Gudaitis-Guziavicius, Aleksandras

Born May 25, 1908, in Moscow; died Apr. 18, 1969. in Vilnius. Soviet Lithuanian author; People’s Writer of the Lithuanian SSR (1968). Member of the CPSU from 1927.

Born into the family of a worker. Gudaitis-Guziavicius lived in Lithuania from 1921 and took part in the underground revolutionary struggle in bourgeois Lithuania; between 1931 and 1938 he was in fascist prisons. From 1940 to 1946 he was a member of the government of the Lithuanian SSR.

In 1928 he began publishing short stories about the Lithuanian working people’s struggle in illegal communist newspapers. The first collection of his sketches and stories, The Standard-bearer (written under the pen name Brolis), came out in Minsk in 1935. His most important works were the first historical novels in Soviet Lithuanian literature. The Justice of the Blacksmith Ignotas (vols. 1–2, 1948–49; State Prize of the USSR, 1951) and The Brothers (vols. 1–4, 1951–55). about the revolutionary events of 1918–20. They present vivid images of the Lithuanian Communists. The first of these novels served as the basis for a play by the same name (1950) and for the motion picture Ignotas Has Come Home (1957). The novel The Plot (vols. 1–2, 1964–65) depicts the revolutionary struggle of the Lithuanian people in the years of bourgeois dictatorship. The collection of stories Dark Night (1958) recreates the life and struggle of revolutionaries in bourgeois Lithuania. The short historical novel October Commissar (1967) pictures the activities of V. S. Mickiavičius-Kapsukas. Gudaitis-Guziavičius was the author of the plays The Banks of the Nemunelis (1957), Invisible Weapon (1958), and The Single Combat (1961). He was awarded two Orders of Lenin, three other orders, and a number of medals.