The Literary Field Under Communist Rule 1618119788, 9781618119780

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The Literary Field under Communist Rule

Lithuanian Studies without Borders Series Editor Darius Staliūnas (Lithuanian Institute of History) Editorial Board Zenonas Norkus (Vilnius University) Shaul Stampfer (Hebrew University) Giedrius Subačius (University of Illinois at Chicago)

The Literary Field under Communist Rule Edited by

AUŠRA JURGUTIEN ˙E AND DALIA SATKAUSKYT˙E

Boston

2018

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jurgutiençe, Auésra, editor. | Satkauskytçe, Dalia, editor. Title: The literary field under Communist rule / edited by Ausra Jurgutiene and Dalia Satkauskyte. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2018. | Series: Lithuanian studies without borders | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018055394 (print) | LCCN 2019002692 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618119780 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618119773 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Soviet literature–History and criticism–Theory, etc. | Literature and society–Soviet Union–History. | Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930-2002–Influence. Classification: LCC PN849.R9 (ebook) | LCC PN849.R9 L47 2018 (print) | DDC 809/.04–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018055394 ©Academic Studies Press, 2018 ISBN 9781618119773 (hardback) ISBN 9781618119780 (electronic) Design and Typeset by Lapiz Digital Services On the cover: Vincas Kisarauskas, Two Shapes (1968). Reproduced by permission. Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Preface

vii

Dalia Satkauskytė, Introduction

viii

Soviet Literature as Theoretical and Historical Problem

1

Evgeny Dobrenko, Soviet Multinational Literature: Approaches, Problems, and Perspectives of Study

3

Dalia Satkauskytė, The Role of Aesopian Language in the Literary Field: Autonomy in Question

18

Vilius Ivanauskas, Between Universalism and Localism: The Strategies of Soviet Lithuanian Writers and “Sandwiched” Lithuanian Ethnic Particularism 

37

Contradictions in Lithuanian Literary Field

57

Nerija Putinaitė, Atheist Autobiography: Politics, the Literary Canon, and Restructured Experience

59

Solveiga Daugirdaitė, Sartre and de Beauvoir Encounter the Pensive Christ

80

Loreta Mačianskaitė, The Production of Eimuntas Nekrošius’s Kvadratas as a Palimpsest of Soviet-era Memory

97

Donata Mitaitė, The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets, Their Illusions and Choices

116

Aušra Jurgutienė, The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism that Legitimated Soviet-Era Modernism

138

Hermeneutics of Truth and Compromise in Literatures of Other Soviet Republics

159

Valentyna Kharkhun, Ukrainian Literature of the Late Soviet Period: The History of Three Generations of Poets 

161

vi

Contents

Pavel Arsenev, State of Emergency Literature: Varlam Shalamov vs. “Progressive Humanity”

181

Eva Eglāja-Kristsone, Reading Literary History through the Archives: The Case of the Latvian Literary Journal Karogs

201

Anneli Mihkelev, Hamlet and Folklore as Elements of the Resistance Movement in Estonian Literature

213

Biographical Notes

227

Index233

Preface

The problem “The Literary Field under the Communist Regime: Structure, Functions, ‘Illusio’” was discussed by literary scholars from various European countries and the USA who came to the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore in Vilnius (2015). At this conference the literary scholars aimed to overcome the dualistic schemes prevailing in the research of literatures under the communist regime and to create more complex, nuanced, and contextualized frameworks for their analyses. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of literary field suggested a systematic approach towards literary practices, highlighting the functional relationship between literature and society, revealing a network of interconnected individual and collective literary agents, emphasizing the role of illusio (the tendency of participants to engage in the political game and believe in its significance), and combining internal and external analysis of literary works. Part of the discussion from this conference was published in the journal Colloquia as “A Discussion on Methodology for Researching Soviet Literary Space” (2015). The other part of the discussion—which includes the most relevant articles—has been written for this collection. The goal of the book The Literary Field under Communist Rule is to provide a platform for cross-fertilization of ideas on the structure and functioning of literary fields, while the republics were under communist domination. A wider explanation of the set problem of the collection is to be found in the Introduction. The editors would like to thank the colleagues who helped them to prepare this volume: the translator of the Lithuanian articles, Ada Valaitis, and the editor of all the English versions, Violeta Kelertas. We also thank the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and its Council for their financial support for the publication of this book. Aušra Jurgutienė Dalia Satkauskytė

Introduction Dalia Satkauskytė

Western scholars analyzed literature written in the Soviet Union up until its collapse. The analysis was usually a part of the more general regime of Soviet studies because literature, like culture as a whole, was a means of ideological education as well as a tool of political conflict in the Soviet Union and other Communist bloc countries. The analysis of Soviet literature was one of the ways to showcase the mechanism of ideological indoctrination and to recognize the “real” socialism, that is, its utopian idea. Later, in the post-Soviet era, Evgeny Dobrenko asserted that Socialist Realism was not so concerned with producing literature as an aesthetic phenomenon as it was with producing reality itself; Socialist Realism was and remains the only material reality of socialism.1 Studies of Socialist Realism, literature, and culture of the Stalinist era were plentiful both in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. They provide the most varied interpretations of the phenomenon—from the impossibly aesthetic (Régine Robin, Le réalisme socialiste: une esthétique impossible, 1986) to the transference of aesthetic principles to reality (Stalinism as a concept of an aesthetic project in Boris Groys’s book The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, 1988, English translation 1992), from the transformation of history into a mythical narrative in a Socialist Realist novel (Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 1981) to an interpretation of Socialist Realism as discourse that uses narrative to produce sublimated socialist reality (Evgeny Dobrenko, Political 1 Evgeny Dobrenko, “Socialist Realism.” In The Cambridge Companion to TwentiethCentury Russian Literature, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Marina Balina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 112.

Introduction

Economy of Socialist Realism, 2007). Western scholars, many of whom were emigrants from the Soviet Union, were less inclined to analyze literature of the post-Stalinist era, which tried to separate itself from the dogmas of Socialist Realism and supposedly moved from the political sphere to the aesthetic. Nonconformist scholars in the Soviet Union were the first to analyze the aesthetic dimension of literature as a counterbalance to ideological indoctrination. However, literature of the Thaw period or of the late Soviet era, where undoubtedly there are works of high aesthetic value, does not cut its ties with the political authority, but usually transforms them by creating, for example, an opportunity for indirect political criticism through so-called Aesopian language (Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship. Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature, 1984). This was a heterogenous time period during which literature both supported the system and eroded it, and in rare instances, attempted to exist beyond the system (as the well-known situation of Joseph Brodsky demonstrates, this infuriated the authorities no less than the dissident movement). During the era of the Cold War Western scholars treated Soviet literature as almost exclusively Russian, and they rarely analyzed national literatures of the Soviet republics,2 regardless of the time period or aspect of analysis. As Evgeny Dobrenko highlights in this book, the collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of new independent states in Eastern Europe has prompted a keen interest in the cultures and literatures of the former Soviet republics. While there are some studies of individual national literatures in English,3 analyses of Russian literature dominate, and most national literatures were examined in isolation from the overarching institutions of Soviet literature and disregarding their role in the project of multinational Soviet literature. According to Dobrenko, the history of “Soviet multinational literature” from the early 1930s to the 1980s has remained a terra incognita for Western scholars. 2 Several of the few existing examples would be a history of Belarusian literature (Arnold McMillin. A History of Byelorussian Literature from its Origins to the Present Day (1977) or George Luckyj’s book Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934 (1990) which appeared just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. 3 See for instance: Rimvydas Šilbajoris, A Short History of Lithuanian Literature (2002); Donald Rayfield. The Literature of Georgia (2014); History of the Literary Cultures of EastCentral Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. III (ed. Marcel Cornis-Pope, John Neubauer, 2007); selections of articles Baltic Postcolonialism (ed. Violeta Kelertas, 2006), Grotesque Revisited: Grotesque and Satire in the Post/ Modern Literature of Central and Eastern Europe (ed. Laurynas Katkus, 2013).

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Much work will have to be done in order to transform this terra incognita to a populated land. This collection of articles is an attempt to look at Soviet literature as a systemic phenomenon and to present a few of the functional aspects of this system. The central concept of the system proposed draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field, which the authors of this volume rely on explicitly or implicitly. According to Bourdieu, the literary field is in part autonomous, has a distinctive structure, specific principles of the formation and circulation of capital, the agents competing for positions within this field depend on the otherwise uncommon illusio—the belief that it is worth engaging in this activity, which from the outside does not seem very valuable. The field of power affects the literary field, but this influence is not straightforward. It is indirect, often imperceptibly interiorized in the internal structure of the field and its dynamics, while the process of autonomization of the field is inevitably connected to this interiorization and to the reflection of the structure of field within literature itself.4 A reasonable question might arise about the ability to rely on this theory when analyzing the literatures of totalitarian societies. The literary field under the Soviet or any other totalitarian regime does not operate according to Pierre Bourdieu’s principle of partial autonomy. As with the entire cultural field, it depends directly on the government, that is, the field of power, which forms it to achieve its own goals (to instill an ideology, to produce a subject loyal to the regime—the new Soviet man), and is controlled by various means of repression. Undoubtedly, we must suspend the premise of partial autonomy in the literary field. Nonetheless, if we avoid applying the model of the literary field mechanically, the theoretical model proposed by Bourdieu, whereby society is composed of various social fields that affect one another and are structurally connected, is an effective analytical tool that can be applied to the societies governed by Communist regimes, to the entire multinational Soviet literary field, and to specific segments of Soviet period literature. Used this way, the theory can help reveal rather different modes of the intersection of the fields of politics and literature in different national literatures. In her article “The Role of Aesopian Language in the Literary Field: Autonomy in Question” the author of this introduction presents the 4

Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art. Génèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1992), 17–81.

Introduction

specifics of the Soviet literary field. Within the framework of Bourdieu’s theories, the author speculates on what the role of Aesopian language in the literary field is; discusses the positions and dispositions of several of its practitioners; questions how self-censorship and internal control of the field operate in the domain of Aesopian language, how they interact, and how these forms of control insinuate themselves into the agent’s habitus.5 Bourdieu’s theory is based on the functioning of a national literature, meanwhile the literary field of the Soviet Union was formed and functioned as a project of multinational literature, thus it was a complex construct composed of varying cultural segments that affected one another. Hence, it is impossible to analyze any Soviet national literature without taking into account the very project of a multinational literature, the history of its formation and continued functioning, its national literatures, and the interactions and relationships of their traditions; in other words, the complexity and multi-layered nature of the literary field cannot be ignored. Evgeny Dobrenko focuses on this issue in his article “Soviet Multinational Literature: Approaches, Problems, and Perspectives of Study.” The author does not directly rely on Bourdieu’s theory, though he suggests looking at multinational Soviet literature as a system that formed and functioned in a different manner than the national literatures of democratic societies. He questions the traditional view that the process of the formation of multinational literature was unidirectional, that is, that the literatures of the republics of the Soviet Union simply copied the Russian model of Socialist Realism, and decorated it with elements of the national literature. Each national literature delivered something from its traditions that was required for the formation of Soviet people, and several literatures, for example the literature of Central Asia, were concurrently evolving and participating in the formation of a multinational Soviet literature project. Dobrenko discusses the primary stages of the formation of this project comprehensively, wherein the folklore of Central Asian countries that did not have a professional literature played a key role. Soviet multinational literature was the product of ideological oriental stylization, and 5 “[...] habitus, as a system of dispositions, are effectively realized only in relation to a determinate structure of positions socially marked by the social properties of their occupants, through which they manifest themselves.” See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 71. Habitus in Bourdieu’s theory refers to the embodiment of cultural capital, to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that the social agent possesses due to his / her life experiences.

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a true incarnation of the Eurasian vision, summarizes Dobrenko. He proposes that Stalin’s Socialist Realism formula “national in form and socialist in content” be defined as “European in form and Asian in content where European Marxist ideology collided with what Marx called Asian economic and political formation.” The formula “national in form and socialist in content” emerged intermittently within various national literatures in a variety of configurations. Vilius Ivanauskas discusses one such configuration in his article “Between Universalism and Localism: The Strategies of Soviet Lithuanian Writers and ‘Sandwiched’ Lithuanian Ethnic Particularism.” The author uses the “sandwich” metaphor for elements of both particularism or nationalism and Soviet universalism, but proposes to interpret them as closely intertwined in a specific way. Using Soviet Lithuania as an example and comparing it with the situation in Georgia, the author describes it this way: “the ‘sandwiched particularism’ model, which explains the constant gravitation of ‘titular culture’ into ‘All-Union culture,’ at the same time leaving space for local interest, manifestations of ethnic particularism, and individual trajectories of cultural elites. Lithuanian literature, culture and society embody the results of this close correlation and the consequences of its dynamics to this day.” These three articles in the first section consider theoretical issues that arise in analyzing the Soviet literary field as a system and also demonstrate how we may approach certain phases of this system (the formation of a multinational literary field) and its phenomena (Aesopian language, the tension between ethnic particularism and Soviet universalism). The authors of the articles in the following sections analyze the fragments, elements, and samples of the Soviet literary field. They also strive to show, implicitly or explicitly, the relationship between the presented situations and the structure of the Soviet literary field, and how these represent the state of the field in a certain historical period. The authors of the articles in the second section analyze Lithuanian literature as a part of the multinational Soviet literary field. Lithuania and the other Baltic nations were incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940 through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Yet all three Baltic states became part of the multinational Soviet literature project under rather different circumstances than those nations that had participated in the formation of this field from the very beginning. A very important factor is that from 1918 to1940 Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia existed as independent nations. A literary field evolved in this period, one that functioned

Introduction

according to the principles of partial autonomy: with a system of publication, literary criticism, and other institutions, with a clear reflection of literary tradition and the role of the writer,6 and generational literary conflicts. There was a generation of writers who were born in an independent Lithuania in the 1930s, who pursued a version of Lithuanian modernism, using Western literature as a model to expand the boundaries of literary and cultural imagination. What happens to these preliminary results when they are forced into the empire of Soviet literature? Under Soviet rule, Lithuanian literature had to either reject the entirety of the literary legacy of the interwar period as bourgeois or to Sovietize it, that is, to identify sources of national Socialist Realism in Lithuanian literature. For example, Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas’s autobiographical novel Altorių šešėly (In the Shadow of the Altars, 1933), where the main character is a young priest struggling with his doubts about faith and finally having to choose between priesthood and the vocation of an artist (a poet), was perhaps the best known novel of interwar Lithuania that substantiated the formation of an autonomous literary field. In the Shadow of Altars did not become a canonical work of Socialist Realism, however, its narrative model was used for atheistic propaganda. Nerija Putinaitė in her article “Atheist Autobiography: Politics, Literary Canon and Restructured Experience” discusses this situation and examines autobiographies as a case of productive internalization of political aims to create a new society of non-believers. The other authors in this section analyze the situation of the Lithuanian literary field during the post-Stalinist period, when there was an opportunity to directly or indirectly express national interests in literature. This opportunity was seized on first by Lithuanian poets, the so-called 30s generation, equivalent to the Sixtiers (shestidesyatniki) in Russian literature. Donata Mitaitė discusses the trajectories of the main representatives of this generation in the Soviet literary field in her article “The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets, Their Illusions and Choices.” Mitaitė is primarily concerned with the connection and the conflict between ideology and poetics, although the problem of the relationship between multinational Soviet literature and Soviet Lithuanian literature also arises. The Lithuanian 30s generation, like the Russian shestidesyatniki, emerged during the Thaw and believed in 6 Pierre Bourdieu considers this type of reflection to be an attribute of the autonomy of the literary field. See Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art, 171.

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“socialism with a human face.” They followed a similar path of illusion, disillusion, compromise, however, they did not become important agents of the multinational field as did their Russian colleagues. It is likely that this was not merely coincidence or the culture politics of the Soviet Union, but the entirely disparate social and cultural capital of these two groups of poets. In the case of the Lithuanian poets this capital was formed in an independent Lithuania where they were born and completed primary school, experienced Soviet occupation and saw the anti-Soviet resistance up close. Their attempts to become established in the Soviet literary field paradoxically aligned with the aspiration of expressing national interests, while in the case of Justinas Marcinkevičius to assume the role of the national bard. The debate about the cultural and political consequences of this dual game, about the character and poetry of Justinas Marcinkevičius continues in Lithuania to this day. This is also discussed by other authors in this book (Loreta Mačianskaitė and Dalia Satkauskytė in her article). It is obvious that writers who wanted to work in the Soviet literary field could not avoid compromise. However, those compromises varied greatly. In her article, “The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism that Legitimated Soviet Era Modernism,” Aušra Jurgutienė analyzes instances of Lithuanian literary criticism as examples of so-called mimetic resistance. An examination of the works of two literary critics of the Soviet period shows that compromise is skewed and requires a nuanced approach to judge its impact. A careful analysis of critical texts and a reconstruction of their position in the literary field allow us to consider conformism as a manifestation of loyalty to the system (as in the case of the literary critic Ričardas Pakalniškis) or as an opportunity to defy the system (the case of Albertas Zalatorius.) The two other articles on Lithuanian literature present examples that demonstrate the contradictory semantics and the effects of the literary field that result from encounters with the literature of the metropolis (Russia) or with significant actors of the Western literary field. Solveiga Daugirdaitė’s article “Sartre and de Beauvoir Encounter the Pensive Christ” focuses on the reception of the two French philosophers’ visit to Soviet Lithuania in the summer of 1965. The author analyzes how the other’s recounting of this event which was held in the greatest regard for its significance to local authors and how the opportunity to meet with Sartre, whose visit lasted only five days, effected a change in the power dynamics within the literary hierarchy. In the article entitled “The Performance of Eimuntas Nekrošius’s Kvadratas / The Square as a Palimpsest of Soviet-Era Memory,” Loreta

Introduction

Mačianskaitė analyzes how Nekrošius, an internationally recognized director who began his career in the Soviet period, in 1985 succeeded in creating a production opposed to the system. Forced to use material imposed by the state, a Russian documentary narrative, called It Happened Once, the director conceived an ideological amalgam wherein he melded the dominating Soviet discourse, including a perekovka (a reforging, rehabilitation) intertext, with the most important themes of classical Russian literature (the little man, salvation through a woman’s sacrifice, a trial by rendezvous, the sanctity of the working class) and subverted them. When the play about the love between a prisoner and a teacher was performed, it was viewed as a metaphor for totalitarianism; it was interpreted as such in the West, even endowing dissident attributes to the hero. Paradoxically, The Square marked the beginning of a nonverbal theatrical paradigm in Lithuanian theater; however, its textual structure reveals the literature-centric mentality of society. The third section of the book is dedicated to the presentation of other literatures of the multinational Soviet field, and an exploration of the ways in which they function in that field. In Valentyna Kharkhun’s article, “Ukrainian Literature of the Late Soviet Period: The History of Three Generations of Poets” the central theme is the equivalence of the generation of the 1960’s in Ukrainian literature, only that Mitaitė, who analyses the same equivalence in Lithuanian literature, focuses on an analysis of poetics, while Kharkhun concentrates on the dynamics of the poet’s position in the literary field. However, the word “equivalence” can only be used conditionally, because, according to Kharkhun “[i]nterest in the non-Russian part of Soviet cultural history increased at that time, symbolizing a shift from the Russian model as dominant in examining post-Stalinist times to the other republics, providing examples of different ways of expressing national and artistic liberation.” Just like Mitaitė, she considers the Ukrainian generation of the 1960s version not as a copy of the Russian, but as a specific phenomenon of Ukrainian literature formed by cultural conditions, which is why Kharkhun consciously utilizes the Ukrainian version of the term (shistdesyatnyky) instead of the Russian transcription (shestidesyatniki).* * Since our standard of the transliteration from Russian is slightly different from the regulations proposed by the Library of Congress we want to clarify it. We use the letter y to designate the Russian letter й and the corresponding sound, even where the letter itself does not appear in writing (that is, for the letters я, ю, and where the letter е appears after a vowel or in a word initial position). Also we use -y for Russian -ий in surnames, but a more “phonetic” rendering -iy for -ий in nouns.

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Pavel Arsenjev (Rusakov) is interested in the problem of the morality of literary forms in Russian literature (“Literature of a State of Emergency: Varlam Shalamov vs. ‘All Progressive Humanity’”). He analyzes Varlam Shalamov’s prose as an example of “the literature of a state of emergency,” and interprets it as an existential act of truth that transcends the borders of literature and literariness, and radically opposes all forms of compromise. How can we characterize the place of this kind of prose in a multinational literary field? It appears that it crosses not only literary boundaries, but is also almost beyond the multinational field of Soviet literature. Nearly, but not completely, because this type of literature is also dependent on the conditions that formed the Soviet literary field, that is, the Communist regime. Besides, we can consider Shalamov and his prose as a segment of this Soviet literary field that held a surreptitious potential to destroy the entire field. This example only confirms just how complex and multidimensional the literary field was in the Soviet Union. Arsenjev’s article presents the possibility of typological comparison because there were similar, though lesser known, situations in other national literatures. For example, literature of this type did exist in Lithuania; its most noteworthy instances are the two sets of Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s memoirs, Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros (Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea.)7 The first variant, written while the author was living in a direct state of emergency from 1949 to 1950, was lost, but was later found; the second was composed in 1974, and published for the first time in Lithuania only in 1988.8 The other two articles explore literatures of the Baltic states during the Soviet era. Anneli Mihkelev discusses the principal strategies of resistance to official Soviet discourse and Aesopian language in Estonian literature (“Hamlet and Folklore as Elements of the Resistance Movement in Estonian Literature”). Eva Eglaja-Kristsone’s article “Reading Literary History through the Archives: the Case of the Latvian Literary Journals Karogs” can be considered to be a fragment of the history of censorship. Political censorship, which perhaps played the principal role in the development 7 The most recent version of Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s memoir was published in English in a new translation by Delija Valiukenas during the course of writing this introduction. See: Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, Shadows on the Tundra (London: Peirene Press, 2018). 8 Some critics are of the mindset that this type of literature was influenced by official Soviet discourse. For example, Jura Avižienis argues that the memoirs of Grinkevičiūtė mimic the socialist realist plot and the official Soviet discourse of propaganda. See: Jura Avižienis, “Learning to curse in Russian: mimicry in Siberian exile,” in Baltic Postcolonialism, ed. Violeta Kelertas (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006), 187–202.

Introduction

of Aesopian language, is analyzed from a somewhat different perspective. The author focuses on the literary journal as an institution of the literary field. Using the major Soviet era Latvian literary journal Karogs (Flag) as an example, Eglaja-Kristsone poses a question that concerns every author of the selections in this book: What were “the interactions in the fields of literature, power, and economics during the Soviet era?” She, however, is concerned about something in addition as well, namely the documents that testify to the functioning of the Soviet-era literary field, its dynamics, the missing archival materials and lost documents. Does this dynamic reveal the censoring of censorship that perhaps was most intensely pursued during the first decade of the post-Soviet era? *** According to Fredric Jameson, the separation between the private and the public sphere is an essential element of Western realist and modernist literature.9 Literature functions simply as literature and not as political allegory, as a substitute for public discourse or as a device for propaganda. It seems that contemporary post-Soviet literatures became a part of the paradigm of Western culture. Nevertheless, differentiation between the spheres mentioned is not absolute or even similar to that in Western literature. The aftereffects of the Soviet occupation are still evident today—in the very structure of the literary field, in the behavior and consciousness of its agents, in the continuing public discussions regarding the cultural heritage of the Soviet period and its continuing critical reflection in literary works. Consequently, the literature of Post-Soviet nations may appear exotic or even incomprehensible to the Western reader at times. We hope that this collection of articles, analyzing the conditions under which Lithuanian and other Soviet-era national literatures were forced to function, will bring clarity to the situation and enhance the literary field’s international perception.

9 Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text, no. 15 (1986): 70. In this article Jameson writes about the difference between mature Western literature and that of the Third World. Generally speaking, this difference is also valid in discussions about the literatures of former Soviet captive nations.

