Antanas Baranauskas’ Original Texts (1853–1863) – History of Writing

The thesis analyses the manuscripts of the most famous Lithuanian poet of the 19th century Antanas Baranauskas, including his diary, the family book (silva rerum) of the Baranauskas family and the collection of poems Wiersze. The thesis exposes the cultural context of manuscripts written in Polish and their communicative nature. Through the conception of the history of writing, the author of the thesis examines the process of writing the manuscripts and scrutinises the formation, functioning and transformation of the writer, the portrayed community and creative self-consciousness. The final section of the thesis deals with Baranauskas’s poems in Lithuanian, the tradition of turning them into songs and their relationship with an environment. The poet’s creative biography is reviewed without splitting it into Polish and Lithuanian. His turn from one language to another and shifts in his poetics are associated with a change in social status and thus represents an integral narrative of the history of Baranauskas’s writing