Antanas Kriščiukaitis, also known by the pseudonym Aišbė (24 July 1864 - 30 October 1933) was a Lithuanian writer and judge who served as the chairman of the Supreme Tribunal of Lithuania from 1918 until his death in 1933.
He studied law at the University of Moscow and joined a secret society of Lithuanian students, chaired by Petras Leonas.
After his graduation in 1890, he worked as interrogator and judge in Moscow, Mitau (Jelgava), Tikhvin and Novgorod raising to the rank of State Councillor.
As a writer, Kriščiukaitis is known for his short stories that moved away from didacticism (which was prevalent in contemporary Lithuanian literature) to literary realism as well as satires and feuilletons.
Kriščiukaitis was born on 24 July 1864 to a family of well-off Lithuanian farmers in Paežeriai [lt] in Suvalkija, then part of Congress Poland, a client state of the Russian Empire.
After about six months he was transferred to Mitau (Jelgava) where he met Jonas Jablonskis, Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas, and other Lithuanian activists.
[5] Petras Leonas became the minister and Kriščiukaitis was appointed as the chairman of the Lithuanian Tribunal, the highest court in interwar Lithuania, on 10 December 1918.
In 1920, he became co-founder and chairman of the Society of Lithuanian Jurists (Lietuvos teisininkų draugija) and editor of its journal Teisė (Law).
[7] In October 1922, he was invited to become a professor of the criminal law and procedure at the newly established University of Lithuania and started teaching in January 1923.
[8] From 1929, he was a specialist advisor to the State Council of Lithuania and worked with special commissions on legal terminology (which disbanded after his death), new criminal code, and civil registration.
[1] He was editor of two volumes of an unofficial collection of laws and regulations compiled by Antanas Merkys in 1922 and 1925 and of an anniversary book devoted to the first decade of the Lithuanian courts.
[1] He often published translated texts – an essay of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, excerpt from Urania by Camille Flammarion, fairy-tales The Most Incredible Thing and The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian Andersen, poem The Sphinx by Ivan Turgenev, story Who is to Blame?
), a shortened translation of Eppur si muove - És mégis mozog a Föld by Mór Jókai.
[4] The same year he published a collection of six short stories Kas teisybė – tai ne melas (What Is Truth That Is Not a Lie), which was enlarged and republished in 1905 and 1974.
[1] The initial collection included four original stories by Kriščiukaitis and two loose translations of Quench the Spark by Leo Tolstoy and The Little Cask by Guy de Maupassant.
[4] His tragicomedy Laisvė (Freedom) which borrowed the plot from antiquity but discussed Lithuania's democracy was staged by the Vilkolakis Theater in 1923.
[19] While pedagogically it was a much-improved primer, it was not very popular and republished only six years later due to criticism by the clergy and because people used to the old slebizavimas did not know how to teach the new method to children.