marcelė Mačiulytė.
The mansion that houses the museum was built in the mid-18th century on the cellar foundations of three 16th-century Gothic houses. After the war of 1812 the building served as a hospital. During the suppression of the 1863–1864 uprising a court martial sat here; one of the leaders of the uprising, the priest Antanas Mackevičius, is believed to have been imprisoned in the cellars and sentenced to death.
While Maironis lived here, the ground floor housed the Sakalas publishing house, a school of applied arts, the first public Lithuanian library and reading room in Kaunas, and a number of other cultural organisations.
Many prominent figures of Lithuanian art, science, the church and public life have lived in or visited Maironis’s house.
The Maironis Lithuanian Literature Museum has five branches: the Juozas Grušas House-Museum, the Salomėja Nėris and Bernardas Bučas House-Museum, the Balys and Vanda Sruoga House-Museum, the Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas Apartment-Museum, the Children’s Literature Museum.
The museum’s founder is the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania.