The directory «Plots»

Brazdžionis Bernardas
(1907—2002)

Leading Lithuanian poet, editor, critic, and—under pseudonym—author of popular children's books. An older poet, Bernardas Brazdzionis, who had established his reputation during the years of independence as a Christian mystic in love with sonorous rhetorical cadences, reacted to exile with fiercely patriotic verse in which the outrage against the injustice to his nation and the defiance of tyranny were raised to a highly emotional, almost hysterical pitch. The stance he took in such works as Alien Mountains (1945), or The Northern Lights (1947), or again, The Great Crossroads (1953) was that of a poet and prophet, calling his people to persevere in prayer and hope and to testify to the whole world about the cruel fate inflicted on his nation. Over the years his poetry evolved into a kind of pilgrimage across the alien universe, toward the receding native shores of hope. Many of his poems centered around the image of a weary traveler with the burden of injustice on his back and the jewel of faith in his heart, calling to his God in all the crossroads of the world. This image was in essence a structural repetition, in a different, pathetic context, of his earlier basic imagery, where human life as such was basically conceived of as a journey toward a metaphysical home of the soul beyond the gates of death.

Lithuania, 2007, Bernardas Brazdžionis