Crosses

329 Pages in 35 Chapters. Shows some light ageing to the boards. Interior text pages are tight and white. Dust jacket is complete with flap price $4.00. Some wear around the edges. This first English edition was limited to 1200 copies. This Lithuanian novel Crosses is a story that was lived by thousands of men and women in the period beginning about 1940 in Europe, when two tyrants, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, conspired to destroy and absorb the territory and peoples lying between them. Some awaited the infringing newcomers with hopeful anxiety, thinking they could better their condition; others saw the newcomers as subjugating aggressors. Kreivenas, the Lithuanian hero of Crosses, belonged to the former group; he saw economic and social salvation in the coming of the Red Order, and he did all in his power to speed its way. How Kreivenas saw his dream turn to doom is admirably told in this first Lithuanian novel ever to be translated into the English language. Outside of its framework, Crosses is a unique novel; it is unique in the way it reveals practical Communism to the naked eye, to the eye of the common man. Theoretical analysis of Communism has no place here. Stark, brutal fact forever stigmatizes the system as crude, lawless, irresponsible and incompetent. Aside from the political conflict in Crosses, all of the human passions pass in review: Pride, Greed, Lust, Love, Hatred. In turn, Kreivenas calls them all forth in his futile search for power and dependence, in his headlong, savage lust to gratify his selfish ambition. Crosses is a tender love story, a ruthless attack on religion, a book of pious devotion, a villainous confession, a memoir of penitence. It cannot fail to stir the reader, and it is told by a master of Lithuanian letters, Vincas Ramonas, a new light in the firmament of foreign authors. Vincas Ramonas is not new among authors; he began writing in 1925, in Lithuania, where he was born in 1905. A graduate of the Lithuanian University at Kaunas, he earned his livelihood as a teacher, writing in his spare time. There was a period when he wrote nothing. It was after he fled from Lithuania in 1944 that he had his first literary triumph-it was the publication of Crosses, a book that was both hailed and condemned, a book that raised tempers and brought forth praises. The book was read and reread, in Latvian and German now in English. The publishers are proud to present this first Lithuanian novel in English to the reader.…