Teofilis Tilvitis

(Teofilis Tilvytis). Born Jan. 15 (28), 1904, in the village of Gaidziuose, in what is now Utena Raion; died May 5, 1969, in Vilnius. Soviet Lithuanian poet. People’s Poet of the Lithuanian SSR (1954). Member of the CPSU from 1951.

From 1933 to 1940, Til’vitis was editor of the satirical journal Kuntaplis. He first published his works in 1923. He wrote the collection Three Grenadiers (1926), which parodies the symbolists and romantics, and the narrative poem The Plowmen (1930–47), a grotesque interpretation of Lithuanian history. Til’vitis satirized bourgeois mores in the narrative poem Dicius (1934) and ridiculed bureaucrats in the novel Journey Round the Table (1936; Russian translation, 1959).

In the Soviet period, Til’vitis mainly wrote lyric and epic poems. He published the poetry collections Wind From the Baltic (1948), Sonnets on Happiness (1951), and On Native Fields (1953). In the epic poem Usnyné (1949; published in Russian translation as On the Lithuanian Land; State Prize of the USSR, 1951), Til’vitis depicted the road to socialism taken by a Lithuanian peasant. The heroic poem Song of the Expense of Life (1926) was dedicated to V. Montvila. Til’vitis also wrote the collections of satirical verse House of My Childhood (1958) and Alas, It Happens (1964). He translated fairy tales by A. S. Pushkin, fables by I. A. Krylov, and V. V. Mayakovsky’s narrative poem Vladimir Il’ich Lenin.

Til’vitis was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, and various medals.