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Evgeny Dobrenko

Soviet Multinational Literature Approaches, Problems, and Perspectives of Study

The sudden emergence of new independent states in Eastern Europe and Eurasia that were established as a result of the Soviet Union’s collapse has prompted a keen interest in the cultures of the former Soviet republics— now the newly independent states. This is especially true of their so-called “national literatures” which are often seen by the local elites (and not without reason) as both a reflection and a source of a particular national character. It was a peculiar consensus that served as the foundation of the former Soviet empire: instead of sovereignty, the nations were offered an opportunity for “national development.” For Russian culture that is predominantly literature-centered, these projects of national development were reflected mostly through the growth of national literatures that became the subject of concentrated construction during the Soviet period. It was precisely through works of literature that the status of national languages was established with the majority of these languages simultaneously receiving their writing systems, often based on the Cyrillic alphabet. National literatures became the real domain of the Soviet imperial imagination, thus creating a national mythology and an appropriate “historical past” for these nations. One of the most important tasks is to trace and document the way in which Soviet Russian literature, its institutions and ideology (including theoretical and critical polemics) shaped the development of national and ethnic identities in the non-Russian Soviet literatures. It is equally important

4

The Literary Field under Communist Rule

to investigate the impact of this process on the creation of the new public sphere in the newly independent states. Without such a history, neither the comprehension of the post-Soviet imperial complex nor the specificity of national and cultural development in the former Soviet Republics today can be recognized. Indeed, for decades, Western scholars treated Soviet literature almost exclusively as Russian. While there are some excellent studies of individual national literatures in English (first of all Ukrainian, Belarusian, Baltic, Georgian, and Armenian literatures)1 most national literatures were examined in isolation from the overarching institutions of Soviet literature (as purely “national”). According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, Soviet “national literatures” lost their specific national character long ago and, therefore, (in their “Soviet incarnations”) did not deserve serious scholarly attention. Western histories of Ukrainian, Baltic, and other literatures typify this thinking. The researchers’ specifically literary interest begins to flag as soon as they approach the Stalin era; at that point, their attention veers away from literature, instead concentrating exclusively on the persecution and repression of the particular intelligentsia involved, especially writers. Literature and its institutions as such resurface only when a scholar turns to the culture of a particular national emigration. Even today, a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union’s collapse, there is no scholarly work available where the phenomenon of these literatures is considered in its complexity as a part of the Soviet ideological and institutional imperial undertaking. The analyses of different aspects of Soviet national cultural developments are mostly represented in the works of historians;2 however, the issues relevant to the national 1 See for instance: George Luckyj, Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990); Arnold McMillin, A History of Byelorussian Literature from its Origins to the Present Day (Giessen:  W. Schmitz,  1977); Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History (New York: Routledge, 2014). 2 See Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917 (New York: Fontana Press, 1998); Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2001); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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Soviet Multinational Literature    EVGENY DOBRENKO

literatures and their development, if mentioned at all, remain on the far periphery of these comprehensive studies. The evidence of such neglect is obvious: presently, the single academic source in the English language that is available on this subject is The Literatures of the Soviet Peoples: A Historical and Biographical Survey, edited by East German scholar, Harri Jüngar, translated into English and published in 1970. Not only is this book out of print and generally outdated, but the encyclopedic style of its entries lacks an analytical approach, presenting recorded facts predominantly in the Soviet spirit. In short, the history of “Soviet multinational literature” from the early 1930s to the 1980s has remained a terra incognita for Western scholars. This history has been likewise ignored in the Soviet Union. According to official Soviet doctrine, the national literatures in their development followed a spirit of “international unity” which meant that they were modeled on Russian literature. The latter served as the “vanguard” for the rest of the Soviet Union. As a result, the most important events in the shaping of national literatures during the period of their relative cultural independence in the 1920s were expunged or falsified. Furthermore, the central concept of Soviet literature and culture, “the international unity of literatures,” was accepted as dogma by the Soviet scholarly establishment, and thus has never been subjected to analysis (in the West, it was dismissed as mere propaganda). The irony of such approaches is that they refuse to accept the very fact that Soviet literature did, in fact, evolve into a genuinely unique, multinational phenomenon encompassing no fewer than seventy-eight different national literatures. The phenomenon was similar in character and scope to a massive, multinational religious order with seventy-eight vernacular churches, each having its own liturgy, saints, and canon. This stubborn fact, absolutely crucial for an understanding of Soviet and post-Soviet cultural dynamics, has remained hidden in plain view and has escaped serious scholarly scrutiny. Thus, in order to approach this subject, we have to address two major predicaments in our discussion of Soviet multinational literature: 1. Because of its uniqueness, Soviet multinational literature usually is not perceived as a self-sufficient and coherent subject but as a conglomeration of various national literatures. 2. By virtue of the fact that the various national literatures were in various stages of their development (from very few ancient

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literatures to the overwhelming majority of very new ones with only recently acquired written languages), they correlate differently with the general history of Soviet literature as a single phenomenon. Thus, a complicated problem of periodization arises that is crucial for any comprehensive historical narrative. I would like to suggest the division of the history of “Soviet multinational literature” into four distinct periods and outline specific problems related to each of them: 1. the “unification” of literatures in the 1920s and early 1930s; 2. their development during the Stalin era; 3. progressive “de-Stalinization” of the national literatures that began in the 1960s and lasted through the 1980s, when both the features of originality of these literatures and the limits on such diversity under Soviet conditions became manifest; 4. and finally, the process of true “nationalization” of national literatures of the former USSR republics under the newly obtained conditions of independence in the late 1980s and 1990s. To clarify: I.

Among the least researched issues are matters of construction, or rather invention, of a “multinational Soviet literature” as the process of “unification” of different literary traditions that began in the early 1920s. By 1934, approximately the time when the USSR Writers’ Union came into being, this “unification” was practically complete. The crucible for this development was, however, rooted in the system of the All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP). This was a complex and very powerful organization wherein the Soviet Marxist internationalist doctrine fostered by the party-state became fused with the local nationalisms which had, in the days of the Russian empire, given the original impetus to the development of national literatures. These two polar opposites—Marxist internationalism and local nationalism—often clashed, giving rise to an intense infighting among the “fraternal” national literatures. These tensions are most visible among Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Transcaucasian

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literatures (all undergoing “unification” even before 1932) in the context of the VAPP institutions. II. The impact of the Stalin era on the development of national literatures provides its own challenges and requires first and foremost a retrospective study of the national literatures within the context of the multinational Soviet Union. Such an approach makes it possible to understand the processes that are taking place in these literatures today, in post-Soviet times. The chief issue for “national” developments nowadays consists of how to get rid of the “provincial” complex which formed in the Stalin era as a result of the imposition and assimilation of particular ideological strictures and the forms of their enforcement. In this respect, an analysis of the main ideological campaigns between 1930s and 1950s that were aimed at unification of these literatures is crucial. It was during that period, of course, that the Bolshevik Marxist doctrine was finally transformed into a chauvinistic Stalinist Great-Russian cultural policy. A whole series of special decrees of this period, such as, for example, the infamous struggle against “cosmopolitanism” and “bourgeois nationalism,” need to be reevaluated in light of new archival sources. III. The period from the 1960s to the 1980s is of special interest with regard to the development of the national literatures of the former USSR. Absolutely inexplicable within the traditional approach to Soviet multinational literature is the paradox that out of these half-dead (or—in the majority of cases—stillborn) national literatures of the Stalin era, a really diverse first-rate body of literary works was born! Suffice it to mention the names of the Kirghiz Chingiz Aitmatov, the Belarusian Vasyl Bykov, the Balkar poet Kaisyn Kuliev. It was at this time that the so-called “chimera novel” (khimernyi roman) developed in Ukrainian literature (Volodymyr Drozd, Yevhen Hutsalo, Volodymyr Yavorivsky, Pavlo Zagrebelny, Oles Ilchenko, Vasyl Zemliak, Valeri Shevchuk); the “small novel” and “laboratory-experimental prose” (that of Enn Vetemaa, Alexander Beekman, Jan Kross, Paul Kuusberg, and others) arose in Estonian literature; the “interior monologue novel” (e.g. Mykolas Sluckis, Alfonsas Bieliauskas, Jonas Avyžius, etc.) underwent intense development in Lithuanian prose; and the Georgian philosophical novel based on myth and parable

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(typified  by Chabua Amiredzhibi, Otar Chiladze, and Nodar Dumbadze) experienced an extraordinary flowering. Indeed, during this period practically all national literatures underwent a fascinating aesthetic transformation. It is crucially important not only to give a systematic account of these processes but also to understand its aesthetic and historical sources. IV. When it comes to the post-Soviet period, critics often use the term “post-colonial development” but this terminology does not reflect the multidimensional situation in which national literatures, conceived to be a bulwark to national aspirations, function in post-Soviet nation-states and the role they have to play in the building of new states. At present, two opposing trends are shaping the development of national literatures in Ukraine, the Baltics, Belarus, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia. On the one hand, the Soviet tradition continues to exert a strong influence both as a constructive force and as a source of rejection. On the other hand, writers are eagerly reaching out to the cultural values and traditions that were suppressed or marginalized in the Soviet period, such as the knowledge of a particular history of one’s national literature, the national literature of the diaspora, non-communist ideologies and aesthetic trends of the East and West, and, of course, varieties of religions. New and fascinating trends are now sweeping all the national literatures of the former USSR, including the literatures of the various autonomous regions within the Russian Federation. The character, dynamics, and particular directions these trends are taking at present cannot be understood without a re-assessment of the Soviet multinational project, this “untold story” of the Soviet Union’s national literatures. The complexity of the subject requires the use of various methodologies, among them the historical approach (institutional and cultural history), a strong literary critical apparatus as well as ongoing comparative analysis. Although each period, outlined above, is interesting on its own merit, the most important in terms of understanding the phenomenon of multinational Soviet literature as a self-sufficient subject is, of course, the Stalin era because in the 1920s those national literatures which existed at that time evolved largely independently. In post-Stalinist times, the literatures that developed, albeit in a single Soviet line, were primarily national literatures;

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they were very different from each other not only ethnographically, but primarily aesthetically. It was during the Stalin era that Soviet literature emerged as a multinational phenomenon, and this process included several stages: it involved institutional foundations (through the organization of the Writers’ Union in Moscow and in all national republics as well as autonomous republics), it promoted creation of written languages for the so-called “small peoples,” it required constant interaction between Russian and national literatures through an extensive translation industry and the Decades of Friendship, publishing, and book trade policies. These developments affected the formation of the national school literary canons and provided an overpowering aesthetic transformation (through thematic resemblances—so all these literatures depicted the great leaders, Lenin and Stalin, all praised the friendship of the Soviet peoples, industrialization and collectivization, and the struggle for peace, etc.). Such stylistic likeness was created by means of translating works of national literatures into Russian, since none of them could survive on their own, outside of the Russianspeaking world, however, those translation efforts were continuously narrowed because of the policy of Russification. As an example, I would like to turn to the literary texts about two leaders—Lenin and Stalin—that were created during the Stalin era. These texts are usually referred to as Leniniana and Staliniana, respectively, and their quantity is huge indeed: there was hardly a single Soviet poet, Russian or non-Russian, who did not compose works glorifying Soviet leaders. If one adds to this the enormous number of professionally composed poems in “folklore” style (that is often referred to as fakelore),3 it becomes clear that this phenomenon is first and foremost an example of an exceptionally extensive ideological production. For the sake of time, I skip textual analysis but will try to formulate some general conclusions to reflect on the national, and in particular, the “Oriental” dimension of these texts. The idea of a supreme power in Russia had been identified with the notion of empire from the very beginning. Although images of the empire changed (originally, they were associated with Roman and Byzantine, then, starting with Peter the Great, with the Russian Empire), the highest and most complete power in Russia was always based on some extra-ethnic value. This tradition obviously facilitated the Stalinist project. However, 3

See: Frank Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1990).

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this project was based on the rejection of, if not imperial practice, then, at least, its former images: pre-Soviet Russia was condemned as “the prison of the peoples,” the pre-Soviet era was depicted in national epics as the era of suffering and national oppression. The necessity to construct a “nation” out of the former collapsed, delegitimized, and stigmatized empire, which was made up of different peoples and diverse civilizations, additionally complicated this situation. The combination of former representational strategies based on the sacred character of supreme power, tradition, religion, patriotism and Marxist postulates of the destruction of the state, class struggle, and proletarian internationalism presented enormous difficulties. In these conditions, Staliniana played a key role in the “ideological arsenal” of Soviet art and the formation of the imperial imaginary. The “thematic unity of brotherly literatures,” fixated on the glorification of the leader, was very conducive towards the formation of the new “curtailed” identity of Soviet nationalities which, as I’ve mentioned before, instead of national sovereignty and quite in line with Russian literature-centrism, were offered national literature (which, in many cases, was created for this purpose ab initio). Staliniana becomes the basis of the culture of Stalin’s “big family”4 (with Russian people as the elder brother, the Motherland as the mother, and Stalin as the father). At the same time, having become almost a primary topic of Soviet multinational poetry, glorification of the leader conflicted with the main politico-ideological purpose of this poetry—the formation of quasi-national (curtailed) identity. For this reason, in this poetry the invocation of one’s own national history was replaced by the invocation of ethnic style and images, often constructed post factum. Soviet multinational literature was the product of ideological stylization. In the 1930s it was eastern national styles that were chosen, which corresponded with the culture’s general shift to the south and the east, which was visible in everyday life, in poetry, where spring and summer’s plenitude never ended, in architecture, and in the specific cult of water: fountains decorate cities and fill movie screens, while canals are built throughout the country, as if reproducing the “hydraulic society” where despotism first emerged. This shift is most conspicuous when compared to the 1920s. “The Orient” that was constructed in Soviet literature and understood as a phenomenon that predates or lies outside the Enlightenment, denies 4 See Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

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individualism and fosters collectivism, without doubt influenced Russian literature. It was, of course, not the authentic East but the one constructed by Russian culture itself: a hundred-year-old Kazakh akyn Dzhambul, who wrote songs about Stalin, was a product of Russian culture to a greater extent than of Kazakh culture, because it was in Russian culture that he was created (“translated”) and functioned.5 “The Orient” entered Russian culture through stylistics, but it brought along a specific political culture. The paradox of Stalinism is that the Russian Revolution, which won under the banners of Marxism, produced a deeply retrograde culture for which “Oriental style” appeared to be the most suitable form. It was a culture of regress to the pre-Enlightenment era. This is why it invoked the conservative, patriarchal “East” rather than the “West,” which was associated with modernization, liberalism, and Enlightenment. So much so that some critics trying to describe this phenomenon even use the term Stalinismus Orientalis. Hence the use of folklore whose importance for Socialist Realism was proclaimed by Gorky in 1934.6 Professional poetry was a later superstructure added to the initially “folklore” (meaning “popular”) Staliniana. Its key figures were the bards—the Dagestani Lezgin ashug Suleiman Stalsky and the Kazakh akyn Dzhambul Dzhambaev. These are just the best known figures: behind them, there is a whole corpus of semi-folklore—semi-professional texts. The two poets themselves were composite figures: they were both the voices of popular creativity and individualized bards. We encounter here a mass culture that, while remaining essentially ethnic, is positioned as national. Mass culture that does not use writing lacks authorship. Its author is its consumer. Stalsky and Dzhambul are signature figures of early Soviet multinational literature. They are legendary figures that could not emerge in cultures with developed literary traditions like Russian. Stalsky and Dzhambul, representing the Caucasus and Central Asia respectively, are nearly mythological figures, not surprisingly, as Staliniana could not be a product of ordinary authorship. The author had to die to be born as Stalsky and Dzhambul, 5 See Konstantin Bogdanov, Rikkardo Nikolozi, and Iuri Murashov, eds., Dzhambul Dzhabayev: Priklyucheniya kazakhskogo akyna v sovetskoy strane (Moscow:  Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2013). 6 See Gorky’s speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, in M. Gorky, K. Radek, N. Bukharin, A. Zhdanov et al., Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934 (New York: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977), 25–69.

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and then, in this fantastic guise, engender “the image of Stalin” as an even more unheard-of Author—“the great creator of Soviet life.” At the First Writers’ Congress in 1934 Gorky demanded that literatures be created in every republic and every autonomy of the USSR,7 but these literatures did not exist yet. There was only folklore in the republics of Central Asia, the Northern Caucasus, the Volga region, and the Far East. Addressing the “representatives of the peoples of the Caucuses and Central Asia” Gorky gave Stalsky, whom he called “the Homer of the twentieth century”8 as an example. Stalsky is representative of a whole strata of such “Homers” who emerged everywhere at that time. In all national republics such talents were “discovered.” These “masters of oral national creativity” became members of the Writers’ Union of the USSR. The unprecedented “oral literature” was being born. Folklore was coupled with new media and new technologies of political manipulation. Since the texts of such “peoples’ bards” as Stalsky and Dzhambul were published straight away, it is impossible to determine what the “originals” looked like. These “originals” were commissioned by one person, communicated to the “author” by another, verbalized by the third one, written down by the fourth, translated literally by the fifth, given a literary form by the sixth, edited by the seventh, censored by the eighth, etc. The author himself did not speak the language in which his texts were circulated, and the “originals,” even if they did exist, have been lost. In any event, these texts are not authentic by definition, and not only because they mostly functioned in a different language. Whereas in the 1920s folklore was considered a sign of backwardness, in the 1930s it became the symbol of “socialist popular and national spirit” which, in the context of the rejection of the former internationalist doctrine, was more and more associated with “national roots.” Eastern—specifically Central Asian and Caucasian—folklore was especially celebrated in the 1930s. This “Soviet folklore” being a product of Soviet nationalities could only function as written literature because, due to linguistic limitations, it was dysfunctional in the oral form. It could only function in translation and under the conditions of the new oral (radio) and print (local and central press) media. This folklore, naturally, was not some “organic extension” of oral folklore creativity. Akyns were ideally suited to demonstrate 7 Gorky’s speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers. 8 Ibid.

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the leap from feudalism to socialism bypassing capitalism. In  fact, they demonstrated the leap across written literature to literary mediated mythology. The epic time of folklore in Europe ended with the birth of authored literature. With the emergence of the author the road to epos was blocked forever. Art became individual. In Central Asia, however, this had not occurred yet. Soviet power encountered a living folklore tradition and made it serve its political purposes. This situation is in many respects unique: it is neither a common utilization of literature nor the simulation of folklore (as was the case in Russian literature), but the use of living folklore which was being reproduced here and now. Dzhambul’s songs were a purely performative act. The main function of Dzhambul’s poetry is the organization and infection of the social medium with jubilation, its transformation into the medium of terror. The stylization and metaphorization of terror are the main things in these ecstatic texts, which could only appear and function under conditions of direct terror. They project violence. They are themselves the instrument of terror: by infecting the reader with fear, they sublimate his hatred of the enemy into love for the leader. The question of Dzhambul’s translations is neither narrowly professional nor technical. It is central for the understanding of the Dzhambul phenomenon and the whole Soviet multinational literary project. This literature had its own reader who was different from the national one and required a special type of writer who was de facto dysfunctional in his native language. It was a “national literature” not because of its language, for it functioned outside its language and its ethnos, but national-Soviet literature designed to serve “the Soviet people” as a whole. Each national literature delivered something from its traditions that was required for the formation of Soviet people. Socialist Realism emerged in the national literatures of Central Asia and the North Caucasus when they did not have their own alphabets, let alone a literary tradition. This is why the regress to epos was inevitable. In the twentieth century many national cultures experienced this epic regression to the pre-modern epoch in the course of modernization: Eastern-European in the beginning of the century, Asian, African, and Latin American—after World War II. During the transitional period, when writing and literary institutions were just emerging among Soviet national minorities, written culture co-existed with an archaic oral one in a unique symbiosis. Soviet archaic-oral society creates culture that, on the one hand,

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aspires to a developed Western literary model by creating alphabets and modernizing the institutes of propaganda, writing, education, and media, but on the other hand, relies on centuries-old oral tradition used as the source of its “nationality.” The latter is not merely a tribute to the Soviet interpretation of Marxist doctrine. The fact that these texts are “national in form” plays a decisive role, as it displaces the question of language to the periphery. Stalsky and Dzhambul become cultural events not because they sang (if they did) in their native languages, but because they left an imprint on paper in Russian, an imprint that cannot be subjected to attributive procedures. In the Lezgin language Stalsky exists as a merely local episode in the history of peripheral and exotic literature, as a literature created in “one single aul,” as a curiosity rather than a cultural phenomenon because his works (or works attributed to him) are dysfunctional outside the Russian language. They are dysfunctional from the point of view of their own production, as they cannot perform their politico-aesthetic function of filling and infecting the non-Lezgin medium with the rhetoric, images, and metaphors of terror and jubilation, giving this space a national dimension. The opposite is also true: this is the poetry of primordial reflexes. Released from the wrapping of Oriental metaphors, it reveals its ethical carcass: kin, leader, blood feud, tribalism, militarism, heroization of murder, etc. This poetry cannot appeal to developed cultural and social forms, so, in order to effectively play the role of social mobilization, it seeks adequate cultural forms in tribal society that preserved the primordial forms of oral culture. And, since this poetry is incorporated into a more developed culture, the latter experiences a kind of romantic reductionism, based on the ideas of Herder, for whom the nation was a language group, language was a synonym of thought, and, therefore, the nation was endowed with “natural,” almost genetic characteristics. In a paradoxical manner, Soviet national cultural construction combined Enlightenment pathos and internationalism with obscurantism and anti-modernist romantic national ideology. The main function of Soviet multinational literature—the creation of the image of the leader and a space of jubilation around him—demonstrates that the “interaction and mutual enrichment of national literatures of Soviet peoples” proclaimed by Soviet ideology was by no means unilateral Russian influence on all others as it is commonly perceived. It turned out that modern European literatures, no matter the level of their development, simply did not have the rhetoric, imagery, and metaphors for

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the representation of the leader(s) and glorification of terror and the new “Golden Age,” and had to follow Eastern folklore in this respect. Whereas the political “Orientalization” of the Russian state required three hundred years of the so-called “Mongol yoke,” the aesthetic Orientalization only took a few years of Stalinist terror. Stalsky’s and Dzhambul’s texts are so excessive and tautological, the role of pure language in them is so profound, their stylistic affectation is so artificial, and their form so much dominates the ideological content that one could definitely speak of the complete irrelevance of this content. These texts could be “translated” using any deviation from any “original,” metaphors could be replaced with others, parts of the texts interchanged, extended, omitted, etc. One can say that these texts did not require the original at all. In principle, it is not important who or what Dzhambul compares Stalin (Voroshilov, Ezhov, Kaganovich, Kalinin) with in each particular case—all this can easily be reshuffled. It is not important which anniversary or holiday is commemorated by this particular song or poem. Names of historical actors, attribution of events and facts, concrete ideological messages (except laudation or cursing of a particular event or person) are all not important, neither is the original language of these texts. Important are metaphors, rhetoric, and style. Therefore, the author is not important, either; he himself is a function that does not presuppose a personal dimension at all. The more texts about Stalin Dzhambul writes, the more irrelevant his authorship becomes. This figure melts, his life, color, and voice flow into the figure created in the texts, that of the only Artist and Author—Stalin himself. Texts about the leader cannot have an author by definition. By becoming a medium of the leader, the Author loses all qualities: he gets deprived of history, biography, psychology, and becomes a reader himself. Homers of Stalinism, by the very oddity of their discovery, the fictitiousness of their biographies, their lack of creative independence and their dysfunction remind us that any Author under Stalinism is superfluous. There should be no one third between the leader and the masses. The Soviet multinational literary project in literature-centric Russian culture was supposed to be a true incarnation of the Eurasian vision since 1. both the West and the East were condemned for individualism and anti-modernism respectively, and 2. the majority of these literatures were perceived as “Oriental”—not only Central Asian or of the small people of Siberia but of the Northern Caucasus as well (being Islamic cultures, they

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were associated with Oriental tradition). They turned out, however, to be neither European, nor Asian since these literatures reflected not so much geographical differences as historical ones. These were literatures of different stages of development: Marxism and folklore, proletarian internationalism, and feudal patriarchal societies simply could not find any common language other than the language of Socialist Realism and glorification of the leader and the terror. Under these conditions Soviet literature described by Stalin as “national in form and socialist in content” could, therefore, be defined as European in form and Asian in content, where European Marxist ideology collided with what Marx called Asian economic and political formation. Today literary historians and critics in the former Soviet republics write books and dissertations about the “Socialist Realist canon in Ukrainian (Belarusian, Georgian, etc.) literatures,” that is about something that was historically in these literatures during the Soviet era, but in principle was imported from Russia. Nonetheless, when it comes to the Ukrainian (Georgian, Armenian) revival of the 1920s nobody claims that it was imported from Russia, although without the events of 1917 in Petrograd, it is unknown when and how this Ukrainian (or Belarusian, or Georgian) revival would have occurred. So, there were “the Ukrainian Renaissance” and “the Georgian avant-garde” but “Ukrainian Socialist Realism” did not exist—only a “Socialist Realist canon imposed on Ukrainian (or Georgian) literature.” Socialist Realism, however, is not just an instance that was brought about and that was completely alien to national literatures. On the contrary, it acted as a fungus that grew from within these national cultures akin to some viruses that live in any environment, even in such as a national culture. Not tempered by cultural tradition, the whole body of national culture got infected easily, so the very existence of a “Socialist Realist canon” could be compared to a scar left on the heart after a heart attack. The weaker these cultural conditions were, the more fragile was the protective cultural armor. Therefore, the more dangerous the process of infestation became that much harder the serious complications it has left behind is to remove. Thus, Socialist Realism can be used as a measurement of the cultural stratum of each national culture: the more powerful the “Socialist Realist canon,” the thinner the layer of tradition, and vice versa. In other words, the study of national Socialist Realisms, provides a new dimension to the histories of national literatures. And this, in particular, makes the study of Stalinism in the national literatures indispensable.

