Lithuanian literature

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Lithuanian literature refers to literature written in the Lithuanian language .

Early Lithuanian written language

The chronicles of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania , written in Church Slavonic chancellery language, form the beginning of the literature in the area of ​​today's Lithuania . Until the Renaissance, the Latin language (as in the work of the poet Maciej Sarbiewski ) and Polish dominated the literature.

Oral tradition goes back much further: In addition to the songs in the Lithuanian language ( Dainos ) mentioned as early as the 10th century with their often dark mythological content, which have been handed down in fragments since the 16th century and whose artistic value was already noticed by Herder and Lessing , The Raudos (" lamentations "; singular: Rauda ), first mentioned in the 13th century, are among the oldest creations of Lithuanian folk literature. They differ from the Dainos by a more complex artistic design in sophisticated language; mostly they were probably recited and modified according to the situation through improvisation. A distinction was made between deaths, wedding suits of the bride and suits in times of emergency and war.

The Lithuanian hero myths emerged from the 15th to the middle of the 17th century , such as the dream of Grand Duke Gediminas and the founding of Vilnius , some of which were only compiled in the 19th century. Since the middle of the sixteenth century there have been clearer traces of the Catholic and Protestant mission in these myths.

The Duchy of Prussia became Protestant in 1525 and there was a need for religious writings in the mother tongue of the Prussian Lithuanians who lived there . Based on the Polish version of Martin Luther's catechism , the Protestant pastor Martynas Mažvydas (approx. 1510–1563) wrote Catechismusa Prasty Szadei in 1542, the first book in Lithuanian, which, however, was not allowed to be used in actual Lithuania. The other early writings of the Lithuanian language were also of spiritual content, including the hymn book by Baltramiejus Willentas (approx. 1525–1587) and Johannes Bretke's (1536–1602) translation of the Bible, which however could no longer be printed. The Protestant pastor Stanislovas Rapalionis was the first Lithuanian poet to write a passion song in the Lithuanian language.

The Counter-Reformation in actual Lithuania, however, had an inhibiting effect on the development of a Lithuanian written language since 1570. The Protestant books were burned, the printing works were closed, and many Protestant Lithuanians had to flee to Prussia. Since 1600, Lithuanian has been increasingly replaced by Polish, which the local elites adopted after the union with Poland . Vilnius became a Polish city, the scholars at Vilnius University spoke Latin, the Jews Yiddish .

Konstantinas Sirvydas

The Jesuit Konstantinas Sirvydas published a trilingual Lithuanian-Polish-Latin dictionary in 1619, as Lithuanian was less and less understood. It saw many new editions. 1629 followed his sermons ( Punktai Sakymų ) in the Lithuanian language; these also served as a textbook for learning Lithuanian. Lithuanian translations of the New Testament and the entire Bible first appeared in Koenigsberg in 1701 and 1735 , as well as Lithuanian grammars and dictionaries were published by Protestant pastors in Prussian Lithuania in the 18th century. In return, “cultural imports” to Lithuania took place: in 1706 the fables of Aesop appeared in a Lithuanian translation.

The baroque sermons and the baroque theater gradually supplanted Lithuanian as a written language. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late 18th century, they finally went completely under. The lexicon became Polish, only the grammar remained Lithuanian. The enlightened reforms before the last partition of Poland came too late. In 1794/95 Lithuania fell under tsarist rule.

19th century

A characteristic of literature in the area of ​​the Russian General Government Vilna, which had existed since the last Polish partition in 1795 and which covered a somewhat larger area than today's Lithuania, was its multilingualism. In addition to Lithuanian (in the country) and Polish, Belorussian was spoken in Russian-Lithuania and Hebrew and Yiddish were spoken in Vilnius in particular. In Prussian-Lithuania (the Lithuanian- speaking part of East Prussia around Tilsit ), German was spoken alongside Lithuanian.

The Simonas Daukantas Museum in Papilė, Šiauliai district (2013)

Russian rule initially tolerated and promoted Lithuanian traditions. At the beginning of the 19th century, efforts were made to “cleanse” the Lithuanian language of Polish word stems. This is primarily the work of the historian Simonas Daukantas , who literally had to search for lost Lithuanian words in remote areas and who pursued a systematic language development with his students. The first volume of poetry in the Lithuanian language, which of course was still influenced by Polish song forms, comes from Antanas Strazdas and was printed in 1814. The poem Die Jahreszeiten ( Metai ), in which the German-Lithuanian Protestant pastor and “down-to-earth enlightener” Kristijonas Donelaitis (Christian Donalitius) in the 18th century described the life of serfs in an annual cycle in 3000 hexameters, was only considered large in the 19th century poetic achievement recognized and edited by Ludwig Rhesa (1818) in a shortened version, then again by August Schleicher (Petersburg 1865) and Georg Nesselmann (Königsberg 1868). In 1977 UNESCO added the work to the Library of Literary Masterpieces.

