The Meanings of Vitality in the Prose Book “On the Other Side of the Lake” by Pulgis Andriušis

Abstract

The article is devoted to the talented Lithuanian exile writer Pulgas Andriušis (1907–1970) and the analysis of his debut prose work “Anoj pusėj ežero” (On the Other Side of the Lake, 1947), which was awarded the Lithuanian Red Cross Prize and was praised by the Lithuanian literary critics. The article analyses the meanings of vitality in Andriušis’s Expressionist short stories, with a view to Henri Bergson’s notion of the élan vital and creative evolution, and Gaston Bachelard’s concept of creative imagination and metaphor. The article explores the connections between organic phenomenological philosophy of life and the Expressionist short stories of Andriušis, which are revealed in the talented writer’s poetic prose. The research employs the concepts of élan vital and creative dynamic imagination, and Bachelard’s concept of metaphor.

The analysis of Andriušis’s debut book originates in his autobiography “Septinton įleidus” (After letting into seventh). It is important that Andriušis’s autobiography tells the story of the creator’s life, and that while still studying at Kaunas University, Andriušis was intensely interested in Henri Bergson’s philosophy of the élan vital, which emphasised the life-giving power of creation. The autobiography became the source of the writer’s experiences and creativity, his birthplace embodied the world he lived in, the Bergsonian principle of life, the idyll of nature and the creator.

Andriušis’s dynamic imagination creates a celebration of nature’s vitality, embodies the principle of radical transformation typical of Expressionist poetics, and introduces a complex vocabulary of his literary worldview and original metaphors, linked to biblical and folkloric intertexts. It should be emphasised that Andriušis’s Expressionist short stories reinforce the importance of speech as the affirmation of life, as élan vital, as vital energy. Speech, as a continuous flow of life, conveys the world of the main character, his openness to the living world, the true joy of life, the experience of the fullness of being, a poetic way of life, manifested in the natural harmony with his own earthly space, a meaningful existence in the natural world as if at home. In Andriušis’s Expressionist short stories, not only human speech but also music embodies Bergson’s principle of vital momentum, vital energy, and the order of vitality as the will to live.