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Bibliography Bogdanov, Konstantin, Rikkardo Nikolozi, and Iuri Murashov, eds. Dzhambul Dzhabayev: Priklyucheniya kazakhskogo akyna v sovetskoy strane. Moscow:  Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2013. Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1981. Gorky, M., K. Radek, N. Bukharin, A. Zhdanov et al. Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. New York: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977. Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Hosking, Geoffrey. Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917. New York: Fontana Press, 1998. Luckyj, George. Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. McMillin, Arnold. A History of Byelorussian Literature from its Origins to the Present Day. Giessen: W. Schmitz, 1977. Miller, Frank. Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990. Pipes, Richard. The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917– 1923. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A history. New York: Routledge. 2014. Slezkine, Yuri. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Martin Terry, eds. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Dalia Satkauskytė

The Role of Aesopian Language in the Literary Field Autonomy in Question

Introduction The first question that arises when preparing an analysis of so-called Aesopian language based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field of literature is whether or not it is appropriate to rely on it when considering a specific phenomenon that is uncharacteristic or nearly uncharacteristic of Western literature. According to Bourdieu, the literary field is in part autonomous, having a distinctive structure, specific principles of the formation and circulation of capital, with agents competing for positions within this field, contingent on something rather rare in other disciplines, that is illusio—the belief that it is worth engaging in this activity, which observing it from outside does not seem particularly valuable. The field of power does affect the literary field, but this impact is not uncomplicated. It is indirect, often imperceptibly internalized in the interior structures of the field and its dynamics, while the process of making the field autonomous is inevitably connected both to this interiorization and to the reflection of the field’s structure within literature itself.1 Hence the question arises: can we fruitfully utilize this theory to examine the literatures of nations once ruled by Communist regimes, which like other cultural realms were considered special spheres of ideological importance and were directly controlled 1 See also Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure su champ littéraire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992), 17–81.

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by the government? It would seem obvious that the literary fields of the Soviet republics or other Communist societies did not function according to Bourdieu’s principle of partial autonomy. The existence of what is known as Aesopian language is one of the evident confirmations of just how closely the fields of power and culture and/or literature are connected in Communist societies. As Irina Sandomirskaja claims, “[t]he power, but ultimate vulnerability of Aesopian language lies in its invisible belonging to the immediate situation of speaking and its dependence on the images and concepts of the dominant language, the object of its critique [emphasis mine—D. S.].”2 In other words, political restriction of the autonomy of the field of literature is the raison d’être of Aesopian language. Thus, it is understandable that an attempt to define Aesopian language as a purely literary phenomenon leads one to an impasse. Many scholars who have tried to write about the arsenal of poetic devices that forms the semantics of Aesopian language,3 arrive at nearly identical conclusions: it is a rather elementary semantic phenomenon that utilizes a standard collection of techniques to convey an illegal content by using legal means; the Aesopian meaning is established not so much within the text, but rather beneath or above the text, or “between the lines.” This beneath, above, or between is nothing other than a social stratum where power and literature intersect. At which point in this intersection do the conditions for Aesopian language to form and flourish exist? What happens to Aesopian language as this intersection transforms? What position does the writer who practices Aesopian language assume in the field of Soviet literature and how can this position change? These are just a few of the questions that arise, when attempting to define the role of Aesopian language in the field of Soviet literature.

2 Irina Sandomirskaja, “‘Bez Stali i Leni’: Aesopian Language and Legitimacy,” in Power and Legitimacy—Challenges from Russia, ed. Per-Arne Bodin, Stefan Hedlund, and Elena Namli (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 197. 3 Lev Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship. Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature (Munchen: Verlag Otto Sagner in Kommision, 1984); Violeta Kelertas, “Soviet Censorship in Lithuania 1945–1989,” in vol. 3 of History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007), 125–34; Tomas Venclova, “The Game of the Soviet Censor,” in Forms of Hope (Riverdale on Hudson, NY: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1999), 185–91; Sandomirskaja, “‘Bez Stali i Leni,’” 188–98.

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It may appear that this introduction is paradoxical and self-contradictory—having first cast doubt on the universality of Bourdieu’s theory of the field of literature, and the ability to rely on it when analyzing the literature of totalitarian societies, I nevertheless raise questions about Aesopian language, relying on the concepts of this theory. However, I propose to take this contradiction as a provocative reminder that there are no theories that can be mechanically applied, while re-shaping the object of the analysis to fit. I am convinced that the theoretical model proposed by Bourdieu, whereby society is composed of various social fields that affect one another and are structurally connected, is an effective analytical tool that can pertain to societies governed by Communist regimes. But to determine what the forms of intersection of various fields are, how they manifest themselves in literature, and to identify the structural role of some phenomenon or other in the literary field is possible only when we perform an analysis of the distinct factors of that field, without relying on conclusions reached when analyzing other fields under other social conditions.4 In this article, Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field is not used mechanically or formally—questions are posed about how to adjust or expand the theory, taking into consideration the specifics of the Soviet literary field. With this stipulation, Bourdieu’s theory functions as a key facilitator that helps reach two main goals. The first is to discuss the role of Aesopian language in the Soviet literary field, its impact on structure and dynamics. The second is to identify and describe other possible parameters that establish Aesopian language as a socio-poetic form—a phenomenon where the fields of power and literature intersect, whose poetics are inseparable from the conditions of reception, and whose aesthetics are rooted in an historically defined mode of communication. In both instances I rely on examples from Lithuanian literature. I assume that the communication model of Aesopian literature is universal, that it exists in other Soviet national literary fields. On the other hand, I think that the very existence of the phenomenon influences not only the field of literature, but also the tradition of usage and the literary tradition in general, and the stability or dynamics of one or another element of the structure of the field (such as the agent’s habitus, position and position-taking). Different “targets” of Aesopian criticism in different 4 In his classic work The Rules of Art (Les règles de l’art), which examines the problems of social theory and art, Bourdieu analyzes the field of nineteenth century French literature.

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national literatures would probably reveal rather different adjustments of the intersection of the fields of politics and literature.

The Literary Field, Censorship, Aesopian Language, and the Paradoxical Illusio As mentioned, almost all scholars agree that Aesopian language is a collective utterance. The author of the literary work does not create Aesopian meaning, neither do the textual structures, which we can interpret as only one of the conditions of the creation of this meaning. Instead it is through a conspiracy between the sender (writer) and the addressee (reader) against the censor, who in turn becomes an indirect co-author of this meaning. According to Pierre Bourdieu, censorship works in any social field, whether it be culture or scholarly knowledge, as an indirect co-author. In his book Language and Symbolic Power (Langage et pouvoir symbolique), he describes the mechanism of censorship as an internal factor of the field that regulates the selection of one form or another: The specialized languages that schools of specialists produce and reproduce through the systematic alteration of the common language are, as with all discourses [italics mine—D. S.], the product of a compromise between an expressive interest and a censorship [italics—P. B.] constituted by the very structure of the field in which the discourse is produced and circulates.5

When discussing the literary fields of Communist societies, we must adjust Bourdieu’s proposition that claims universality. Under the conditions of a Communist regime, censorship is not pressure on the internal structure of the field to choose one form or another, but rather an official institution that belongs to the field of power and that influences the field of literature primarily from the outside. The repressive effect of censorship, its nature and strength, its repertoire of imposed forms can vary widely at different instances and times. If we are discussing the Soviet Union, then during the Stalinist period this impact is straightforward; the repertoire of officially imposed forms and content is strictly regulated by Socialist Realist dogma. In later periods, during the period of the Thaw censorship more 5 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 137. Bourdieu, basing himself on Martin Heidegger’s example, analyzes philosophical discourse, though, as is evident from this quote, he considers the principles of choice universal, applicable to all types of discourse.

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readily controls the content, and the form—only as much as it can convey the content. This is the separation of content and form, notwithstanding that in literature, form is also a mode to convey meaning, and creates preconditions, or at least some of them, for Aesopian language to flourish.6 So political censorship, which institutionally functions from the outside, indirectly intervenes in the literary field and begins functioning from within, by regulating the selection of form. “Censorship is the mother of metaphor,” the famous quote from Jorge Luis Borges, accurately describes this dual impact. Thus, the direct interjection of censorship, as an agent of political power, into the literary field creates a paradoxical effect. On one hand, literature does not function and is not read only as literature—it performs the functions of all the forms of non-existent public discourse. In the case of Aesopian language, the poetic function of the text, using the classic model of communication developed by Roman Jakobson,7 is put to use as political reference,8 and becomes its auxiliary. Although the web of internal connections in the text that Jakobson also called characteristic self-reference to the poetic function, the text’s orientation to itself, is strengthened at the same time, so that one can camouflage Aesopian allusions in it. In Lev Loseff ’s description of the semantic mechanism of Aesopian language, which is based on the interplay of the screen and the marker, the poetic function and literariness can function as the screen.9

6 This is more a tendency, and not the sole factor, of the prevalence of Aesopian language. Much depends on literary tradition, and so also on the structure and dynamics of the internal field. In Lithuanian literature, which did not have such an old tradition of Aesopian language as, for example, Russian literature did, this phenomenon is formed and flourishes during the period of the Thaw. At the same time, the so-called non-Soviet modernization process began in Lithuanian literature. However, modernist art forms could be assaulted even during the decline of the Socio-Realist dogma as alien to the “Soviet people.” In this way the form itself is imparted an anti-Soviet tenor (the famous melee with Nikita Khrushchev in 1962 at the modernist art exhibition at the Manege). 7 Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas E. Sebeok (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960), 350–77. 8 Political references can dominate in literary works produced in democratic societies, however, these are visible, not adroitly or intentionally hidden, and not controlled by political censorship. An instance of overt political reference can be what are known as anti-utopias. Perhaps the most prominent and most recent example would be the scandalous French author, Michel Houllebecque’s novel (Soumission, 2015), where a dark vision of the future is presented on the election of a representative of the Islamist party to the French presidency. 9 Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship, 29–52.

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If we agree with the premise of sociologist Leo Strauss that the mode of communication of “writing between the lines” (Aesopian language is a version of this type of writing) provides for the possibility of heterodox thought,10 we can assert that even though its expression formed under the influence of external censorship of the literary field, Aesopian language strengthens the poetic function and creates the premise of partial autonomy in literature. Might not such a tendency of autonomy itself be interpreted as resistance against political control and against the dominating understanding of the role of literature? These assumptions would allow for a discussion about the refinement of poetic language or the modernization of Lithuanian literature in the Soviet period, which does not coincide with Soviet modernism, and whose paradigmatic examples would be the winner of the Lenin Prize Eduardas Mieželaitis (1919–1997)11 or the so-called internal monologue prose, represented by such authors as Alfonsas Bieliauskas (born 1923) and Mykolas Sluckis (1928–2013).12 The most incontrovertible representatives of non-Soviet modernism are the poets Marcelijus Martinaitis (1937–2013), Vladas Šimkus (1936–2004), Sigitas Geda (1943–2008), and the prose writers Juozas Aputis (1936–2010), Romualdas Granauskas (1939–2014), Ričardas Gavelis (1950–2002), and others.13 Using Aesopian language too, on the one hand, they were part of the general Soviet literary field, on the other, they formed alternative segments of the field and forms of symbolic capital. In the Soviet literary field, official symbolic capital correlated with the financial one, however, the symbolic capital, which has demonstrated autonomous tendencies in the segment of this field, worked similarly as described by Bourdieu—according to the principle of “the loser wins.” In other words, it was an honor for writers to not belong to the circle 10 Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Social Research 8, no. 4 (1941): 488–504. 11 See Rimantas Kmita, Ištrūkimas iš fabriko: Modernėjanti lietuvių poezija XX amžiaus 7–9 dešimtmečiais (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2009). 12 Interior monologue prose was probably the principal “export commodity” of Lithuanian literature thereby integrating itself into the meta-field of multinational Soviet literature. See also Taisija Oral, “Lietuva daugiatautės sovietinės literatūros metalauke,” and Jūratė Sprindytė, “Vidinio monologo romano kontradikcijos,” in Tarp estetikos ir politikos: Lietuvių literatūra sovietmečiu, ed. Dalia Satkauskytė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015), 27–53, 397–421. 13 For more about the hidden political content and its relationship to modern narrative forms in Aesopian language, see Violeta Kelertas, introduction to “Come into My Time”: Lithuania in Prose Fiction, 1970–90, ed. Violeta Kelertas (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 1–42.

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of “Soviet modernists” and those who belonged were viewed critically or ironically,14 although sometimes the latter were used as a screen to legalize modernist forms (in Lithuanian poetry Mieželaitis played this protective role.) Absent more comprehensive research, we can only intuit that the Soviet literary field had a relatively more complex structure because of the existing multinational meta-field of literature (or at least the attempt to create one) and because of the intersection of the fields of power and literature than the coherently-formed and slowly-established partial autonomy literary fields on which Bourdieu based his theory. Political censorship, the essential basis for the function of Aesopian language, complicates the structure of the literary field. This censorship, as was mentioned, does not correspond with what Bourdieu calls the censorship of the field. It would be more precise to call it internal control of the field (Bourdieu himself affirms that he uses the word “censorship” as a metaphor)15 which, as the pressure to choose one form or theme of expression over another, also existed during the Soviet period. In Lithuanian literature, for example, the internal control of the field included the supremacy of poetic and lyric forms of narrative, village themes, even a certain cult of sincerity stemming from romanticism as well as the paradoxical requirement for “real life authenticity” which is tied to the Soviet doctrine of art. Because of this, for example, intellectual, constructivist literature, the prose works of Gavelis or Saulius Tomas Kondrotas (born 1953),16 which contain some Aesopian anti-utopian features; or the work of Icchokas Meras (1934–2014) was not favorably received even by literary critics who rather openly opposed the Soviet system. Albertas Zalatorius (1932–1999),17 who 14 Friction and conflicts between writers who held contrasting views of symbolic capital is recorded primarily in retrospective instances—in the memoirs and oral histories of participants in the Soviet Lithuanian literary field. See Nevienareikšmės situacijos. Pokalbiai apie sovietmečio literatūros lauką, ed. Rimantas Kmita (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015). 15 Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 344. 16 Kondrotas is perhaps one of the most translated Lithuanian prose writers: his novel Žalčio žvilgsnis (1981) has been translated into eleven languages. In 1986, he defected from Lithuania and then on several occasions criticized not only the Soviet system, but also the provincialism of Lithuania and Lithuanian literature. He is the only Lithuanian writer who is mentioned as representative of small nations in Pascale Casanova’s sociological study La république mondiale des lettres (Paris: Èditions du Seuil, 1999), 261. 17 Further about Zalatorius, see the article by Aušra Jurgutienė, “The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism that Legitimated Soviet-Era Modernism,” in this book.

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was regarded as an anti-official critic, acknowledges that Kondrotas’s novel Ir apsiniauks žvelgiantys pro langą (And those looking out of the window will frown, 1985) is “an analysis of the expansion and contraction of the psychological roots of tyranny and dictatorship,” although he criticized its constructivist character, behind which, he believes, lies a dangerous concept of literature as a game.18 He openly refuses to accept literature that has to be read with emotions “disabled” and with only the mind “enabled,” though he admits that Lithuanian literature lacks a rational element.19 One of the most important figures in Lithuanian literary theory of the Soviet period, Vanda Zaborskaitė (1922–2010), who was dismissed from her position at Vilnius University during the 1958 to 1961 “cleansing” (the Department was accused of inciting nationalism and a non-Marxist approach to teaching literature), and who indirectly opposed the regime, said the following already during the post-Soviet period: I am not interested in prose where moments of ‘doing’ or construction dominate, where there is a more rational structure rather than an expression of a person’s life (which is why I don’t like Icchokas Meras’s Striptizas and the prose of S. T. Kondrotas.) This approach to some members among the academic critics of the émigré community, for example, seems old-fashioned and provincial, but I still hold on to it.20

This constructivist “insincere” prose, which was pushed to the periphery or to the segment of the Lithuanian literary field that was inclined toward autonomy during the Soviet period, gravitated to the center of the field only during the post-Soviet period. In the case of literature during the Soviet period, it is not easy to discern where the impact of censorship ends and where the internal control of the field begins. The intersection of these two modes of control and the uncertainty of the boundaries, particularly during the late Soviet period, would be a specific feature of the structure of the Soviet Lithuanian literary field. Euphemization, which Bourdieu considers the primary expressive reaction to control of the field, applies in the case of political censorship as well, and it appears in Aesopian language (Sandomirskaja calls this political 18 Albertas Zalatorius, “Už tamsaus lango blykčioja žaibai,” in Literatūra ir laisvė: kritika, esė, pokalbiai (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1998), 317–24. 19 Albertas Zalatorius, “Žalčio žvilgsnio šaltis ir sugestija,” in ibid., 304–16. 20 Vanda Zaborskaitė, Tarp istorijos ir dabarties (Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2002), 628.

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euphemization).21 However, the junction of both mechanisms of regulation are viewed with ambivalence created by the interplay of the screen and the marker, in which one can prefigure the direction of the political reference, but not necessarily the reference itself. The philosopher Nerija Putinaitė captured the paradox of Aesopian language quite precisely: in the Aesopian culture of the Soviet era, presentiments that unspoken meanings exist were more important than the actual contents of those meanings.22 I would add—the specific contents of a concrete text, because the totality of those contents, formed by the cultural and historical memories of the readers, undoubtedly existed like a reservoir of possible significances. We can easily reconstruct this in a negative manner—according to the meanings that the censorship feared and tried to erase. The nation, its history, Lithuanian statehood, the occupations of the country in 1940 and 1944, the postwar anti-Soviet resistance, criticism of the internal and foreign politics of the Soviet government—this would be the thematic field of Aesopian language in Lithuanian literature. Perhaps the most problematic effect of political censorship and the most evident intersection of both aforementioned modes of control is the so-called internal censor.23 The internalization of the structures of the controlling field, according to Bourdieu, is a universal issue. It can be so pervasive that it even eliminates the necessity of personal internal control (self-censorship): Censorship is never quite as perfect or invisible as when each agent has nothing to say apart from what he is objectively authorized to say: in this case he does not even have to be his own censor because he is, in a way, censored once and for all, through the forms of perception and expression that he has internalized and which impose their form on all his expressions.24

21 Irina Sandomirskaja, “Aesopian language: The Politics and Poetics of Naming the Unnameable,” in The Vernaculars of Communism. Language, Ideology and Power in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, ed. Petre Petrov and Lara Ryazanova-Clarke (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 64. 22 Nerija Putinaitė, Nenutrūkusi styga. Prisitaikymas ir pasipriešinimas sovietinėje Lietuvoje (Vilnius: Aidai, 2007), 190. 23 According to Evgeny Dobrenko, “[t]he transformation of the author into his own censor—herein is the true history of Soviet Literature,” see Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of State Writer. Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), xviii. 24 Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 138.

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If we have in mind the literary field overwhelmed by absolute censorship (as defined by poet Marcelijus Martinaitis25), it is believed that the internalization of political censorship, the unanimity of the censor and the self-censor may be considered a purposeful objective (“When both censors become friends and coincide, any regime can rest easy”).26 However, in the Soviet literary field the complicated and intricate mechanism of political censorship, the very exteriority of censorship, paradoxically hinders this kind of targeted internalization. Even those who were the most conformist, regardless of whether it was conscious or not, could not be guaranteed that they would manage to keep pace with the political situation, that they would absorb the ever-changing variations of external rules. This inability to achieve a complete internalization of censorship is most evident during the period of Stalin’s rule, when any form of self-censorship could seem inadequate at any point. An observation made by former Vaga publishing house director Jonas Čekys (1916–1999) against the campaigns of that period (for example, against cosmopolitanism or nationalism) is pertinent here: “they had equal status: the established writers, and the laureates, and those who had been honored with awards.”27 In the case of Aesopian language, which balances on the edge of legitimacy and illegitimacy, the inner censor does not appear to be a completely internalized censorship (this would signal a transition to the side of official discourse), but more as a disposition toward internalization. Perhaps this disposition forms the specific habitus of someone using Aesopian language or is at least a component part of it.28 The tendency toward internalization is viewed retrospectively as an agreement to play by the imposed rules, an indicator of immersion in the field of Soviet literature, and yet as a paradoxical, fragile illusio as well—the belief that it is worthwhile to participate in the official field of literature, to play according to its rules and at the same time to dismantle those rules. Although, the discovery of the inner censor or its acknowledgement (which also confirms that the internalization of the censor is not absolute) could be interpreted as a knot of conflicts, an 25 Marcelijus Martinaitis, Lietuviškos utopijos (Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2003), 51. 26 Martinaitis, Lietuviškos utopijos, 63. 27 Rašytojas ir cenzūra, ed. Arvydas Sabonis and Stasys Sabonis (Vilnius: Vaga, 1992), 220–21. 28 Sandomirskaja calls the internal censor a cultural competency comprised of both experience and intuitive knowledge of how to write in order to avoid censorship. (Sandomirskaja, “Aesopian language,” 63). This cultural competency can be considered to be part of the habitus of a writer in the Soviet period.

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impetus to the changes in the field, the point of deviation in the agent’s trajectory, in other words, a rejection of the illusio. The partial autonomy of the literary field is somewhat more restricted than in the model proposed by Bourdieu, but it is nonetheless a space of possibilities. Not least because in the presence of the aforementioned space there are at least two alternatives: to remain in the official field of literature, believing in the disruptive power of Aesopian language, in the significance of fostering a national culture under captive conditions; or to retreat (by emigrating or by transitioning to unofficial publications), believing that censorship, which imposes its rules of the game on the writer, has won. The latter view is retrospectively often expressed by writers who chose to retreat and withdrew from the Soviet literary field. For example, the poet Tomas Venclova (born 1937) who emigrated from Soviet Lithuania in 1977 and six years later wrote the following: A person wastes all his strength, all his time, all his inventiveness on this ridiculous game. The game minimizes the task of art—art turns into a wink, a grimace, a jab. Things that are of little significance in themselves get blown way out of proportion, just because the author was able “to slip something by.” People become overenthusiastic when they get what everyone knows perfectly well anyway in a clever package. If at the same time the author is even to a small degree able to break restrictions on sex or on linguistic obscenities, this enthusiasm goes beyond all conceivable bounds. Insignificant figures win themselves undeserved reputations just because they have battled with the censor.29

Other Aspects of the Sociology of Aesopian Language, or Aesopian Language as a Socio-poetic Form Venclova evaluates Aesopian language and the role of the censor from a distance, while living under different social and political conditions. He recognizes an important problem in the functioning of Aesopian language—the reception dynamics of a text conveying an Aesopian message. In considering how a literary text written in Aesopian language works in a society controlled by political censorship, the unavoidable question is— how does it work when the censorship disappears. Usually the answer to this question is pessimistic. Venclova asserts that Aesopian language, as a game with the censor, is aesthetically insignificant of (“the game minimizes 29 Venclova, “The Game,” 191.

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the task of art”), while Sandomirskaja maintains that when Soviet discourse has lost its legitimacy, the Aesopian language that had previously criticized it becomes unnecessary and dies.30 Although the artistic text can conflict with the Aesopian message—this can be only one of the semantic layers or valencies of the text, if we invoke Loseff ’s terminology. According to Loseff, a literary text written in Aesopian language can have two valences— one of them pulls the text into a social-ideological orbit, the other—into the literary-aesthetic one.31 (“And still poetry is that which remains when you eliminate politics, social and political journalism, the ciphers of passwords,” Martinaitis’s position is essentially the same).32 Once political censorship, which is the fundamental condition for the Aesopian message, disappears, the text, which is now read in a completely different social context, can switch registers and begin functioning without the Aesopian message or just with its remnants. In this way, those who had experience reading Aesopian language can read this literary text and can incorporate this experience into the reading process as a memory of a former context of communication (for those who did not have this experience, the text may be “dead”). There is another possible option: social valency is not lost but begins working in another regime—as a universal criticism of society and ideology. In other words, the allegory can work without the Aesopian language which requires the tension between legitimacy and illegitimacy in order to exist. This is what happens in the somewhat Kafkaesque works of Kondrotas and Gavelis. These would be the more or less successful circumstances of transformations of the meaning of Aesopian language. Although, the more prevalent case is the one mentioned by Sandomirskaja and other critics of this phenomenon—after Aesopian language has lost its political context that generated the potential of meaning, the literary text slowly stops functioning in the cultural memory. Or it continues its existence only as a “historical monument,” that requires institutional efforts in order to maintain understanding—this has happened with several literary works from the Soviet period that are included in the high school curriculum. The transformation to a “historical monument” is hastened by radical changes in not only ideological, but also in social contexts. In Lithuanian literature of the Soviet period, the dominant protagonist (with certain exceptions, some of which 30 Sandomirskaja. “‘Bez Stali i Leni,’” 197. 31 Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship, 36. 32 Martinaitis, Lietuviškos utopijos, 92.

