Memories about M. K. Čiurlionis in post-war years

ENThe first part of this paper introduces the history of a memoiristic discourse about the outstanding Lithuanian painter and composer M. K. Čiurlionis by writer Kazys Boruta and ethnomusicologist Jadvyga Čiurlionytė. Jadvyga, the artist’s sister, had conceived the idea of writing a memoir during the Second World War, when she visited Druskininkai, a city she had not seen for more than a couple of decades due to tense relations between Lithuania and Poland. She saw Boruta, a writer with an excellent style of language whom she married in 1945, as its author. Unfortunately, Boruta soon had to stop writing his memoirs: he was tried for a political case and kept imprisoned between 1946 and 1949. After his release, he drafted a complete typewritten version of a memoir on Čiurlionis titled Druskininkų novelės (The Druskininkai Novellas), but complex circumstances prevented him from publishing it. In 1957–1958, Čiurlionytė took over the initiative to write and publish memoirs about Čiurlionis and the Druskininkai of his time. After divorcing Boruta, she took the final version of her ex-husband’s typescript. The second part of this paper reviews the publications of memoirs about Čiurlionis by both authors. Their quantitative ratio changes significantly after Boruta’s death in 1965; the 90th birth anniversary of Čiurlionis was publicly celebrated in September of that same year. Čiurlionytė’s memoirs were published as a separate book in 1970. Boruta’s text appeared three years later in Volume 6 of his Raštai (Works), with editorial cuts. Čiurlionytė’s memoirs were reprinted two more times and translated into Latvian and Russian. The second part of this paper also presents a comparative analysis of these texts. In her own way, Čiurlionis’s younger sister rewrote and, to a large extent, developed the co-authored work.Although she criticized her ex-husband for the fictionality of his text, her own work is also of fictional character. The majority of the story lines coincide. This study reveals the reasons behind the close stylistic similarity of some of the text fragments. This paper discusses the phenomena of reflective nostalgia, the struggle for the rights of the memoirist, and the phenomena of the musealization of memory (during the period researched, a museum was being established and created in the former site of the homestead which belonged to the Čiurlionis family in Druskininkai). Keywords: M. K. Čiurlionis; memoirs; Kazys Boruta; Jadvyga Čiurlionytė; reflective and restorative nostalgia; musealization of memory.