Jurgis Savickis

Jurgis Savickis (4 May 1890 – 22 December 1952) was a Lithuanian short story writer and diplomat representing interwar Lithuania mostly in the Scandinavian countries.

Born to a family of well-off Lithuanian farmers, Savickis attended a gymnasium in Moscow and studied painting at the School of Fine Arts in Kraków. During World War I, he was sent as a delegate of the Lithuanian Society for the Relief of War Sufferers to Denmark to care for Lithuanian POWs in Germany. After the war, he was recognized as the official Lithuanian representative in Denmark and later in Norway and Sweden. In 1923–1927, he was posted in Finland. In 1927–1929, he worked in Kaunas as the director of the Law and Administration Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as director of the Kaunas State Drama Theatre. He returned to the diplomatic service and represented Lithuania in Sweden (1930–1937), Latvia (1937–1938), and the League of Nations (1938–1940). After the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in June 1940, Savickis retired in his villa in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin near Monaco in the South of France.

During his life, Savickis published three collections of short stories, one novel, and four travel books. He was one of the first to introduce literary modernism (with elements of Expressionism, Impressionism, and Existentialism, though his works don't neatly fit any particular literary movement) to Lithuanian literature. As his works departed literary realism, they were not well received by contemporary critics who thought his works were too foreign and too removed from Lithuanian realities. Savickis, having lived abroad for most of his life, reflected aesthetics of modern Western European bourgeois. His works feature sharp and playful wit and irony and succinct and finely tuned sentences. His works were influenced by his interest in painting (abundance of colors, character sketches), theatre (characters as actors, stage setting), and film (dynamic montage of fragments). His narrator is an observer from a certain emotional distance that leaves it up to the reader to finish what is not said. Provided by Wikipedia