Letters to the Klimases by Vaižgantas: The Letter as Autobiography

Abstract

The publisher’s decision to publish the private Vaižgantas’ correspondence with the Klimases and the Lesauskases in one book without the responses from the other side allows us to read it as a single text. Although the visual appearance of the book (the vocative case, the place and the date, and the signature) reminds us that these are letters, frequent retrospective parenthesis and attention to the inner plot erase the visible form of a letter and foreground the story of Vaižgantas which is the basis of the autobiography. The writer’s letters, i. e. his autobiography, published in one book establish a new reality which was missing in just a separate letter. A new meaning which appears within this new reality is also a new event whose interpretation is based on the question-answer dialectics by Hans Georg Gadamer. Laiskai Klimams [Letters to the Klimases] belong to the referentive genre; however, the story told in letters takes over this feature creating a new separate world which, according to Gadamer, is expressed in a word. Understanding it brings us back to the hermeneutic circle where the letter and the autobiography are only the means of a new dialogue between Vaižgantas and today’s reader. Keywords : Vaižgantas, letter, Petras Klimas, autobiography, dialogue, reference. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/alc.2014.13