Kristijono Donelaičio personažas Krizas - turtingo, šykštaus ir klastingo valstiečio tipažas

ENIn the works of Kristijonas Donelaitis, all the characters by the name of Krizas possess many common features: they are of a similar social status, have similar attitudes towards life and similar personal qualities. These characters embody the type of a Lithuanian peasant who is amoral, stingy, and sly. It is a paradox that the name Krizas, meaning Christian, was chosen for such a type of a character, but it can be explained by stating the atrophy of Christian values in society and by hypocrisy of religion at that time. Scholars mostly focus on the Krizas depicted by Donelaitis in the narrative poem Metai (The Seasons). He has been approached in many controversial ways. The literary historian Vaidas Šeferis went into the depths of exploration of the character of the ‘charitable’ peasant who had become a pauper; he explains Krizas’s destiny on the grounds of the Lutheran paradigm, the so-called ‘Theological Justice’. In The Seasons we find a depiction of the social situation and stratification. Farmhands were the poorest and the most exploited part of the society and nobody took any effort to defend them. Donelaitis looked at the situation through the prism of an educative point of view of ‘fair God’ and condemned both the German lords and their servants and Lithuanian well-off peasants for exploiting the poor and despising them. Krizas and wealthy Kasparas are equal in their social status and the way of behavior.Donelaitis depicts the hero’s hyperbolized self-praise with deep irony. The well-off peasant Krizas seeks to justify his stinginess by the poor work of his farmhands and his own poverty. Krizas’s complaints about his workers are prompted by Ruse, Hypocrisy and Amorality. One can tell that his becoming a pauper at the end is the morale of the fable. This is a non-contradictory line of the story: the destiny of a beggar is the right end to stingy and canny Krizas, it is a right and justified punishment from God. So, in the personality of Krizas the poet embodied the type of a rich and amoral Lithuanian peasant; his behavior was condemned as inappropriate and calling for the punishment from God.