Photo by Irmantas Gelūnas

The poet and playwright Mindaugas Nastaravičius (b. 1984) made his debut in 2010 with a collection of poems Dėmėtų akių (Stained Eyes). The book won the prestigious Zigmas Gėlė Prize for the best debut in poetry. He received a degree in journalism at Vilnius University. He has worked in the media and hosted radio shows on culture. He made his debut as a playwright in 2012 with his play Paukštyno bendrabutis (The Dormitory of the Poultry-Farm) at the Versmė national drama festival. 

The main themes of Nastaravičius’s poems are the search for origins, the source of the subject, and the axis of identity. Rich with autobiographical fragments and skilled imitations of autobiographical discourse, the poems read much like short stories inhabited by individual characters. 

The title of Nastaravičius’s latest collection, Bendratis (Infinitive, 2018), also refers to infinite things – the circle of death and life, and blood ties. The poet is especially interested in the drama of the father/son relationship, a close connection affected by overwhelming distance. The subheading of the collection indicates that the book is “a story of one poem”. This is accurate enough: the same characters show up in the poems (father, mother, neighbours, boyhood friends), along with a number of signs hinting at the Soviet regime and the period post–independence. The poet depicts, playfully, the atmosphere of his hometown, the relationship of his family, and a teenage initiation game – and later, visiting a dying father, and the birth of a son. All of these events are considered in search of an answer to a Hamlet-type question: “Who am I?”