Narrative
Forest of the Gods
Dievų miškas
Balys Sruoga · 1945
Synopsis
Caught up in a roundup of Lithuanian intellectuals, in reprisal for the Lithuanians' refusal to form a legion for the German army, the narrator recounts his detention at Stutthof, a camp built in the marshy wood that gives the book its name. There is little action: a mosaic of camp life, in no chronological order, and a gallery of portraits of fellow prisoners, in which the prisoners promoted to overseers sometimes prove more brutal than the SS. Faced with the absurd, the narrator keeps a stoic distance, and irony makes us laugh at the horror.
Context
The author wrote the book in a few months in 1945, on his return from Stutthof, where he had been sent with forty-seven other Lithuanian intellectuals. Soviet censorship blocked its publication, and the narrative appeared only in 1957, posthumously, in an expurgated version: Neringa Markevičienė notes that the editors removed the camp slang, the obscenities and the ironic judgments, and counts eleven editions, including those of 1957, 1997 and 2005. Algimantas Puipa made a film from it in 2005 that broke box-office records in Lithuania.
Who it is for
A narrative of constant irony, translated into English in 1996; the only French version, made from the Russian and expurgated, appeared in Moscow from Éditions du Progrès.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the first European literary testimonies on the Nazi camps and as a major work of Lithuanian literature.
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