DEVELOPING OF IGNAS SCHEYNIUS PHYLOSOPHY AT MOSCOW UNIVERSITY AND HIS SWEDISH WRITING

Ignas Jurkunas Šeinius (also Ignas Jurkunas Scheynius, 1889-1959) is a phenomenon nur- tured by three cultures (Lithuanian, Swedish, Russian). In the philosophic-essayistic "program" of the writer, discussed in the paper, the reminiscences of those schools are envisaged. The brightest and most conceptual guidelines of Scheynius world-view were discovered having analysed the materials of the Stockholm National Archive and his particular works: the Moscow University graduation paper Introduction into the philosophy ofart; the cultural study The culture ofthe Lithuanians written in Swedish, and having reviewed the Lithuanian litera- ture tradition and trends in a circumspect way. The paper reconstructs the general aesthetic- philosophic concept of the writer, which is the base of the literary heritage created in Swedish in the course of fifty years. Polyphonic view on the Lithuanian-Russian-Swedish correlations in the artistic world-view of Scheynius has discovered a surprising paradox of cultures, in the centre of which there is the fact that the changes occurred in the Lithuanian essayistic and expressed in Swedish stays not evaluated as an important cultural information: Culture Study written in Swedish is unknown to the Lithuanian reader and beyond understanding for the Swedish reader because of the differ- ences in the culture mentality. Whereas Scheynius stated a unique observation (which is re- stored from the whole of his attitudes in the paper) about the development of the Lithuanian literary self-awareness from the positivistic-romantic antithesis towards the romantic modern- ism, and finally, clear modernistic forms. The theoretical base for this observation was gener- ated by Scheynius' art studies at the Shaniavski University in Moscow.