In life and in work, he was known for his ability to sense beauty in the mundane, and even in dirtiness, and for his humour, sometimes bitter-sweet, but often side-splitting, which is rare in Lithuanian literature. He is also known and admired for his penchant for describing well-known places and cityscapes usually of Vilnius, but also of his native Alytus , and for transforming them into something intrinsically romantic and beautiful. His often drunken vagabond characters invoke comparisons with Charles Bukowski and beatnik literature.
Would you care to go there? All you have to do is cross the wooden bridge after passing the endless open-air tennis courts and then take a turn to the right across an almost inconspicuous prominence of the river bank, where once a wooden pavilion decayed, long and stubbornly, with its hand-carved windows and strange-spired tower.
The reddish precipice is no longer far off — soon you will stumble over its magnitude, suddenly halting as if transfixed at a round table with seven throne-like chairs, placed there, as it were, for the convenience of the weary. Here, you will awake your new cohorts — seven minstrels in maxi-coats, crashed in the grass in a heavy drunken stupor.
Have them take their seats properly and brace them on their firm thrones. Are you comfortable, dear debauchees? They stare with open gaze but are asleep. My friends, the minstrels. Who knows, maybe someday at least one of them will actually gaze at our descendants from the pantheon of the Lithuanian National Wax Figure Museum. The minstrels in maxi-coats. Tired Vilnius troubadours. Old-Town bards. Fall of They are being sought by the police.
They are taking a breather in a holding cell. No one, it seems, rests more than they do. They sit there, just as I have had them seated. Frozen in the most uncomfortable poses. Without stirring. Imaginary as well, are the note-covered sheets of music on the wooden table and chairs. Pentagons of dead spiders and flies, fallen into the spiderwebs.
