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Algirdas Landsbergis (June 23, 1924 – April 4, 2004) was a Lithuanian American writer, human rights activist, and professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He wrote plays, novels, essays both in Lithuanian and English.

Biography

Early life and education

Landsbergis was born June 23, 1924, in Kybartai, Lithuania. He studied Lithuanian language and literature at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas from 1941 to 1943. In 1944, the Landsbergis family decided to flee Soviet-occupied Lithuania because his father was a postal worker. As a government worker his name and the names of his family members had been placed on the Soviet deportation lists to Siberia during the first Soviet Russian occupation in 1941.

In 1944, the Landsbergis family reached the Allied-occupied territories of West Germany. They settled in the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) operated displaced persons (DP) camp in Wiesbaden. While living in the DP camp, Landsbergis studied English and Romance languages at the University of Mainz. At the same time, Landsbergis worked as a high school teacher in the Lithuanian refugee high schools in the Wiesbaden and Kassel camps.

Algirdas Landsbergis, 1950

Early career

Landsbergis published his early short stories, critical essays, and literary translations from English into Lithuanian with émigré publishing houses created in the network of displaced persons camps. He was one of the editors of the Avant Garde journal Žvilgsniai (Viewpoints), which was published in the DP camps from 1946 to 1948. In those years, Landsbergis was a close friend of the Lithuanian Avant Garde independent filmmaker, Jonas Mekas, who also sheltered in the same Wiesbaden DP camp.

While living for five years in a displaced persons camp in Wiesbaden, Germany, the philosophy of existentialism gave Landsbergis a theoretical framework from which to write his first novel, Kėlionė (The Journey), which was later published by the Lithuanian Diaspora press in the United States in 1954. This early modernist novel was written in a stream of consciousness style and traces the wartime experiences of the protagonist, Julius, a young man in his early twenties, as he escapes from Lithuania to Germany by train when the Soviets invade Lithuania a second time in 1944. Soon after he arrives in Germany, Julius is conscripted into forced labor and works in a machine shop where he encounters and befriends a group of forced laborers from a variety of countries occupied by the Nazis and the Soviets. This coming-of-age story shows the development of a young psyche shaped by the devastation of war and does not focus solely on the experience of the Lithuanian protagonist but also on the lives of the other forced laborers from Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere.

Life in the United States

In 1949, Landsbergis immigrated with his parents and brother and sister to the United States and eventually settled in New York City. From 1949 to 1950 he worked in a bookstore in Brooklyn; from 1956 to 1966 he worked as a writer in the secretariat of the Assembly of Captive European Nations in New York. During the 1950s, he studied English and comparative literature at Brooklyn College and earned a master’s degree in comparative literature from Columbia University in 1957. In 1965, he joined the history faculty at Farleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and eventually was granted tenure. He taught there until he retired in 1992. He also taught at Edward Williams College in New Jersey.

Landsbergis produced and broadcast programs about Lithuania for Radio Free Europe from 1974 to 2004 and spoke in programs for the Voice of America. He worked for the Lithuanian Information Center, New York. Throughout his life, Landsbergis worked tirelessly for freedom for Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and the other countries occupied by the Soviet Union.

After retirement, Landsbergis lectured widely in the New York public libraries. From 1993 to 2004, he lectured on literature and history at libraries and Jewish community centers in Nassau County, Long Island, New York. He died on April 4, 2004, in Freeport, New York.

Algirdas Landsbergis entering New York harbor as a displaced person in 1949.

