Educated at Kražiai College and Kharkiv University, Juška as a Roman Catholic could not obtain a job in Lithuania and had to live in and work as a school teacher in various Russian cities (Mogilev, Novgorod, Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Kazan).

With his help, Juškas brothers managed to get a permit to print Lithuanian texts in the Latin alphabet at the University of Kazan and began preparing Antanas' works for publication in earnest.

They also managed to get a special exemption from Tsar Alexander II of Russia to publish a wedding song collection at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Antanas died in 1880, and Jonas published four volumes of Lithuanian folk songs and a small part of the Lithuanian–Polish dictionary before his own death in 1886.

[2] He attended a Bernadine school in Dotnuva and was admitted to Kražiai College where he earned a living working as a superintendent in a students' dormitory.

[5] Though the university did not have a strong linguistic program, Juška became the first Lithuanian to receive specialized philological education in the Russian Empire.

[6] As a Lithuanian he could not obtain a job in Lithuania due to Russification policies and for about four decades taught at various Russian educational institutions.

[2][7] In 1852, Juška established contacts with professor Izmail Sreznevsky and with his support and encouragement started more serious studies of the Lithuanian language.

Such evaluation was particularly hurtful as Juška and his brother spent so much time and effort on collecting language examples from the people.

[22] After this failure, Juška did not write any new studies of the Lithuanian language but continued to help his brother Antanas to organize his collected information and publish it.

[24] However, in reaction to the failed Uprising of 1863, the Tsarist authorities issued a decree forbidding to employ Roman Catholics in administrative posts in 1865.

Further, Okhrana investigated Juška for his help to members of the uprising who were deported to the interior of Russia and passed through Nizhny Novgorod.

[27] As years ticked by, Juška looked for ways to publish his and his brother's life-long work on Lithuanian folk song.

Baudouin de Courtenay managed to get the university to publish the works in the Latin alphabet despite the Lithuanian press ban (the university had autonomy and was not subject to general laws of the censorship in the Russian Empire), however Juška had to pay the publication expenses that amounted to 606 Russian rubles for just the first volume of the song collection.

The work was reviewed by Franz Anton Schiefner and Kazimieras Jaunius who highly praised its value and urged the academy to publish it.

[32] However, publishing Lithuanian text in the Latin alphabet became an issue particularly because the academy republished The Seasons by Kristijonas Donelaitis in 1865 which prompted the Ministry of National Education, by the order of the Tsar, to issue an order that Lithuanian works must only be published in the Cyrillic script.

[33] Therefore, Yakov Grot, vice-chair of the Academy of Sciences, had to petition Dmitry Tolstoy, the Minister of National Education, who in a consultation with Lev Makov [ru], the Minister of Internal Affairs, petitioned Tsar Alexander II of Russia for a special exemption to publish the songs.

He also sought better medical care for his illness, but after thirteen months of work in Kazan, Antanas Juška died on 1 November 1880.

[19][40] He devoted the rest of his energy to the dictionary, but proofreading galley proofs was a very slow process – some pages required to be fixed five or six times.

[41] Between 1884 and spring 1886, only ten author's sheets (160 pages that did not encompass the full letter A) worth of the dictionary was published.

[44] Both brothers were buried in a joint grave in the Arskoe Cemetery in Kazan; their remains were exhumed and reburied in the churchyard in Veliuona in November 1990.

[45] The same year, museum of Lithuanian ethnic culture named after brothers Juškas was established in the former rectory in Vilkija where Antanas briefly worked in 1862–1864.

[8] The two brothers closely cooperated in their studies; Jonas frequently visited Antanas in Lithuania during summer vacations.

At the time, Russian and German linguists became more interested in the Lithuanian language due to its archaic features and similarity to Sanskrit.

[52] In 1856, Sreznevsky asked Juška to write a scholarly review of the newly published Lithuanian language textbook by August Schleicher.

The dialect descriptions were not in depth, sometimes missing key features and entirely failing to address pitch accents or accentuation.

The work was evaluated by Otto von Böhtlingk, Oskar Johann Wiedemann [et], and Franz Anton Schiefner.

In his review of Schleicher's book, Juška urged to use the Samogitian dialect as the basis for the standard Lithuanian as he perceived it as purer and more archaic.

[56] After Schleicher rebuffed the notion in his response, Juška supported the use of both Samogitian and Aukštaitian dialects but using the same spelling rules.