Set in the Stalinist era, when Lithuania's farmers lost everything to the process of collectivization, this book documents the life of the village idiot / trickster Kukutis. Unable to comprehend the strictures of the totalitarian regime, he says and does what he likes and is a potent symbol of freedom until the downfall of communism in Lithuania.

In creating the character of Kukutis, Marcelijus Martinaitis found a voice which could articulate the anger, frustration and passions of the Lithuanian people, a voice which, contrary to all expectations, managed to escape the Soviet censor's pen and which, a decade after publication of The Ballads of Kukutis, was to become the catalyst for revolution in the Baltics. Indeed, during the mass political rallies of the late 1980s and early '90s, poems from The Ballads were chanted, sung and performed everywhere.