Career as a writer

Landsbergis wrote and published plays, essays, and novels both in Lithuanian and in English. Landsbergis was the first Lithuanian émigré writer of his generation to cross the linguistic divide from writing in Lithuanian to writing in English. By shifting linguistically from Lithuanian to English, Landsbergis embraced his new North American cultural home. Meanwhile, other Lithuanian diaspora writers of his generation continued to only write in Lithuanian for a Lithuanian audience. By writing about Lithuania’s cultural trauma experience in English, Landsbergis brought that experience into the universal realm. Existentialist philosophy provided him with the language to talk about events that had taken place in Eastern Europe during World War II that may not have been as accessible to an American audience. Poet and critic, Tomas Venclova reflected on the life and career of Algirdas Landsbergis in his essay, “Saying Goodbye to Algirdas Landsbergis" writing, “Algirdas Landsbergis was one of the people who took everything he could from his new environment. He felt that he was a part of the post-war cultural cauldron—fragmented, grotesque, and not entirely understandable world, which contained not only Braždžionis’s patriotic poetry, but also existentialism and nihilism, the novels of Camus, the dramas of Ghelderode, Durrenmatt and Tennessee Williams, stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, surrealism, which was on its way out but which was still alive then, and a little later Beckett and Ionesco. We in Lithuania discovered all that much later, probably two decades later—besides, my generation received only fragments, just faraway echoes. For Algirdas, it was all an entirely living context. It defined not only his novel, but also his rather few, but memorable short stories, and the most important component of his work—drama" (Venclova, Tomas. "Saying Goodbye to Algirdas Landsbergis." Lituanus, Volume 51:1, 2005, pp. 11-19).

Landsbergis employs the philosophy of existentialism to depict the trauma of war as a universal experience in his post-war drama, Penki stulpai turgaus aikštėje (Five Posts in a Market Place). The play was initially written in Lithuanian in 1957 for an audience of post-war DPs in the North American Lithuanian diaspora. In 1959, Landsbergis rewrote the play in English as Five Posts in a Market Place. The English version was staged in New York in 1961 in an off-Broadway theater while the Lithuanian version of the play was staged multiple times by Lithuanian émigré theater groups from the late 1950s into the last 1970s. In the play, Landsbergis depicts the universal experiences of war and conflict by providing his play with no clear physical settings that could be easily ascribed to one region or location. In the play, twentieth-century politics are non-specific. The occupying forces are referred to as “The New Order” and the men and women opposing these forces are called, “The Resistance.” The play raises questions on how existentialist individual choice and suicidal choice play out in a conflict zone. The non-specific setting of the play makes it universal while at the same time key details unique to the Lithuanian resistance render it a historical play. As a result, the central themes of the same play in two different languages—Lithuanian and English—were interpreted differently by two different audiences and received widely divergent reviews from critics representing these two audiences, one made up of Lithuanian émigrés, the other made up of American viewers. Lithuanian poet and academic Tomas Venclova wrote about Five Posts in a Market Place, “I’d say that the play became a modern, and not just a Lithuanian classic, which resonated with the existentialist drama of Camus and Sartre. It probably isn’t Landsbergis’s best work, but one think in it is really worthy of our attention—the playwright shows the exhaustion on both sides of the battle and introduces the tone of the absurd and alienation (Venclova, Tomas. "Saying Goodbye to Algirdas Landsbergis" Lituanus, Volume 51:1, 2005, pp. 11-19.” In his introduction to the English language publication of the play, writing only six years after Stalin’s death and at a time when Soviet power seemed permanent, Robert Payne writes, “The play Five Posts in a Market Place is concerned with the butcher’s block: the place where a culture comes to an end, or comes very nearly to an end, for victory can sometimes be snatched from the block at the last moment, and the dead sometimes spring to life. Algirdas Landsbergis has written a tragedy for our time” (Payne, Robert and Landsbergis, Algirdas. "Introduction." Five Posts in a Market Place. New York: Manyland Books, 1959.) The New York critic Frank Aston “hailed the arrival of a new ‘provocative’ playwright of ‘promising vitality’ finding nothing small about his concept of responsibilities” (Aston, Frank. "5 Posts Opens at Gate Theater," Long Island Sun, 6 March 1961)

After his early success, Landsbergis continued to write plays in Lithuanian for an émigré audience. His plays were staged frequently in Lithuanian émigré communities in New York, Chicago, Toronto, and elsewhere. Throughout most of his career, because of his political activities and the subject matter of his plays, Landsbergis’s work was banned in Soviet-occupied Lithuania. During the Cold War era, Lithuanians caught reading his work faced a prison sentence. Despite censorship, Landsbergis’s Lithuanian language plays, novels, novellas, short stories and essays were reproduced as samizdat publications and distributed widely throughout Lithuania during the decades of the Soviet occupation of Lithuania. In 1989, with the loosening of restrictions on freedom of expression during Gorbachev’s period of perestroika, Landsbergis’s play Penki stulpai turgais aikštėje (Five Posts in a Market Place) was staged in Kaunas, Lithuania by the Kaunas Drama Theater. He returned to Lithuania for the first time since he fled in 1944 after independence in 1991.