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I’ve alluded to in this article) was either not separated from nature or was intensely trying to return to it; and the traditional village and the conservative values of society were indirectly declared as a counterbalance to Soviet progressivism and modernization. Rimvydas Šilbajoris (1926–2005), an émigré literary critic, asserts that the literature of Soviet Lithuania, where a traditional world view articulated through modern forms of narrative or poetic structure which created a greater or lesser alternative for Soviet progressivist discourse, is paradoxically avant-garde (essentially it encompasses that which, in this article, is called non-Soviet modernism).33 We can say that it functioned on its own as an Aesopian message. Although in the post-Soviet society that had survived another turning point of modernization, this literature, if it doesn’t have a more universal dimension, loses the basis of social reception and is again viewed as archaic and anachronistic (at least by the younger generation of readers who have a tendency to choose writers who were in the periphery of the field, like those I have already mentioned, Gavelis or Kondrotas). In both cases (successful or non-successful transformations of meaning) literary work written in or interpreted as Aesopian language could be considered, according to the literary sociologist, Rita Felski, as “a non-human actor.” We can pose the question, how does this actor act in one or another context and what happens with the text when the context changes.34 Although the role of the “human actor” is integral in the receptive dynamic of Aesopian language, apparently when the political and social circumstances that form meaning change, the opportunity for a variety of interpretational and self-interpretational manipulations occurs. One example of a radical inversion of interpretation is presented by Rimantas Kmita in the article “Maištas ‘brandaus socializmo’ sąlygomis. Sigito Gedos atvejis” (Rebellion in the context of ‘mature socialism.’ The case of Sigitas Geda). Geda (1943–2008), who had a reputation as a rebel and, as Kmita reveals, actively worked at creating it, not only in his artistic work, but also in his persona. Together with Saulius Šaltenis (born 1945) he wrote a “revolutionary drama”—the play Komunarų gatvė (Komunarų [Defender 33 Rimvydas Šilbajoris, “Avangardo problematika Lietuvos poezijoj,” in Netekties ženklai (Vilnius: Vaga, 1992), 525–43. 34 In her attempt to resolve the antithesis between text and context in literary analysis, Felski proposes the French sociologist and anthropologist, Bruno Latour’s theory of social networks. See Rita Felski, “‘Context Stinks!,’” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 581–88.

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of Communism] street) (it was staged in 1977 which was the celebration of the sixty-year anniversary of the October Revolution). This was probably Geda’s most significant public compromise. Geda was one of the most striking non-Soviet modernists. Later, after independence, re-interpreted in journals, his rebellion was the most significant, and the work, whose manuscript is yet to be found, is given an aura of resistance.35 The text, which actively relied on the resources of official discourse, was, in retrospect, interpreted as having a completely antithetical meaning. Venclova has written about the premise for this situation: Still another tactic was earlier used by many nineteenth-century Russian authors, as well as Heinrich Heine: to say brazenly something directly opposite to what you mean, for example, to praise the secret police in an unbearably sickly-sweet tone, so that the reader grasps the full degree of the author’s dislike. Here Aesopian speech literally coincides with the official language and only the context, e.g., the very name of the author gives the reader a hint of truth.36

This example again very clearly illustrates that Aesopian language is not only a textual but also a contextual and politicized phenomenon. It is created in a social interaction where the agents of the literary field are individualized and appear as persons who accept concrete decisions and create interpretations. It is precisely this individualization that leads to the fact that, according to Venclova, the multi-level and complex machine of totalitarian censorship breaks down frequently37—works that were, in today’s view, rather obvious political allegories are approved while those that don’t have even a whiff of Aesopian language are suppressed. I will provide just one example that shows how differently the censor (as an institution, behind which lie concrete individuals) can interpret a potential Aesopian message. The poet Jonas Juškaitis (born in 1933) in his book Rašytojas ir cenzūra (The writer and censorship) mentions a situation when a poem by Judita Vaičiūnaitė (1937–2001), in which the following lines appeared: “destinies like traffic lights / change colors quickly here—red, yellow, green” was not published in the journal Švyturys because the editor saw in it the

35 Rimantas Kmita, “Maištas ‘brandaus socializmo’ sąlygomis. Sigito Gedos atvejis,” Colloquia 34 (2015): 80–98. 36 Venclova, “The Game,” 190. 37 Ibid., 187.

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“bourgeois” colors of the Lithuanian flag,38 even though within the poem the colors are those of a traffic light, and not the sequence of colors of the Lithuanian flag. And here is Geda’s poem “Lietuvos gimimas” (The birth of Lithuania) that contains the same association of colors with the flag of an independent Lithuania, and because of their sequence,39 and because the title of poem could appeal to the independence of Lithuania, was approved by the censors and published in the poet’s first poetry collection Pėdos (Footsteps, 1966). It is worth noting that the poem appears second in the collection, as if compensating for the first poem that performs the so-called role of the locomotive,40 offering a glimpse of Lenin and Fidel Castro. It is difficult to say today why “Lietuvos gimimas” was published. Was it because of the benevolence of an individual working somewhere down the chain of command in the censor’s office, or because of his inability to recognize a hidden message in a phantasmagoric mythologic scene,41 or maybe because the first poem of the collection dulled the censor’s vigilance. The editor tended to play a major role in these strange situations—the editor who was the least politically engaged, but the most visible cog in the mechanism of censorship. This individual could directly or indirectly support an author and help “push through” a risky text, or, alternately, the editor could recognize a political code and put a stop to the public appearance of a text that had a political subtext (or perhaps recommend corrections or suggest that the text not be published at all). The editor could have seen a political subtext where one did not exist and not seen it in places where it was obvi38 Rašytojas ir cenzūra, 58. 39 The flag of independent Lithuania has three equal yellow, green and red horizontal bars. 40 Texts that extolled official Soviet themes and rhetoric as a gesture of formal loyalty to the system were called ‘locomotives.’ These provided cover for subsequent games with Aesopian language. 41 Geda’s poem begins: a yellow light splashed in the sky and fish swim toward it singing hymns red and green like a hunchbacked crab the Lithuanian land leaps up. (Sigitas Geda, Pėdos [Vilnius: Vaga, 1966], 6). For a comprehensive evaluation of this poem, see Paulius Jevsejevas, “Ezopo kalba kaip semiotinis mechanizmas,” in Tarp estetikos ir politikos, 306–9.

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ously there. And he or she could have recognized it, as though in solidarity with the author, and still could have stopped the publication of a text with an Aesopian message out of fear. After populating the abstract mode of the literary field with concrete figures of its agents and their possible (but also real) activities reconstructed from concrete post-publication histories of censorship, Aesopian language appears to be an ideologically passionate structure. It was supported by the feeling of complicity, which could arouse an almost erotic thrill for a reader of Aesopian language, or the intellectual joy of solving a mystery—like reading a detective novel.42 This demonstrates that Aesopian language is not a meaningful construct formed by the medium of poetics, but a socio-poetic form par excellence. We could consider the socio-poetic form to be the result of a reaction to a sociolinguistic situation. Pierre V. Zima calls the polemic junction of the use of various languages a sociolinguistic situation, a constellation of historic and dynamic discourse where each one articulates the interests of a different social group.43 It is obvious that Aesopian language primarily reacts to the Soviet discourse—polemicizing, rebelling, but at the same time not completely cutting its ties with it. These ties can be formal, used as a screen, although the risk here is that the writer enters enemy territory.

Conclusions The analysis of the phenomenon of Aesopian language allows one, at least in part, to write about the specifics of the field of literature in the context of the Communist regime, solidifying a rather abstract model, whereby the literary field (and culture in general) is directly governed by the field of power and does not have the partial autonomy characteristic of democratic societies. Even though the field of power directly affects the structure of the field of literature, by using political censorship, this structure is neither homogenous (all agents of the field submit to the system), nor binary (some submit to the regime, while others oppose it). Aesopian language, which uses the tools of the official discourse as a screen, attests to the ambivalent relationship of the agents of the field of literature with the field of power, submitting while attempting to dismantle the rules imposed on the field of literature at the same time. The ambivalent relationship with the field of 42 See Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship, 227. 43 Pierre V. Zima, Texte et societé (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 39–46.

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power was characteristic of a large number of writers, but there were also some exceptions: agents of the literary field who were completely obedient to the field of power, in other words, overt collaborators; those who rebelled, that is, dissidents or self-publishing writers (there was not a strong representation of this in the field of Lithuanian literature); and those who tried to write or indirectly criticize the Soviet system and its official discourse as though the Soviet government did not exist; that is, those who established a segment of partial autonomy in the literary field. Although even those writers who used Aesopian language or other means to circumvent taboos did not move uniformly in the ambivalent zone where the fields of power or literature intersect. For example, Jonas Avyžius (1922–1999) in his novel Sodybų tuštėjimo metas (The time of emptied farmsteads, 1970, 1989), which was awarded the Lenin Prize, spoke about the partisan war that took place in postwar Lithuania in a problematic manner, avoiding the use of Soviet propaganda clichés, although the central conception of the hero remained Soviet (the path of a person’s ideological consciousness). The poet Justinas Marcinkevičius (1930–2011), who took on the role of the national bard during the Soviet period, penetrated taboo zones (we can appreciate his plays as a glorification of Lithuania’s past, and his poetry as an expression of national patriotism), although his actual conception of history had ties to the official historiographic discourse,44 and his poetry, at least in part, satisfied the Socialist Realist requirement of national form and socialist content.45 The non-Soviet modernists mentioned in this article were able to create partial autonomies in the Lithuanian literary field, though, of course, they could not avoid gestures of loyalty (for example, redirecting the attention of the censor to the so-called locomotive texts). Analyses of Aesopian language often begin or end with a moral evaluation of the phenomenon, with an indictment of those who participated in the criticized ideological system. We would venture to say that Bourdieu’s theory provides the tools to demonstrate that the practice of this phenomenon reveals the significant complexity of the agents’ position in the literary field. 44 For a more extensive analysis, see Aurimas Švedas, “Justino Marcinkevičiaus drama Mindaugas kaip atminties vieta,” in Tarp estetikos ir politikos, 231–58. 45 In the post-Soviet period, Justinas Marcinkevičius was the subject of diametrically opposed evaluations. He was praised as the national bard, and condemned as a collaborator. See the article by Donata Mitaitė, “The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets, Their Illusions and Choices,” in this book.

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Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. ———. Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992. Casanova, Pascale. La république mondiale des lettres. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999. Dobrenko, Evgeny. The Making of State Writer. Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Felski, Rita. “‘Context Stinks!’” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 581–88. Geda, Sigitas. Pėdos. Vilnius: Vaga, 1966. Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by Thomas E. Sebeok, 350–77. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960. Jevsejevas, Paulius. “Ezopo kalba kaip semiotinis mechanizmas.” In Tarp estetikos ir politikos: Lietuvių literatūra sovietmečiu, edited by Dalia Satkauskytė, 289–311. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015. Kelertas, Violeta. Introduction to “Come into My Time”. Lithuania in Prose Fiction, 1970–90, edited by Violeta Kelertas, 1–42. Urbana and Chicago: Urbana University Press, 1992. ———. “Soviet Censorship in Lithuania 1945–1989.” In vol. 3 of History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope, 125–34. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007. Kmita, Rimantas. Ištrūkimas iš fabriko: Modernėjanti lietuvių poezija XX amžiaus 7–9 dešimtmečiais. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2009. ———. “Maištas ‘brandaus socializmo’ sąlygomis. Sigito Gedos atvejis.” Colloquia 34 (2015): 80–98. Loseff, Lev. On the Beneficence of Censorship. Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature. Munchen: Verlag Otto Sagner in Kommision, 1984. Martinaitis, Marcelijus. Lietuviškos utopijos. Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2003. Nevienareikšmės situacijos. Pokalbiai apie sovietmečio literatūros lauką, edited by Rimantas Kmita. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015. Oral, Taisija. “Lietuva daugiatautės sovietinės literatūros metalauke.” in Tarp estetikos ir politikos: Lietuvių literatūra sovietmečiu, edited by Dalia Satkauskytė, 27–53. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015. Putinaitė, Nerija. Nenutrūkusi styga. Prisitaikymas ir pasipriešinimas sovietinėje Lietuvoje. Vilnius: Aidai, 2007. Rašytojas ir cenzūra, edited by Arvydas Sabonis and Stasys Sabonis. Vilnius: Vaga, 1992. Sandomirskaja, Irina. “‘Bez Stali i Leni’: Aesopian Language and Legitimacy.” In Power and Legitimacy—Challenges from Russia, edited by Per-Arne Bodin, Stefan Hedlund, and Elena Namli, 188–98. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. ———. “Aesopian language: The Politics and Poetics of Naming the Unnameable.” in The Vernaculars of Communism. Language, Ideology and Power in the Soviet Union and

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Eastern Europe, edited by Petre Petrov and Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, 63–87. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Sprindytė, Jūratė. “Vidinio monologo romano kontradikcijos.” In Tarp estetikos ir politikos: Lietuvių literatūra sovietmečiu, edited by Dalia Satkauskytė, 397–421. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015. Strauss, Leo. “Persecution and the Art of Writing.” Social Research, vol. 8, no. 4 (1941): 488–504. Šilbajoris, Rimvydas. “Avangardo problematika Lietuvos poezijoj.” In Netekties ženklai, 525– 43. Vilnius: Vaga, 1992. Švedas, Aurimas. “Justino Marcinkevičiaus drama Mindaugas kaip atminties vieta.” In Tarp estetikos ir politikos: Lietuvių literatūra sovietmečiu, edited by Dalia Satkauskytė, 231–58. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015. Venclova, Tomas. “The Game of the Soviet Censor.” In Forms of Hope, 185–91. Riverdale on Hudson, New York: The Sheep Meadow Press, 1999. Zaborskaitė, Vanda. Tarp istorijos ir dabarties. Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2002. Zalatorius, Albertas. “Už tamsaus lango blykčioja žaibai.” In Literatūra ir laisvė: kritika, esė, pokalbiai, 317–24. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1998. ———. “Žalčio žvilgsnio šaltis ir sugestija.” In Literatūra ir laisvė: kritika, esė, pokalbiai, 304–16. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1998. Zima, Pierre V. Texte et societé. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011.

Vilius Ivanauskas

Between Universalism and Localism The Strategies of Soviet Lithuanian Writers and “Sandwiched” Lithuanian Ethnic Particularism

Introduction Writers played an important role in expressing Lithuanian national identity during the Soviet period. They both legitimized and dismantled the system, not only by developing a Soviet Lithuanian identity, but by helping to form the “Soviet nation” in general. Lithuanian ethnic particularism in the Soviet period, analyzed through activities of writers and the scope of their literature, have embodied expressions of national identity in three stages between titular Lithuanian culture and Soviet national policy: 1. legitimization of the Soviet system and redesigning of the titular culture and the nation itself under Stalinism; 2. recognition of the titular culture on the union level in the late 1950s and 1960s; and 3. an increase of authentic ethnicity and its related deviations during the 1970s and 1980s.1 Several theoretical-methodological aspects must be highlighted. First, the Soviet system succeeded in implementing ethno-federalism, where titular nations are granted some opportunities depending on the degree of

1 Vilius Ivanauskas, Įrėminta tapatybė: Lietuvos rašytojai “tautų draugystės” imperijoje (Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2015), 10.

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trust-based relationships with the Center. Yuri Slezkine,2 Terry Martin,3 P.  G. Roeder4 and others have described the Soviet system as a kind of multi-national empire, constantly shaping national politics, reacting to the dynamics of relations between nations and involving the cultural elite in the process. Second, literature acted like a “window” to observe the formation of Lithuanian ethnic particularism and national processes more broadly during the Soviet era beyond an “engineering of human souls”5 associated with modernistic Soviet projects. Third, these characteristics create space for the viewpoints of Soviet universalism and ethnic particularism, strategies for Lithuanian writers that not only competed but also at times overlapped. Methodologically it allows for the integration of a Center-periphery approach incorporating a diversity of relationships between peripheries and the Center, depending on the level of their intensity. Within ethno-federalism ethnicity was institutionalized via passports, titular nation languages, etc.6 In the Soviet-era writers not only mediated between party (both central and local) and society by disseminating images that came out of ideological agencies to create the “new man,” but implemented Soviet universalisms and ethnic particularisms at the same time,7 and continuously maneuvering between “localized universalism” and “universalized localism.” Here, localism is associated with ethnic particularism, which reflects the culture of the “titular nation,” and can rely on the projection of the “blossoming of the nation” of Leninist national policy. Meanwhile, universalism expresses a shared culture at the All-Union level, claiming common values, principles, and identities. Universalism refers to the intention to strengthen Soviet society and relies on the “rapprochement of nations” (sblizheniye) and the 2 Yury Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414–52. 3 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 4 Philip G. Roeder, “Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization,” World Politics 23, no. 2 (1991): 196–233. 5 Mezhdu molotom i nakoval’ney. Soyuz sovetskikh pisateley SSSR. Dokumenty i komentarii, ed. Z. K. Vodop’yanova et al. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011). 6 For example, contrasts of ethnical policy are presented in the work of Şener Aktürk, comparing regimes of ethnicity and nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey. See Şener Aktürk, Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 7 This proves that “affirmative action,” as discussed by Yury Slezkine and Terry Martins, continues into the post-Stalinist period.

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“merging of nations” (sliyaniye). In reality, the boundaries between the two were blurred and closely intertwined. Using archival documents and interviews with Soviet writers, this article reveals the phenomenon of “sandwiched particularism,” showing the effect of top-down Soviet policies on shaping both universalism and particularism as well as revealing the impact of local interests and strategies in Lithuanian literature from the bottom up.

1. The Stalinist Period Writers played an important role in anchoring Soviet rule in post-war Lithuania. Stalinist culture permeated everything and negatively affected the dynamics of the relationship between various creative areas. Lithuanian literature was not only at a deadlock, it was hardly able to present itself to a larger audience.8 In 1945 and 1946, literature was balancing between adaptation to the era of Stalinism and the “blossoming of the nation,” and local cultural workers hoped to harmonize the new socialist regime with ethno-cultural independence and autonomous ideas and the imagination of intellectuals and cultural figures.9 Still, between 1946 and 1948 during Zhdanov’s campaign,10 the naked truth was revealed: one can try adapting only to be commissioned by the party,11 to “creation of revolution” from above, however, fitting this framework of creative work and understanding of “how to depict this new life of Lithuania” cannot be independently attained and consultations with the party leaders is a must.12 An analysis of writers (e.g., Aleksandras Gudaitis-Guzevičius, Teofilis Tilvytis and others) in the Stalin era reveals several important things. First, cultural workers and the nomenklatura had to absorb images of this 8 Ivanauskas, Įrėminta tapatybė, 33–81. 9 Vladas Sirutavičius, “Sovietizacijos ypatybės Lietuvoje 1945 m. vasarą,” in Stalininis režimas Lietuvoje 1944–1953 m., ed. Renata Laukaitytė (Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2014), 10–32. 10 Galin Tihanov, “Literary Criticism and the Institution of Literature in the Era of War and Late Stalinism, 1941–1953,” in A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism. The Soviet Age and Beyond, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Galin Tihanov (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 169–72. 11 Mindaugas Tamošaitis, Skausmingas praregėjimas: Lietuvių rašytojai Antrojo pasaulinio karo metais ir pokariu (Vilnius: Gimtasis žodis, 2014), 53. 12 “Tarybinės lietuvių literatūros uždaviniai. LKP(b) CK sekretoriaus drg. K. Preikšo pranešimas visuotiniame tarybinių Lietuvos rašytojų susirinkime Vilniuje 1946 m. spalio 1 d.,” Literatūra ir menas, October 13, 1946, 4.

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“new life” being “lowered” from the Center, as imposed by discipline and repressive measures, leaving almost no space for creative and organic ethnic expression (except for attention to façade symbols and elements of the progressive culture of people). The so-called Lithuanian “Dekadas” for literature and art from 1948 and 1954 held in Moscow revealed this schematic approach of Lithuanian literary works, which during Stalinism was much safer than being blamed for nationalism or inappropriate forms of creativity. This situation was responsible not only for the lack of dynamics in literature, but also its ineffectiveness in development and wider presentation of the titular culture of the “Soviet Lithuanian nation” at the local and All-Union levels.

2. The Post-Stalinist Period Under Khrushchev the situation visibly changed. The generation of the sixties13 offered more opportunities for new forms of literature and art. Ideological controllers no longer required such dogmatism and wanted more flexibility to disseminate Soviet ideology. The writer’s talent became much more significant and local literature became more dynamic. Two Lithuanian poets in particular expressed this dynamism. The first was Eduardas Mieželaitis, who was blamed for inappropriate ideological content in his poetry during the zhdanovshchina campaign in 1946, and he had a hard time finding his place in the Stalinist milieu of local writers. However, in the sixties he became a widely acknowledged author not only at the local, but even at the All-Union level. His poem “Man,” for which he received the Lenin Prize in 1962, expressed the universalist idea of the New Soviet man, and met the requirements of Khrushchev’s cosmos era, receiving generous support from the Center and Center authors like Boris Slutsky.14 At this time he became the central figure of Lithuanian “titular culture,” showing that Lithuanian particularism fits the universalist requirements. “Localized universalism” became the initial characteristic associated with Lithuanian particularism and was praised by other authors. Kyrgyz and Kazakh authors highlighted Mieželaitis as an

13 Juliane Furst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 14 Ivanauskas, Įrėminta tapatybė, 160–61.

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example of how to write “white poetry,”15 and in 1974 the famous Russian poet Robert Rozhdestvensky acknowledged that “a generation of young Russian poets were strongly affected by the ‘miezhelaitysatsia’ process.”16 However, Mieželaitis was not only the voice of contemporary local universalism in Lithuania, but he also supported ethnic values, especially as they gained popularity among local audiences at the end of the sixties. He personally memorialized the heritage of such Lithuanian artists as the composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis17 or the poet Maironis. This line, inspired by Mieželaitis, shaped particularism incorporating universal and ethnic components, promoting the latter by seeking wider dissemination among other cultures and the behavior of the writer positioned at the Union level. He succeeded in presenting insufficiently recognized culture, while demonstrating its confluence with the changing world and incorporating new values. Despite his enormous authority, Mieželaitis felt pressured by younger Sixtiers (shestidesyatniki) authors (e.g., Justinas Marcinkevičius, Algimantas Baltakis, etc.), who were more engaged with the ethnic line and soon gained greater recognition and increasingly occupied important positions in the writers’ establishment. The second important poet to discuss would be Justinas Marcinkevičius. Born in 1930, he started his career with universalist values but increasingly turned to ethno-historical themes. His historic dramas (Mindaugas, Mažvydas, and Katedra) at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies received enormous support from local audiences and the nomenklatura.18 He was not recognized at the All-Union level like Mieželaitis, but he was the most recognized poet in Soviet Lithuania from the mid-1960s on. He expressed the line of “universalized localisms” that reflected similar processes supporting ethnic values not only in Lithuania, but also in other republics (e.g., derevenskaya proza). The turn of cultural figures towards greater ethnicity in the 1960s signaled an important change: the historical past and heritage were gradually 15 Interview with literature reviewers S. Karymshakov and S. Tnilabayev and writer B. Zhakieyv, June 9, 2014. 16 Box 30, Folder 1, 78–80, Fund 631, Rossiyskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva, Moscow, Russia. 17 Vytautas Landsbergis, “Tolimas kaimynas,” in Eduardas Mieželaitis: post scriptum. Prisiminimai apie Eduardą Mieželaitį, straipsniai, laiškai, ed. Vladas Braziūnas (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2008), 250–51. 18 Vilius Ivanauskas, “Sovietinis režimas ir kultūrinės nomenklatūros kaita vėlyvuoju sovietmečiu Lietuvoje. Rašytojų aplinkos atvejis,” Politologija 4 (2010): 53–84.

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introduced as having value in themselves, without overly emphasizing current advantages. Changes of ideas and preservation of norms or gradual change were quite clearly visible in the course of conferences of writers or individual meetings and plenums. When assessing the rhetoric of the Writers’ Union meetings, not only is the formal language of reports notable, but also certain dominating ideas. This transformation shaped a multifaceted particularism, where along with the new universalism the stream of authentic ethnicity was also getting stronger, helping “to localize universalism” at certain moments. Importantly, these streams of particularism did not disappear; they co-existed, in certain situations overlapping and affecting each other, together shaping the multifaceted Lithuanian ethnic particularism and internally hosting various deviations. The traditionalist line of escalating Lithuanianness, presented through the prism of heritage and folklore,19 was considered a quite legitimate position in official rhetoric even before perestroika and eventually became the de facto dominating “new ideology” in the local field of writers’ work, actively reacting to the central objectives of homogenization of society, the dangers of Russification making everything uniform and the option of the “merging of nations.” On this basis it strongly engaged in shaping the “grand narrative” of Lithuanian literature (in relation to national policy), oriented towards historicity and ethnic nostalgia. This position partly agreed with the attitudes of the local nomenklatura of the time but superseded it by its attention to the dynamics of forming the titular national culture and resisting the objectives of homogenization. One can observe the reserved attitudes of Marcinkevičius, Baltakis, Jonas Avyžius, and several other writers, and the establishment of a dominating standard, thus diminishing the objective of the “imperial creating Lithuanian” and maintaining the line of Mieželaitis as the external standard of Lithuanian particularism. Internally, however, the line of Marcinkevičius was adhered to. Because of the existing specifics of particularism Mieželaitis himself agreed to localize his personal “universalism,” to keep balancing between the conflicting streams and responding to the existing standard. However, universalism remained an important stream among artists of all kinds. This was also determined by the interventionist central policy, routinized Sovietization,

19 Violeta Davoliūtė, The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).

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and opportunities for mobility or even “entering wider markets,” appropriated by some cultural figures.

3. “Sandwiched Particularism” The situation when Lithuanian authors moved towards Universalist ideas and later adjusted ethno-historic values reveals the dominant trends for shaping and reshaping Lithuanian ethnic particularism and ensuring the balance between the Center’s requirements and local demand. However, the picture looks more complex when examining how local writers tried to promote themselves in the Center, and how local creative deviations dealt with general lines. I describe this as the “sandwiched particularism” model, which explains the constant gravitation of “titular culture” into “All-Union culture,” at the same time leaving space for local interest, manifestations of ethnic particularism, and individual trajectories of cultural elites.

