Julius Kaupas

Julius Viktoras Kaupas was a Lithuanian doctor, writer, pioneer of the urban fairy tale in Lithuanian literature, essayist, literary critic.

Kaupas was born on March 6, 1920, in Kaunas from 1929 – 1938 he studied at Kaunas Jesuit High School, in 1939 he graduated from the Kaunas Military School. He visited literary evenings, where he met the poet Henrika Nagis. In 1944 he graduated in medicine from Vytautas the Great University. He published his first works in 1943-1944 in the magazine "Žiburėlis".

In 1944 he moved to the West and in 1946 Studied pharmacology at the University of Tübingen, Doctor of Medicine. From1947 - 1949 He studied philosophy and literature at the University of Friborg, attended the School of Arts and Crafts led by VK Jonyns . He edited the academic youth magazine "Šviesa", actively collaborated in the magazines "Aidai" and "Literatūros lankai", wrote literary criticism articles, edited books. In 1948 his first book "Doctor Kripštukas in Hell" was published  and in 1950 he moved to the USA, working as a psychiatrist at Alton Hospital.

He wrote neo-romantic fairy tales, in which the tradition of European (Hans Christian Andersen, Ernst Teodor Amadeus Hoffman, Oskar Wild) fairy tales is prominent. The main principle of creating fairy tales is the combination of fantasy and reality. Magical events take place in Kaunas, depicted with realistic details.

In the short stories (the collection "In the light of sunflowers", unpublished) the background and realities of history are abandoned, the human existence is at the center of them, full of painful experiences, tragic feelings, characterized by psychological insight. The characters are dreamers, eccentrics prone to melancholy.

In his critical articles, he supported the openness of Lithuanian literature to modernist tendencies, he was one of the first to use the categories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, and in the article "The Interpretation of Nine Brothers" he applied a psychoanalytical method to the analysis of the fairy tale. Novels published in English.

Kaupas died on March 1, 1964, and was buried in Detroit.