ART. A Pine Sprig in the Suitcase of a Synesthetic Genius: M. K. Čiurlionis’s Letters and Work

Aleksandra Zińczuk

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„You’re being such a pig if you don’t look after your health […]. When you begin a sonata, surrender yourself to it wholly — with your mind, your body, every part of you. […] In the act of creation, a composer should harbour but one thought and one longing. Yes, my boy. If you wish to craft a fine sonata, immerse yourself in it completely. I give you my word it will be beautiful”.* —Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis to composer and painter Eugeniusz Morawski, May 1902, Leipzig.

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, active from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, was known in Poland simply as Kostek Czurlianis. For Lithuanians, he is a figure akin to the Poles’ Adam Mickiewicz, and he was shaped by Mickiewicz’s writing, and above all by that of Juliusz Słowacki, steeped in the spirit of Neo-Romanticism. As a man of the borderlands, Čiurlionis possessed an innate openness to diverse cultural influences. Though a myth about peasant origins clung to him, his mother came from a bourgeois family.

New light has been shed on Čiurlionis’s creative personality by a collection of letters recently published in Kaunas. He left behind extensive correspondence that allows us to read the workings of his mind and about his reverence for nature and his fascination with the world’s mysteries. His oeuvre, ranging from artworks to musical compositions and writings, along with his tragic biography, continues to resonate and inspire successive generations. The new volume’s first part comprises letters addressed mainly to friends from 1892 to 1906, while the second, covering the final four years of his life, consists chiefly of letters written to his family and to his wife, the writer, social activist and literary critic Sofija Kymantaitė. This correspondence is an inexhaustible well of knowledge about lesser-known figures of the artistic and intellectual bohemia of the time, particularly among Lithuanians and Poles. Fairytale (1907), M. K. Čiurlionis

It also reveals the painter’s sensitivity, his refined command of Polish, and the profound love he’d felt for his wife-to-be, Sofija. And anyone who has ever encountered their own shadow or descended into the hell of anhedonic darkness, thus sensing darkness made manifest, will easily discern between the lines the recurrent sombre states that ultimately led him to utter exhaustion and to his premature death at barely thirty-six.

It is said that in his suitcase, along with sheet music and a pocket sketchbook, he always carried a pine sprig from Druskininkai. And Čiurlionis travelled widely: from his beloved Druskininkai to Warsaw, Leipzig, St. Petersburg, Vilnius. As a child, his brother Paweł would wake him by brushing him with the needles of a pinetwig. Beneath the pines he would later stroll with his great love, Sofija: Zośka or Zo, as he called his future wife. Both his painted landscapes and his music compositions are permeated with a genuine attunement to nature: forest murmurs, the living speech of sun and wind. His keen ear coupled with his fused senses of observation and feeling gave rise to his piano miniature “Słowik”, into which he wove the nightingale’s authentic song. As a boy, his mother sang Lithuanian dainos to him, and by early childhood he was already playing piano by ear. Today, his works can be heard resonating from Gdańsk’s carillons. His most famous piece, the Fifth Sonata or Sonata of the Sea, was performed in central Vilnius on 5 October 2025 during the cultural community’s protests against a populist, pro-Russian Lithuanian political party.

This fascinating painter and composer embodied the concept of correspondance des arts. Čiurlionis’s inner world was suffused with musica mundi. Born 150 years ago into a multinational family (Lithuanian father; half-German mother), shaped primarily by Polish culture, committed to fostering Lithuanian identity, and at the same time universal, supranational, and unbounded by any established artistic order. Writing in Polish. Enigmatic, exceptional, mystical.

Now situated alongside the post-Romantics and Symbolists, Čiurlionis was above all a synaesthete, an intuitionist, a surrealist, a modernist, and a pioneer of abstraction, as demonstrated at a Sorbonne lecture by Alexis Rannit, an Estonian scholar who argued that Kandinsky saw early Čiurlionis works in Russia at a group exhibition before beginning to paint in an abstract spirit.

Through the initiative of Polish Lithuanians, Čiurlionis has been honoured in Warsaw with a street bearing his name as well as a commemorative plaque at 45 Żurawia Street, where he and his brothers lived during their impoverished student years, and with another at the site of his premature death at Czerwony Dwór psychiatric hospital in the Marki district.