Schleicher and Nesselmann also collected numerous Lithuanian fairy tales, sagas and folk songs and translated them from the various dialects. The research begun by Germans into the material of Lithuanian folk songs and legends, which can hardly be surveyed, was continued by Lithuanians themselves from around 1830, u. a. by Simonas Stanevičius , Liudvikas Adomas Jucevičius and Simonas Daukantas , later especially by Antanas Juška .

The Polish nobleman Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (Lithuanian: Juozapas Ignotas Kraševskis) created with Anafielas (1840–1845) an epic based on mythological sources in Polish about Vytautas (Witold), the Grand Duke of Lithuania, modeled on the Kalevala . Its first part, Witolorauda (Lament of Witold), was translated into Lithuanian by Audrius Vištelis and has the status of a Lithuanian national epic.

The priest Antanas Baranauskas also originally wrote in Polish, which was spoken by the educated classes and the petty nobility. In 1860/61, in his poem Anykšči ( šilelis (The Anykščiai Grove), he described the deforestation of a forest by foreign masters - a metaphor that probably referred to the neglect of the Lithuanian language. Baranauskas, under the influence of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz , who also saw himself as a Lithuanian, developed Lithuanian, which is considered a “peasant language”, into a literary language. However, as late as the middle of the 19th century, three Lithuanian idioms were competing to become a written language.

After the uprising of 1863, there was a tsarist order from 1864 to 1904 that books were only allowed to be printed in Cyrillic, which severely hindered the further standardization of the written language and promoted the spread of Russian - not to mention the discrimination against Catholics in public offices. Many Lithuanian books in Latin script had to be published in Prussia. It was not until shortly before independence that the Western High Lithuanian ( Aukschtaitic ) dialect prevailed as the standard written language under the influence of the work of Friedrich Kurschat (Frydrichas Kuršaitis), who also contributed to the publication of the Dainos, and Jonas Jablonskis .

At the same time, Yiddish literature was able to develop in Lithuania to a greater extent than in any other European country. A representative of the German-Lithuanian variant of Yiddish was Eisik Meir Dick . Many printing works were in Jewish hands during the Tsarist era. The strengthening of the Lithuanian national consciousness after 1918, however, led to the decline of Yiddish literature and also to anti-Semitic statements by a number of Lithuanian writers.

National Romanticism and Early Modernism

Maironis monument in front of the Maironis Museum in Kaunas

The first work of Lithuanian modernism is the poem Pavasario balsai (Spring Voices ) by the priest Jonas Mačiulis ( Maironis ) from 1895, who also redesigned and popularized works of folk culture, e . B. the legend of Jūratė and Kastytis (1920).

In 1904 the ban on printing Lithuanian books in Latin letters was lifted. It had already been undermined by the book smuggling from Prussia and by the boycott of Lithuanian books in Cyrillic. As a result, the Lithuanian national movement and its legal newspaper Vilniaus žinios came to light, but immediately came into competition with the Polish and the emerging Belarusian national movement.

The Lithuanian literature of the first period of independence after 1918 was shaped by the national romanticism of the Maironi against the background of the conflict between Lithuanian, Polish and Russian. In addition, Lithuanian symbolism developed ( Balys Sruoga and Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas , 1894–1967). For a long time, poetry dominated; the themes were often taken from rural life.

The poet Oscar Milosz (1877–1939), who also collected folk tales, wrote in French . The symbolist Jurgis Baltrušaitis (1873-1944), who also worked as a diplomat and translator of Scandinavian literature, wrote only in Russian until 1927, then also in Lithuanian . The avant-garde Kasys Binkis (1893–1942) took up European futurism and expressionism . With Antanas Rimydis and others, he turned to a redesign of the Lithuanian metric.

A peculiar, partly Catholic-neo-romantic influenced, partly avant-garde Lithuanian existentialism developed around the magazines Granitas (1930) and Naujoji Romuva (1931). His representatives include the most important poet of her time, Salomėja Nėris , Jonas Kossu-Aleksandravičius, who was influenced by Romanticism and Expressionism, and Bernardas Brazdžionis , who developed the symbolist style to perfection.

Vilius Storosta ( Vydūnas ) and Kazys Puida (1883–1945) can be seen as representatives of romantic and impressionist theater before and after the First World War. Jurgis Savickis (1890–1952) was an important modernist prose author of the interwar period.

