Stodamas į aukštąją mokyklą…
Upon entering a school of higher education...

Summary/Abstract: Donatas Sauka (1929–2015), a professor of Lithuanian Literature at Vilnius University, worked at the Department of Lithuanian Literature from 1956 to 1993, teaching courses in Lithuanian literature and folklore to several generations of students. These different generations of students were equally impressed by the professor’s erudition, his uncompromising attitude and the perfectionism that he demanded of himself and others; also surprising were his endless curiosity and sincere interest in every new phenomenon that he had encountered or person that he had met. In conversations, essay and publicity articles, Donatas Sauka expressed himself as an insightful, precise yet also sensitive critic of society. D. Sauka wrote his fundamental study Lietuvių tautos savitumas ir vertė (The Peculiarity and Value of the Lithuanian Nation, 1970), a textbook for schools of higher education Lietuvių tautosaka (Lithuanian Folklore, 1987, with a second, extended edition published in 2008) and the monographs Žemaitės stebuklas (The Miracle of Žemaitė, 1998) and Jurgis Savickis – XX a. literatūros šifras (Jurgis Savickis: A Cipher of the 20th c. Literature, 1994). During the Lithuanian National Revival, Professor Sauka published an essay book titled Noriu suprasti (I Wish to Understand, 1991), while his culturological study Fausto amžiaus epilogas (An Epilogue of Faust’s Age, 1998) earned him the Award of National Culture and Art. After the professor’s passing, an intellectual, biographical manuscript was discovered in his personal archive, written during the last decade of the 20th century – a work born out of a need to pay his debts to his own time. This publication is dedicated to reminiscing on the period of his studies at Vilnius University as well as the postgraduate studies he undertook during 1948–1956. Some fragments of the manuscript and the respective comments were prepared for publishing by Saulė Matulevičienė.

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