Čiurlionis’s oeuvre continues to draw new discoveries, with a recent reminder being the London exhibition Between Worlds at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. In 2025, the 150th anniversary of his birth is being celebrated across Lithuania with great enthusiasm. There, the largest collection of his artworks is held by the Čiurlionis National Museum of Art in Kaunas. And they must be seen in the original, for even the finest reproductions and catalogues can’t impart the full depth, colour palette, and subtlety of his craft.

Meanwhile, anyone travelling through the Druskininkai region should step into the old orchard where fruit trees were planted by the father of Lithuania’s greatest artist. There, one will see the former homestead and fine village cottages now housing the M. K. Čiurlionis Museum in Druskininkai, and can experience the finest immersive exhibition of his work, Angelų takais (The Path of Angels), with its newly created second part, The Creation of the World.

The Lithuanian visual artists Kristina Buožytė and Vitalijus Žukas were acknowledged for their curatorial work, receiving awards at the Venice Film Festival as well as distinctions in the UK and Vilnius. In the art of translating an artistic language into virtual reality, there’s certainly much to learn from our Lithuanian friends — and not only in that art.

It is said that the writer Maria Konopnicka would visit the cottage in Druskininkai. In fact, even in the Čiurlionis’s childhood, the cosmopolitan intelligentsia were already coming to Druskininkai. Well before the Polish leader Józef Piłsudski, who owned a small house there, the town had welcomed composer Stanisław Moniuszko and writers including Zymunt Kraszewski Eliza Orzeszkowa, and Maria Rodziewiczówna. And Druskininkai was also sending people out into the world: one Lithuanian Tatar emigrated to the US where he’d become the father of actor Charles Bronson — surely having departed Europe on a ship like those Čiurlionis loved and so often painted. Two of the artist’s brothers would likewise set off across the ocean aboard such vessels, seeking a better life.

In the interwar period, Druskininkai was a frontier town, with the Niemen River flowing picturesquely up through it from where it marks the national border. The life of someone born in a borderland region is rarely idyllic, though one usually secures oneself through a personal arcadia: a place from which to draw vital strength. Outside his mythical Druskininkai, however, young Čiurlionis did face difficulties due to his Lithuanian identity. At the Warsaw Conservatory, he was ultimately denied the prize as most talented student when someone objected to the fact that he was a foreigner. He was also denounced as a chorus director by Lithuanian nationalists for accepting Polish singers and creating the ’intercultural’ chorus. His father suffered as well: he was removed from his post as church organist in Druskininkai when a new priest arrived with a mission to polonise the area — a priest who was later murdered by Nazi Germans.

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„I can hear your thoughts soaring like a meteor, and I feel boundless joy, and I believe – deeply, steadfastly – that greyness, that threadbare prose, will never creep into our home”. — Čiurlionis to Sofija Kymantaitė

Lublin, as a historic city of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, brushed with this original artist only in passing; he may well have provided an entirely new direction in the city’s artistic development. Had Čiurlionis agreed to take the position of director of Lublin’s music school, however, the body of painting we know today might not exist. Fortunately, he turned down that role. He chose to devote himself fully to creative work, rather than being caught in the role of administrator and teacher — roles he largely detested.

Decisions he made out of inner necessity did little to ease his financial difficulties, though, as it was difficult to make a living from selling paintings.

He regarded musical language as the speech of the gods and the human soul’s most essential utterance. He collected Lithuanian folk songs, conducted a Lithuanian–Polish chorus, and gave music lessons. Many of his works will never be known to us, having been lost in the turmoil of war. Among these were pieces created during painting retreats in Kazimierz Dolny on the Vistula River and in Zwierzyniec in the Roztocze region, south of Lublin. Those plein-air work periods, full of adventure and exceptional company, he owed to his professor, the painter Kazimierz Stabrowski, who headed the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw.**

In Čiurlionis’s final years, his and his wife’s joint project, the opera Jurata, absorbed much of his attention. Its storyline forms the central theme of the major exhibition currently on view in Kaunas, held to mark the grand celebrations of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Sadly, Jurata is an unfinished work of the two artists, interrupted by his progressing mental illness.

As Jadwiga Siedlecka, a scholar of Čiurlionis’s work, has observed about the opera’s origins: “In Palanga was Birutė Hill, where pagan priests had guarded the temple and the eternal sacred fire. It was from local fishermen that Kostek [Čiurlionis] first heard about Birutė, Jurata and other figures from Lithuanian legends.”***

There, too, beside the oldest oak, local rites were performed — ceremonies that surely stirred the young artist’s imagination.

