Among Lithuanian prose writers of the early decades following World War II, only one voice was able to express both the personal and the universal anguish felt by many artists and thinkers amid the ruins of European civilization. That voice belonged to Antanas Skema. In "Anketa Antano Skemos literaturinio palikimo vertei apsvarstyti" (A Questionnaire to Assess the Value of Literary Heritage of Antanas Skema, 1963), poet and critic Alfonsas Nyka-Niliunas expressed the view that Skema's main achievement lies in "his effort to comprehend as an artist his own human situation and to depict it in terms of his time." Responding to the same questionnaire, critic Algirdas Landsbergis noted that "the grand themes of the modern Western world--Nothingness and the Death of God--have so far in our literature sounded most clearly in Skema's works." In his plays, short stories, and novel Skema developed an artistic language adequate for expressing the...