On the 75th anniversary of Breda Smolnikar

  

 

 

On the 75th anniversary of Breda Smolnikar

https://www.nuk.uni-lj.si/eng/node/496

 

 

https://newsbeezer.com/sloveniaeng/anniversary-of-breda-smolnikar-a-symbol-of-the-struggle-for-freedom-of-artistic-speech/

Photo courtesy of Breda Smolnikar and Michael Biggins.

Breda Smolnikar's amazing novelette, When the Birches Leaf Out Up There - December 12

Breda Smolnikar's amazing novelette, When the Birches Leaf Out Up There, translated by Michael Biggins, is our read for December 12. This book is not commercially available in North America; individuals who register will be sent instructions to pick up their free copy at UW's Suzzallo-Allen Library between now and December 10.

The registration link is coming soon.

Breda Smolnikar's portrait. Courtesy of Breda Smolnikar and Michael Biggins.

Special thanks to Professor Violeta Kelertas and more on the topic of White Shroud

Many thanks to our special guest, Professor Violeta Kelertas!

Post-discussion references

Here is a link to a review that was addressed by one of the discussants during the meeting by Erik Noonan: 

DREAM THE BEHOLDERS 

And more on the topic.

With regards to the personal recollection of Jonas Mekas at the end of "White Shroud," a link to Mekas's website:

http://jonasmekas.com/diary/

From Jonas Mekas's recollection (2016):

I think it was in 1947, in the Kassel Displaced Persons camp, that myself with a couple of younger, post-Škėma generation writers, we read one of the short stories that had just came out in Škėma’s first collection of prose pieces. We were taken by one of his short stories which ended with a very clinical description of a spittoon by hospital patient’s bed. It was so minimal and so clinical like nothing before in Lithuanian literature.

As much as we were critical of the writings of the generation “before us,” we admitted that Antanas Škėma was “OK.”

...

Later, some five years later, in Brooklyn, I met Škėma in person. He had just opened a theatre studio. I decided to join it. I have to confess that my joining his studio was not motivated by my wanting to become an actor: I joined it because I was falling in love with a young woman who had joined it… And it was amazing to find out how Škėma was able to take a sentence from a play and analyse it in the same clinical, down to earth way as he did with the spittoon in his short story. Piece by piece he was bringing the sentence alive in front of our eyes, very factually

And clinically. Only later I found out that before joining Kaunas and later Vilnius National Lithuanian Theatre, where he worked as an actor and director, he had studied medicine and law. So now he applied it all to his writing. No baloney, as they say. No unnecessary ornamentation. Algimantas Mockus, a poet of “our” (“younger”) generation later described his generation as a “generation without ornamentation.” Škėma, more than any other Lithuanian writer of the immediate post-war period, with BALTA DROBULĖ represents most uniquely that generation, the generation with no ornamentation.