Exile literature

Numerous Lithuanian authors such as Brazdžionis, Radauskas, Savickis, Kossu-Aleksandravičius (since 1952 under the pseudonym Jonas Aistis permanently in the USA), Algirdas Landsbergis and the symbolist lyric poet Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas went into exile from 1941 to 1944 after Lithuania went through the German and Soviet occupation was badly hit. The novels Baltoji drobule (The white sheet) by Algimantas Skema and Miskais ateina ruduo (Autumn walks through the woods) by Marius Katiliskis as well as volumes with stories by Savickis were published in US exile . The poet Tomas Venclova emigrated to the USA in 1977. The younger generation of exiles further developed Lithuanian literature towards contemporary American or Western European prose.

Eduardas Mieželaitis fled the German occupation to Moscow in 1943. There he published his first volume of poetry and in the 1960s created experimental poetry linked to Futurism. Salomėja Nėris also went into exile in Moscow.

Born in today's Lithuania, Czesław Miłosz , in exile in France since 1951 and an American citizen since 1970, wrote in Polish. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980 .

post war period

In the post-war years, the poet and dramaturge Balys Sruoga (1896–1947) wrote his Dievų miškas (Forest of the Gods), a realistic-grotesque novel about his experiences in the National Socialist Stutthof concentration camp . The authors who remained in the country were able to build on Lithuanian poetry of the 1930s under the influence of Mieželaitis', which also had an impact on Russian literature, at the end of the 1950s. Representatives of socialist realism in Lithuania were the narrator Juozas Baltušis, the playwright Juozas Grušas , who had published realistic prose texts since 1928, and the narrators P. Cvirka and M. Sluckis. It was only in the 1970s that Lithuanian prose authors emancipated themselves thematically from political guidelines. Ieva Simonaitytė (1897–1987), born near Memel, became known for neo-realistic family novels from her homeland. The most important, artistically uncompromising novel of the late Soviet period is Priesausrio vieskeliai ("The highways in the early morning") by Bronius Radzevičius (1940–1980). Several of his stories were published posthumously.

Since 1959, a systematic catalog of folk texts catalog has been created at the Institute for Lithuanian Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR, which at the end of the Soviet era comprised over 300,000 records.

In terms of reception history, the East Berlin author Johannes Bobrowski (1917–1963) dedicates his poems and prose texts to the memory of Lithuania as a “landscape with people”, especially Memelland. This is reflected in his last novel “Lithuanian Claviere” (1963), a book about an opera that is to be written in Tilsit in 1936 about the German-Lithuanian pastor Kristijonas Donelaitis (Christian Donalitius).

After independence in 1990: myth versus market

After independence, the spectrum of literary forms and subjects expanded. Juozas Šikšnelis (* 1950) became popular for his sustained production of detective novels, for which he received numerous awards.

The social and literary identity discourse in Lithuania after 1990 shows a clear split in literature into a constructive-pro-European and a reproductive-nationalist direction, which is primarily oriented towards the cultural tradition and towards the foreign - both towards the West and towards the East - delimits.

The latter group includes e.g. B. Tomas Kondrotas , who has lived in the USA since the late 1980s, as well as Romualdas Granauskas , who had written stories and novels on the history, mythology and rural traditions of Lithuania since 1954 and through the novel Das Strudelloch (Lithuanian Edition 2009) became known. The poet Bernardas Brazdžionis, who returned from exile in 1989 and died in Los Angeles in 2002, was also caught up in patriotic themes.

Ricardas Gavelis , who also died in 2002, belongs to the Europe-oriented postmodern camp , who in his novel Vilniusser Poker (Poker in Vilnius) in obscene language settled not only with communism, but also with romantic nationalism. The novel The Rain Witch by Jurga Ivanauskaitė , also known in Germany, was banned in Lithuania immediately after its publication (1992). The author viewed Catholicism very critically, which makes it difficult to achieve popular success in her home country to this day. She died at the age of 45 in 2007. Another polarity that is becoming visible in the new Lithuanian literature is that between the “old” Catholic and the “new” market-dominated Lithuania, which is also viewed critically.

Marius Ivaškevičius (2008)

Translated into German a. the poems of the US-born poet and essayist Eugenijus Alisanka , the satires by Teodoras Četrauskas (* 1944) about the Soviet era ( Something, Somehow, Somewhere , German 2002), the historical and cultural-historical consideration of Vilnius: A City in Europe des Poet and former Yale professor Tomas Venclova, the novel Žali (2001; German The Greens , 2012) about the partisan war of the 1950s by Marius Ivaškevičius and the novel Mein Name ist Maryte (German 2015) by the director and screenwriter Alvydas Šlepikas ( * 1966), who deals with the fate of the German-born "Wolf Children" who fled from East Prussia to Lithuania.

