Bernardas Brazdzionis is one of the most significant Lithuanian poets to emerge from the interwar years. His oeuvre is sharply divided into two periods by his emigration from Lithuania in 1944. Before emigrating, Brazdzionis was an innovative poet with great versatility both in his motifs and in his poetic technique; after World War II he returned to the premodern tradition and developed mainly patriotic themes to protest the brutality of the Stalinist system and the Soviet occupation of Lithuania. His later poems are rhetorical and have brought him wide popularity in Lithuania, especially since its liberation from the Communist regime.

Brazdzionis was born on 2 February 1907 in the village of Stebeikeliai in northeastern Lithuania. His parents were poor peasants, Jonas and Morta Brazdzionis. He accompanied them to the United States, where his father worked at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, Michigan, for several years. Upon returning to Lithuania in...