Letters of Balys Sruoga to Valerija Čiurlionytė

The goal of the article is to present, in accordance with the anthropology and new- or material-philological perspectives, a collection of letters that Balys Sruoga, the outstanding Lithuanian classic of the first half of the 20th century, wrote to his friend Valerija Čiurlionytė, the textual history and inner content of those letters, and the vision of their publication. Sruoga wrote these letters from 1915 to 1918 from Russia where he studied at the faculties of history and philology at the universities of Petrograd and Moscow. When in the summer of 1914 Sruoga left Lithuania for Russia, he made the acquaintance of Valerija Čiurlionytė, the sister of future Lithuanian composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, and they became close friends. Sruoga’s letters to Čiurlionytė are stored at the Manuscript Department of Vilnius University Library and the Manuscript Department of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore. They have not all been published yet and not described in detail. In his letters to Čiurlionytė, we see a maturing man who had already experienced the shock, the spiritual crisis, and the poverty of the World War I. It was the war that made Sruoga leave Lithuania for Russia, where he lived and studied for four years. It is important to identify the characteristic features of these letters in the context of the writer’s autobiographical writing, to review their content (Sruoga’s worldview, his outlook, and the realities of the environment of a young man who had just graduated from Panevėžys gymnasium and had to study in Petrograd and Moscow because of the war), to identify the textual scholarship problems and prospects of publishing letters in the traditional and digital format, to describe the link, the methodology, and the tools for creating an electronic archive of Sruoga’s academic writings and letters