The Baltic substrate in the works by Jurgis Baltrušaitis

Abstract

The article describes the detection of typological similarities at the thematic, figurative, motivic and ideological levels of the text between the daines, traditional for the Baltic folk versification, and the poems by Jurgis Baltrušaitis from the collection “Earthly Steps” with the same poetic size. The purpose of the article is to detect a semantic halo between the groups of works under consideration, determined by the author's biography. Structuralism was chosen as the method of the study, based on the claims that a literary work consists of several levels of structure, each level has its own autonomous laws, and some more general laws apply at all levels and link them together. As a result of the study, a semantic halo was found at all of the above levels. In the future, similar studies are possible to detect semantic halos that come from different poetic traditions, as well as to discover the relationship between biography and creativity at the level of metre.