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„I want to compose a symphony out of the whisper of waves, out of the mysterious speech of ancient woods, out of the flickering of stars, out of our songs, and out of my boundless longing. I would like to climb the highest peaks inaccessible to mortals and weave from the most beautiful stars a garland for Zosia — my wife”. —Čiurlionis to Sofija Kymantaitė

His working method played out simultaneously: composing and painting in the same phase, in a sense he was inscribing his auditory experiences into landscapes. Many paintings he titled as sonatas, fugues, preludes, and fantasies, though as a rule he didn’t title his artworks. His painted sonatas are divided into four movements, as with a instrumental sonata or symphony, with the tempo indications allegro, andante, scherzo, and finale. Remarkably, he only painted over the course of the last six years of his life.

Time and again, Čiurlionis envisioned the world as a vast symphony. His palette shifted between delicately nuanced shades and colour contrasts that are daring, almost explosive. Within these landscapes, ruins appear in the faintest of traces — barely suggestive, subdued, as though meant to be fully summoned in the viewer’s imagination. Symbols accumulate and well up like geological strata. In all these works, harmony between the divine and human, the feminine and masculine, remains the governing principle.

He painted trees piercing dissolving clouds and mists. An evanescent underwater world speaks merely in pencil — in the lightest outlines of fishermen’s nets. Domes, minarets, ancient structures. Underwater cities are ancient temples with obelisks and cosmological inscriptions.

Čiurlionis produced numerous sketches and postcards drawn with intricate, finely detailed ink ornamentation, as well as works in fluoroforte, a technique later banned due to harmful health effects.

His fantastically majestic landscapes, infused with theosophical and astronomical fascinations, evoke an expressive power also hidden in Henryk Waniek’s symbolic vistas of earth and mountains, a more contemporary celebrant of his own axis mundi and proponent of Silesian mysticism.

From left (Druskininkai): bench referencing Čiurlionis’s fascination with astrology,; historic villa architecture; sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz.

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„My studies are going even better than I expected, but in the past few days it has somehow been strangely difficult to work. Evidently the energy reserve I brought from Druskininkai and Palanga has run down a little”. — Čiurlionis to Prince Ogiński, December 1901, Leipzig.

The final stage of Čiurlionis’s life is shrouded in mystery. At the height of his creative powers, he worked almost incessantly, in a kind of mania. His finest paintings (again, he left them largely untitled) and musical compositions were made during this period.

As a boy, when he left his family home in Lithuania’s Dzūkija region for the first time, he fell ill with melancholy. In Palanga on the coast he first saw the sea, and later he returned to nearby Plungė with his wife. That initial journey, undertaken when he was barely a teenager, seems to have held his first serious breakdown; it changed the young artist physically. He had always looked far more mature than his age. Before that, his father’s sudden disappearance may have planted a seed of anxiety deep in his child’s soul. His father, fond of wandering the forests, had vanished under vague circumstances for a long stretch of time; the spirit of wanderlust may have seized him and he set off for Siberia. After that absence veiled in mystery, he then returned to the family.

Jadwiga Siedlecka, meanwhile, sees Čiurlionis’s first major psychological crisis in tragic separation from his first love, a young woman from the Morawski family, in whose wealthy household, as it seems, an impoverished Lithuanian artist from peasant origins wasn’t welcome. She nearly took her own life due to her parents’ unjust imposition. Fortunately, the two then remained lifelong friends, even after each had married.

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„I saw mountains with heads stroked by clouds, and proud snow peaks holding their gleaming crowns high above all the clouds. I heard the roar of the Terek, in the riverbed of which it wasn’t water that flowed but foam rolling on, with the stones booming and growling. I saw [Mount] Elbrus like a great snowy cloud heading a white procession of mountains, distant by 140 versts [150 km]. I saw the Darial Gorge at sunrise, amid wild, fantastical cliffs coloured in grey-green and pink. […] We forced our way through places so dangerous my companions paled, broke into cold sweats, shaking all over. And we reached the Kazbek glacier, with such silence that if you clap your hands rocks break off and fall into the abyss” […] — Čiurlionis to his brother Paweł, 1905.