In August 2002, the trauma and conflict of Five Posts in a Market Place was successfully staged again in New York in English. Renamed Five Posts, in post-9/11 New York, the Stone Soup Theater staged five performances of Landsbergis’s play with a contemporary setting in a conflict zone in the Middle East. The play was directed by Nadine Friedman. In a press release, Friedman writes that the play explores “universal choices made by characters in distinct locations.” She explains how a play originally written by a secondary witness about the postwar anti-Soviet resistance in Lithuania was adapted to post 9/11 New York: “I was struck immediately by the relevance of the Landsbergis story to our world. You could see the events of the play, written over 40 years ago, in today’s New York Times, and I wanted to bring its universality to a new audience. The subject of war and the occupation in the Middle East has perpetually been in American headlines, and “Five Posts” and “Fun” both evoke the same questions we’re asking right now: what drives people to take such extreme measures? All the characters seem to struggle with the same conflict, which is whether to create or destroy” ( Friedman, Nadine. "Fun/Five Posts in a Market Place," Stone Soup Theater Arts Press Release, 17 August 2022)

In his essay, “In Memorium Algirdas Landsbergis,” literary critic Stasys Goštautas reflected on Landsbergis’s life and oeuvre: “Fifty years ago, four young musketeers, penniless and without baggage, landed in Manhattan. Even if they lived in Woodhaven, Freeport, Long Island, Connecticut or New Jersey, metaphorically, they lived in the shadow of Manhattan as if they had never left the magic island. They were stuck for the rest of their lives in Manhattan, the island where everything happened. The four musketeers were Jonas Mekas, who lived most of his life in the Chelsea Hotel, his brother Adolfas Mekas, who still spends most of his time in New Jersey; Leonas Lėtas, who wrote good poetry in Connecticut; and Algirdas Landsbergis, who wrote a novel called Kelionė (Journey, 1954) in the spirit of the Beat generation, like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1950) and the Spanish novel El camino (The Path, 1950) by Miguel Delibes. Landsbergis’s novel is about a strange community of displaced persons (DPs) from all over the world—Armenians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Italians, and of course, Lithuanians, who by accident of war found themselves together in the barracks of post-war Germany” (Goštautas, Stasys. "In Memorium Algirdas Landsbergis." Lituanus 51:1, 2005, pp. 8-10)

Personal life

Algirdas Landsbergis married Joan Jacobi in 1951. Their son Paul Landsbergis was born in 1952, and their son Jonas was born in 1956.

Publications

Plays in Lithuanian

• Penki stulpai turgaus aikštėje (Five Posts in a Market Place), 1957, 1959
• Meilės mokykla (School of Love), 1965
• Vėjas gluosniuose. Gluosniai vėjuje, (The Wind in the Willows. Willow in the Wind), 1973
• Paskutinis piknikas (The Last Picnic), 1980
• Vaikai gintaro rūmuose (Children in the Amber Room), 1981
• Onos veidas (Ona’s Face), 1983
• Sudie, mano karaliau (Goodbye my King), staged by the Klaipėda Drama Theater, 1990
• Idioto pasaka (The Idiot’s Story), staged in Slovenia in 1992
• Du utopiški vaidinimai (Two Utopian Plays), 1994

Plays in English

• Five Posts in a Market Place. Manyland Books, New York, 1959, 1968. (also published in Confrontations With Tyranny: Six Baltic Plays with Introductory Essays (pp. 33-94), Alfreds Straumanis (ed.). Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, IL, 1977.)
• The Last Picnic. Manyland Books, New York, 1978.
• Children in the Amber Palace. Légèreté Press, 1986

