The directory «Plots»

Nėris Salomėja
(1904—1945)

Salomėja Nėris (born Salomėja Bačinskaitė - Bučienė) is one of the best known Lithuanian female poets.

Nėris was born in Kiršai, present day Vilkaviškis district municipality. She graduated from University of Lithuania where she studied Lithuanian and German languages and literature.

After that she was a teacher in Lazdijai, Kaunas, and Panevėžys. The first collection of poems, titled «In Early Morning», was published in 1927.

In 1928, Nėris graduated from the University and was appointed to teach German language at the Gymnasium in Lazdijai. Until 1931, Nėris contributed to nationalist and Roman Catholic publications. While studying German in Vienna, in 1929, Nėris met Lithuanian medical student Bronius Zubrickas and became attracted to him. Zubrickas had socialist views and Nėris engaged in socialist activities to make impression on him.

In 1931, Nėris moved to live in Kaunas, where she gave lessons and edited Lithuanian folk tales. In the second collection of Nėris's poetry, «The Footprints in the Sand», one can already spot the verses that assert the oncoming spiritual crisis. In the same year the verses containing revolutionary motives were published in the pro-communist literary journal «Trečias frontas» (The Third Front).

Her promise to work for Bolshevism was also published, however it was not written by her but by chief ideologist of «Trečias frontas» Kostas Korsakas and communist activist Valys Drazdauskas (Nėris was more interested in writing poetry than in declarations, politics and theories about art).

Salomėja Nėris was awarded the State Literature Prize in 1938.Controversies surround her involvement with the Soviet occupation. She was appointed as representative in the so-called People's Parliament and was a member of the delegation that went to the Soviet Union's Supreme Soviet to ask that occupied Lithuania be accepted into the Soviet Union.

Nėris was asked to write a poem in honor of Joseph Stalin. She did write such a poem and was awarded the Stalin Prize. After that, she wrote more verses on the themes, as encouraged by the USSR Communist Party officials. She spent the World War II in the Russian SFSR.

Salomėja Nėris returned to Kaunas but fell ill and died of liver cancer in 1945. Her last poems show deep affection to Lithuania. She was buried in Kaunas, in a square of the Museum of Culture, and later re-interred in the cemetery of Petrašiūnai.

Writer's original pen name was Neris, the name of the second biggest Lithuanian river. In 1940, she received a letter from her students calling her a traitor of homeland and asking her not to use the name of the River Neris. She added a diacritic on «e» and used only the pen name Nėris, having no particular meaning, until that time.

USSR, 1954, Salomea Neris

USSR, 1988, Neris monument in Kaunas