3.1. Gravitation to the All-Union (The Imperial) Level Integration of the national cultures was regulated by the policies of the development of fraternal literatures and the “friendship of nations,” implementation of which very much depended on the actions of local elites. However, in practice this multi-polarity, when societies of different cultural and ethnic color had to reach a similar level of involvement in the imperial lifestyle and share their respective cultures, was difficult to achieve. Lithuanian literature in the post-Stalinist era experienced a breakthrough in its engagement on the Union level. In the 1960s through to the 1980s a dominating group of local writers, led by Mieželaitis, Avyžius, and Marcinkevičius, began more actively participating on the Union level and became more recognizable among the cultural figures and creative intelligentsia of the Union.20 The triumvirate of Marcinkevičius, Maldonis, and Baltakis21 had close personal relationships with the Moscow-based Sixtiers

20 The protocol of USSR Writers’ Unions meeting, September 23, 1980, Box 30, Folder 1, 18–23, Fund 631, Rossiyskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva, Moscow, Russia. 21 More information about the 30s generation can be found in Donata Mitaitė’s article in this book.

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(shestidesyatniki) poets, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Vasily Aksenov, and Andrey Voznesensky.22 Until the end of the USSR they did not achieve significant notability among wider audiences in the Union, although the works of some writers and individually surfacing images of “exotic” and “western Baltics” started anchoring in the collective mind-set. Involvement on the Union level was continuous, and the process was more rapid in the post-Stalinist period, along with the rise of Mieželaitis and recognition of the circle of Marcinkevičus, and Avyžius (who also got the Lenin Prize in 1976) in the Center. The reasons to ensure that Lithuanian literature and some particular works became familiar were both personal, hoping for individual success, and general, understanding that it is important for Lithuanian literature to expand knowledge about itself rather than risk marginalization, which would have affected opportunities for writers and the appreciation within the Republic. However, the dangers of Russification (e.g., the Tashkent conference in 1977) realized by the local cultural elite, and challenges of high subjection to the government from the Center designed certain filters: preference was given to the means of dissemination (translations, publications in Union periodicals, etc.) rather than an actual embrace of the creative environment at the Center. The result also put some brakes on the younger generation of writers, mainly by engaging tools of the Writers’ Union as a platform for participation, thus inhibiting the gravitation of individual authors toward imperial space, although not completely prohibiting it. On the Union level ethnic particularism had become a part of the larger agenda of creating Soviet society, attempting to push principles of the “friendship of nations” toward prospects of a “rapprochement of nations” or even a “merging of nations.” Thus, particular national cultures were linked by their common identity; “fraternal nations” were integrated as “proprietary nations” of the Soviet system. This aim was supported by discursive practices, by expressing clear relationships of power through the use of specific language and employing this language to create the reality of the “friendship of nations in practice,” where hierarchies among the titular nations and unequal relations with the Center, etc. were highlighted. This process was not one-directional: the local party and cultural elite actively participated in developing particularism by supporting the “blossoming of national culture,” not only by coordinating it with the strategies 22 Ivanauskas, “Sovietinis režimas ir kultūrinės nomenklatūros kaita,” 53–84.

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of assimilation of nations supported by the Center, but also experiencing conflicts within these lines (e.g., greater support for the Lithuanian language as a reaction to Russification, or greater promotion of the Lithuanian heritage).

3.2. A Brief Asymmetric Comparison with the Georgian Case Looking at the cases of Georgia and Lithuania, we can see rather different models of formation, very different lines of positioning and preservation thereof in the general background of the Union that in a way express the importance of ethnic particularism alongside elements of the amalgamation of society. Next to emerging “Georgian exoticism” or increased dissemination of Georgian culture on the Union level, perhaps the most important feature has become a rather conservative attitude, compatible with the communist ideology of supporting “Georgianness” (favorable to positioning the titular nationality). The Mercurian behavior of the Georgians and their gravitation toward the Center (the metropolis) was much more intensive (e.g., the generation of Irakli Abashidze, Giorgi Leonidze) and full of confidence that joining the higher level would not mean downgrading Georgian culture nor the merging of cultures. This diaspora culture strengthened the connections of Georgian artists with the Center, heavily integrating some of them into the creative environments of Moscow and Leningrad. This process coincided with the increasing mobility of ethnic Georgians and emigration to the Center (e.g., Bulat Okudzhava lived in Moscow). Noting the commonly valid desire among Lithuanian and Georgian writers to ensure functioning of ethnic particularism, albeit rather unevenly expressed, one may try typologizing these differences, describing “internally oriented Lithuanian authors” and “Centrally gravitating Georgians.”23 This typology is applicable not only in the case of writers, but also to the wider creative environment of both republics. Looking at both cases we may argue that Lithuania had better conditions for developing a cosmopolitan attitude as an ideological divergence than did Georgia. Lithuania enjoyed stronger dynamic ideas in the post-Stalinist period (compared to Georgia), whereas in Georgia writers were more engulfed in an environment of self-control of personal connections, woven into a fairly comprehensive and conservative

23 Ivanauskas, Įrėminta tapatybė, 273–99.

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discourse, which ensured communication of similar ethnic particularism with eventual slight change of forms.

3.3. The Local Level: The Younger Generations In explaining how “titular culture” developed at the local level, one must examine the broader circles of Lithuanian writers. If we look at the generations, which were younger (e.g., Juozas Aputis, Marcelijus Martinaitis, Sigitas Geda) than Mieželaitis and Marcinkevičius, and who started their careers at the end of the sixties, we should note several important characteristics: 1. they attempted to bring more modernism into the literary field; 2. they permanently felt control and discipline from the older generation, and they were continuously kept in a marginal situation; 3. their gravitation to the Center was limited by the boundaries set by Mieželaitis’s and Marcinkevičius’s generation; 4. they continued the path launched by Marcinkevičius, ensuring “universalized localism” and promotion of ethno-historic values, but they opened a broader scale of searching for authenticity, and implemented various deviations in this line. Some deviations in the content of authenticity (e.g., some works of Aputis, Geda, Romualdas Granauskas) clearly entered a peculiar situation of being vne, as described by Alexei Yurchak.24 The mainstream of this new generation had controversial relations with the generation of Marcinkevičius and Baltakis. On the one hand, they experienced pressure and control from their influential colleagues and did not take up significant positions in official institutions; on the other hand, they received recommendations from senior colleagues to join the Writers’ Union and experienced their support in publishing and distributing their writings.25 Although some of their books were criticized and under the surveillance of local censorship (Glavlit), the fact that this generation did not “write for the drawer” reveals that the authors made compromises, corrected their texts and attempted to publish them. They used the possibilities of Aesopian language,26 “found the appropriate form” and obeyed the informal bureaucratic rules.

24 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 25 Although print runs of their books were lower than those of their senior colleagues. 26 Aesopian language is widely discussed in Dalia Satkauskytė’s article in this book.

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For instance, there were situations when Glavlit did not understand the metaphorical expressions of young writers. Martinaitis remembered that his poem, “Kukutis,” was viewed by Glavlit as children’s literature and was therefore approved.27 Different sources illustrated the interpretational character of Soviet censorship.28 As Stephen Lovell observed, central censorship cut some parts of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, published in 1966, but they did not always remove the most suspicious sections,29 leaving some symbolic and controversial parts.30 With the exception of Tomas Venclova, most writers did not join the dissident movement and did not produce samizdat. Underground literature in Lithuania neither copied the model of Moscow intellectuals nor had the same idols. The existing configuration in Soviet Lithuania whereby even opposition authors were part of institutional processes and gained the status of official writers illustrates the fact that the Writers’ Union embodied a particular configuration.31 While the Central and local trends coming from Party regulations after 1968 required stricter control and ideological nurture, the existing structure provided partial restraints, but did not exclude authors who did not fit within official strictures. After the end of the Thaw, when ideology was again no longer open to reinterpretation at the local level,32 they were already a part of the establishment during the epoch of real socialism. They did not take a stand against Central policies; rather they maintained the rhetoric required by the Party. During the Congress (s’ezd) of Writers on May 27–28, 1970, the generation of Baltakis, at that time holding positions in the Writers’ Union establishment and the status of “recognized writers,” clearly distinguished themselves from the youngest generation of writers and poets, who were

27 Interview with poet Marcelijus Martinaitis, Vilnius, December 10, 2011. 28 Solveiga Daugirdaitė, “Draugas redaktorius,” in Nevienareikšmės situacijos. Pokalbiai apie sovietmečio literatūros lauką, ed. Rimantas Kmita (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015), 31–56. 29 Stephen Lovell, “Bulgakov as Soviet Culture,” The Slavonic and East European Review 76, no. 1 (1998): 28–48. 30 Dalia Satkauskytė in her article reveals the paradoxes of similar communication situations. See her article. 31 Vilius Ivanauskas, “Lithuanian Writers and the Establishment during Late Socialism: The Writers’ Union as a Place for Conformism or Escape,” Lithuanian Historical Studies 15 (2011): 51–78. 32 Judson R. Mitchell, “A New Brezhnev Doctrine: The Restructuring of International Relations,” World Politics 30, no. 3 (1978): 366–90.

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constantly making mistakes and did not take the “correct position.”33 In the transcripts of the Congress, we can observe a collective ritual in which the privileged generation collectively criticized the younger generation, which according to them was not socially responsible, even though the younger generation was more educated. Chairman of the Writers’ Union, Mieželaitis condemned the artistic expression of some young writers, emphasizing that their heroes were far from the place “where people really work.” Baltakis mentioned that some young writers “seemed too snobbish and followed fashion without showing appropriate respect to the established writers of Soviet Lithuanian literature.”34 The growing tension between generations about literature and the role of the writer continued for several years. In the spring of 1972, Romas Kalanta self-immolated in an act of nationalist protest in Kaunas, provoking local demonstrations. Almost simultaneously, Tomas Venclova was not accepted into the Writers’ Union and the famous local critic, Vytautas Kubilius was suspended for an “incorrect” article. Kubilius, who was recognized for his talent and adherence to the literary establishment, described his continuously ambivalent relationship with the system in his diary. Relating the situation when his article was published in the magazine Nemunas, after which he was widely attacked within the Party for his critical position toward a famous poet Kostas Kubilinskas and the trends of contemporary literature, Kubilius expressed surprise that his colleagues actively opposed him and supported Party officials. His activities were suspended for some time and his diary notes revealed the fear and despair of the cultural administration: I see clearly that I am finishing my career. Finishing not because of my old age, weariness or creative emptiness, but in struggle. It is because of my style. The cruelty of those communist writers goes so far that nobody doubts that it is normal to throw stones at me. It happened after I tried to be the advocate of their creative uncertainty and searchings in the eyes of government.35

The third generation of young writers was continuously in ambiguous situations: they attempted to launch new aesthetic boundaries, were disciplined

33 The protocol of the Congress of Soviet Lithuanian Writers’ Union, May 27–28, 1970, Box 34, Folder 1, 566, Literature and Art archive, Vilnius, Lithuania. 34 Interview with poet Algimantas Baltakis, Vilnius, July 21, 2010. 35 Vytautas Kubilius, Dienoraščiai 1945–1977, ed. Janina Žėkaitė, Jūratė Sprindytė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2006), 366.

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by older generations, made compromises, and attempted to adjust to the milieu of local writers.

3.4. The Local Level: Other Ethnic Groups The peculiar effect of the “friendship of nations” is revealed in the relationship between Lithuanian literature and that of other nations living in Soviet Lithuania. Through the analysis of opportunities presented to Polish, Russian, and Jewish writers living in Lithuania, one notices certain unevenness: local Russian literature had more significant institutional support, because of Russian’s status as a lingua franca, the strengthening phenomenon of the Russian-speaking population (e.g., due to migration), and opportunities to perform an instrumental role (translations, critical reviews, etc.) ensuring wider dissemination of Lithuanian literature. Local Russian authors like Pavel Gelbak and Igor Kashnicki took on significant positions in the local establishment; they were close to the authoritative domestic writers, but by supporting local Russian culture they also followed the path of the dominant local lines, ensuring the promotion of Lithuanian authors (e.g., via the journal Litva literaturnaya published in Russian or via the Center’s journals) instead of creating strong local Russian literature. Polish literature, after the post-war relocation of the Polish intelligentsia to Poland,36 experienced a significant downfall and remained on an amateur level, with weak institutional support, although in the later years of the Soviet era, it was possible to speak of some recovery (but not of a breakthrough). While the representation of Jewish culture was limited at the local level, the individual strategies of Jewish writers signal several important questions: 1. the trajectory Jewish writers shape when their own culture faces a lack of legitimacy; 2. how Lithuanian ethnic particularism determined their choices; 3. what was the space for local Jewish writers to proceed to their gravitation to the Center (the imperial or All-Union) level. A brief analysis of five Jewish authors demonstrates the large contrasts between their individual trajectories. From late Stalinism Jewish culture received weak support from both the All-Union and local level (and even experienced antisemitism). However, during Khrushchev’s Thaw there was 36 Vitalija Stravinskienė, Tarp gimtinės ir Tėvynės: Lietuvos SSR gyventojų repatriacija į Lenkiją (1944–1947, 1955–1959 m.) (Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2011).

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certain room to speak about the Jewish tragedy (e.g., Yevgeny Yevtushenko in Russia or Icchokas Meras in Lithuania), but this speech was continuously controlled, especially after Jewish writers started their return to Israel in the seventies. In Lithuania, we could see that local Jewish authors mostly chose maneuvering instead of sticking to one dominant path. By examining the careers of five Jewish writers—Hiršas Ošerovičius, Jokūbas Josadė, Icchokas Meras, Mykolas Sluckis, and Grigory Kanovich37—and their different relationships to the Lithuanian literary field we can see that Soviet-era Jewish writers’ career paths reflect the considerable tensions felt by writers who do not belong to the dominant culture, when experiencing Soviet ethno-politics, and several areas where they could gain more legitimacy for their cultural works. For instance, Josadė, who was active under Stalinism, maneuvered between creating images of the New Man, but also writing in Yiddish, especially later in life. He and Ošerovičius chose to participate within the Lithuanian literary field and within the rather fragmented “islands” of Yiddish literature. Sluckis’s choice was fully assimilationist, using strategies to adjust to Lithuanian literature, and belong to the dominant groups led by Mieželaitis or Marcinkevičius. Meras expressed a partly assimilationist strategy, writing in Lithuanian and feeling strongly that he was part of the Lithuanian writers’ milieu (however, after his settlement in Israel in 1972 his literary works were removed from official literature), but finding a form to write about the Holocaust in the sixties.38 The most pronounced was the case of Kanovich, who maneuvered between the Lithuanian and Russian literary fields, which both were legitimate and offered artists greater possibilities for recognition. By participation at the local level and writing scripts for local theatre and cinema, he was acknowledged as a local writer, but at the same time writing in Russian and choosing historical Jewish topics,39 he ensured imperial behavior (similar to Mieželaitis), gaining support from Jewry at the All-Unions level, as an author writing in Russian, making contacts with Central figures,40 37 Vilius Ivanauskas, “Lietuvos žydų rašytojų trajektorijos sovietmečiu: tarp pritapimo respublikoje ir dalyvavimo imperijoje,” Colloquia 35 (2015): 51–71. 38 Icchokas Meras, Lygiosios trunka akimirką (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2006), translated as Icchokas Meras, Stalemate, trans. Jonas Zdanys (New York: Other Press, 2005). 39 Grigorijus Kanovičius, Kvailių ašaros ir maldos (Vilnius: Vaga, 1985); Grigorijus Kanovičius, Ir nėra vergams rojaus (Vilnius: Vaga, 1990). 40 M. Bleiman’s letter to Grigory Kanovich, October 29, 1964, Fund 3655/202, Personal fund of writer Grigory Kanovich, Fund 3655, The Archive of State Archive of Vilnius Jewish museum of Gaon, Vilnius, Lithuania.

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actively using his cultural and social capital being promoted at various levels. Kanovich’s model of the Jewish writer / artist’s participation in the empire is the most marked embodiment of the Soviet-era Jewish intellectual’s multi-layered identity. The situation of writers from ethnic minorities demonstrates not only the opportunities they had, but also that domination of the titular culture (Lithuanian) in the republic was very visible. Local leaders had enough instruments collected from the ethno-federalist structure to preserve this superiority and to impose certain acts of discipline, limiting undesired participation.

Conclusions 1. Lithuanian writers shaped and transformed Lithuanian titular national culture and developed Lithuanian particularism in the Soviet era. This particularism gradually evolved (except for the Stalinist period) not only as imposition of ideological requirements from the Center or their harmonization with the local nomenklatura, but also as a fairly multifaceted and dynamic process. In this process, along with ideological policy from the Center and the “friendship of nations” as an integrating and gradually homogenizing element of Soviet society, a serious role was played by the interests and attitudes of the local cultural elite and its reaction to the priorities of the local nomenklatura, the factor of the society of the republic and sharing of views with artists from other republics; also tensions in the sphere of culture between Soviet universalism, the praxis of homogenization of society and the element of locality, shifts towards expressions of ethno-cultural authenticity and the rise of new dominating narratives. 2. Writers of Soviet Lithuania were active participants in the construction of Soviet modernization, being actively involved in the formation of Lithuanian ethnic particularism and its presentation in the field of the politics of internationalization (within the Soviet bloc), and with time more and more helping the advancement of Lithuanian national identity, which was shaped as being more “internally directed” and closed (rather than visible on the Union level).

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3. In the Stalinist period one can see that under pressure (e.g.,  zhdanovshchina) Lithuanian particularism was not fully expressed, and Lithuanian literature appeared to be at an impasse. During the post-Stalinist era one can observe a more notable turn towards the development of Soviet universalism that coincided with increasing participation in the empire that helped further “legitimization” of Lithuanian titular culture, presenting it through wider exposure to universalism, which in turn had to be followed by the increased maneuvering of writers in the channels of imperial “friendship of nations.” After the Soviet universalism of the sixties and the seventies there was a shift toward ethnic nostalgia. Both universalist and ethnic views shaped Lithuanian particularism, ensuring integration into the All-Union level and adjustment to local conditions at the same time. 4. The trajectories of poets Mieželaitis and Marcinkevičius reflect the intertwining streams of “localized universalism” and “authenticity” as well as the tensions between them. Universalism in the period of Khrushchev’s Thaw helped to legitimize Soviet Lithuanian culture (namely, literature), whereas the stream of “authenticity” at the end of the sixties and seventies provided weight and color to Lithuanian culture of the Soviet period. By supporting the “blossoming of nations,” while distancing itself from the “rapprochement of nations” and especially the “merging of nations,” it tried to limit and localize universalism and expressions of modernity, and to include and maintain a newly developing city culture within particularism. Because of this tension, continuing Soviet modernization did not become the “significant other” to the line of “authenticity.” On the contrary, modernization was to be included in the cosmology of Lithuanian particularism where conflicts between the two deviations were in existence but not of great significance. The most important “significant other” was one of the vectors of Central national policy, supporting the homogenization of society and leading toward the prospect of the “merging of nations.” Both authors tried to balance “universalism” and “authenticity,” albeit in different ways: Mieželaitis appropriated the strategy of active maneuvering on the Union level (as also adopted by Kanovich), while emphasizing the significance of one’s roots in the increasingly mobile Soviet world (e.g., the metaphor

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of “home is here”). At the same time Justinas Marcinkevičius, whose strategy was adopted by the majority of artists, prioritized existence in the local space and writing about it. He generally demonstrated an internally oriented attitude, although it could be open to wider participation as much as was required by the “friendship of nations” concept, his high status, and his desire to enter wider circles of readership. 5. The comparative perspective used in this research demonstrates that Lithuanian particularism was not favorable toward the formation of Lithuanian individuals indifferent to their local space, gravitating toward the metropolis or marking the diaspora with the identity of an “imperial Lithuanian” or an “imperial Lithuanian author,” and did not reach the intensity of formation another titular culture—the “imperial Georgian” underwent. However, Soviet universalism, as a factor affecting the local cultural establishment, maintained important positions throughout the entire Soviet period via established Sovietization, dissemination of Soviet standards, and a constant focus on the creation of Soviet society and maintenance of commonality, being continuously present both as a threat realized by artists of all kinds and as a pragmatic opportunity. 6. “Sandwiched particularism” illustrates the constant gravitation to the All-Union level and adaptation of Soviet universalism at the same time reacting to local demand and supporting expressions of ethnic particularism, creating certain lines and boundaries for local writers. Writers of the younger generation (e.g., Martinaitis, Geda, Aputis), and of other ethnic groups illustrate the certain discipline and rules of maneuvering in the local cultural establishment. The Writers’ Union was also transformed in comparison with the earlier period of its activities in the Stalin era. In that Union there was space both for conformity and maneuvering. The system itself had a strong mechanism of control that protected not only (general) ideological objectives, but also ones rooted in localism. The growing influence of national ideology in literature became significant not only in “diluting” or replacing communist content, or promoting mobilization of national identity in society, but also as a tool for creating strategies for individual authors, finding their niche and exclusivity in the Writers’ Union and in the literature of the time.

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Bibliography Daugirdaitė, Solveiga. “Draugas redaktorius.” In Nevienareikšmės situacijos. Pokalbiai apie sovietmečio literatūros lauką, edited by Rimantas Kmita, 31–56. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015. Davoliūtė, Violeta. The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Furst, Juliane. Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Ivanauskas, Vilius. Įrėminta tapatybė: Lietuvos rašytojai “tautų draugystės” imperijoje. Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2015. ———. “Lietuvos žydų rašytojų trajektorijos sovietmečiu: tarp pritapimo respublikoje ir dalyvavimo imperijoje.” Colloquia 35 (2015): 51–71. ———. “Lithuanian Writers and the Establishment during Late Socialism: The Writers’ Union as a Place for Conformism or Escape.” Lithuanian Historical Studies 15 (2011): 51–78. ———. “Sovietinis režimas ir kultūrinės nomenklatūros kaita vėlyvuoju sovietmečiu Lietuvoje. Rašytojų aplinkos atvejis.” Politologija 4 (2010): 53–84. Kanovičius, Grigorijus. Ir nėra vergams rojaus. Vilnius: Vaga, 1990. ———. Kvailių ašaros ir maldos. Vilnius: Vaga, 1985. Kubilius, Vytautas. Dienoraščiai 1945–1977, edited by Janina Žėkaitė and Jūratė Sprindytė. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2006. Landsbergis, Vytautas. “Tolimas kaimynas.” In Eduardas Mieželaitis: post scriptum. Prisiminimai apie Eduardą Mieželaitį, straipsniai, laiškai, edited by Vladas Braziūnas, 250–51. Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2008. Lovell, Stephen. “Bulgakov as Soviet Culture.” The Slavonic and East European Review 76, no. 1 (1998): 28–48. Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Meras, Icchokas. Lygiosios trunka akimirką. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2006. Mezhdu molotom i nakoval’ney. Soyuz sovetskikh pisateley SSSR. Dokumenty i komentarii, edited by Z. K. Vodop’yanova, T. Domracheva, and L. Babaeva. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011. Mitchell, Judson R. “A New Brezhnev Doctrine: The Restructuring of International Relations.” World Politics 30, no. 3 (1978): 366–90. Roeder, Philip G. “Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization.” World Politics 23, no. 2 (1991): 196–233. Sirutavičius, Vladas. “Sovietizacijos ypatybės Lietuvoje 1945 m. vasarą.” In Stalininis režimas Lietuvoje 1944–1953 m., edited by Renata Laukaitytė, 10–32. Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2014. Slezkine, Yuri. “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414–52.

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Stravinskienė, Vitalija. Tarp gimtinės ir Tėvynės: Lietuvos SSR gyventojų repatriacija į Lenkiją (1944–1947, 1955–1959 m.). Vilnius: Lietuvos istorijos instituto leidykla, 2011. Tamošaitis, Mindaugas. Skausmingas praregėjimas: Lietuvių rašytojai Antrojo pasaulinio karo metais ir pokariu. Vilnius: Gimtasis žodis, 2014. “Tarybinės lietuvių literatūros uždaviniai. LKP(b) CK sekretoriaus drg. K. Preikšo pranešimas visuotiniame tarybinių Lietuvos rašytojų susirinkime Vilniuje 1946 m. spalio 1 d.” Literatūra ir menas, October 13, 1946. Tihanov, Galin. “Literary Criticism and the Institution of Literature in the Era of War and Late Stalinism, 1941–1953.” In A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism. The Soviet Age and Beyond, edited by Evgeny Dobrenko, Galin Tihanov, 169–72. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

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Nerija Putinaitė

Atheist Autobiography Politics, the Literary Canon, and Restructured Experience

Introduction Atheist autobiographies as a means of propaganda were politically approved in 1963 at the earliest. One of the CC LCP (Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Lithuanian SSR) plenums of the year was intended to discuss the “condition of scientific atheist propaganda.” The Plenum specified atheist autobiographies as a recommended measure for atheist propaganda: “It is necessary to publish more stories [told] by former believers.”1 Already before the Plenum atheist autobiography was appreciated as a good practice of propaganda. The Plenum of the CC LCP only gave it unequivocal political backing. The first model autobiography in Lithuania that initiated the phenomenon was a book by ex-priest Jonas Ragauskas called Ite, missa est! published in 1960.2 In the book he told about his personal path to becoming a non-believer. The following year a new edition of the book was issued because of its popularity. At the beginning of 1962 the daily newspaper of the CC LCP Tiesa (The truth) was already urging its readers to share their stories about becoming atheists.3 The newspaper opened a column 1 Resolution “Už marksistinės-lenininės pasaulėžiūros pergalę,” February 1963, in Nutarimai ideologiniais klausimais (Vilnius: Laikraščių ir žurnalų leidykla, 1968), 16. 2 Jonas Ragauskas, Ite, missa est! (Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1960). The title of the book comes from the last phrase uttered by the priest at the end of the Catholic Mass “Go, the Mass is Over.” 3 Steponas Miltenis, “Mano kelias į ateizmą,” Tiesa, January 27, 1962, 4.