Short stories in Lithuanian

• Kelionė (The Journey), novel, 1954
• Ilgoji naktis (The Long Night), short stories, 1956
• Muzika įžengiant į neregėtus miestus, (Music While Entering Unseen Cities), short stories, 1979 (also published as part of Kelionės Muzika (The Journey’s Music). Vagos publishers, Vilnius,1992.)
• Trys dramos (Three Dramas), 1980
• Kelionės muzika (Music on the Journey) novel and short stories, 1992
• Five short stories in Modernioji Lietuvių Egzilio Proza (Modern Lithuanian Exile Prose). Versus Aureus, Vilnius, 2006.

Short stories in English

• Words, Beautiful Words. Arena, vol. 6, March 1962. Published by the P.E.N. Center for Writers in Exile, London. (also published as Žodžiai, Gražieji Žodžiai in Kelionės Muzika (The Journey’s Music). Vagos publishers, Vilnius, 1992, in Lithuanian.)

Editor

• Algirdas Landsbergis, Clark Mills (eds.). The Green Oak, Selected Lithuanian Poetry. Voyages Press, New York, 1962
• Algirdas Landsbergis, Clark Mills (eds.). The Green Linden. Voyages Press, New York, 1964.

Awards and honors

• Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas in the 5ht degree (1999)
• Cleveland Lithuanian Literature Prize (1989)
• The Lithuanian Community Drama Prize (1981, 1983)
• Los Angeles Lithuanian American Drama Prize (1980)
• Lithuanian Writers Union Prize (1980)
• Draugas newspaper prize for the best novel, Kėlionė (1954)

Organizations

• President, International P.E.N. Center for Writers in Exile, American branch, 1966-1976.
• Vice-President, International P.E.N. Center for Writers in Exile, American branch, 1976-2004.
• Member, Lithuanian Writers' Union (since 1992), P.E.N., U.S. Dramatists Guild.

Posthumous tributes

• Lituanus, volume 51:1 (2005), http://www.lituanus.org/main.php?id=search-articles-2005

• Maironis Lithuanian Literature Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania, 90^th birthday celebration, June 26, 2014:  http://maironiomuziejus.lt/lt/parodos/algirdas-landsbergis-19242004-419/gallery

Commemorative events

To mark the 100th anniversary since the birth of Algirdas Landsbergis, the following events took place in his native Lithuania. Two commemorations of the work of Algirdas Landsbergis were organized by dr. Virginija Babonaitė-Paplauskienė of the national Maironis Museum of Lithuanian Literature. These were held on July 10, 2024, in Kybartai, Lithuania, the writer’s birthplace, and on July 12, 2024, in Ariogala, where he lived for several years as a child. At both events, participating speakers and performers included dr. Virginija Babonaitė-Paplauskienė of the Maironis Museum of Lithuanian Literature, professor and theater director, Gytis Padegimas, actor Dainius Svobonas of the National Kaunas Drama Theater, harpist Viktorija Smailytė, Paul Landsbergis, son of Algirdas, and Aylin Landsbergis, granddaughter of Algirdas. A new edition of the biography Journey into Algirdas Landsbergis’ journey (Kelionė į Algirdo Landsbergio kelionę) was published in 2024, edited by dr. Virginija Babonaitė-Paplauskienė. The original edition of this biography was first published by dr. Babonaitė-Paplauskienė in 2014.