The M. K. Čiurlionis Museum in Kaunas provides insight into the full breadth of his rich artistic output. At the special exhibition From Amber to the Stars (2025), his photos were included: images from his remarkable journey to the Black Sea, the Caucasus where he was utterly enthralled, and the Terek River in the region’s north. He was fascinated by photography, even setting up a small darkroom in the family cottage’s basement in Druskininkai. From a trip to Anapa (1905) he made an album of 39 photos: steep mountain slopes above the sea, boats, ordinary people, cemeteries.

The exhibition marked his 150th anniversary and made for an evocative journey through the artist’s maritime and cosmic navigation, with juxtapositions of works by other artists, enriched by the curators’ compelling interpretative perspective. The exhibtion included works on loan from the Tate Gallery and from Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

At present, the experimental exhibition Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis: From Buddha to Rex is on view until 2026, with themes brought to the fore of spiritual peregrination and diverse cultural fascinations.

Different motifs in his work emerged over the years he painted. Initial themes were of the flood and the end of the world, followed by a focus on creation and with the subacquatic realms of the sea.

Čiurlionis pursued his vision of a better reality with ardent intensity. Certain fascinations can be discerned in his painting, with its intermingled elements of Hindu philosophy, cosmogony, folklore, esotericism, and ancient cultures. This holds for Japanese art as well, which he encountered in Warsaw through Feliks Jasieński, for example, as well as the idea of the transmigration of souls, which he discussed with the writer Tadeusz Miciński. Reports of astronomical discoveries and concepts of extraterrestrial life reached him through the French scholar Camille Flammarion.

Subsequent generations of Lithuanian artists came up amidst the cult of his personality; they include, also from Druskininkai, the world-renowned sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, who would later emigrate to France.

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“Warsaw poured onto the streets — around 20 enormous banners with white eagles, ‘Boże, coś Polskę’ [God save Poland] sung by 200,000 voices, a roar, tears dropping off balconies, handkerchiefs waved from every window, jubilation, Kościuszko portraits, soldiers doffing their caps, bells clanging, shouts of ‘Long live the White Eagle!’ and ‘Long live the Lithuanian Pahonia!’Next day, streets were back to their usual order; on corners, newly posted pronouncements in big black letters: martial law. Soldiers patrolling streets in tight ranks, cannon wheeled out onto Dzielna and Nowolipki Streets. A young fellow tried tearing down a martial-law notice and fell, pierced by a bullet.”

This scene Čiurlionis saw from a Warsaw window 125 years ago. He may have gotten entangled in anti-Tsarist political actions. Yet the Lithuanian language came to him relatively late – as a man in his thirties he admitted he couldn’t use it without mistakes. His wife supported him in learning; she’d studied philosophy, literature and art history at the Jagiellonian University in Cracov.

To his Polish friends, he was affectionately called “Lithuanian Bear,” as given his short stature he was remarkably energetic and strong. Acquaintances also recalled his mesmerizing gaze.

Neo-Romanticism that is so present at the symbolic layer of his work grew from his compulsive fascination with writers including those mentioned above: Mickiewicz, Słowacki, Władysław Syrokomla, Józef Ignacy Kraszewski. At the same time, he developed an internal sense of fraternal heritage through a kind of communion with Romantic spirits. One figure undoubtedly influencing him in youth was his patron, Prince Michał Mikołaj Ogiński, who even made him the present of a piano. Another authority present at the Warsaw Conservatory was Juliusz Stattler, Słowacki’s godson.

With Maria Morawska, his first, ill-starred love, he’d walk through Powązki Cemetery in the capital, where they would sit at Chopin’s sister’s grave. It’s likely that Maria, at the grave of her aunt, planted a birch tree for her godmother, and the two often spent time there.
Even given these strong affinities, Čiurlionis’s work extends decidedly beyond the bounds of Romanticism, anticipating in many respects future artistic tendencies.

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„You have no idea how hard it has been for me here lately – I thought I would simply die of despair. Nothing was working, I didn’t feel like doing anything, and the sadness – it was terrifying! […]. There are days when I don’t have the chance to utter a single word (not even in German). When I feel the urge to work and the work is going well, that’s one thing; but there are times when I cannot work, have no one to speak to, and nowhere to go. You understand what that is like.” — Čiurlionis to Eugeniusz Morawski, December 1901, Leipzig

Left broken by a nervous illness that was most likely severe depression, he was committed to a hospital for the mentally ill in Warsaw. Sofija, his wife, had realised far too late, during their stay in St Petersburg, how advanced his condition had become. With his brother and friends she decided to seek help, entrusting him to Czerwony Dwór, in the reliable psychiatric care of Dr Władysław Olechowski.

