Alfonsas Danys (16 September 1924 – 2014) was a Lithuanian writer known for satire works, detective fiction and novels about a rural life, Interwar, World War II and the Soviet Lithuania.
Early life and education
Danys was born to a Lithuanian family of farmers in 1924 in Trumpiškiai, Rokiškis, Lithuania. He was raised in a family of five children: he had one brother and three sisters. In 1937, due to a fire, his parents lost all the buildings and animals on the farm.
Danys studied at Rokiškis gymnasium. His first employment was a teacher’s job at Pakriauniai elementary school where he worked for 2 years since 1944 autumn. In 1946, he moved to Kaunas to study at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences. In 1947, he moved to Vilnius to study law. In Vilnius, he held a variety of jobs including work at the confectionery factory "Žibutė" where he began writing. Danys finished Lithuanian language and literature studies at the Vilnius Pedagogical Institute. His longest employment started in 1953 at the Lithuanian government body where he worked for 33 years. Danys has begun his career as an assistant editor of government news at the Lithuanian branch of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. Later he worked as a chief editor and translator at the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. As a specialist in Lithuanian language philology, Danys was responsible for translating legal documents from Russian to Lithuanian.
Writing career
Danys wrote his first book ("Saldaus Gyvenimo Klampynėse") after a work experience at the confectionery factory. The theme of the book was the impact of communism on human mentality and how thefts became a norm in society. Danys started to write satires and feuilletons when he worked at the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. He wrote under a pseudonym "Banys". Since 1961, satires were published by Šluota and other magazines. 250 of works were published since then. In 1982, "Pergalė" magazine has published parts of a satire novel "Rūkytas Kumpis" where Danys wrote about the Soviet government in a humorous tone. This event has prevented to publish more of Danys works during the Soviet Lithuania. All Danys works were published only after 1990 when Lithuania got the independence from the Soviet Union. The first book was published when he was 54 years old.
Works
The most popular works of Alfonsas Danys are the series of four novels that talk about the Interwar, World War II and Postwar periods. The books were inspired by a resistance among intellectuals and artists to adapt their ideas to the ideology of the communism during the Soviet occupation. In Soviet Lithuania, only the works which were adapted to fit the view of the Soviet ideology were allowed to be published. All artists, including writers, scriptwriters and cinema directors were forced to adapt the original stories with the demands of the Soviets. Danys was also asked to include the Soviet ideas to a movie script "Kruvina Puota" ("Blood Feast") that he wrote, although a writer refused to follow a demand of the Soviet censorship and he burned a script instead. This event inspired Danys to write the series of four novels connected by the same characters.
The Four Novel Series
The series is an analysis of a certain type of people who lived during the Interwar, World War II and Postwar periods. The series theme is a divide between rural people who supported different ideologies during the World War - Nazis, Soviets or Lithuanian Forest Brothers. The second theme is the agriculture reform called the collectivization of agriculture during which all private land was nationalised by the Soviet Union. The drama of the land nationalisation highlights Lithuanians as an agrarian society who were fighting for their own piece of land in this Earth. The novels show the impact of the Soviet and Nazi occupation on rural people's life, on identity and patriotism of Lithuanians which lasted longer than the occupation itself.
"Sutryptų Vilčių Aimana" is the first book in the series. The novel covers the events during the German occupation of Lithuania during the World War II including the Holocaust in Lithuania. The novel was originally written in 1970, published in 1998.