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By Gloria Kivytaite O'Brien
I have visited Lithuania several times during the past years, always spending time with my many relatives there: three teta's (aunts) – my mother's younger sisters – and their extended families. My cousin Ellie's son-in-law, Vytas, is our good-natured driver and tour guide, escorting me and other family members through villages, towns and cities. Each place has its own charm and distinction, often including a small museum, and almost always a church and nearby cemetery. We never pass up the opportunity to walk through a cemetery, admiring the gravestones and markers, reading the inscriptions and musing upon the country's history and essential continuity.
Teta Stase introduced me to Pranas Vaicaitis as we stood at his grave in the Sintautu cemetery. Looking straight into my eyes, she quietly recited:
“Yra šalis, kur upes teka
Linksmai tarp giriu uzanciu...”
“There is a land where rivers flow
Merrily mid rustling forests...”
She continued through many more lines of a poem that celebrated the beauty of the Lithuanian homeland and the goodness and nobility of her rural population in the face of daily hardships and unremitting labor. The poem is a deeply touching panegyric to the native land, the innocent loveliness of her maidens, the simple hospitality and generosity of her people, and the sumptuous beauty of nature. It ends with a regretful sigh, as the poet, feeling himself an exile, speaks of his deep longing for his beloved lost home and regrets that his time there was so short. No words, nor any writings, he says, can express, how precious is that place – it can only be felt and perceived through the emotions.
It's difficult to describe the impression that moment made on me, with my aunt so earnestly declaiming the lines of this beautiful poem, my cousins standing around us, listening, the breeze sighing through the tall trees, and the poet's modest grave marker there before us. The inscription says: “P. Vaicaitis - Gime 1876 - Mire 1901”. He was just 25 years old.
Pranas Vaicaitis was born on February 10, 1876, in the village of Santakai, near Sintautai, in the county of Šakiai, in the ethnographic region of Suvalkija, the first-born of a family of small means. His parents, Juozas and Marijona, worked a comparatively large plot of land (25 hectares, later increased to 50), but the soil was poor and not bountiful.
Pranas distinguished himself from the other village children only by his weak constitution and his withdrawn, lonesome disposition. He played by himself, was very quiet and contemplative, and people often had to look for him after he had wandered away on his own. There seems to have been no obvious influence, either within his family or outside it, that stimulated his poetic drive, other than his own unique personality.
His parents, themselves barely literate, had ambitions for their eldest son, but he didn't care for study and didn't finish primary school. Not about to give up on their plans, in 1887, his parents by some maneuver were able to enroll him in a gimnazija (high school) in Marijampole, where he managed to maintain an average student's profile. Education, during that era, deliberately did all possible to distract students from serious matters such as politics and Lithuanian nationalism then being reborn. But the nationalist movement was surging through Marijampole and the surrounding countryside, bringing idealistic notions, ideas about ethnic identity, and the excitement of opposition to detested authority, to a populace mired in compulsory homage to the Russian czar.
Pranas, deeply influenced by the movement, developed a strong dedication to his country, and sympathy for the common man. He recognized and valued his poetic talent, and began to think of education and hard work as a means to effect changes, and cherished hopes for an end to social injustice. He clashed with his father, who intended Pranas for the Church, and wanted him to enter a seminary. Pranas felt no call to the priesthood, instead applying to the St. Petersburg University law school, and so his father broke off all ties and withheld even the small monetary assistance he had been prepared to give.
He found hospitality and encouragement in St. Petersburg among a small circle of like-minded friends, a few of whom were already under surveillance by the Russian police, as suspected liberal revolutionaries. He and his closest friend, Antanas Daniliauskas, were subjected to repeated searches and seizures of their property and papers, and in consequence of his fear of incrimination, he himself destroyed a substantial portion of his work and writings. He spent the better part of a year so persecuted by police investigations, being jailed for a time and heavily fined, that he was denied a “certificate of good conduct”, and was then unable to stand for his final examinations. All these hardships and difficulties had a strong effect on the poet's health and already melancholic character, and probably contributed to the thematic development of his work.
During his years in St. Petersburg, he fell in love with Julija Pranaityte, a daughter of a deeply religious family, who was herself studying at the university. One of her brothers was teaching at a religious academy, and another served as organist for Lithuanian religious choral groups. Pranas' interaction with the Pranaitis family may have had an influence on his talent, equal to that of his friends in the Lithuanian revival movement.
He received his diploma in 1900, and wanted to study economics in Belgium, but, short of funds, he spent the summer at home, taking a job in an academic library. Soon after, he fell ill and returned to his family home, where he maintained a wide correspondence while hoping for a cure. He hoped to enter a tuberculosis sanatorium, but lacked the money, and his father, still unreconciled to his son's “perfidy”, gave him no help until it was much too late to matter. He died on September 21, 1901. Neighbors long remembered his solemn funeral, during which his friends from St. Petersburg bore his coffin from his home to the church in Sintautai and then to the cemetery.
His poetic legacy is not large, comprising less than 100 original poems and a few translations from Russian and Polish. Much of his work is elegiac in character, melancholic or satiric, complaining of social injustice, upholding the worth of the down-trodden peasant, praising the unsurpassed beauty of the countryside and celebrating the wonders of nature. He criticized the Polonized Church, and one of his most famous poems begins:
“Priseskie, vaikeli, ka tau pasakysiu,
Kaip reikia gyventi, tave pamokysiu”
“Sit by me, child, and I'll tell you something,
I'll teach you how you should live”
And the boy's mociute (grandmother) philosophizes through some thirty lines of bitter satire, on how he, as a future candidate for the priesthood, will absorb and emulate the superior arttitude of the Polish clergy, then return to live grandly as a parish pastor in the Polish style, lording it over the ignorant villagers.
Vaicaitis, among Lithuania's late-19th-century poets, is generally ranked second only to the great immortal, Maironis. Maironis' poetry was the work of a mature and highly-educated, long-lived individual. Whereas Maironis' poetry, though often sentimental, was cerebral in nature, Vaicaitis' was almost wholly emotional. That is not to say that Vaicaitis' work was childish, but his talent was young, and his early death allowed little opportunity for maturation. His former family home is now a small museum, and his legacy is watched over by a society formed in 1993, Prano Vaicaicio Draugija. To quote one of its members, Zenius Šileris, “Each person dies twice. His second death occurs when no one remembers his name. Pranas Vaicaitis has escaped a second death. While there is a Lithuania, his name will always be spoken”.
Source: “Pranas Vaicaitis - Raštai” -- Lietuvos Rašytoju Sajungos Leidykla
