Antanas Škėma

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Antanas Škėma (born November 29, 1910 in Łódź , Russian Empire ; † August 11, 1961 near Chicago , USA ) was a Lithuanian writer .

Life

Antanas Škėma was born in 1910 in Łódź, then part of the Russian Vistula , where his father, a Lithuanian teacher, had been transferred. At the beginning of the First World War , the family fled to the Russian hinterland. Škėma experienced a traumatic childhood, first in Voronezh and then during the October Revolution in Ukraine . In 1921 the family returned to the now independent Lithuania . 1929 SKEMA began in Kaunas Medicine , later 1931 law to study. From 1935 he devoted himself increasingly to the theater, he worked as an actor and later as a director at the Vilnius State Theater. In 1941 Škėma took part in the June uprising against the Soviet occupation, in 1944 he fled from the renewed Soviet occupation to Germany, where, like tens of thousands of his compatriots, he lived in DP camps for several years . In 1947 Škėma published a volume of short stories and wrote his first dramas. In 1949 he moved to the USA, where he earned his living as a factory worker and lift boy. In Lithuanian exile circles, he was involved in theater in the USA and Canada, wrote numerous articles for newspapers and magazines in the émigré press and published two further volumes of novels, essays and poems. In 1961 he died in a car accident in Pennsylvania .

plant

Balta drobulė (German: The white sheet ) was Antanas Škėma's only novel. He wrote it between 1952 and 1954 in his New York exile. It is regarded as the first Lithuanian novel of literary modernity, takes up procedures of the beat generation and modernity, such as the stream of consciousness , and combines these modern elements with memories of its Lithuanian past. In 1958 the novel was published for the first time in the London exile publisher Nida. In addition, Škėma wrote plays ( Pabudimas , Žvakidė ), poems and a handful of short stories (in the volumes Nuodėguliai ir Kibirkštys and Šventoji Inga ). Škėma was enormously influential for the following generations of Lithuanian writers, Jonas Mekas calls him a representative of the "generation without ornaments". Because of his existential issues, Škėma was known as the "Lithuanian Camus ".

Works

  • Nuodėguliai ir Kibirkštys. 1946
  • Pabudimas. Terra, Chicago 1956
  • Šventoji Inga. Terra, Chicago 1956
  • Žvakidė. 1957
  • Balta drobulė. Nida, London 1958
  • Čelesta. Nida, London 1960

Web links

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Footnotes

  1. ↑ Claudia Sinnig: Antanas Škėma. Entry in Kindler's Literature Lexicon . JB Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart, pp. 248f.
  2. ^ Jonas Mekas: Antanas Škėma. In: The white sheet. Guggolz Verlag, Berlin 2017, pp. 252f.
  3. ↑ Rimvydas Šilbajoris: The Tragedy Of Creative Consciousness: Literary Heritage Of Antanas Škėma. In: Lituanus, Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences. Volume 12, No. 4, winter 1966
personal data
SURNAME Škėma, Antanas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Skema, Antanas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lithuanian writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 29, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Łódź
DATE OF DEATH August 11, 1961
Place of death Chicago