1924, Sruoga graduated from the University of Munich, where he enjoyed Western culture, and in 1943 he was arrested by the German Nazis and deported to prison. From 1915 to 1918 he studied literature in Russian universities, and in 1946 the Soviet guards came and took his typescript. Those who seemed to be familiar to him became strangers. Do we feel the same way today? What does Sruoga’s “The Forest of the Gods” tell us about ourselves and the present?

It is the story of a creator caught between two ideologies.

B. Sruoga’s memoir speaks not only in its content, but also in its complicated publishing history. The painful fate of the book is also important as a testimony to the political situation of the time, because throughout the Soviet era and even after, schoolchildren read a censored work in school! On the anniversary of the creation of “The Forest of the Gods”, we invite you to reflect on creative freedom and its conditions. B. Sruoga wrote the memoir in 1945, but it was never published. It was censored ten years after his death, and the authentic text had to wait even longer.

B. Sruoga, who endured Nazi repression in a concentration camp, did not like the Soviet government either. He was misunderstood because of his sharp, grotesque style and his deliberately chosen anti-political stance, as he spoke in an artistic rather than documentary style. A unique, exceptional work and its author were discussed. The experience of the Stutthof concentration camp is shocking, but the writer’s powerlessness in the face of the state apparatus in peacetime is equally shocking.

We invite you to the last, dark period of Sruoga’s life. It comprises two ‘resorts’: Stutthof, the ‘seaside resort’, where the writer experiences real horrors but never stops writing comedies; and sunny Birštonas, where he immerses himself in the dark manuscripts of the “Forest of the Gods”. In the background, there is the ‘liberated’ post-war Vilnius and a blind inner darkness

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The exhibition will be open at the Maironis Lithuanian Literature Museum from September 13, 2025.

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The exhibition was curated by:

Audronė Meškauskaitė, Exhibition Curator 
Inga Zamulskienė, Designer of Exhibition and Publishing Project 

Consultants
Birutė Glaznerienė, Chief Collection Curator
Kristina Grigonytė-Šerpenskienė, Educator 

Construction assembled by Romas Štuikys

We would also like to thank: Justina Džiuvytė, Tadas Jakubauskas, Kristina Tutlytė and Ugnei Baliutavičiūtei.

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