Bibliography

• Aston, Frank. “5 Posts Opens at Gate Theater,” Long Island Sun, 6 March 1961.
• Babonaite-Paplauskiene, Virginija. Archyvai: Kelione I Algirdo Landsbergio kelione (Archive: A journey into Algirdas Landsbergis’ journey). Kaunas, Lithuania: Naujasis Lankas, 2014.
• Algirdas Landsbergis. Visuotinė lietuvių enciklopedija.   T. XI (Kremacija-Lenzo taisyklė). – Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 2007. 492.
• Friedman, Nadine. “Fun/Five Posts in a Market Place,” Stone Soup Theater Art Press Release, 17 August 2002.
• Goštautas, Stasys. “In Memorium Algirdas Landsbergis.” Lituanus 51:1, 2005, pp. 8-10.
• Gražytė, Ilona.“ Landsbergio partizaninė drama.“ [Landsbergis’s partisan drama], Aidai 8, 1967, pp. 363-4.
• Hawley, M. “’Five Posts’ seeks freedom’s worth.” The Daily Egyptian, 10 May 1975.
• Kuizinienė, Dalia. “Rezistencijos tema Alg. Landsbergio, V. Alanto ir V. Ramono kūryboje.” [Theme of Resistance in the Creative Work of A. Landsbergis, V. Alantas, and V. Ramona] Genocidas ir rezistencija 1/[Genocide and Resistance 1], 2000, pp. 72-87.
• Kutkus, Vytautas. “Dar kartą ‘Penkių Stulpių’” [Once again about ‘Five Posts.’] Draugas, 16 May 1959.
• Landsbergis, Algirdas. Kėlionė. [The Journey] Kaunas, Marionio lietuvių literatūros muziejus [Marionis Lithuanian Literature Museum], [1953].
• Landsbergis, Algirdas. “Adventures in Storyland.” Ed. Vincė, Laima. The Earth Remains. Columbia University Press.
• Landsbergis, Algirdas. “The Baltic Case—A Personal Perspective.” Unpublished. Manuscript from 1991, copy provided by Jon Landsbergis, 26 August 2018.
• Landsbergis, Algirdas. “Vita Longa Breviter.” Manuscript, 1973.
• Landsbergis, Algirdas. “Words, Beautiful Words.” Lithuanian Quartet. New York. Manyland Books, 1962.
• Landsbergis, Jonas. “To the West: In Memory of my Father.” Lituanus. Volume 51:1, 2005, pp. 5-6.
• Landsbergis, Algirdas. Five Posts in a Market Place. New York: Manyland Books, 1959.
• Lukša, Juozas. Forest Brothers: The Account of an Anti-Soviet Lithuanian Freedom Fighter, 194-1948. Translated by Laima Vincė. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009.
• Maironis Lithuanian Literature Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania:   http://maironiomuziejus.lt/lt/parodos/algirdas-landsbergis-19242004-419/gallery
• Melnechuk, Theodore. “On Stage: Five Posts in a Market Place.” Lituanus 7 (I). 1961, pp. 30-2.
• Michelsonas, Stasys. Lietuvių išeivija Amerikoje (1868-1961) [The Lithuanian Diaspora in America (1868-19610]. Boston, 1961.
• Misiūnas, Remigijus. Barakų kultūros knygos: lietuvių D.P. leidyba 1945-1952 [Books of the Barracks Culture: D.P. Publishing 1945-1952]. Vilnius: 2004, pp. 15-46.
• Payne, R., and Landsbergis, Algirdas. “Introduction.” Five Posts in a Market Place. New York: Manyland Books, 1959.
• Paul, Jon and Joan Landsbergis, personal collection.
• Savino, Guy. "Huge Concept: 'Five Posts' Off-Broadway Raises Host of Questions." Newark Evening News, 6 March 1991.
• Šilbajoris, Rimvydas. Perfection of Exile: Fourteen Contemporary Lithuanian Writers. Norman: University of Nebraska Press, 1970, pp. 22-3.
• Venclova, Tomas. "Saying Goodbye to Algirdas Landsbergis." Translated by Laima Simutis. Lituanus. Volume 51:1, 2005, pp. 11-19.
• Vincė, Laima. "Two Interpretations--Two Continents: Algirdas Landsbergis, Five Posts in a Market Place." Journal of Baltic Studies, 2022, Volume 53, Issue 1.
• Vincė, Laima. "Two Interpretations--Two Continents: Algirdas Landsbergis, Five Posts in a Market Place." Vanished Lands: Memory and Postmemory in North American Lithuanian Diaspora Literature. Peter Lang International Publishers, 2023. pp. 215-241.