An Omnipotent tradition: the illustrations of Kristijonas Donelaitis's poem "Metai" and the creation of a visual canon

ENKristijonas Donelaitis's poem Metai [The Seasons] (written c. 1765-1775; first published in 1818) is widely regarded as Lithuania's greatest literary work. The poem gained recognition as early as the nineteenth century, but its reputation was not cemented until 1940, a critical time for Lithuania. The author's treatment pf peasant culture, which was considered fundamental to the Lithuanian national culture, was then judged to be major topic of the poem, and any other interpretations were discarded, The present article seeks to examine the historical formation on the interpretive tradition of Donelaitis's poem and its expression in the "material body" of the text, i.e., the editions of the poem in Lithuanian and other languages. Most of our attention is devoted to two editions from 1940 and 1956 which built and established the "bibliographic code" of the work.