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Lithuanian physician, prose writer, poet, publicist, critic, translator, bell-ringer, editor of the newspaper "Varpas", one of the ideologists of the Lithuanian National Movement.

He attended Paežeriai Primary School, where he was distinguished by all kinds of talents. In 1871, after graduating from the elementary school, he entered the Marijampolė Gymnasium.

Natural artistic and intellectual abilities were already revealed at school, and he was able to study at the gymnasium very easily. He was an art lover and a salon dancer, with a leaning towards Polish culture. After completing six grades, he entered the seminary in Seine, forced by his father. He studied there for two years and was expelled for "lack of vocation".

After leaving the seminary, he returned to the gymnasium in Marijampole, graduated in 1881 and entered the University of Warsaw the same year. At first he studied philology, and a year later he switched to the Faculty of Medicine. He took a two-year break (1885-1887) due to a political case, and graduated in 1889.

The first Lithuanian work by Kudirka was an insignificant satirical poem, "For What Reason Do Jews Don't Eat Pork?", which was published in 1885 in "Dawn". In the same year, he was arrested, imprisoned and expelled from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Warsaw for rewriting Karl Marx's Das Kapital. In 1887 he returned to the university, from which he graduated in 1889. In 1888, he founded the illegal Warsaw Lithuanian Students' Society "Lietuva". In 1889, the society started publishing "Varpas", which he edited for several years and wrote a column "Tėvynės varpai" (Bells of the Homeland).

Since 1890, on Kudirka's initiative, a peasant newspaper "Ūkininkas" (The Farmer) has been published in addition to the "Varpas" (Bell). At the end of his life, the editorship of "Varpo" passed completely into his hands.

In 1890-1894, he worked as a doctor in Šakiai. At that time he was already suffering from a then incurable disease - jerky. In Šakiai he formed an ensemble of string instruments, met a young widow V. Kraševskiene, who became a faithful and beloved friend who later took care of the writer.

Since his grammar school days, he wrote poems and published a mocking newspaper. Later, the poems became visions of Lithuania's future, manifestos of struggle. He analysed and described his own poems and those of other Lithuanian poets in the poetic treatise "Tiesos eilėms pisyti" (Truths for writing poems). In it, he described the shortcomings of Lithuanian verse writing and pointed out the perspectives of syllabotonics.

The satires combine the elements of thought poetry, symbols and allegories, and the absurd, synthesising the publicist's acuteness, criticality, and the philosopher's tendency to abstract, to express the essence by aphorisms or moral imperatives. Kudirka had a talent as a translator - his translations of Ivan Krylov's fairy tales are unsurpassed even today. Allegory, poetry and comedy are always together in his work.


In 1885, he published his first poem-essay "Why Jews Don't Eat Pork" in Aušra. A little later, in 1888, the original poems "Gražu, gražiau ir gražiausia", "Kregždelė", and the translated poems "Motinai" (based on K. Junoša), "Troškimas" were published in the "Lietuviskajālais balsa" (The Lithuanian Voice). Kudirka liked to write poems for the occasion, and they were usually didactic in content. This poem urges people to unite and work for the sake of Lithuania, evokes noble feelings for his mother and native land, and encourages him to strive for the honour of his homeland. The Lithuanian group is opposed to being surrounded by strangers, and the maxim of noble life is formulated ("The most beautiful thing is to see with one's eyes, / When hearts and words and deeds respond") and the aspiration for a perfect life ("So that all the Lithuanians themselves, not being driven, / Do not blaze trails for the honour of their motherland"). This was also the poem's author's freely chosen task in life - to encourage, to unite, to work himself. The poem's structure and the gradation of concepts are strict and logical. The adjective "beautiful" is graded to the superlative in three stanzas: beautifully, more beautifully, most beautifully. The rhetoric of the poem is based on moral imperatives, an injunction, an exhortation to act for the sake of one's homeland.

In 1895-1898 he wrote four satires, which he published in "Varpe". These were "The Chiefs" (1895), "The Memories of the Bridge of Lithuania" (1896), "The Question of Censorship" (1898), and "Wolves" (1898). He is the most famous author of comic prose not only in the 19th century. As a man of society, Kudirka had many prototypes, situations and plots to draw from, and he created unforgettable characters of the Tsar's officials, such as Kruglodurov, Rylosuyev, Izvergovich and Vziatkovich, which are as good as or even better than Gogol's.