Ieva Simonaitytė

Ieva Simonaitytė or Ewa Simoneit (23 January 1897 – 27 August 1978) Hailing from a poor peasant family and growing up without a father, she had to work since young age as a gooseherd or babysitter.

Her big break came in 1935 with publication of Aukštujų Šimonių likimas. She received state literary award, a pension, and dedicated her remaining life to literature. Simonaitytė died in Vilnius and was buried in the Writers' Hill of the Antakalnis Cemetery.

Works Simonaitytė's most famous novel, Aukštujų Šimonių likimas, depicted the fate of the Šimoniai family between the 18th and 20th centuries through independent fragments. As the Lithuanian culture gradually and unavoidably disappears under relentless pressure from the Germans, the struggle between two cultures becomes surrounded by a fatalistic aura, Her works were censored and continuously revised by Soviet authorities; for example, it took six years of revisions to meet requirements of Soviet ideology to publish Pikčiurnienė, a novel about a woman consumed by greed. The novel was turned into a grotesque portrayal of greed and cruelty among the privileged classes (kulak/buožė in Soviet terminology, in Russian and Lithuanian respectively), which was supposed to justify Soviet oppression.