Review

She was born in Kaunas (Lithuania). She had health problems since her youth. The mother was overwhelmed by alcoholism.

Studied at Kaunas VII Gymnasium. In Šančiai, when she was only ten years old, she started writing poems. 1948 graduated from the gymnasium and went to Vilnius to study literature. 1955 graduated from Vilnius University as a specialist in Lithuanian language and literature. She worked at the Tauragė Children's Library and taught Russian at an evening school. Later, working in sanatorium orphanages due to deteriorating health. With the help of friends, she settled in Vilnius and worked as an editor at a fiction publishing house. She was treated for heart problems in Moscow, Yalta. 

Justifications

• She belongs to a generation of poets whose childhood and youth were marked by experiences of war, occupation, and post-war massacre. The path to creation began in the 1960s when literature had to submit to the strict demands of the Soviet government.
• The entire creative period of this poet belongs precisely to the Soviet period of Lithuanian literature, as the author died just before Lithuania regained its independence, which was very much awaited.

Biography

Janina Degutytė (1928–1990) - poet, translator, and author of children's poems and fairy tale books. She belongs to a generation of poets whose childhood and youth were marked by experiences of war, occupation, and post-war massacre. The path to creation began in the 1960s when literature had to submit to the strict demands of the Soviet government. The entire creative period of this poet belongs precisely to the Soviet period of Lithuanian literature, as the author died just before Lithuania regained its independence, which was very much awaited. 

The poet was born in independent Lithuania in 1928. In Kaunas, a suburb of Šančiai, a family of construction technicians and housewives from Kaunas workers. Initially, the harmonious and affluent Degučiai family began to collapse in early childhood when their mother started drinking. The poet herself, who described her painful childhood in the book Atsakymai (Answers) in the last decade of her life, had said that this was when her biography began: “My whole life begins at the age of seven. Until then, everything has faded: fragments, fragments, moods. But from the age of seven, every day, every hour, is cut down like an axe in the heart. No time, no happiness will equal them. " Moreover, with the outbreak of World War II, during the Nazi occupation, in 1942, Degutytė's father was shot in Mažeikiai, with whom the poet has a special spiritual connection based on love and trust. At that time, Degutytė attended a gymnasium in Kaunas and the burden of keeping a mother who had been drinking and sold out her family was shouldered. 

Works

English

• Ant žemės delno (On the Palm of the Earth)

Bibliography

Jurgita Žana Raškevičiūtė, Janina Degutytė (http://www.xn--altiniai-4wb.info/index/details/1234)

Didactic approach

Lithuanian Literature.

Documents