Marius Ivaškevičius occupies a mediating position between the camps; For him, the partisan war, elevated to a myth by the nationalists, is not a struggle between homogeneous ethnic groups, but a civil war: Lithuanians and Russians fought on both sides, while the Jews got between the fronts. For Ivaškevičius, the distinction between a just and an unjust war is no longer valid. The work of Markas Zingeris (* 1947) is determined by the problems of Jewish identity, but he sees himself as a Lithuanian writer who remembers a long time of peaceful coexistence and in his novel "Playing Four Hands" (2003) about the rescue of Jews remembered from the ghetto by Lithuanians.

In 2002 Lithuania was the partner country of the Frankfurt Book Fair , and in 2017 it was the focus country of the Leipzig Book Fair .

literature

General
  • Friedrich Scholz: The literatures of the Baltic States. Their creation and development . (= Treatises of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 80). Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1990. ISBN 3-531-05097-4 .
  • Eugenija Ulcinaitė: Baroque literature in Lithuania . Baltos Lankos, Vilnius 1996, ISBN 9986-813-05-0 .
  • Sigita Barniškienė: “I too have to hike back home”. Lithuania and East Prussian literature . Saxa-Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-939060-20-8 .
  • Read Lithuania . Trauner-Verlag, Linz 2009, ISBN 978-3-85499-586-9 (The ramp)
  • Jürgen Joachimsthaler: Lithuanian songs and stories . In: ders .: Text margins. The cultural diversity of Central Europe as a problem of representation of German literature . Winter, Heidelberg 2011, Vol. 2, pp. 1-145, ISBN 978-3-8253-5919-5
  • Friedrich Scholz: The Lithuanian literature . In: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, ed. Walter Jens, vol. 20, p. 368 ff.
mythology
  • Adalbert Bezzenberger : Lithuanian research. Contributions to the knowledge of the language and ethnicity of the Lithuanians . Peppmüller, Göttingen 1882.
  • August Schleicher : Lituanica . Treatises of the Vienna Academy, Vienna 1854 (on Lithuanian mythology )
  • Edmund Veckenstedt (ed.): Myths, sagas and legends of the Zamaites (Lithuanians) . Heidelberg 1883 (2 vol.).
Folk songs
  • Christian Bartsch: Dainu Balsai. Melodies of Lithuanian folk songs . Sendet, Walluf 1972, ISBN 3-500-24190-5 (reprint of the Heidelberg edition 1886/89).
  • Karl Brugmann : Lithuanian songs, fairy tales, wedding bittersweet sayings from Godlewa . Trübner Publishing House, Strasbourg 1882.
  • Antoni Juszkiewicz: Lietuvîkos dainos . Kazan 1880-82 (3 vols.).
  • Antoni Juszkiewicz: Lietuvîkos svotbinès dainos ("wedding songs "). Petersburg 1883.
  • August Leskien : Lithuanian songs and fairy tales . Trübner Publishing House, Strasbourg 1882.
  • Georg Nesselmann : Lithuanian folk songs . Publishing house Dümmler, Berlin 1853.
  • Ludwig Rhesa (first), Friedrich Kurschat (ed.): Dainos . New edition Berlin 1843.
  • August Schleicher (Ed.): Lithuanian fairy tales, riddles and songs . Weimar 1857.
anthology

Individual evidence

  1. keyword Raudos in: Kindler's new literary lexicon, Ed Walter Jens, Munich 1996, vol 19, p.376...
  2. ^ Gertrud Bense: On the regional and personal environment of the earlier Prussian-Lithuanian literature. In: Annaberger Annalen 4 (1996), pp. 55-67.
  3. ^ Tomas Venclova, Vilnius. A city in Europe , edition suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2006, pp. 78 and 128.
  4. Sabine Peters: An ear-opening reading. DLF, January 10, 2018.
  5. ^ German new translation: The seasons. Ebenhausen near Munich 2017.
  6. keyword Dainos in: Kindler's new literary lexicon, Ed Walter Jens, Munich 1996, vol 18, p 448th..
  7. On the codification history of Lithuanian cf. [1] .
  8. T. Venclova, 2006, p. 177 ff.
  9. See F. Scholz, Die lithauische Literatur, p. 372
  10. Cf. F. Scholz: Die lithauische Literatur, p. 372 f.
  11. ^ Archived copy ( Memento of April 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Lithuania: The literature , randburg.com
  12. Christina Parnell: Between Myth and Market: Images of Identity in Contemporary Lithuanian Literature. In: Mirosława Czarnecka, Christa Ebert (Ed.): Cultural Identities in Transition - Cross-border commuters as a literary phenomenon. Bamberg 2006, ISBN 978-3931278441 , pp. 221-242, here: pp. 223 f.
  13. Reinhard Veser: Literature from Lithuania: Exil und Mutterland on faz.net, October 9, 2002.
  14. Parnell 2006, p. 232 ff.
  15. Parnell 2006, p. 234 ff.

See also

literature