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entitled, “Kaip aš nustojau tikėjęs” (How I ceased believing). It regularly published stories sent by ordinary people (henceforth called “the peoples’ autobiographies”). Analogous columns also appeared in regional dailies, in atheist broadcasts in radio and television. The Tiesa column was a regular one, filled with autobiographies sent by people from all over Lithuania. Manuscripts preserved in the archives4 indicate that the people’s stories publicized were not faked by active propagandists. In about 1965 the wave of atheist stories decreased. However, the atheist autobiographies functioned as an inductive and practical means of atheization of society until the end of the Soviet period. Yet 1985 saw the publication of a collection of a hundred brief people’s atheist autobiographies, called Mano mokytojas—gyvenimas (Life is my teacher). The stories were collected during special expeditions to collect this kind of local lore. Eventually ex-priests and ex-monks, who were occasionally or regularly engaged in atheist propaganda, also published their own atheist autobiographies. Even ex-clergymen who denounced their priesthood many years before the publication of Ite, missa est! wrote and told their stories. The autobiography became a must for priests who subsequently denounced the priesthood. Worth mentioning are the Didžioji iliuzija (The great illusion, 1963) by Stasys Markonis, the selection of autobiographies Anapus vienuolyno sienų (Behind the walls of the monastery, 1966), Adomo Šerno priešmirtinis laiškas (The deathbed letter of Adomas Šernas, 1971) by Adomas Šernas, Vienuolis ir tikėjimas (The monk and faith, 1974) by Bronius Jauniškis, Žemės šauksmas (The call of the Earth, 1979) by Algimantas Žilinskas, Peržengę kryžkeles (Beyond the crossroads 1982) by Jauniškis, Kryžius be nukryžiuotojo (The cross without the crucified one, 1987) by Stasys Bataitis, etc.5 There were altogether about twenty stories published as separate books. At least a part of the atheist autobiographies was considered “literature” in the narrow sense of the word. Even before the publication of Ite, missa est! Ragauskas himself called the book a “novel of an autobiographical nature.”6 4 The part of the pool of manuscripts that was sent to Tiesa and to the radio broadcast “Ateistų radijo klubas” (later “Akiračiai”) can be found in the archive of the Soviet Lithuanian Museum of Atheism (Archives of the National Museum of Lithuania). 5 Stasys Markonis, Didžioji iliuzija (Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1963); Stasys Bataitis, Kryžius be nukryžiuotojo (Vilnius: Šviesa, 1987); Bronius Jauniškis, Vienuolis ir tikėjimas (Vilnius: Mintis, 1974). 6 Jonas Ragauskas’s letter to Alfons Sukovskis, July 3, 1954, Fund MLM ER1 18602, Archives of Maironis Lithuanian Literature Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania.

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Atheist Autobiography    NERIJA PUTINAITĖ

After its success he was awarded the literary State Prize of the Lithuanian Republic (1960) and accepted to the Writers’ Union of the LSSR. Other authors of published autobiographies were not members of the Writers’ Union, but their stories were taken as “literature” (essays, memoirs, etc.); sometimes they were called “prose writers,” as in the case of Jauniškis. The use of these autobiographies reshaped the practice of propaganda activities. The propagation of scientific materialism was used as a “classic” means against religion. On the other hand, ex-priests and ex-monks who had already been working as propagandists began to hold atheist lectures structured around a personal story about becoming a non-believer instead of the criticism of religion from the viewpoint of scientific materialism. The atheist autobiography, which focused on human personal experiences and the transformation of the writer’s values as revealed in personal memoirs, resonated with the spirit of Nikita Khrushchev’s epoch. The literature of the Thaw concentrated on “sincerity,” literary narration turned from the position of the detached spectator toward personally experienced historical events, and politically corrupted national memory was substituted by personal history.7 Next we will discuss how the atheist autobiography functioned as literature as well as a means of atheization politics.

Effective Measures of Atheization The creation of the new man in Lithuania was first of all based on bringing forth a non-believer. An additional political goal of atheization in Lithuania was to isolate the Catholic Church, which the local authorities considered to be its main political rival, from society.8 The successful reshaping of the people’s world view was one of the political priorities of the leadership of the LCP. To create a society of non-believers the Party looked for effective means that would work in practice. After the war, during the time of Stalin, the political measures taken were not so much propaganda as direct repression of the Church and its believers. Priests were persecuted and deported, many 7 Marina Balina, “Prose after Stalin,” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Marina Balina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 154–55. 8 See more about this in my book, Nerija Putinaitė, Nugenėta pušis: ateizmas kaip asmeninis apsisprendimas tarybų Lietuvoje (Vilnius: Lietuvių katalikų mokslo akademija, Naujasis Židinys-Aidai, 2015).

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churches were closed, and all religious orders were prohibited. The radical anti-clerical literature that featured images of priests (and the Church) as debauched, deceitful, exploiters, criminals, and even as bloodthirsty men was published.9 With the Thaw came more activities connected with education in the Marxist-Leninist doctrinal concept of religion as a superstition that must be eradicated by scientific materialist knowledge. The ideologues struggled to inculcate criticism of religion into doctrine by severely disciplining its propagandists, by knocking down the “wrong” elements of the interpretation of religion in their lectures and texts presented for the “Society of Knowledge” (the Lithuanian branch was eventually named Žinija) and in other propaganda texts. The propagandists were foremost criticized for their atheist attitudes as entirely anti-clerical and anti-Catholic: that they directed their critique of religion against priests instead of criticizing religion as a “form of social consciousness” and religious superstitions, and that they attacked the Catholic Church as a particular organization, instead of unveiling the activity of the Church as a supporter of the class of exploiters. In their activities the lecturers were required to follow the strict letter of a doctrinal critique of religion. However, doctrinal atheist propaganda was of little interest to the people. The lectures of instruction in the atheist scientific materialist word view were attended unenthusiastically. In the late fifties, the leading ideologues of the LCP had a clear view of the situation and understood that doctrinal measures were not being successful in instilling a non-religious world view. They were seriously concerned with finding “effective means” to distract the society from religious practice. Secretary of the CC of LCP Vladas Niunka in one of the conferences illustrated the situation with a picture of a woman collective farmer who was so impressed by Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space that she hung his portrait next to the images of the saints.10 The doctrine of scientific materialism would suggest that the image of Gagarin should not leave room for saints. Leading ideologues looked for more effective practice, and they identified the atheist autobiographical story about becoming a non-believer as one. 9 The best example of the collection of various literature is “In the Battle against Clericalism,” Lietuvių literatūra kovoje prieš klerikalizmą: literatūrinis rinkinys, ed. Kostas Korsakas (Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1951). 10 Vladas Niunka, “Ką atskleidžia buvusių tikinčiųjų laiškai,” Tiesa, August 1, 1962, 3.

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The “effectiveness” of autobiography was appreciated much more than its keeping to the letter of the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. The priest Ragauskas, the author of the first model atheist autobiography, publicly renounced the priesthood in 1948 and started atheist propaganda activity. In the early 1950s he had fallen into the bad graces of the authorities, because his propaganda texts were classified as merely anti-clerical and anti-Catholic. In 1954, the publication and circulation of his atheist brochures were discontinued; his activity as propaganda lecturer was strictly limited. As a consequence, he subsisted very poorly. At this time, he hit on the idea to write an autobiographical book. Through the mediation of friends, the Lithuanian daily newspaper Komjaunimo tiesa (The truth of the Komsomol) started publishing the separate pieces of his new book in the summer of 1959. The editors soon discovered a sudden increase in the readership of Komjaunimo tiesa, which beforehand had not been in high demand, because of interest in Ragauskas’s story. A year later his novel was published as a book, titled Ite, missa est! The next year it was reprinted. In 1963 the fourth edition of the book was already being readied. The general interest in Ragauskas’s autobiography was a very important factor that stimulated the political authorities in Lithuania to rate it as acceptable for criticizing religion. Ragauskas did not abandon his anti-clerical and anti-Catholic attitudes. However, the autobiographic form rendered these attitudes tolerable. He told about his personal experiences, about religious practices that he personally performed, about priests whom he met, about the personal transformation of his world view that he underwent. Personal literary narration was interesting to the people, and the authorities accepted it as propaganda in spite of its deviation from strict doctrinal requirements. Ragauskas’s way to convert a believer into an atheist was politically accepted as a model for internalization of atheism. Ite, missa est! as the first model autobiography of becoming a non-believer (or an atheist), as well as the later autobiographies, did not comply with the scientific Marxist doctrine in several respects. As mentioned previously, they were characteristically anti-clerical and anti-Catholic. Loss of faith in God comes not from scientific knowledge of the world, but from personal life experience, existential upheavals, and traumas. The Ragauskas story of transformation starts with the sentimental childhood religiosity that was implanted by his family. His first doubts appear during studies in the seminary. Later they get more profound

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regarding the rules of ecclesiastic life. With a special permission he reads atheist and materialist literature, but this reading only deepens his uncertainty, drawn from personal observation even further. His enthusiasm as a young priest and his desire to serve people collides with the immoral behavior of some of the priests, their hypocrisy and pragmatic approach to the priesthood. Subsequently he comes to the conclusion that the Church as an organization is also not perfect, because it sets requirements (such as celibacy) that contradict human nature. Eventually he gets disappointed with the Church and its priests, but he takes on a personal priestly mission, because he still has a strong faith in God. At the end his faith in God is destroyed by a very intense personal traumatic experience. Ragauskas discusses the execution of Jews during the Second World War that took place close to the church where he served as a priest. From his presbytery he could hear shootings and shouting almost every day and started to blame God for His indifference toward evil, the suffering of innocent people, and the injustice in the world. As he put it: together with the people “my religious faith was also shot; if it was not killed on the spot, then it was fatally injured.”11 Ragauskas did indeed read atheist books. Yet the personal traumatic experience made the strongest effect on his faith rather than the books. On several occasions he confesses that by the time of his public renouncement of faith in 1948, he had not “mastered the Marxist explanation of religion.”12 His way of transformation toward the condition of a non-believer was paved by life experience. Even more strikingly, the traumatic experience is highlighted in the poet Justinas Marcinkevičius’s autobiographical episode in his Publicistinė poema (Publicist poem, 1961). There he tells about the death of his mother, and her son’s reflection on God’s silence in the face of his loss. The narration is probably deliberately naive: seeing his mother dead the child gives God “a chance” to resurrect his mother, and even sets a deadline. Nothing happens: “The miracle didn’t occur. / Mother died, and God did too.”13 The traumatic experience as a central event in atheist conversion is characteristic of other autobiographies as well. Another aspect of atheist autobiographies that does not fit into atheist doctrine is that the atheist conversion tends to remain incomplete. The 11 Ragauskas, Ite, missa est!, 274. 12 Ibid., 465. 13 Justinas Marcinkevičius, Poemos: Siena, Publicistinė poema (Vilnius: Vaga, 1972), 160.

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person becomes a non-believer, but he/she does not become an active atheist or at least a person who would have a strong materialist world view. In contrast, the stories of religious conversion as a rule are complete. The person renounces his/her former pagan beliefs or world views after he/she discovers the new (Christian) faith as a new relation to God. Marxist doctrine puts the atheist conversion in a similar way: the person acquires a new scientific world view that leaves no place for religious belief. The Party program affirmed by the 22nd Congress of the CP of the USSR in 1961 among other topics speaks about the education of a citizen who would be ideologically committed to communism. Educating people “in the spirit of the scientific materialist world view” by means of science revealing the erroneousness of religious explanation of the world14 is presented as a main antidote against religious superstitions. Lithuanian atheist conversion does not follow from attainment of the scientific world view. In model autobiographies, as well as in those written by ordinary people, one tells the personal story about “liberation” from religion. Sometimes the liberation is understood as coming back to the authentic self that was hidden under the socially imposed cover of religion. Ragauskas called the condition he achieved as liberation “from religious fraud,”15 and also as “great relief ” felt every time, when he realizes that he is not a priest any more. Stasys Markonis relates that after closing “the doors of a mystic world, I felt myself a newly born, happy man.”16 The episode of the death of Marcinkevičius’s mother ends with the contemplation of the meaning of the distressing occurrence: “with her death she liberated me from god. / Maybe it’s good that no miracle happened.”17 In any case the stories clearly do not tell about getting the new materialist world view, and it is a very important peculiarity of most of Lithuanian atheist autobiographies. At the same time atheist autobiographies were appearing in Soviet Russia. Evgraf Duluman wrote an autobiography, Pochemu ya perestal verit’ v boga (Why I ceased believing in god, 1957)18 that received a strong 14 TSKP XXII suvažiavimo medžiaga (Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1962), 359. 15 Ragauskas, Ite, missa est!, 484. 16 Markonis, Didžioji iliuzija, 116. 17 Marcinkevičius, Poemos, 161. 18 Evgraf Duluman, Pochemu ya perestal verit’ v boga. Rasskaz byvshego kandidata bogosloviya (Moscow: CK VLKSM “Molodaya gvardiya,” 1957).

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response in society. The Russian Orthodox ex-clergyman from Estonia Aleksandr Osipov, wrote his own Put’ k duchovnoy svobode (The path to spiritual freedom, 1960).19 The autobiography of Duluman affected people in a similar way to that of Ragauskas in Lithuania: it was reproduced in numerous contexts.20 However, the difference in content is considerable. For model Russian autobiographies scientific knowledge is the most important factor leading to firm atheist convictions. The partiality of conversion is even clearer in peoples’ autobiographies. The ultimate point of the renunciation of faith is marked not by a new set of convictions, but by a specific existential condition. The typical feeling is one of harmony and relief: “peacefulness,” “a brightened consciousness,”21 liberation from fear,22 the ability to find delight in simple everyday matters (“today my husband and I have a nice apartment, jobs that we enjoy”23), etc. The person renounces his faith, but he does not become an expressive adherent of a new world view. The ideologue Niunka, while talking about peoples’ autobiographies, regrets that they do not reveal the further development of their world view. Their writers end with getting rid of religious superstitions. Niunka points out that the aim of atheist propaganda is not merely to destroy religious images, but “to aid working people in nurturing the scientific world view.”24 Ideologues regularly discussed the problem of the “half-atheist.” Two decades later, at the beginning of the eighties, the attitudes of indifference of most members of society, especially of the youth, were indicated as the most significant problem in the society’s world view. The indifferent person has no solid world view, neither religious nor soviet. The book Ateizmas ir dabartis (Atheism and the present, 1983), which analyzed relevant 19 Aleksandr A. Osipov, Put’ k duchovnoy svobode (rasskaz byvshego bogoslova) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye izdaniye politicheskoy literatury, 1960). 20 Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, “‘A Sacred Space Is Never Empty’: Soviet Atheism, 1954– 1971” (PhD diss., University of California, 2010), 137. 21 Letter of KN, No. 151, January 22, 1964, Fund “Nustojusiųjų tikėti laiškai,” Inv. 2, Archives of the Soviet Lithuania Atheism museum in archives of the National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius. 22 Letter no. 65, January 5, 1961, Fund “Nustojusiųjų tikėti laiškai,” Inv. 2, 4, Archives of the Soviet Lithuania Atheism museum in archives of the National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius. 23 Broadcast “Ateistų radijo klubas,” December 14, 1965, Fund AM GEK 21503, R 2354, 3, Archives of the Soviet Lithuania Atheism museum in the archives of the National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius. 24 Vladas Niunka, “Ką atskleidžia buvusių tikinčiųjų laiškai.”

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problems, dedicated a special chapter to the problem of “indifference as a stage in the process of formation of a person’s atheist attitudes.”25 The Lithuanian political means of atheization led to the development of a person who had lost his religious world view, but did not acquire the scientific materialist one. As one of the measures taken atheist autobiographies contributed greatly to the result. To sum up, Ragauskas’s atheist autobiography became a model autobiography in spite of its obvious non-compliance with the doctrine: its anti-clericalism, anti-Catholicism, its lack of a basis of the scientific materialist world view, and only partial conversion. The personal story presented in the form of a literary narration gained popularity in society and stimulated the authorities to appreciate autobiography as an effective measure. Literary narrative as a means of atheist propaganda was used as a complementary component of or even as a substitute for a doctrine based on the scientific materialist Marxist world view that was of little interest for society and had a poor impact on its religiosity. This supports Jochen Hellbeck’s thesis that “Soviet revolutionary practice was not repressive, but productive” and that by means of autobiographical reflection it made “Soviet citizens … think of themselves and act as conscious historical subjects,”26 and demonstrates its broader application. As we saw, atheist autobiography helped the Soviet political practice become productive in contrast to education in scientific materialism that was not accepted by the population as a repressive measure. Atheist autobiographies indicate that at least some of the literature in Khrushchev’s time functioned as a supplement to the doctrine, as a practical measure to instill the political aims of creating the new man and transforming society.

Canonic Plot, Model Character, and Variations Ragauskas’s Ite, missa est! gave rise to the formation of the autobiographical canon based on the same plot of the story with a similar main character who underwent an atheist transformation. The canonic plot provided discipline to the (actual and possible) experience of becoming a non-believer, 25 J. Jaselskis, “Indiferentiškumas, kaip asmenybės ateistinės pozicijos formavimosi stadija,” in Ateizmas ir dabartis, ed. Jonas Mačiulis (Vilnius: Mintis, 1983), 75–84. 26 Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin Era Autobiographical Texts,” in Stalinism: The Essential Readings, ed. David L. Hoffmann (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 185.

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separated politically dubious and non-reliable experiences from model experiences. Canonical atheist autobiographies have at least two features that distinguish them from other autobiographies of former believers. They are published as a separate edition and are included in digests of recommended atheist literature. The publication of Ite, missa est! as well as of the further autobiographies indicated the high political appreciation of each particular story. Most of stories that composed the canon were written by ex-priests and ex-monks, but there were some exceptions. The pool of canonic autobiographies grew till the end of the Soviet era. The most important elemental variations to Ragauskas’s story were the earlier mentioned autobiographies of Jauniškis, Žilinskas, Markonis, Šernas, and an ex-nun Genovaitė Juronienė. It is not surprising that the canon was composed mostly of the stories of ecclesiastical people. Monks and priests were the best “specialists” in religion. Their experience was based on a deep practical and theoretical knowledge of Christianity which gave an important additional legitimation to the canonic plot. As Jauniškis noted about Ragauskas, “He had a profound knowledge of theology, scholastics and other ecclesiastical disciplines, he himself lectured on them, and… rejected God. Can we mistrust him?”27 In people’s autobiographies observations occur that if even priests and monks, who know the Church’s life from inside, became non-believers, then nothing else is left for “an ordinary person.” An exceptional experience of experts that far exceeded the experience of ordinary people was attributed to authors of canonic texts. In this respect the almost exceptional variation in the canon is the story of a meek woman, collective farmer Anastazija Vikertienė. Her autobiography was printed in Tiesa in 1962 as one of the ordinary people’s autobiographies. Later it was published as a book.28 The transformation from people’s autobiography into canonic autobiography can be explained by the extraordinary kind of experience she encountered. She was not only an elderly woman, but also carried rich and vivid memories of her life as an ordinary believer. Consequently, her autobiographical character was much more developed in comparison to any other of the people’s autobiographies. 27 Bronius Jauniškis, Peržengę kryžkeles (Vilnius: Šviesa, 1982), 192. 28 Anastazija Vikertienė, Išpažintis (Vilnius: “Vaizdo” spaustuvė, Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1963).

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The narration of poet Justinas Marcinkevičius about the death of his mother and his transformation into an atheist does not present a detailed plot and a well-developed character. It is only an episode of the story and a fragment of a much longer poem. It could only be attributed to the canon with great reservations. On the other hand, the strength and suggestibility of traumatic experience makes it possible to speak about the model experiences of his character. The Soviet poet as well as an ex-priest played the role of the specialist of experience. Not every autobiographical story of an ex-priest became canonic. Vytautas Starkus publicly renounced the priesthood and his faith in 1977. On various occasions he presented at least several short autobiographical stories. Three of them were published in Tiesa.29 However, his autobiography was not included in the canon. The stories were short, contradictory, and the character was not developed. Supposedly the author was unwilling or unable to create an autobiography with a fully developed character and his transformation. There was also a kind of atheist autobiography that was left outside the canon because of the special features of their character. The pre-war free-thinkers in the times of the autobiographical boom also wrote their autobiographies following a particular plot. The free-thinker was a lay person, whose way of becoming a non-believer began as and was inspired by their individual revolt against the social and political order of bourgeois Lithuania. The free-thinker Karolis Valašinas participated in Soviet atheist meetings, shared his experiences, but he was introduced merely as a sometimes exotic witness of times past. The autobiographies of free-thinkers were at hand,30 but not propagated and popularized; they were kept beyond the limits of the canon. The most famous pre-war story of a priest becoming a non-believer was also not included into the canon. Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas in 1933 wrote an autobiographical novel Altorių šešėly (In the shadow of the altars), where the main character is a young priest struggling with his doubts about faith and finally having to choose between the priesthood and the vocation 29 Vytautas Starkus, “Kodėl iš klystkelių pasukau,” Tiesa, April 26, 1977, 4; “Lenkiuosi žmogui, o ne dievo mitui,” Tiesa, July 6, 1977; “Gyvenimo tiesa griauna bažnytines dogmas,” Tiesa, September 10, 1977. 30 The daily newspaper Tiesa had prepared an archival file of the free-thinkers but did not publicize them. The file is located at the Fund “Respublikos ateistų (laisvamanių) / vyresniosios kartos / laiškai,” Inv. 2, Archives of the Soviet Lithuania Atheism museum in the Archives of the National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius.

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of an artist (a poet). The rewritten novel was published as soon as 1946 and later reissued several times. It was popular as a novel, but the text was used in atheist propaganda with great reservations. In 1948 the literary critic and functionary Kostas Korsakas attacked the autobiographical story of Altorių šešėly for its individualist and feeble main character. He criticized the plot as not having any “deeper ideological content” and as not leading to a joyful liberation.31 Evidently Korsakas could not accept the elitist mindset of the character, his focus on a love-story that prevented the connection to the Soviet model experience. The canonical stories are based on the same plot of becoming a non-believer, which was developed in Ragauskas’s story: beginning with a religious childhood, proceeding through doubts about priests and the Church, losing “faith in priests,” and ending with a loss of faith in God. The main character of most autobiographies has typical features and experiences. On the other hand, there are some variations and novelties in the characters that were highlighted by propaganda. Jauniškis’s story, alongside the dominant stories of ex-priests, gave a new model character in the form of a monk. In the exposition of the Museum of Atheism in Vilnius, Vikertienė was presented as a woman collective farmer, who in her old age “got rid of religious superstitions.”32 The model character of an old, poorly educated woman was very important for propaganda, because rural women were hardly ever influenced by atheist politics and had a great religious influence on their children and grandchildren as well as acting as pillars of religion in society. The peculiar variation of the main character is related to Adomas Šernas’s story. He was the superintendent of the Reformed Church, who renounced his priesthood and faith in 1964. As in other cases he wrote an atheist autobiography that was primarily published in Tiesa33 and followed the canonic plot. The novelty of the character consisted in his denomination (a member of the Reformed community), his high status in the Church, his age and the condition of his health. At the time of his renouncement he was almost 31 Kostas Korsakas, “Liudas Vasaris literatūroje ir visuomenėje,” in Literatūra ir kritika: straipsnių rinkinys (Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1949), 261. 32 The description of the 1983 exposition is in vol. 5 of The Soviet Lithuanian Museum of Atheism, Fund 272, Inv. 1, 115, Archives of the Soviet Lithuania Atheism museum in the Archives of the National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius. 33 Adomas Šernas, “Kodėl aš darau tokį žingsnį,” Tiesa, August 16, 1964.

