Romantic Interpretation of the Human and the World in Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė’s Novel Ad Astra

Abstract

Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė was an active participant in the Lithuanian national revival of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. She was a book smuggler, a supporter of the distributors of the banned Lithuanian press, a teacher, a journalist, and a writer. She based her novel Ad Astra on the principle of memories in order to artistically reconstruct the process of national revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, its events, and the activities of individual social strata and personalities. The author’s choice of Maria Konopnicka’s motto ‘I believe in the necessary, conscious invasion of people into powerful ideas of rights and equality’ clearly drew its semantic ideological line.
Living in a friend’s manor and interacting with the landlords of the Polish mindset, Elzė feels a sharp cultural divide between ‘own’ and ‘foreign’. Everything related to the old Lithuanian ethnic and cultural identity belongs to the category of ‘own’: the mother tongue, the harmony of one’s own home, myths of the childhood, and family history. In the novel, the ‘foreignness’ is represented by the Polish mindset (owners of the manor), a hedonistic worldview (young people, old ladies), and even the living environment of the manor characterised by a certain relationship with the representatives of the repressive government apparatus (the colonel).
Elzė is depicted through a fundamentally new form of female consciousness in society of that time. This awareness is primarily represented by attention and social sensitivity to the lower strata of society (self-care and full care of the seriously ill Eliutė, Pėželienė’s daughter), respect for the nation’s historical memory and historical heritage, courageous efforts to preserve her language (she speaks Lithuanian with a young man), censorship, lively interest in the success of new cultural phenomena (she is interested in Lithuanian books secretly published in Prussia). For a long time, Elzė’s Lithuanian identity seems to be off-centre; it gains total power when the girl meets Bataitis, a student. The influence of his ideas and the girl’s intense self-esteem determine the formation of an integral female ego, a new model of a woman’s active existence. She is determined to follow Bataitis’s ideals of bringing the nation together and fighting for the rights of her compatriots, and this stimulates her new spiritual ambitions and activates new activities of her consciousness.
At the epicentre of the depicted world events, the woman becomes a powerful force that unconditionally invades new experiences of discovery, succumbing to new quests and movements. Elzė’s self-identification is not the discovery of a specific stable and unchanging situation, but a constant change of states and positions in order to establish the woman’s new social ego. Following the stereotype of the ideal spiritual woman, participating in the work of nation-building, and experiencing inspiring elation, Elzė feels she has discovered herself, the full-bloodedness of life that can manifest itself without becoming a mother or wife and is experiencing a constant contact with transcendence.