The White Linen

A reading featuring Corinna Harfouch and Hideyo Harada from Antanas Škėma's novel "The White Linen".

The novel is considered a milestone of modern Lithuanian literature. Written during Škėma's exile in New York, it tells the story of Lithuanian emigrant Antanas Garšva, based on the author's own biography. In the early 1950s, Garšva works as a lift operator in the city's largest hotel. The daily up-and-down motion in the elevator feels to him like the labour of Sisyphus - a comparison that earned Škėma the epithet "Lithuanian Camus". The mindless repetition of the same routine and the sensory overload of the illusory reality of the American megacity wear down the already neurotic Garšva, who sees himself as a poet, born to leave verses for eternity.

In an expressionist, associative style interwoven with episodic flashbacks to childhood and youth, first love and its loss, political indoctrination in his homeland, and finally emigration, the novel unfolds the psychological portrait of a driven man - and simultaneously a mockingly distorted mosaic of the twentieth century dominated by ideologies: from socialist Kaunas to the capitalist-hollowed postwar New York.

Translator Claudia Sinnig has rendered this finely composed tirade in all its harshness, despair, and linguistic force into German - Škėma's first German voice ever. Alongside Corinna Harfouch's reading, pianist Hideyo Harada performs piano pieces by Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Schumann through to Čiurlionis and Bartók.