Guest of the ilb 2007
Vytautas V. Landsbergis is one
of Lithuania’s leading authors of children’s books in addition to being
a screenplay author and film and theatre director. He was born in
Vilnius in 1962 and studied philology in his native town as well as
directing in Tbilisi, Georgia. On completing his studies, during which
time he met the avantgarde director Jonas Mekas in New York and worked
with Krzysztof Kieślowski in Poland, he founded a production company
and has since made over twenty documentaries and fictional dramas. As
an author of children’s books he has published – to great acclaim –
prose, poetry and plays, which he has adapted for the stage in
Lithuania.
Landsbergis belongs to a
generation of young writers from the Baltic states who are confident
enough of a child’s intellectual ability to adopt an experimental
method of narration rather than a teacherly stance. Literature
professor Kestutis Urba commented: »Landsbergis established a new
current in Lithuanian children’s literature with his unusual
combination of nonsense puns and absurd wordplay with old-fashioned
language and clichés from folklore.« Full of humour, and reflection,
Landsbergis speaks, in his lyrical work, of timeless values such as
friendship, faith and luck with a sense of a religious dimension. His
fable-like characters sally forth dynamically – regardless of whether
they are humans, animals, angels or supposedly inanimate everyday
objects – to pursue adventures in a poetic universe. Yet he never loses
sight of the horizons of childhood experience.
In his volume of short stories
»Obuolių Pasakos« (1999; t: Apple Tales) Landsbergis presents a curious
and bizarre fairytale spun around two friends who are apples, Anton and
Peter, who embark on a journey across time, starting with Adam and Eve,
across the Middle Ages until Armageddon. He also skillfully depicts
various characters such as Vytautas the Great, the sparrow Alyosha, the
potato general Karolina and Xenophobia the fox. Among Landsbergis’ most
well known works is »Arklio Dominyko Meilė« (2004; t: Dominykas, the
horse in love): Dominykas, a wild white horse, falls in love with a coy
cornflower. When the approaching winter threatens to freeze her, he
hides his beloved under a protective stone and sets out for Africa in
search of her relatives. After an ill-advised trip during which
Dominykas encounters a white bear, a crocodile and a hippopotamus, the
wild horse returns to the freshly blossomed cornflower. Central themes
of the text are love, care and the eternal cycle of the cosmos –
personified by the figures of the wild horse and the cornflower, whose
incompatibility results in a particular kind of literary tension.
Landsbergis has received
numerous distinctions for his poetic children’s books. The volume of
short stories »Rudnosiuko istorijos« (1994; t: Tales of the little
brown-nosed bear) was named best Lithuanian children’s book of the year
in 1995 while »Arklio Dominyko Meilė«, translated into Swedish, was
granted entry to the White Ravens Catalogue (2005) of the International
Youth Library in Munich and included on the IBBY Honours List (2006).
Landsbergis, married with five children, lives in Vilnius.
© international literature festival berlin
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