The directory «Plots»

Janonis Julius
(1896—1917)

The poet Julius Janonis, was born in 1896 into an extreme poverty that «nourished an ardent antagonism to social inequality», wrote for socialist periodicals in Lithuania and Russia, joined the Social Democratic Party in Petrograd, and became an active revolutionary known for passionate verse devoted to the realization of his ideal, «humanistic socialism». In 1917, having apparently contracted tuberculosis in a Petrograd prison, he committed suicide by throwing himself under an express train «in a gesture of despair».

Ostensibly, Janonis is a convenient tool for the propagation of orthodox Soviet ideology. As a young Lithuanian idealist-poet who essentially sacrificed his life for socialism, the presentation of Janonis to a Vilnius audience would presumably have suggested the universality of the socialist ideal and its roots in Lithuania. School textbooks in Soviet Lithuania, for example, depicted the poet as the personification of a deep commonality and socialist temperament shared between the Russian and Lithuanian cultures and justified by historical experience.

USSR, 1966, Julius Janonis

USSR, 1986, Julius Janonis

USSR, 1988.10.29, Janonis monument in Biržai