Twórca w czasach przełomu: nowe formy wyrażania wiary i religijności w tekstach Vaidotasa Daunysa
An Artist in a Watershed Time: New Forms of Expressing Faith and Religiosity in Texts by Vaidotas Daunys

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses Christian themes in the works of the Lithuanian poet, essayist, publisher and editor Vaidotas Daunys (1958–1995). Daunys belonged to the generation of Lithuanian writers born between 1947 and 1995, whose most intense creative period were the 1980s and 1990s – the dusk of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, the activity of Sąjūdis (Reform Movement of Lithuania), and the beginning of systemic transition in the independent Republic of Lithuania. Still within the confines of the Soviet system, the ideological demands of the Communist Party of the USSR and the omnipotent censorship, a careful process began in Lithuanian literature of reconstructing severed bonds with its own national (including émigré) and Western European culture. The political breakthrough of 1990 resulted in a completely new political situation and sped up the existing cultural processes. An important position within Lithuanian culture was reclaimed by religion (mostly Catholicism), Christian tradition, and the closely related national and patriotic themes. The author analyses Vaidotas Duanys’s most important works (poems as well as essays) against the backdrop of his biography but also as an expression of the Christian tradition and its shape at the turn of the 1990s. Vaidotas Daunys’s creative biography places him among those who throughout the Soviet period balanced between the conformism of the socio-political status quo and a (naїve?) faith in creative independence and the possibility to safeguard one’s own worldview. Daunys was the editorin-chief of the Pergalė [Victory] monthly (from 1987), the Veidai [Faces] almanac (1985–1988) and, starting from 1988, the Krantai [Shores] monthly. In 1985, he published his first book of poetry, entitled Metų laikai [The Four Seasons]; the next one, Kelio ženklai [Road Signs], appeared in 1999, after the poet’s death. In independent Lithuania, he established the Regnum Foundation (whose fields of activity include publishing, music and culture) and reactivated the tradition of the inter-war cultural criticism magazine Naujoji Romuva [The New Romuva]. Vaidotas Daunys died tragically in the summer of 1995, while preparing to take flight at a balloon race.

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