Semiotiko ištakos ir darbai: Algirdas Julius Greimas

Article "The Origins and Works of a Semiotician" features a portrait of the scholar and thinker Algirdas Julius Greimas and discusses the environment and historical context of his emergence. Authentic rural customs and beliefs which Greimas came across in his childhood later became a reliable foundation for the theoretical reconstruction of the Lithuanian mythology. The thinker's cultural horizons were formed in the schools of the independent Lithuania. When leaving to Grenoble to study, together with him he brought concepts which were unfamiliar to the nations of the former Roman empire - elements of the German culture in philosophy and history as well as the Scandinavian and Slavonic concept of the spirit Greimas's cultural bilingualism helped him in viewing meaning as a dynamic process - a different transposition of one language into another. During the years of the German occupation Greimas joined the anti-Nazi resistance and upon the return of the Red Army he retreated to France. Greimas the founder of the Paris School of Semiotics and Greimas the mythologist and researcher of old beliefs is in fact the two faces of the same persona. His Structural Semantics, which became the theoretical basis of semiotics, was published in 1966. The same year Greimas tried to formulate the theoretical basis for interpretation of a mythical narrative as based on the analysis of Bororo myth by Claude Levi-Strauss. At the time the famous anthropologist did not agree with the semiotician, which encouraged Greimas to move his field research to his native culture.Greimasian semiotics marks a turn from lexical research of semantic fields to the analysis of text as a signifying whole, from system to the semiotic process that presupposes its existence. Just like other humanitarians of the 20th century, attributed to the modern episteme, Greimas believed in the objectivity of meaning and the possibility to describe it. Greimas's mythological research revealed not only the debris of old beliefs, hidden under the patina of Christianity, but also the ideological foundation of unity in the medieval Lithuania. Highlighting these points in the occupied Lithuania contributed to the national awakening. During his last years Greimas actively participated in Lithuania's changing political and cultural life.