Short stories
Šventadienio sonetai
Not translated into English
Jurgis Savickis · 1922
Synopsis
Sonnets of Feast Days: ten short tales, from La Coquette to La Flûte, in which the characters are figures rather than characters, often masked, who play a role. In Le Voleur, the wrongdoer takes on the features of a Christ figure, and a child mixes generosity with cruelty there; in Les Yachts enchantés, a petty bourgeois puts on airs. Irony governs the plot, the composition and the style, parody comes to the surface, and the title itself promises neither Sundays nor sonnets.
Context
The collection, its author's first, appeared in 1922, the same year as a second. It caused a scandal: Adomas Jakštas and Vytautas Bičiūnas judged it severely, Balys Sruoga defended it, and the author passed for a dangerous modernist and a decadent. Critics have since seen in it an existential pessimism close to expressionism, a pathetic humanism or a playful aestheticism, and rank it among the first modernist works of Lithuanian prose.
Who it is for
Short, ironic tales that will throw anyone expecting peasant realism; no French translation has been found.
Prizes and reception
Received as the work of a decadent, it is regarded today as a landmark of modernism in Lithuanian prose.
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