Political Satires: The Underbridge of Maironis’ Poetry

Abstract

Public and ecclesiastical activity, as well as poetical works of the classical author of the national revival era, Jonas Maciulis-Maironis, are political in the meaning of Aristotelian politeia. Maironis undertook the responsibility for the programme of Lithuanian Christian Democratic Union and was one of its founders in 1905-1906. His views were moderately conservative; he criticized the tsarist regime and demanded national autonomy for Lithuania. After 1918, he was allied to the moderate nationalists (tautininkai). His political satires (written mostly in the period of independent Republic of Lithuania) were thoroughly discussed and highlighted in Soviet literary historical studies. Soviet ideologues considered Maironis disillusioned by the parliamentary democracy and ruling elite. His poems of “lower style” might be interpreted as the part of patriotic oeuvre which seemed to play the interconnecting role between two visions of Lithuanian culture: one related to the past, to the “bright sphere of ideals and desires,” and another – to the present, to the “sphere of mundane, perceptible reality without the aura of purity.” Maironis never directly engaged as a politician but he often acted as an important representative of cultural opposition and European-oriented Catholic intellectual. Although his satires often were qualified as marginal “underbridge,” they inspired the non-conformist writers and influenced the evolution of poetical satire as a genre. Keywords: poetry, nationalism, satire, irony, Eurocentrism, politics, political correctness. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/alc.2017.3