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eighty years old, severely ill, and died soon afterwards. The propaganda stressed that his status in the Church was equal to that of a bishop in the Catholic Church, and his decision shows the predetermined general extinction of faith, with the Reformed Church coming before others because of its more “progressive” nature in comparison to the Catholic Church. Soon after Šernas’s death his autobiographical story was named Priešmirtinis laiškas (The deathbed letter). The same title was given to his published autobiography.34 Atheist propaganda presented Šernas as a very old man who knows he is dying and is in a hurry to give witness publicly about his discovered truth, that of atheism. The character was very important for propaganda to combat the popular belief that “all non-believers call for a priest and want to make peace with God on their deathbed.”35 Although not developed, Starkus’s main character was tied to the experience of a representative of the younger generation, who graduated from a Soviet secondary school, but stayed immune to measures of atheization. His atheist transformation occurred when he faced the practice of ecclesiastical service. The character was aimed at the generation which had no pre-war experience of religious education. In each case, the propaganda emphasized particular traits of the character to appeal to the religious experience of specific groups of society. Although the canon included variations in the characters, children and adolescents were notably lacking among them. Instead, the function at least partly was performed by fictional stories about children who free themselves from religious spells and resist an adult’s (usually a grandmother’s) will.36 Such stories were used in atheist propaganda, but they were placed outside the canonic field of autobiographies. Canonic model autobiography claimed to present authentic experience. It was a necessity for the legitimate status of the measure of atheization. Mere fiction would lose at least part of its legitimacy as a model for other people. On the other hand, the canonic autobiographies were literary stories. They more or less moved away from authentic experience or interpreted it in a specific way. In the foreword of Ite, missa est! Ragauskas called 34 Adomas Šernas, Adomo Šerno priešmirtinis laiškas (Vilnius: Mintis, 1971). 35 This is the way that the reflection of Ragauskas about his attitudes facing death starts: Jonas Ragauskas, “Ateistas ir mirtis,” in Žmogus ieško tiesos (Vilnius: Vaga, 1972), 289. 36 Worth mentioning are the short stories of Albinas Žukauskas, “Nepulk ant kelių” and Halina Korsakienė, “Pirmas žingsnis” in a later edition: Jonas Linkevičius, ed., Balta dėmė: ateistiniai apsakymai, jaunesniam mokykliniam amžiui (Vilnius: Vaga, 1984).

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it “a book,” stressing that the names of the priests he met have been changed and that the biographical “material is freely arranged in a literary fashion.”37 His remarks made the book’s relation to reality ambiguous. Publishers of a later edition of the book provided an additional foreword, which indicated that this is “a book of memoirs”38 and thus overshadowed Ragauskas’s remarks. Jauniškis in 1982 puts one of his autobiographical stories, which he calls “my recollections,” in a book along with his fictional stories about monastic life in Lithuania in the olden days. His intentions to present true stories are expressed in a rather peculiar way: “The characters for my book come from archival documents.”39 Jauniškis was repeatedly reproached by his readers that in his autobiographies he intertwined true facts with fictions. The main means to legitimate the model autobiography of the canon as a “true” story was to involve its author in activities of atheist propaganda, so that he or she told the story to different audiences in person. Ragauskas and Jauniškis were very active propagators of atheism, held lectures for all kinds of audiences (in kindergartens, schools, factories, collective farms). When autobiographies were politically legitimated as a measure of atheization politics, most lectures given by the authors of the autobiographies were based on retellings of their stories about becoming a non-believer instead of instructing on scientific materialism. Even if the written stories mixed reality with fiction, when told personally, they achieved the status of reality. Even Šernas, who was too sick to personally meet with an audience, participated in an atheist broadcast that publicized fragments of his story.40 He also answered additional questions that were formulated so that they would lead Šernas to confirm his choice and his path once more, and his critical attitude towards faith and religion. The failure to canonize the story of Starkus can be related to its very weak truthfulness. The Vatican Radio, which was listened to in Lithuania, announced facts indicating that Starkus’s choice was brought about by brutal pressure from the KGB.41 These Ragauskas, Ite, missa est!, 5. The later edition: Jonas Ragauskas, Ite, missa est! (Vilnius: Vaga, 1970), 7. Jauniškis, Peržengę kryžkeles, 4. Broadcast “Ateistų radijo klubas,” July 15, 1964, Fund AM GEK 21504, R 2355, Archives of the Soviet Lithuania Atheism museum in the Archives of the National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius. 41 The Vatican Radio read texts of the samizdat Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, which retells the words of Starkus to his friends: “Dar viena KGB auka,” Lietuvos Katalikų Bažnyčios kronika 4, no. 28 (1977): 294–95. 37 38 39 40

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suspicions of the truthfulness of his story could have been neutralized by Starkus’s active participation in atheist propaganda. But having renounced the priesthood in a very public and publicized manner, he showed hardly any propaganda activity. To sum up, there were some necessary features for a model story: usually it had to be told by an ex-priest or ex-monk; it employed some character variations (an old uneducated woman, an old dying man, a young man, etc.) highlighted by propaganda; it followed the plot mostly created by Ragauskas’s Ite, missa est!; it was created as a literary story that claimed the status of a “true” experience, which was usually supported by their author’s participation in atheist public propaganda by confessing his/her own personal transformation.

The Universal Normative Validity of the Model Experience The canon of the atheist autobiography presented a model experience which was not intended to be simply admired by ordinary people. The politically approved model of experience received universal status and had to become the norm in Soviet society. Soviet ideology connected the meaning of human life with the progressive development of society toward a historically predetermined end. An individual in a historically pre-given situation could choose only the one “right” way of personal emancipation. The function of the canon of the atheist autobiographies was to design and protect from divergence the universally valid way of human transformation. The model experience as universal was in turn validated by the repetition of the plot of the transformation. The canon was composed of stories with the same plot, where individual traits of characters were mere variations that did not affect the canonic plot. The transformation described by Ragauskas in Ite, missa est! was reiterated in later stories. The different stories present very similar childhood experiences of religion, motives to choose the life of a priest, grounds for doubts and feelings about ecclesiastical service. The variations of the characters provided new elements to the canonic plot. Model atheists and in particular the authors of canonic autobiographical stories had to integrate the experience of various canonic characters into their life. The expanded canon defined their future life before they even lived it, let alone told about it. The most striking example is related to the life of Ragauskas himself. He was the first to create the canonic plot, but

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later new variations of transformed characters expanded the field of model atheist experience. Šernas’s narrative introduced the character of a dying man who stuck to firm atheist attitudes. This canonic element became an imperative for Ragauskas. In 1967 he was fatally ill. In hospital after a complicated surgery he wrote a short reflection, titled Ateistas ir mirtis (The atheist and death). There he reaffirms his unshaken atheist position in the face of death: “no doubts emerged about the non-existence of God.”42 He also indicates Šernas as a model example for how to face death. Another example of the universal validity status of the canonic plot concerns the ritual of renouncement of the priesthood. The acts of the MGB reveal their intention to make Ragauskas’s renouncement of the priesthood as theatrical as possible.43 He was instructed to publicly remove his cassock during the High Mass at the beginning of the school year in front of the whole seminary and the bishop himself, and to announce his loss of faith. He did not do that. The day before the festivity he simply quit his office as an instructor at the seminary. But the scenario was not forgotten. In Lithuania it was employed only once, in the case of Starkus. This single case created a precedent that was presented as a universal rule of behavior for a priest or monk. In 1982, Jauniškis in his autobiography tells the scenario as if it were conventional: I knew that priests and monks who leave the church celebrate the last Mass. ... In his last sermon the clergyman indicates that he is saying goodbye to the faithful. That he renounces religion, having searched for God his whole life and not found Him. ... Publicly, at the altar he removes the liturgical robes, the cassock, and the habit if he is a monk.44

The single real case provided the basis for the claim of a universally imperative ritual. The universal validity of model autobiography is a feature that is characteristic of Soviet Socialist Realist literature. Evgeny Dobrenko in his analysis of Stalinist literature indicates that the literature produced images of a non-existing “socialist” world “that return as ‘truth’ for new generations: people now see the world as being like this.”45 The model atheist autobiog42 43 44 45

Ragauskas, “Ateistas ir mirtis,” 291. Fund 57, Inv. 10, 173, Lithuanian Special archives, Vilnius. Jauniškis, Peržengę kryžkeles, 192–93. Evgeny Dobrenko, “Socialist Realism,” in The Cambridge Companion to TwentiethCentury Russian Literature, 111.

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raphy produced the plot and character of the atheist transformation which later functioned (or had to function) as the norm for Soviet Lithuanian society. At least in this very important respect the atheist autobiography can be classified as a case of Socialist Realist literature. In the people’s autobiographies the universal validity of the model experience is present in a specific way. In most cases the character is poorly developed, but most stories follow the two-step plot of losing faith: first in the clergy and the Church, and then in God. In many cases the structure of the canonic plot is covered with occasional and inauthentic fragments of experience. The transformation of the world view of the character is usually illogical and inconsistent. Fragments of very early traumatic experiences are presented as crucial for the decisions regarding the non-existence of God arrived at much later. An old man speaks about his difficult emotions as a soldier in the First World War: God did not respond to his prayers for peace, thus, he stopped believing in God’s omnipotence and His existence.46 But the rest of the story reveals that even later he was a believer. Besides, there are stories that stress episodes of negative childhood experiences of encounters with a rude or unjust priest. An almost random childhood episode is invoked at the time of the narration to provide essential support for an adult transformation into a non-believer. Sometimes the authentic experience of the character is not even called in to fill out the plot. The “secondary experience,” that is, stories and experiences which were “read” or “learned” from books, model autobiographies or from direct propaganda materials can suffice. It happens quite often that Ragauskas’s Ite, missa est! serves as a universally true experience showing the corruption of the Church and its priests. Propaganda images of priests who were supportive of the post-war armed resistance against the regime as “killer-priests” and torturers of “peaceful Soviet citizens” appear quite frequently in the people’s autobiographies. These images were intensively developed by propaganda from the early sixties47 and coincided in time with the boom of the autobiographies. 46 Broadcast “Ateistų radijo klubas,” February 2, 1965, Fund AM GEK 21503, R 2354, Archives of the Soviet Lithuania Atheism museum in the Archives of the National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius. 47 The model book was prepared and issued using interrogation materials prepared by the KGB, entitled Killers under the Shelter of the Church: Bronislovas Baranauskas and Genovaitė Erslavaitė, eds., Žudikai bažnyčios prieglobstyje (Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, Archyviniams dokumentams skelbti redakcija, 1960).

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The most authentic fragments in peoples’ autobiographies depict the traumatic experience of the character that led to the final step towards loss of faith in God. However, these experiences also motivate the transformation into the state of a non-believer rather improbably. A woman is distressed that she had not allowed her son to join the Komsomol. He did not become a believer, committed a crime, and was imprisoned. The mother concludes that the Komsomol, which imposes behavior in accordance with the requirements of the Party, could have kept him from crime and jail.48 She accuses God for causing her to make the decision that led to the disaster. The examples indicate that the acceptance of the universally valid plot allows one to disregard the consistency of transformation that would be led by the intrinsic logic of the character’s experience. This feature of the people‘s autobiographies points to the structure of narration of the Stalin era Socialist Realist literature as described by Katerina Clark: the leap of the heroes is motivated not logically, but ritually: “plot takes priority over character.”49 The muddled sequence of events and experiences, the use of fragments of inauthentic experience characteristic of the people’s autobiographies are a good example of the priority of plot over character during the Thaw. Personal consent to the validity of the model canonic plot allows the authors of peoples’ autobiographies to use very different fragments of experience to fill it: occasional childhood memories; fictional, propaganda or autobiographical stories about the wickedness of priests that they have once read or heard, personal traumatic experiences that are only very remotely linked to the question of the existence of God. Potentially anyone could tell an autobiographical story about becoming a non-believer. The universally valid plot was introduced, propaganda worked hard to create negative images of the Church, priests, and religious life. In addition, everyone had suffered some existential traumatic experience in his/her life. All that was needed was the will to reiterate the plot, and that was produced by the machinery of the politics of atheization. The new edition of the book appeared in 1963. The same and similar stories were told and propagated regularly in the newspapers and radio broadcasts. 48 Letter of VM to the broadcast “Akiračiai,” February 9, 1981, Fund AM GEK 21455/24, R 2392, Archives of the Soviet Lithuania Atheism museum in the Archives of the National Museum of Lithuania, Vilnius. 49 Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero,” in Socialist Realism Without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 47–48.

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To sum up, the model atheist autobiography was a type of Socialist Realist literature, which presented a universally valid normative model of the transformation. The canonic plot and even some variations of the characters played an imperative role even for authors of the canonic autobiographies by providing discipline to their actual and future experience. People’s autobiographies presented the transformation which was not based on the internal logic of the character’s experiences. The story was kept together by the structure of the canonic plot which was filled with fragmented experiences of the character drawn up from different sources. The domination of plot over character made the autobiography a measure of atheization politics actually applicable universally.

Conclusions The case of atheist autobiographies is a good example of the subjection of literature to the political aims to transform society and create a new man in the epoch of the Thaw. At the beginning of the sixties the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party legitimized the atheist autobiographies of ex-priests and ex-monks as effective means of atheization politics. They were practiced by propagandists alongside (and often instead of) instruction based on the doctrine of scientific materialism which was not very effective. The appreciation of the atheist autobiographies in spite of their deficiencies against the letter of the doctrine was a pragmatic step of Lithuanian politicians stimulated by the vivid interest of society in autobiographical stories. The literary status of autobiography as a personal story also contributed to the creation of a space for deviations with respect to doctrinal truths. Ragauskas’s autobiography Ite, missa est! as the first model autobiography kick-started the autobiographical canon, which introduced the model plot of the transformation into a non-believer and developed a model character. The canon provided discipline to the actual as well as potential experiences of the atheist transformation and drew a line between the model way and other ways of becoming an atheist. The canonic model stories were literary narrations which aspired to be authentic personal experience. The authors of the autobiographies in their propaganda work publicly repeated their stories of transformation, thus providing a strong additional legitimation to the autobiographies as

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stories presenting true experience. The context of Soviet ideology required that the model autobiographic transformation be universally valid. As plot in these stories dominated character, the universal atheist transformation in practice became a high probability. The case of the atheist autobiographies in Soviet Lithuania gives an understanding of the modus operandi of (Socialist Realist) literature that serves as a direct means towards the political aim of creating the new man. People were attracted to the autobiographical literature that was politically promoted as a functional alternative to the indoctrination in MarxistLeninist scientific materialism. The literary story of the model experience bridged the gap between the political aims of atheization and personal experience. This kind of literature was very instrumental in internalizing political goals by positioning personal experience within the framework of a politically shaped and controlled plot of inner transformation.

Bibliography Balina, Marina. “Prose after Stalin.” In The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Marina Balina, 153–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Baranauskas, Bronislovas, and Genovaitė Erslavaitė, eds. Žudikai bažnyčios prieglobstyje. Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, Archyviniams dokumentams skelbti redakcija, 1960. Bataitis, Stasys. Kryžius be nukryžiuotojo. Vilnius: Šviesa, 1987. Clark, Katerina. “Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero.” In Socialist Realism Without Shores, edited by Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, 27–50. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Dobrenko, Evgeny. “Socialist Realism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Marina Balina, 97–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Duluman, Evgraf. Pochemu ya perestal verit’ v boga. Rasskaz byvshego kandidata bogosloviya. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo CK VLKSM “Molodaya gvardiya,” 1957. Hellbeck, Jochen. “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin Era Autobiographical Texts.” In Stalinism: The Essential Readings, edited by David L. Hoffmann, 180–209. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2010. Jaselskis, J. “Indiferentiškumas, kaip asmenybės ateistinės pozicijos formavimosi stadija.” In Ateizmas ir dabartis, edited by Jonas Mačiulis, 75–84. Vilnius: Mintis, 1983. Jauniškis, Bronius. Peržengę kryžkeles. Vilnius: Šviesa, 1982. ———. Vienuolis ir tikėjimas. Vilnius: Mintis, 1974.

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Korsakas, Kostas, ed. Lietuvių literatūra kovoje prieš klerikalizmą: literatūrinis rinkinys. Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1951. Korsakas, Kostas. Literatūra ir kritika: straipsnių rinkinys. Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1949. Lahusen, Thomas, and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds. Socialist Realism Without Shores. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Linkevičius, Jonas, ed. Balta dėmė: ateistiniai apsakymai, jaunesniam mokykliniam amžiui. Vilnius: Vaga, 1984. Marcinkevičius, Justinas. Poemos: Siena, Publicistinė poema. Vilnius: Vaga, 1972. Markonis, Stasys. Didžioji iliuzija. Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1963. Nutarimai ideologiniais klausimais. Vilnius: Laikraščių ir žurnalų leidykla, 1968. Osipov, Aleksandr A. Put’ k duchovnoy svobode. rasskaz byvshego bogoslova. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye izdaniye politicheskoy literatury, 1960. Putinaitė, Nerija. Nugenėta pušis: ateizmas kaip asmeninis apsisprendimas tarybų Lietuvoje. Vilnius: Lietuvių katalikų mokslo akademija, Naujasis Židinys-Aidai, 2015. Ragauskas, Jonas. Ite, missa est! Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1960. ———. Žmogus ieško tiesos. Vilnius: Vaga, 1972. Šernas, Adomas. Adomo Šerno priešmirtinis laiškas. Vilnius: Mintis, 1971. ———. “Kodėl aš darau tokį žingsnį.” Tiesa, August 16, 1964. Smolkin-Rothrock, Victoria. “‘A Sacred Space Is Never Empty’: Soviet Atheism, 1954–1971.” PhD diss., University of California, 2010. TSKP XXII suvažiavimo medžiaga. Vilnius: Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1962. Vikertienė, Anastazija. Išpažintis. Vilnius: “Vaizdo” spaustuvė, Valstybinė politinės ir mokslinės literatūros leidykla, 1963.

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Solveiga Daugirdaitė

Sartre and de Beauvoir Encounter the Pensive Christ

The isolation of the Baltic states from foreigners during the first decades after the war was one of the reasons why Simone de Beauvoir’s and JeanPaul Sartre’s visit to Lithuania in the summer of 1965 was considered an important event in the cultural life of Soviet-era Lithuania. This article aims to reconstruct the cultural circumstances of this event and to analyze the contrasting treatment of the visit as it came down in history, while including an examination of the new Lithuanian cultural self-awareness that materialized, the tensions that developed among the writers as a result of this visit, and it especially hopes to elucidate the long-term effects of the visit for Lithuanian culture. The meeting of cultures—of the “small” Lithuanian one and the “large” French one, of Europe’s east and west, of the residents of an occupied, totalitarian country who at first glance seem to have accepted their fate with representatives of a free democratic society, who openly sympathized with socialism is treated from a comparative perspective. The visit by two internationally acclaimed philosophers was examined not only in the documentation of 1965—in the press, in diaries, and later, near the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, in memoirs and in literary works up to the present day. In evaluating Soviet culture we inevitably encounter the problem of the reliability of the sources. Although Soviet era publications are not reliable because of the ideological censorship they have undergone, and the egodocuments reveal the authors’ subjective reality, a critical reading of both source materials allows for the reconstruction of an unfamiliar culture’s reception as the recognitions of one’s own.

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The guests’ impressions can only be discerned in a few paragraphs on Lithuania in de Beauvoir’s autobiographical work, Tout compte fait, 1972 (All Said and Done, 1974).

A Meeting of Two Cultures This visit was an opportunity for Lithuanians to assess their position in the hierarchy of the literary world: those who were permitted to interact the most with the guests were judged to be the leading figures in Soviet Lithuanian literature. They were the novelist Mykolas Sluckis (1928–2013) and the poet Eduardas Mieželaitis (1919–1997), chairman of the Writers’ Union at the time and a Lenin Prize laureate.1 A relatively obscure member of this party was the young photographer Antanas Sutkus (b. 1939). Lithuanian writers, artists and even their families recall their meetings in memoirs even to this day. For example, Sluckis in his memoirs of the five-day visit (although often referred to as a week) wrote: Elle a brillé comme une étoile filante dont on reparle longtemps après en continuant à se demander ce qui s’est passé. Etait-ce un simple hasard? Une étape logique dans les relations culturelles franco-lituaniennes? Ou peutêtre la curiosité touristique qui avait attiré deux personnalités célèbres dans un pays méconnu et enclavé dans la zone “grise” de l’Europe?2 She streaked by like a shooting star and one spoke of it for a long time always wondering what had happened. Was it chance? A logical step in Franco-Lithuanian cultural relations? Or was it simply the curiosity of the tourist, which directed two celebrated personalities to a country, unknown and landlocked in the “grey” zone of Europe?

Sartre and de Beauvoir arrived in Vilnius on the evening of July 26, 1965 and departed on August 3. Highlights of the tour included Vilnius Old 1 For additional information on their works, see: Christina Parnell, “Masks of Stagnation: Disillusionment in Mykolas Sluckis’ Novels on the Eve of Pre-Perestroika,” in Baltic Memory: Processes of Modernisation in Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian Literature of the Soviet Period, ed. Elena Baliutytė and Donata Mitaitė (Vilnius: Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, 2011), 125–32; Elena Baliutytė, “The Eduardas Mieželaitis’ Creative Work from the 1960s to 1980s: From Prometheanism to Quixoticism,” in ibid., 177–87. 2 Mykolas Sluckis, “Le séjour de Jean-Paul Sartre en Lituanie: huit jours inoubliables, 35 ans après,” Cahiers Lituaniens 1 (2000), accessed May 13, 2017, http://www.cahierslituaniens.org/sartre.htm.

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Town with its beautiful churches, the recently renovated Trakai castle, a monument to victims of World War II at the village of Pirčiupis and the former prison at the IX Kaunas Fort. In Vilnius they visited the workshop of artist Augustinas Savickas, in Kaunas, the weaving studio of Anelė Mironaitė and the M. K. Čiurlionis Museum.3 There was a single event for a larger audience on July 27, 1965, a meeting with a select group of writers in the small hall of the Writers’ Union building, and it was reported in the cultural weekly Literatūra ir menas (Literature and art). Reports of discussions in this publication as well as in conversations reveal that the guests were questioned not so much about their own works or activities but rather about French culture in general (“Which writers do French readers admire the most?”; “Is Mauriac popular in France?;” “What is the reception of Picasso’s works in France?”)4 hoping to hear first-hand about the unattainable life in the world of freedom and capitalist prosperity. Sartre’s responses concentrated on social themes, for example, he shared his thoughts on the World Peace Congress in Helsinki, condemned U.S. aggression in South Vietnam, and assured his listeners that Marxist influence is thriving in the Western world. Nevertheless, even after translation and a pass through the filters of Soviet journalism, Sartre’s comments are often witty, and he made an attempt to appear balanced (“just as there are a variety of artists, so there is variety in the public,” was his response to a query about the public reception of Picasso). There was only one personal question—how did French people react to his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize? Sartre’s answer was brief: “My friends even now believe I acted correctly—my enemies believe I did not.”5 The meeting at the Writers’ Union was the only official one, other discussions took place riding in an automobile, dining in cafes, and at private gatherings. The hosts made efforts to demonstrate the unique qualities of their culture: on the first evening, in the hotel restaurant, Kostas Korsakas, director of the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature, “gave an extensive summary of the genesis of the Lithuanian language (and nation)”6 and later when the guests visited his summer home in the suburbs, he showed them publications on Lithuanian studies published by the Institute. 3 Saliamonas Vaintraubas, “‘Lietuviškos žemės sauja’—Žanui Poliui Sartrui,” Vakarinės naujienos, August 4, 1965. 4 “Siunčiame širdingiausius linkėjimus,” Literatūra ir menas, July 31, 1965. 5 Ibid. 6 Mykolas Sluckis, “Po 40 metų,” Šiaurės Atėnai, June 4, 2005.

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The painter Augustinas Savickas made an effort to have the guests invited to see his workshop, though in his memoirs he admits that due to his nervousness he heard little of the discussion, but that the guests did admire his paintings.7 Sluckis wrote that he and Mieželaitis were heartily pleased that Augustinas (Savickas) “passed the exam,”8—meaning that it was treated as an exam for Lithuanian culture and as a chance for it to reach a wider audience. The French philosophers’ visit was and still is viewed this way. However, when the guests criticized Western culture, the hosts dared to protest. They were surprised to hear critical comments about established writers such as Hemingway (“in their turn they were surprised to hear us praising Hemingway so greatly”)9 and Maupassant (“Both assured us that no one reads Maupassant any longer [in France?]. He wrote for the bourgeoisie and irritated them with indecent anecdotes. He wrote poorly and superficially.”10) The Lithuanians defended Maupassant: We disagreed, and argued on his behalf, we explained that both he and Chekhov had a great influence on the form of the [Lithuanian] short story, as for example, on Cvirka and several other writers of the younger generation.11

The Lithuanians were also surprised by the guests’ free interpretations of cultural and social events, their critical view of authority, but they could not have failed to notice that the criticism was first of all directed at Western culture. Both the hosts and the guests, while talking of existential freedom, did not feel at liberty to criticize Soviet reality. That summer, the twenty-fifth anniversary of incorporation into the USSR was celebrated with great pomp and circumstance. The mid-1960s are now remembered in memoirs as a period of relative stability and well-being: the post-war battles against the USSR and the Stalinist deportations to Siberia had come to an end, and the belief, popular during the Khrushchev Thaw, that “socialism with a human face” was possible had not yet faded. 7 Sluckis claims that the artist was so nervous that he removed paintings even before Sartre had a chance to take a good look at them. Eventually, the guests asked him to hold the paintings up a little longer. Augustinas Savickas, Žalia tyla (Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2002), 222. 8 Savickas, Žalia tyla, 223. 9 Sluckis, “Po 40 metų,” June 11, 2005. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.

