Antanas Škėma
WHITE SHROUD
Translated by Karla Gruodis
Blessed are the idiots, for they are the happiest people on Earth.
The greatest wisdom is childish; the greatest eloquence, a stutter.
The organist from Lapės stuttered when speaking, but he sang beautifully.
Introduction
Ask any well-read Lithuanian who completed high school after 2002 which work of literature they remember best from their studies and you are almost guaranteed to hear, “Antanas Škėma’s White Shroud – that’s my favourite novel!” Lots of smoking, whisky-fuelled madness, surreal childhood experiences, unbridled passion, the essential moments of twentieth-century Lithuanian history, and plenty of displacement and alienation – all of this, combined with the author’s film-worthy biography, make it understandable that Škėma enjoys cult status in his homeland. Published for the first time in Lithuania in 1988, White Shroud is universally viewed by Lithuanian critics as a novel that would have found its place in the Western literary avantgarde if it had been written in, or translated into, English. Recent reception of the German translation (Das weiße Leintuch, trans. Claudia Sinnig, Guggolz, 2017) indicates that this is finally happening: the novel was a sensation at the Leipzig Book Fair, with influential critics in the main newspapers and magazines expressing shock that Germany had not known about this work and hailing White Shroud as an undisputed European literary classic.
A natural enfant terrible and an iconoclast in Lithuanian cultural circles, Škėma felt completely at home within the broader landscape of Western literature. And the connections, influences and allusions were many. Škėma’s early dramas contain echoes of Oscar Wilde’s stylistic intonations, his later ones, themes similar to those of Sartre and Arthur Koestler, while his final, darkest plays have strong links to Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and Edward Albee. As a prose writer, Škėma was influenced by the German interwar expressionists, by Joycean stream-of-consciousness, as well as the surrealist imagery of Jean Cocteau, Henri Michaux, André Breton and Isaac Babel. Škėma’s later writing has connections to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit and Jean-Paul Sartre’s La nausée; the satirical New Yorkish tone of his works links him to Nathanael West. But Škėma is “genetically” closest to Franz Kafka and Albert Camus, from whom he borrowed the idea of metaphysical absurdity and the existentialist interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus, while his interest in sexuality and the dark side of human nature can be seen as inherited from Sigmund Freud.
Although Škėma’s generally conservative émigré countrymen sometimes criticised him for being too heavily influenced by this broad context, he did not see this as a problem and adhered to T.S. Eliot’s view that “a historical sense […] makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.” Škėma’s characters do not mention big cultural names lightly. Rather, they identify with the great writers, and even the “proclaimer of the truth” himself, Jesus Christ, and without regard to epoch or language. As Škėma said in an interview, “Borrowing the notion that ‘ideas float about in the air,’ I think, no – I maintain that it is not you who chooses them, but they that pierce you like the arrows did Saint Sebastian, and you are then left to react to the arrows with your paper images. This is one of many means we have to prove our humanity.” In reference to the question of subject matter, Škėma has said that there are thousands of subjects, but it is most important that their exploration correspond to the spirit of the “nightmarish times” in which we live. He demanded that all literature be “of its time” and felt strongly that he and other writers should not become stagnant or stereotypical.
The upheavals and catastrophes of the twentieth century, which left individuals in the Western world stranded in a harsh universe without the cover of any illusions, accompanied Škėma from the beginning of his life.
Given the many dramatic elements in both Škėma’s life and work, it is fitting that he has two birth dates: his real one on 29 November 1910 and an official one, in 1911. As Škėma explains in his autobiography, he was born twice because his father wanted to trick the Lithuanian bureaucracy into providing an extra year of child benefits. Škėma was born in Łódź, Poland, where his father had been sent to work as a teacher, since, according to tsarist regulations (Lithuania belonged to the Russian Empire at the time), Lithuanian intellectuals did not have the right to work in their native country. With the start of World War I, the Škėma family retreated to Voronezh, Russia, and then spent the years immediately after the 1917 Russian Revolution in Ukraine. This period embedded in young, sensitive Škėma’s memory horrifying experiences of games played with torches circling around hanged White Guardsmen, stealing potatoes, malnutrition that later caused half of his teeth to fall out, and drunken Red Army soldiers’ attempts to rape his mother and shoot his father.
After many hardships, Škėma and his family succeeded in escaping from Bolshevik-held territory and returned to now independent Lithuania in 1921. However, his mother did not survive these horrors and was committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she eventually died.
Škėma made his literary debut in 1929, while living in the interwar capital Kaunas, with the novella Fear. Trying to be practical, he opted to study medicine instead of literature, but quickly found that the sciences did not suit his artistic temperament. With his characteristic irony, Škėma later said, “All I took from my medical studies was a love of corpses,” and wrote in a letter to his close friend the Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas that he saw writing as similar to using a scalpel. Nor did later studies in law suit the young Škėma, so he ended up supporting himself by playing cards and pool, and even marching in funeral processions. Škėma discovered himself in theatre: he began theatre studies in 1936 and later worked in theatres in both Kaunas and Vilnius. In 1938 he married Janina Solkevičiutė, who was devoted to him and greatly supportive of his work; their daughter Kristina was born in 1940.
The first Soviet occupation (1940–1941) caught Škėma in Vilnius, and he soon discovered that Bolshevism was not a joke. He received warnings while editing a satirical newspaper and later witnessed some theatre workers being arrested backstage in the middle of a performance. He later wrote ironically that this moment confirmed his beliefs about the “parallels between the tragic and the grotesque”.
After this incident Škėma withdrew to the Kaunas region where, in June 1941, as the German front was approaching Lithuania, he participated in an uprising of Lithuanian volunteer fighters against the Soviet Army. During the Nazi occupation of Lithuania (1941–1944), Škėma lived and worked in Vilnius as an actor and director, and tried his hand as a playwright (his 1943 drama Juliana was included in the main theatre’s repertoire, but the Nazi authorities banned it as too formalist). As the Germans began to retreat and Soviet reoccupation of Lithuania became imminent, Škėma realised that he would be again in danger of repressions, possibly even deportation to Siberia, and that he would never have creative freedom under that regime. Along with tens of thousands of members of the Lithuanian intellectual, business and political classes, Škėma and his family decided to flee, but upon reaching the German border he was faced with a painful choice when he was invited to join the anti-Soviet resistance. Škėma declined and the family continued to Germany, but he would always feel ashamed of his decision and controversially held that the refugees were second-rate heroes.