Narrative
Dėdės ir dėdienės
Not translated into English
Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas · 1920
Opening lines
Saveikių dvaras buvo ne didžiausias Pats-Pamarnecko dvarų. Vis dėlto jo laukų dirbtų suvarydavo iš keleto apylinkės kaimų: Aužbikų, Geišių, Tilindžių ir kitų.
The Saveikiai manor was not the largest of the Pats-Pamarneckas manors. Even so, people were driven to work its fields from several villages round about: Aužbikai, Geišiai, Tilindžiai and others.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from lt.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Uncles and aunts: in the village of Aužbikai, at the end of serfdom, Mykoliukas, the farmer's younger brother, works tirelessly on the estate and on the family farm, with no place or property of his own, like those landless relatives who stayed with the heirs, neither servants nor quite part of the family. His only joy is his violin, which makes the village dance on the hill. He becomes attached to Severija, a lively, neat young girl, but the estate steward, Rapolas Geišė, an authoritarian man nearing fifty, has set his eyes on her.
Context
The story appeared as a serial in the journal Skaitymai in 1920 and 1921, then in book form only in 1929, in the tenth volume of its author's works. Critics were slow to take it up: the first reviews date from 1928 and 1929, and Liudas Gira saw in it a work of the first artistic value. In the early 1970s Algirdas Dausa made from it a film, Tas prakeiktas nuolankumas, whose social reading long made Mykoliukas a figure of submission.
Who it is for
A narrative of about a hundred pages, read at school in Lithuania; no French or English translation has been found.
Prizes and reception
One of the major works of its author, which has become a classic of Lithuanian prose.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.