Apie viską ir nieką: žmogus, visuomenė, kultūra

LTKnygą sudaro Algirdo Juliaus Greimo ankstyvoji, 1947-1959 m., publicistika: sociopolitinių realijų analizės, poleminiai straipsniai visuomenės ir kultūros klausimais, literatūros veikalų recenzijos, literatūros istorijai ir estetikai skirta eseistika. Parengta iš rankraščių pagal paties Greimo sudarytą planą, knyga atskleidžia savitą, daugeliu aspektų ir šiandien aktualią žmogaus ir kultūros sampratą, išdėstytą gyvu stiliumi, su Greimui būdingu subtilumu, ironija, humoru ir kritine galia. [Iš leidinio]Reikšminiai žodžiai: Laiškai; Literatūra; Eseistika; Kultūra; Letters; Lithuanian literature; Essaysistics; Culture.

ENAlgirdas Julius Greimas’s career in journalism began in 1943 and continued to the end of his life. This book is a selection of his journalistic writings from 1947-59, the early period of Greimas’s intellectual development, before the publication of Structural Semantics (1966) or the first study in Lithuanian mythology (1972). Yet it is not only this time span that makes this book representative of Greimas’s pre-semiotic thought but also, and more importantly, the fact that it was put together by Greimas himself. The list of essays grouped into thematic rubrics for this selection survived in Greimass personal archive deposited at the Vilnius University Library Manuscript Department soon after his death in 1992 and was found in the course of a comprehensive research of Greimas’s Lithuanian heritage conducted in 2015-17. At the most probable time of designing the book, in 1959 or soon after, Greimas did not publish the book or even complete outlining its contents: the second of the book’s three parts is considerably larger than the other two, and the manuscripts show clear traces of Greimas’s effort to break it into more proportionate units, but he did not finish this work or give the prospective book a title. Nonetheless, Greimas kept the drafts of the contents page for this selection with the rest of his Lithuanian papers, giving us a chance to complete the earliest of his surviving book projects by collecting the texts, editing them, and publishing the selection as originally conceived. The title of the book comes from a 1988 letter by Greimas to his colleague and friend Bronys Savukynas, in which he characterised a similar essay selection he was planning at the time as a book “of all and nothing”; the subtitle has been given by the editor and lists the major thematic foci of the selection.Part One, "The Assertion of the Human Being and the Morality of Action", comprises five essays. Three of them - "Freedom and Commitment" (1949), "The East and the West" [1948-52], and "The Notion of Resistance" (1953) - ostensibly belong to the genre of political analytic journalism and elaborate on the issue of the impossibility of preserving one’s humanity while living in the essentially inhumane sociopolitical reality of the day. These pieces frame two literary reviews: of Ignazio Silone’s "Le grain sous la neige" (translated into French by Jean-Pierre Samson in 1943, Greimas’s review "Ignazio Silone, The Grain under the Snow" published in 1948) and of the play by Emmanuel Robles Montserrat premiered in Algiers and Paris in 1948, published in 1949, and reviewed by Greimas in 1952 (the review titled "Human Existence and the Idea of Human"). Both Silone and Robles receive Greimas’s appraisal for the dramatic complexity and force with which they stage individual experiences of having to make impossible choices in situations when every choice is as inhumane as another for the deadly consequences each of them is bound to bring. Part Two, "I Care fo r Lithuania", in the fourteen pieces of various genres it contains, expands on a great variety of political, social, and cultural realities of Lithuanians living on either side of the Iron Curtain dividing the nation at the time. In line with his emphatically inclusive view of Lithuanian culture, Greimas does not dwell on the divide itself: he directly addresses it barely once, in the review "On this and the other side" [1947], reading a poetry collection by the Soviet Lithuanian poet Kostas Korsakas to conclude that a poet’s sociopolitical identity does not necessarily have to undermine either his love for the native country or the aesthetic value of its poetic expression.The other essays in this Part consider issues of general importance to Lithuanian self-conception in the spheres of political thought and action ("A Letter to Vytautas Kavolis: The Task for Todays Liberals" (1954), "Resistance and Democracy" [1950-53], "The 17 December Coup (An Attempt at a Specific Analysis") and "A Reply to J. Januškis" on the same issue (1957), "s National Communism a Possibility?" (1956-57)), historical consciousness ("Images of History and Historical Thinking" (1953), "A Short History of Lithuanian Literature" (1956)), and cultural self-perception Greimas finds re-imagined and expressed in daily practices, attitudes, myths ("On Folk Costume Trousers and Synthetic Products" (1947), "The Ancientness and Newness of the Lithuanian Language" (1949), "In the Fallow Acres of Folk Culture (On the Occasion of the Publication of Dr. J. Balys’s Readings in Folklore") (1949)), and all forms of literature (a review of Fabijonas Neveravičius’s Dienovidžio sutemos [Meridian Twilights] (1949), "Vincas Krėvė and the Thought on Statehood" (1955), "Juozas Kėkštas’s Metamorphoses" (a 1953 review of a poetry collection by Kėkštas)). Part Three, The Challenges o f Literature, presents us with a selection of Greimas’s writings on European authors, including some Lithuanians, namely: Valery Larbaud ("Valery Larbaud, Reading, that Unpunished Vice" (1948)), Henrikas Radauskas ("Before the Fountain Speaks again..." (1948) and "Thoughts on Henrikas Radauskas and the Place of His Arrow in the Lithuanian Sky" (1954)), Corneille ("The Contemporaneity of Corneille" (1955)), and Czeslaw Milosz, selected and translated by Juozas Kėkštas ("Consciousness and Conscience (On Reading Translations of Czesław Milosz's Poetry") (1959)). [...]. [Extract, p. 233-236]

• Kalbotyra / Linguistics
• Literatūrologija / Literary Studies