Lietuvių meno kontekstai ir intertekstai Antano Šileikos romane „Bronzinė moteris“
Contexts and Intertexts of Lithuanian Art in the Novel “Woman in Bronze” by Antanas Šileika

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the influence of the Lithuanian national culture on the modern literature. The novel Woman in Bronze written in the English language by the Lithuanian Canadian Antanas Šileika was chosen as the object of the analysis. This is a novel about a Lithuanian artist and Lithuanian art in the open (capitalistic) world of art. The author has created a contradictory character of a creativ personality, the formation of which was highly influenced by the tradition of the national Lithuanian art: crucifix-making. Peculiarities of Lithuanian folk art enhance the meanings of an act of creating a professional sculpture and enable interpreting the story more individually. Love, death and other existential experiences of the main character, sculptor Tomas Stumbras, are subordinate to the national creative hunger that is being both destroyed and renewed (restored) in Paris, the European multicultural art industry of the XX century. We can see similar, and even bigger, antithesis of national and global aesthetic expediencies (their possibilities) not only in the visual art but in literature as well: the story of a Lithuanian sculptor told in the English language in the novel Woman in Bronze limits certain aesthetical possibilities of survival of the novel, which are exclusively liked to the Lithuanian language.

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