The Olechowski family, who had come from Ukraine to the Lublin region, then rendered services to the region of a significance that merits their own separate account (from early archaeological research in the region to ethnographic and anthropological studies). The psychiatrist founded Lublin’s first private medical facility for the mentally ill, on Staszica Street, also treating patients in his home on Czechowska Street (today, 3 Maja Street). Was it there that the poet Józef Czechowicz’s father would later receive treatment? In any case, after several years practicing in Lublin, Olechowski moved his clinic to Warsaw’s outskirts and Czerwony Dwór, where in the former Pustelnik manor he treated his patients, including Čiurlionis. Once the artist’s mental health finally began to improve, he is said to have caught a chill during a winter walk, dying of pneumonia shortly thereafter. That’s the official version, anyway. Sadly, he didn’t live to meet his newborn daughter. Exhausted by illness, he died; his grave can now be visited in Vilnius at the Rasos Cemetery.

While it is difficult to determine when the illness had begun, certain inflammatory points in his life had gradually worsened the well-being of this highly sensitive artistic personality who, in addition, was an exceptional type of synaesthete. Poverty’s persistently harsh conditions did nothing to improve Čiurlionis’s already precarious situation.

The composer Juozas Tallat-Kelpša recalled visible early symptoms of illness:

“Sometimes I noticed strange phenomena in his behaviour. Let’s say we’re walking down the street. There’s a pillar at the pavement’s ege. Čiurlionis doesn’t walk past it, but in some strange way he walks around it, turns and then, like nothing’s happened, keeps walking. I pretended not to notice but once asked him why he did this – what’s it mean? He replied how that way, you’re making very beautiful graphic figures.”****

On his final journey, he was accompanied by a loyal friend, Jan Załuska, from Włodawa, the present writer’s hometown. Załuska would lend him money when he hadn’t a penny to his name, was a witness at the Čiurlionis’s wedding, and personally transported the ailing artist from Druskininkai to the hospital beside Warsaw, where the artist’s life came to an end. Załuska was a painter and sought-after copyist, especially of Rembrandt works, who spent the First World War in Paris then returned during the interwar period to his estate in Stary Brus, in the Włodawa region. Later, in ill health, he’d take his own life.

Such friendships sustained Čiurlionis’s spirit while he lived. He wrote to Sofija during their engagement that thanks to people like those, one realises that in life people are better than we may tend to believe.
He left us many traces of remarkable individuals who await rediscovery: Załuska, the Olechowski family, his accomplished wife. Crucially, Čiurlionis’s literary output remains uncollected and unresearched: an entire body of his work that deserves to be accessible and restored to our attention.

Those close to him remembered him as a warm-hearted man, in whose presence one just wanted to linger – someone making others feel they could become better human beings. His sister, Jadwiga, observed how deeply he was immersed in his unusual, inner, incomparably more beautiful world. He left that world to us in fragments, for contemplation. Yet in that art, nothing truly ends. After all, would he then have signed one work invoking the power of world creation through the word Fiat?

Translated from Polish by:
Andrzej Tuczapiec
Proofreading:
Alan Lockwood

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*Quotations are from the collected correspondence of M. K. Čiurlionis, Letters (I, II volumes) edited by R. Okulicz-Kozaryn, N. Adomavičienė, and P. Kimbrys, published by the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art in Kaunas, 2024.

** Thanks to Prof. Stanisław Baj for drawing my attention to the thread of Čiurlionis’s friendship with Kazimierz Stabrowski.

*** Jadwiga Siedlecka, Mikołaj Konstanty Čiurlionis: 1875–1911: preludium warszawskie, Warsaw 1996; Druskienniki nad Niemnem, Warsaw 1997. Thanks to Paulina Ciucka and Agnieszka Rembiałkowska for these readings.

**** https://asajournal.lt/articles/fragments-of-ciurlionis/. My thanks to Zuzanna Mrozik for this source.

Originally published in:

KULTURA ENTER

April 2025, No. 116

with editorial adjustments for context and clarity

Kultura Enter
2025/04 nr 116