| Julija Beniuseviciute, known as Zemaite, (1845-1921) initiated the Lithuanian prose fiction tradition. She began writing in dialect form in the days before the Lithuanian language was standardized. Her topics were the socio-economic problems of common people, marital conflicts because wives were regarded as a husband's legal property, women's rights and partriarchal, repressive tendencies in society.; The works she wrote in Lithuania have been extensively reviewed. However, her literary achievements in America from 1916 to 1921 have remained unexplored, perhaps due to the distance between America and Lithuania and the difficulty of accessing the American-Lithuanian periodicals in which she published.; Her total output in the Lithuanian-American newspapers and magazines (Naujienos, Kova, Darbininkas, Draugas, Moteru balsas) are being analyzed here for the first time. These publications were made accessible through the computer network system at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the microfilm section of the library.; Within a period of five years in the United States, Zemaite delivered 16 lectures, nine of which have been published. She wrote more than 40 articles in Lithuanian-American newspapers and magazines, four children's fairy tales, six short stories, her 130-page autobiography, and more than 50 letters which were posthumously published in 1956 in Rastai (Zemaite's Works). To collect funds for war victims in Lithuania, the Foundation to Aid Lithuania (Lietuvos selpimo fondas) published a book in 1917 in the United States which compiled Zemaite's writings concerning World War I--Zemaites rastai kares metu (The Writings of Zemaite during the War.); Her radical ideas in her writings and lectures were interpreted as socialist, communist and atheist by some of her contemporaries in America and Lithuania. However, she was never a member of any political party. Four previously unpublished letters have remained buried in the archives of the Martynas Mazvydas National Library in Vilnius and show that she denounced Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, and was conscious of the dangers hidden in anarchism.; In her lifetime, she witnessed a turbulent historical period--the 1863 rebellion against Russia, the Tsar's prohibition in 1864 against Lithuanian literature printed in the Roman alphabet, the lifting of this ban in 1904, World War I as it affected Lithuania, and the proclamation of Lithuania's independence in 1918. These events left an indelible impression upon her and strongly influenced the nature of her short stories, essays, letters and published lectures.; Her life and works were shaped and influenced by the society in which she lived. She remains a monument to this era which she uniquely and astutely depicted in her works, a literary legacy of her ideals in search of the truth. |
