How a poem became a book of poetry: conflict of folkloristic, literary, and linguistic approaches in the publications of a nineteenth-century classic of Lithuanian literature
EN[...] What McGann calls the "textual condition" can be further adumbrated with an analysis of the Anykščių šilelis (The Forest of Anykščiai), the most famous work by the nineteenth-century Lithuanian poet Antanas Baranauskas (1835-1902). This long poem of 342 lines, which conveys a lyrical evocation of nature in an epic portrayal of the history of Lithuania, is unique bibliographically, because folklore versions of the work compete with printed versions, but also linguistically, as the various aims of the author poetic, linguistic and even philological enter into confrontation with each other. Literary critics have long been accustomed to discussing the poem as a discrete work - a book of poetry. Evidence from students' and schoolchildren's essays certainly corroborates the assumption that the correlation between the poem and the individual book is deeply embedded in the consciousness of the Lithuanian readership. One could even suggest that Anykščių šilelis is more strongly perceived as an autonomous artefact by ordinary readers than by literary critics, insofar as ordinary readers are mostly unaware of Baranauskas' other works. Yet in the course of the first five decades of its existence and circulation the poem was never published as a separate volume. Nor was it published as a separate book in the last thirty years Anykščių šilelis, despite it being one of the most important works in the nation's literary history. So, how did a poem become a book of poetry? Let us review the history of the poem's publication. In what follows I want to look at that history in terms of the poem's bibliographical as well as linguistic codes. [Extract, p. 177-178].
