Kostas Ostrauskas, 85, Penn music librarian and Lithuanian playwright

Kostas Ostrauskas, 85, music librarian at the University of Pennsylvania from the 1950s into the 1980s, died Monday, Jan. 9, of heart failure at his home in Newtown Square.

Dr. Ostrauskas earned a larger reputation as a Lithuanian-language playwright in the image of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco.

In an appreciation of his work in the autumn-winter 2006 issue of the Vilnius Review, writer Loreta Macianskaite said:

"It would be hard to overrate the contribution of the playwright Kostas Ostrauskas to 20th-century Lithuanian literature.

"He represents the entire literary epoch of the postwar period, the main trends in its modernisation."

The reviewer wrote that Dr. Ostrauskas "is justly called the author of the first Lithuanian drama of the absurd, the first postmodernist drama," with "obvious links to Beckett or Ionesco and existentialist philosophy in his early work."

The 10-page entry about him in the Dictionary of Literary Biography notes that, while "praised as a writer of international importance, he is nonetheless almost unknown outside his own language group."

The biography, attributed to Violeta Kelertas of the University of Illinois at Chicago, says that "coming close to theater of the absurd in his early years, he has progressed to postmodernist invention and economy of language . . . a postmodern distrust of words to convey meaning."

His works "so far have been mainly read as literary texts, because there has been no professional Lithuanian theater in the West," and because they "present difficulties of comprehension and accessibility to directors in Lithuania.

"When they have attempted his plays, directors have confined themselves to the realistic surface structure that may bring out the absurdity of the situations involved, but leaves the deeper, more meaningful layers unrecognized."

As one who earned his living as a music librarian, Dr. Ostrauskas "has said that he could more easily live without books than without music."

Born in Veiveriai, Lithuania, he fled the Soviets in 1944, the year he turned 18, and from 1946 to 1949 studied at the Baltic University, staffed by emigres in Hamburg, West Germany.

His son, Darius, wrote in biographical notes that, after arriving in the States in 1949, Dr. Ostrauskas entered graduate studies at Penn in 1950, and "his literary career started with the one-act play Pypke (The Pipe), written in 1951.

He began working in the University of Pennsylvania libraries in 1952 and earned his Penn doctorate in Slavic-Baltic studies in 1958, his son wrote.

From 1958 to 2006, a Lithuanian American organization known in English as Concordance and Light published 10 books containing his plays and other writings.

Dr. Ostrauskas received an award from the U.S. Society of Lithuanian Writers in 1991, his son wrote. In Lithuania, four of his books have been published since 1997.

Besides his son, Dr. Ostrauskas is survived by his wife of 61 years, Danute. A private service is planned.