The History and Culture of Diaspora

Algirdas LAndsbergis's Early Short Stories: the Harmony of Mythical Time and Space

Abstract

The article analyses three early prose texts by Algirdas Landsbergis – Antroji kalnų grandinė (The Second Mountain Chain) (1947), Paskutinioji diena (The Last Day) (1948) and Nakties dugnu (At the Bottom of the Night) (1949) – using a mythopoetic method. Mircea Eliade’s theory is used to reveal how the mythical images of time and space help the author to structure the world-view of the works and to convey the existential experiences of the characters. The aim is to analyze the author’s individual mytho poetic principles of world formation – time and space – which articulate the existential tension between the limits of reality and the possibilities of myth, and form a poetic vision of reality that combines retrospection, transcendental tension, and metaphysical experience of the environment.