Antanas Vienuolis Lithuanian writer Date of Birth: 07.04.1882 Country: Lithuania

Biography of Antanas Venuolis

Antanas Venuolis was a Lithuanian writer and a popular writer of the Lithuanian SSR. His real surname was Žukauskas, with Venuolis being his pseudonym. He was born into a peasant family and was raised by his maternal grandfather, the bishop and writer Antanas Baranauskas. Venuolis attended a gymnasium in Liepāja from 1895. Despite the wishes of his parents and Baranauskas, he refused to enroll in a seminary after graduating from the gymnasium, which led to him being disowned by his family.

In 1900, Venuolis moved to Moscow, where he worked as an apprentice to a pharmacist and began writing stories and poems. From 1903, he worked as a pharmacist in the Caucasus. He was imprisoned for a month and a half in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) for his involvement in revolutionary activities. In 1907, he moved to Moscow, where he worked in a pharmacy while studying pharmacology at the Medical Faculty of Moscow University and attending lectures on literature theory and history at the A.L. Shanyavsky People's University.

In 1918, Venuolis returned to Lithuania. In 1922, he moved from Kaunas to Oniškis, where he worked in a pharmacy. In 1925, he built a house in Ažupėčiai on inherited land, where he lived until his death. Venuolis collaborated with the press, participated in literary evenings, and traveled abroad (Italy in 1930; France in 1938).

During the Soviet era, Venuolis' son was sent to Siberian labor camps, and his pharmacy was nationalized. During the war, his daughter fled to the West in 1944. From 1944 to 1945, he taught Russian language in a school in Oniškis. The house where Venuolis lived from 1925 now serves as the Antanas Venuolis Memorial House-Museum.

Venuolis' first publications before World War I included the stories "The Drowned Woman" (1909), "He Returned" (1908), and "The Wife" (1909). He was the author of novels such as "Before the Break of Day" (1925), "The Guest from the North" (1933), and "The Minister" (1935), as well as a historical novel about the struggle of the Lithuanians against the Teutonic Knights, titled "Crossroads" (1932), and short stories like "Cancer" (1920) and "The Chamber of Intellectuals" (1921). He also wrote plays, including "Twilight" (1936) and "1831" (1936), a play about the 1831 uprising. He published a collection of stories titled "Sleepless Nights" (1937).

Venuolis' play "Twilight" was adapted for the stage and performed in Kaunas in 1941 as the "first original Soviet drama." The Soviet government encouraged him to adhere to the principles of socialist realism. His works from the early period of his career, which featured episodes and aspects of the Russian Revolution that were deemed unacceptable by the authorities, as well as his historical and patriotic works, were not reissued or included in his collected works. His last books were "From My Memories" and the collection "Legends and Traditions" (1957). Venuolis was recognized as a People's Writer of the Lithuanian SSR. His works have been translated into English, Latvian (since at least 1923), Polish, Russian, Ukrainian ("The Puodžiūnai Estate," 1957), Estonian, and other languages.