Antanas Škėma

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Antanas Škėma (Lithuanian pronunciation: [ɐnˈtaːnɐs ˈʃkʲeːmɐ]; November 29, 1910 – September 11, 1961) was a Lithuanian writer, playwright, stage actor and director. His best known work is the novel Balta drobulė (White Shroud).

Life and career

Antanas Škėma was born on November 29, 1910 (according to his birth certificate in 1911) in Łódź, Poland, where his father was sent to work as a teacher. During World War I he lived in Russia with his parents. In 1921 they all returned to Lithuania.^[1]

He attended high schools in

In 1949 Škėma left Europe for United States.^[1] He did menial work for a living, including working as an elevator operator,^[1] and he eagerly participated in the cultural activities of the Lithuanian exiles. He took part in the Chicago Theatre and Boston's Drama Group performances, staged his own plays. Further short stories, dramas and the novel Balta drobulė were published.

In 1960–1961 he worked in the editorial office of the newspaper Vienybė. In addition, he was lecturing, debating, and writing articles on theatre and literature for various publications.

Antanas Škėma died in a car accident in Pennsylvania on September 11, 1961.^[1]

Literary work

Škėma's best-known novel, Balta drobulė (1958), aroused vivid literary discussions. Most reviewers considered it an interesting creative experiment that attempted to lead the Lithuanian fiction down an untrodden path. The novel follows an exiled Lithuanian poet named Antanas Garšva who, like Škėma himself, works as an elevator operator in New York. The author examines alienation, trauma and creativity through the character of Garšva and his tragic experiences that ultimately lead to madness. While the immediate action lasts little more than a day, through the memories the story covers Garšva's whole life from early childhood, via the inter-war period, the occupations and refugee camps in Europe to the new life in the US. The novel is partly autobiographical.

Antanas Škėma uses the innovative (for Lithuanian literature) stream of consciousness narrative to great effect, creating entirely his own style. The novel is defined by irony, occasional surrealism, unexpected metaphor, acute stylistic contrasts where lyrical and aesthetically delicate confessions suddenly give way to coarse, cynical images, and a broad spectrum of intertextual cultural allusions. On the technical level, the author often plays with the sounds of words, disengaging phonemes from their literal meaning, and also expresses the cultural clash through the Americanization of language.

Originally printed by an émigré Lithuanian publishing house in London as Nida Book Club series edition (Nidos Knygų Klubo leidinys. no. 23.), Balta drobulė was released in Lithuania in 1990. Since then, it has been translated and published in Estonian (1992), Latvian (2000), English (2017), as White Shroud, German (2017), as Das weiße Leintuch, and French (2024), as Le Linceul blanc.^[5]

His short story Izaokas (Isaak) was made into a major motion picture of the same name in 2019.^[6]

His play The Awakening saw its American debut posthumously in 1985 at the Courtyard Playhouse in New York's West Village.^[1]

References

External links

• Short story "Steps and Stairs"
• The English translation of "White Shroud"
• The German translation of "White Shroud" ("Das weiße Leintuch") Archived May 5, 2021, at the Wayback Machine