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The press did not specifically identify the French visit with celebrations of the anniversary of the Soviet occupation, although readers must have been affected by the context: alongside accounts of the visit, there were announcements of commemorative events. The Soviet press posed self-serving questions, and Sartre understood what was expected of him. For example, in response to a journalist’s question about Western reactionary bourgeois opinion that supposedly the Soviet Lithuanian nation has no independence, that Lithuania’s people are oppressed and even enslaved,12 Sartre claimed that, All the Lithuanians I have met are free people. During my visit I also encountered some Lithuanians from the USA who came to visit their ancestors’ land. It is doubtful whether they would come to an enslaved country.13

The reader at the time more than likely understood the philosopher’s comments of this kind as a necessary tribute to the regime. Maintaining this pro-Soviet position allowed Sartre to visit the Soviet Union many times, and in the 1960s he acquired a personal interest in coming to see the translator Lena Zonina, who then accompanied the philosophers on their travels in the Soviet Union, including Lithuania.

Sartre the Snob and a Lithuanian Folk Sculpture—the Pensive Christ14 Personal documents reveal that beside the public efforts to represent Lithuanian culture in a positive light, they also portrayed the battles in the literary field to affirm membership in the intellectual elite. In this respect, only fragments of Antanas Venclova’s, a member of the older generation of writers and a Soviet functionary, diaries are significant. While on vacation at his summer home in Palanga, Venclova notes in his diary his surprise that Mieželaitis has not come by to visit him, and after a few days is dismayed about not being invited to meet with the visitors:

12 “Žanas Polis Sartras išvyko iš Lietuvos,” Tiesa, August 4, 1965. 13 Ibid. 14 The Pensive Christ in Lithuanian is called “Rūpintojėlis,” popularly interpreted as the Worrier, because he leans his elbow on his knee, supporting his chin with his hand.

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Eduardas [Mieželaitis] intentionally banned me from the meeting with Sartre—although he was in Palanga for several days,15 I did not meet him because Eduardas deliberately did not invite me. At first, I did not realize that it was revenge for something, but for what—to this day, I do not know.16

The wording of the phrase “I did not meet him” reveals that the writer, who participated in many international events in the postwar years, felt that he had a personal relationship with Sartre, but Mieželaitis’s attitude shows that a change in the relationship between power and generation had occurred. It may be that Venclova confided in someone about the affront, because a year later, literary critic Vytautas Kubilius ridiculed him in his diary (September 9, 1966): Venclova speaks with tears in his eyes, that Sartre did not visit him. But Korsakas posed for a photograph with him and shines—we can now hand him over to the Pantheon.17

The opportunity to socialize with the guests was a mark of high rank within the hierarchy of the literary realm, and those who were not in the group of chosen ones felt offended. The trip was organized by the Writers’ Union, with Mieželaitis as its chair, thus to be invited to dine with the guests or not was understood as a mark of the chairman’s approval or disapproval. In 1970, Sartre’s personality and views triggered discussions among the literati when Mieželaitis published a cycle of poems called “Medžio grimasos” (Wooden grimaces) in the cultural journal Nemunas. The first poem, “Medinis filosofas” (Wooden philosopher) begins “Jean-Paul Sartre, the snob / like Buratino approached / the Lithuanian Rūpintojėlis, Picassoesque in its deformity.”18 In his diary, Kostas Korsakas called the poem “an attack on Sartre” in retribution for Sartre’s indifference to his work.19 Even if Mieželaitis’s poem was written out of a sense of personal injury, his criticism of Sartre coin15 The guests and their escorts arrived in Palanga in the evening of July 30th and left Vilnius airport for Leningrad on August 3. Thus Venclova’s “several days” were not more than two or three and during that time there was an expedition to Nida. 16 Antanas Venclova, 1963 m. kovas–1965 m. spalis, vol. 4 of Dienoraštis (Vilnius: Vilniaus memorialinių muziejų direkcijos Venclovų namai-muziejus), 998. 17 Vytautas Kubilius, Dienoraščiai 1945–1977, ed. Janina Žėkaitė and Jūratė Sprindytė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2006), 324. 18 Eduardas Mieželaitis, “Medinis filosofas,” Nemunas 3 (1970): 10. 19 From the diary of Kostas Korsakas, April 1, 1970, quoted in Halina Korsakienė, Namas, kuriame gyvenome (Vilnius: Vaga 1991), 282.

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cided with USSR politics—the philosopher denounced the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and became an enemy of the state: the mockery was acceptable. But, his colleagues disagreed, saying that it was immoral to ridicule Sartre precisely because he criticized Soviet foreign policy, something the Soviet writers themselves did not dare to do. The reaction of the literary set to Mieželaitis, who had once held a position of extraordinary privilege, was highly emotional. However, the discussions were not publicized, and, as yet, there is no supporting material available to allow insight into the motives or the arguments expressed. The publication of the poem was a convenient opportunity to strike out against Mieželaitis whose position in the literary hierarchy appeared unassailable: a Lenin Prize laureate, and one who had been officially endorsed during the entire Soviet era. The poem was illustrated with a graphic work and Sutkus’s photograph of the guests’ visit to the Stained Glass and Sculpture Gallery in Kaunas seen in the foreground, the Rūpintojėlis, and Mieželaitis and the guests in the background. The meaning of Mieželaitis’s cycle of poems and the reference to Sartre in the first poem allows us to speculate on the importance of context in order to understand the work: today it is impossible to reconstruct the meanings that were significant to his contemporaries. There is a depth of meaning within the poem, the word “snob” most likely signifies an opposition to the Rūpintojėlis—a work created by an uneducated woodcarver, embodying the creativity of the Lithuanian nation. If an educated reader in 1970 did not understand this, it was because he had a specific motive not to understand. The lyrical “I” in the poem translates the natural language of the Rūpintojėlis for Sartre, a language that “birds sing in tree hollows / the deer in thickets, striped bees / and trees / reaching up—a language forgotten by men.”20 The Rūpintojėlis here is a symbol of suffering and wisdom (“The Rūpintojėlis’s wooden eyes see better/ than ours— that is why he has gone blind and says nothing.”)21 On the other hand, the Buratino (“Sartre / like Buratino approached”) is also made of wood, thus both—Sartre and Rūpintojėlis—are wooden philosophers. Calling the philosopher a snob repeatedly (twice—“Jean-Paul Sartre, the snob” and later just “snob”) could have been shocking. Mieželaitis drew a conclusion from the ensuing uproar: in the poetry collection Mano lyra (My lyre, 1979) he included two poems from this cycle, including “Medžio grimasos,” but the 20 Mieželaitis, “Medinis filosofas,” 10. 21 Ibid.

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Sartre and de Beauvoir    SOLVEIGA DAUGIRDAITĖ

word “snob” has disappeared, and he never returned to this poem Although Sartre’s dialogue with the Rūpintojėlis is a creation of the poet, his fascination with the wooden sculpture is documented in the memoirs. The journalist Marija Macijauskienė recalls the philosopher’s words at a dinner that “the woodcarver had fashioned not Christ but his own hopes and suffering. That is to say, the subject matter of the sculpture has a human and not a religious meaning.”22 This idea is confirmed by de Beauvoir when she notes that the Rūpintojėlis was the most beautiful thing she saw in Kaunas: In Kaunas, the second most important town in Lithuania, we had to see an exhibition of very ugly modern stained glass, a textile mill, and an interesting museum of antiquities. In this museum I saw a fine wooden figure of Christ; very ugly reproductions are to be seen all over the country, but the original is very beautiful. It is a sitting figure, crowned with thorns, and it leans its cheek upon its hand: it is the very picture of desolation.23

To be precise, the sculpture was made by professional sculptor Juozas Mikėnas. At more than two meters in height, it is an enlarged copy of a folk sculpture, created for the Lithuanian pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, and was intended to demonstrate traditional Lithuanian culture and be a testimony to its trials throughout history. More modernist cultural elites of the 1930s criticized such an archaic representation of Lithuania. Nevertheless, a perusal of memoirs (de Beauvoir’s and the Lithuanians’) written about the visit to Lithuania, and even the accounts in the Soviet press, clearly shows that Sartre appreciated the Rūpintojėlis—an object of religious folk art, which together with the sand dunes of Nida and the symbolist paintings of M. K. Čiurlionis, were the most memorable experiences of the visit. In his final interview before leaving, Sartre said the he was “fascinated by the parallels between modern sculpture and folk woodcarvings.”24 Sartre recognized the artistic direction of Lithuanian art in the 1960s when folkloric elements were stylized and presented as the mandatory Soviet people’s art, while eschewing Socialist Realism, or as it was formulated at the time it was to broaden its ideology. 22 Marija Macijauskienė, “Protas ir humanizmas vaikšto pilkais drabužiais,” in Po aukštus kalnus vaikščiojau: Memuarai (Jonava: Jonava, 2002), 112. 23 Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done: 1962–1972, trans. Patrick O’Brien, with an introduction by Toril Moi (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 316. 24 S. Vaintraubas, “‘Lietuviškos žemės sauja’—Žanui Poliui Sartrui,” Vakarinės naujienos, August 4, 1965.

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Lithuania as a Land of Nature Lithuanians saw the visit by the famous French couple as an opportunity to display their best assets, although their concept of privacy was very different. In his first interview on arrival Sartre said: “We want to learn about your country, to walk slowly in the streets of Vilnius, to reflect on what we see,”25 but the hosts did not hear this subtle appeal for privacy, because they had their own agenda—that the philosopher become an advocate for their culture. The Lithuanians were anxious to check whether their knowledge of the world beyond the Iron Curtain was adequate, thereby suggesting the notion that their cultural achievements were different from the other regions in the USSR. It is not without pride that Sluckis considered that Sartre’s visit, which was a sensation and a mystery to many, proved that “Lithuania is not as provincial as it once was,” if one of the world’s greatest intellectuals chose to visit.26 In his memoirs Sluckis emphasizes that during the visit journalists asked him and Mieželaitis: “Why Lithuania, and not, say, Ukraine or Kyrgyzstan?”27 He answers: A cette époque, la Lituanie n’était pas connu seulement pour ses arts graphiques, sa poésie, son cinéma, sa musique, son architecture ou sa photographie ... Même si la Lituanie faisait partie de cet espace commun d’interdictions et de restrictions, elle avait réussi à négocier (conserver, conquérir, je ne sais comment dire) un ensemble considérable de libertés artistiques, incomparable à celui des autres républiques. 28 In those days Lithuania was known for graphic art, poetry, film, music, architecture and photography … And although we were part of the same space of prohibitions and restrictions, we were able, nevertheless, to bargain for (to ensure, to fight, I do not know how to call it) a substantial amount of artistic freedoms, much more than the other republics, not to be compared with the bare minimum in other republics.

At the time Russian intellectuals and Lithuanians themselves considered the Baltic states to be the “West of the USSR” having more material goods 25 S. Vaintraubas, “Sartras: ‘Tokios pažintys praturtina,’” Vakarinės naujienos, July 27, 1965. 26 Sluckis, “Le séjour de Jean-Paul Sartre en Lituanie: huit jours inoubliables.” 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

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and cultural freedoms, however, by evaluating the visit as a unique honor, Sluckis ignored that fact that Sartre visited the USSR a number of times. The year before he had visited Estonia (Tartu), in 1963, Crimea, Georgia, and Armenia, a year later he went to Kiev, Kishinev, Lvov, and he traveled to Moscow and Leningrad many times.29 In addition, in her memoirs de Beauvoir suggested that Lithuania, Moldova, and Ukraine were parts of one country where intellectual fashions were similar, pointing out that in the following year (1966), students at Lvov University asked the same questions of Sartre as the Lithuanians did the previous year, and the same year in Kishinev: “They were interested in Italian films, above all Antonioni’s, and in French writing, particularly Sagan and nouveau roman.”30 Furthermore, though the writers boasted that the visit was an acknowledgement of Lithuania’s value, the visit also had an entirely different meaning. Suzanne Champonnois points out that French diplomats stationed in Moscow and even Leningrad were not officially permitted to travel to the occupied Baltic nations, because it would have been a gesture recognizing their annexation, something the French government refused to do.31 Thus, the philosophers’ visit to the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic was an “expression of spiritual dissociation from the official French position,”32 essentially undermining it, and meant their tacit approval of Lithuania’s occupation. This aspect of the visit is neglected by all the Lithuanian authors in their memoirs, because it would confirm their own privileged position in the collaborating hierarchy of an occupied nation. The Lithuanian writers were maneuvering between genuine attempts to familiarize the guests with their culture and Soviet restrictions. Although on the other hand, de Beauvoir does mention the annoying presence of escorts in other locales, she provides a more extensive account of those in Lithuania: Next day they would not leave us even for a minute. Once we timidly mentioned that we would like to go for a walk in downtown by ourselves. In the evening, they coldly inquired, “Did you enjoy yourselves better without

29 Between June 1962 and August 1966, Sartre traveled to the Soviet Union nine times. 30 De Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 323–24. 31 Suzanne Champonnois, “Prancūzų požiūris į Baltijos valstybes devintajame dešimtmetyje,” XXI amžius, February 5, 2003, accessed May 13, 2017, http://www. xxiamzius.lt/archyvas/priedai/horizontai/20030205/06.html. 32 Champonnois, “Prancūzų požiūris.”

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us?” We did like them but we did not enjoy roaming the streets in the company of five or six people.33

It is worth noting that de Beauvoir does not mention a single Lithuanian surname in her memoir. It was the landscape of the Couronian Spit, the border zone on the coast, that made a lasting impression on her and she concludes her impressions of Lithuania with a description: Some way from Palanka34 we saw a house where Thomas Mann had stayed. … The position is very beautiful; but even more beautiful are the tall white dunes a few miles away. A strong wind was blowing and it made us stumble as we climbed them: we sat down on the top and gazed at the vividly blue sea lapping against the feet of steep hills of a sand as brilliant and sparkling as snow.35

As she was ready to depart, de Beauvoir admitted that she “was fascinated by the Lithuanian landscape,” “I even liked your rainy weather, the changing colors and little clouds.”36 This assertion reinforced the image of Lithuania as a land of mystery in a state of nature in French literature. This coincides with traditional imagery apparent in Prosper Mérimée’s gothic novella “Lokis” (1869), which describes Lithuania as a land where consanguinity between humans and bears is a possibility. On the other hand, this Western perception of the European East has influenced their own self-awareness and self-representation. The poem “Medinis filosofas” by Mieželaitis mentioned earlier, where a Lithuanian folk woodcarving speaks to the Parisian snob, Sartre, in a natural language forgotten by man is an example of such self-representation. The most far-reaching elements affecting the Lithuanian mentality in this incident are not what Sartre found fascinating, but how he inadvertently disappointed them. Justinas Marcinkevičius (1930–2011), the most characteristic example of a “people’s poet” who managed to sustain Lithuanian national and patriotic ambitions within the boundaries of government restrictions, in his book of essays, Dienoraštis be datų (Diary without dates) created the most significant Lithuanian narrative about Sartre. Although there is no 33 34 35 36

De Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 315. Should read: Palanga. Ibid., 317. Vaintraubas, “‘Lietuviškos žemės sauja’— Žanui Poliui Sartrui.”

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information as to whether the poet had met Sartre on the latter’s visit to Lithuania in 1965, two years previously he had heard Sartre speak at the Community of European Writers (COMES) Congress in Leningrad. Several years later the poet saw Sartre in Rome: Here he spoke of European moral obligations to Africa, about the responsibility to help nations emancipating from spiritual colonialism, to help them to create a culture, about the various forms of assistance. And again—I could not help but clap.37

Marcinkevičius says that he had an idea that a publisher be established under the auspices of UNESCO which would publish literature, art books of small nations translated into the “great” languages (English, French). He thought that Sartre would be the ideal advocate for such an idea. When Sartre invited him along with some other writers to dinner, he was overjoyed: “Is there another man more suitable to promote the idea of a publisher for small nations?”38 Describing this episode in his essay Dienoraštis be datų (Diary without dates) he speaks of himself with a bit of irony, how he tried to broach the matter of the publisher in a roundabout way: what opinions did Sartre have on the cultural destiny of small nations, and what was the appropriate mission for major nations in this respect? I saw that he understood me instantly. He even asked if this was important to me. Very much, I replied. I expected to hear something akin to his speech in Rome in 1965, where he insisted that Europe owes moral compensation to Africa.39

Instead, Sartre said that he was collecting material and planning to write a biography of Joyce, because of his great influence on the European novel. Marcinkevičius claims that at first he was afraid that Sartre had not understood his question, but soon realized that in this case Joyce was a figurative device: Sartre explained to me how the culture of small nations forgotten by God can be like leaven for world culture... that, indirectly, he is advising me, “young man, here is an answer and an example—write in English, French 37 Justinas Marcinkevičius, Dienoraštis be datų (Vilnius: Vaga, 1981), 111. 38 Marcinkevičius, Dienoraštis be datų. 39 Ibid., 112.

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or Russian.”40 Marcinkevičius closed the description of this episode in Dienoraštis be datų with an emphatic decision to reject this suggestion: “I choose the Lithuanian language. I chose it long ago. To abandon my national destiny is incomprehensible.”41

This narrative introduced a long-held conviction in Lithuanian minds that Sartre as a Westerner is indifferent to the aspirations of small nations. This notion coincided with the official government policy, since in the early 1980s when Marcinkevičius’s book was published, Sartre was no longer a friend of the USSR. Forty years later, Marcinkevičius continued this narrative, and mentioned Sartre’s indirect suggestion as an inspiration to write a drama in verse, Mindaugas, about the first and last king of Lithuania, and to “speak of things important to the nation. To strengthen us under the conditions of the time. To inspire self-confidence and courage.”42 Marcinkevičius had a preconceived notion about Sartre’s possible response about the “mission,” and when he got an answer he had not expected chose to interpret it very narrowly: supposedly, small nations raise and nurture the cultures of great nations, they accelerate fermentation. However, we can interpret this another way: Joyce’s homeland is a small nation, he was a great writer, small nations ought not to feel slighted, because they too produce great talents. From a comparative perspective, this is an example, when an internal contact (the appearance of a work) is determined by an external contact that was not based on any enchantment with Sartre as a representative of “the great culture”, but disappointment in his insensitivity to authors from “small nations.” The disappointment was all the greater because like most representatives of the “small nations” Marcinkevičius easily discerned the parallel with Russian culture’s domination in his country and its neglect of the “small” USSR cultures. Posthumously published, Marcinkevičius’s notebooks about his visit to France (November 1967) returns to the subject matter touching on the meeting with Sartre with a different angle of approach. We can compare two accounts of the same story and see how the poet recorded his disappointment and doubt in his private notes, and how he re-wrote the narrative for public consumption, changing the emphasis and transforming it into a decisive declaration. This is an example of how the writer created his public 40 Ibid., 112. 41 Ibid., 113. 42 Ibid., 113.

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persona, which guaranteed his role as a leader of the nation, which in the later Soviet era was lacking in a society searching for an authority figure. This publication revealed a rather different timeline and narrative tone and most importantly, the poet’s stance and features of his character. The notebooks reveal that the writer traveled with a group of USSR representatives, without whom and without the assistance of the highest USSR cultural institutions, he would not have been able to come into contact with the most important personalities: Jacques Prévert, Max-Pol Fouchet, Russian émigrés (Vladimir Posner senior, Ivan Bunin’s friends), and even the director of the French Communist Party publishing house. For this reason, the Paris Marcinkevičius saw was bureaucratically Soviet, with mandatory visits to official institutions and ceremonies (the French Foreign Ministry, a reception at the International Critics’ Symposium whose location was unspecified, the opening of the Soviet Book Fair), the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution at the Maison de la Mutualité. At a meeting at the “Café de Flore,” Marcinkevičius met with Sartre and de Beauvoir where he asked a question about the future direction of art and “the destiny of small cultures”. Marcinkevičius was disillusioned by Sartre because, as he said: “he knows nothing about us [about Lithuanian literature] and does not want to know anything.” 43 Nevertheless, it appears that the question “what next?” applied not so much to the future of abstract art but to the future of Marcinkevičius’s writing career. In Dienoraštis be datų Marcinkevičius paints his own literary portrait—here he is unequivocal, courageous, unafraid to make decisions. He is different in his notebooks: he is spiritually and physically weak (he is ill during the trip and complains of his ailments), delighted not with Paris, the arts, and the meetings, but with telephone calls from his wife. It is important to turn our attention again to the narrative describing the conversation with Sartre in Dienoraštis be datų. First, the author describes his vision, his aspirations about the establishment of a publisher who would popularize the culture of small nations, and how on arriving in Paris and meeting for dinner with Sartre he was misunderstood. The reader is misled by the illusion that Marcinkevičius had explained his ideas to Sartre. The notebooks show that the philosopher had no idea what his guest had in mind. Sartre and de Beauvoir invited not the Lithuanian Marcinkevičius, 43 “Justino Marcinkevičiaus užrašų knygelė,” Santara 111/112 (2015): 69. Entry for November 15, 1967.

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but a group of Soviet writers, among whom was a Lithuanian, who, disappointed with the response to his unarticulated aspirations, transformed Sartre into a personification of international indifference to the idea of cultural or even political autonomy for the small USSR republics. Lithuanian memoirs do not recount the everyday circumstances of the visit, neither the fears nor the actions of the security forces who observed the behavior of the visitors from a capitalist country, or the fact that those who met with the visitors later had to submit reports of their interactions to the KGB. In 1991, Halina Korsakienė (widow of Kostas Korsakas) remembers that, while escorting the guests back to the hotel after dinner, Sartre argued against the arrest of Joseph Brodsky.44 The fact is known that through the interventions of Zonina Soviet writers did try to help Brodsky and that same month Sartre submitted an appeal to the chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, arguing that the motion is anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual, and that it damages the reputation of the USSR.45 Jurgis Kunčinas, one of the better-known writers of the post-communist era, wrote a tragicomic piece “The Waiter Who Waited on Sartre: the Narrative of Jokūbas Švarcas” (1989) that fills in some of the missing gaps in the background of the visit. The waiter describes situations that we do not find in memoirs: concerns about private affairs, unavoidable tensions when trying to make a good impression in front of respected visitors, and certainly the unavoidable presence of the KGB. The waiter refuses to inform on the visitors to the KGB and loses his job at the restaurant of an upscale hotel. Serving beer in a cheap bar, he likes to talk about his encounter with the great philosopher, elaborating on a particularly down-to-earth episode. Thus, using artistic language, the writer describes the atmosphere of the Soviet era: beyond the carefree and pleasant episodes seen in photographs taken during the visit profound personal and political dramas were hidden. Everyone—guests and hosts alike—vacillated between a flirtation with the regime and authentic human feelings.

In Lieu of a Conclusion If we were to consider the totality of the narratives about the visit by two famous twentieth-century philosophers and their documentation as a plot 44 Korsakienė, Namas, kuriame gyvenome, 261–62. 45 Ewa Zarzycka-Bérard, “Sartre et Beauvoir en URSS,” Commentaire 14, no. 53 (1991): 168.

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line, we would see its evolution. In 1965 there were newspaper reports, several interviews, photographs, and reproductions of art work in the press. Later Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s visit was forgotten or remembered with disappointment, using the memory of this couple to create a personal mythology (Eduardas Mieželaitis’ “Medžio grimasos”, 1970; Justinas Marcinkevičius’s Dienoraštis be datų, 1981). This position in part coincided with the official one: Sartre and de Beauvoir, formerly friends of the USSR, became its enemies shortly after the visit—they were to be discussed either in negative terms or not at all. Thus, the stories about the French writers’ visit disappeared from public view and found a safe refuge in artists’ private discussions. The history returned to public discourse, when the people who met with the guests grew old and began writing memoirs already from a post-communist perspective. They tried, albeit unconsciously, to show that their lives during the Soviet era were not entirely colorless and isolated. On the other hand, the competition for the opportunity to meet the famous guests established a change in the center of power in the writers’ hierarchy: a new literary generation, formed during the Soviet era, came to the fore. Although in memoirs the visit of the two French philosophers is portrayed as a source of pride in the Lithuanian culture of that time, a more fastidious analysis demonstrates that more than likely the disappointment in the meeting had a greater effect on Lithuanian culture, which encouraged the writers to search for sources of pride in their own history, not particularly valued in the past. Marcinkevičius’s historical play, “Mindaugas” and later ones as well became a popular means to establish national history in the consciousness of the general public.

Bibliography Baliutytė, Elena. “The Eduardas Mieželaitis’ Creative Work from the 1960s to 1980s: From Prometheanism to Quixoticism.” In Baltic Memory: Processes of Modernisation in Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian Literature of the Soviet Period, edited by Elena Baliutytė and Donata Mitaitė, 177–87. Vilnius: Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, 2011. Champonnois, Suzanne. “Prancūzų požiūris į Baltijos valstybes devintajame dešimtmetyje.” XXI amžius, February 5, 2003. Accessed May 13, 2017. http://www.xxiamzius.lt/archyvas/ priedai/horizontai/20030205/06.html. De Beauvoir, Simone. All Said and Done: 1962–1972. Translated by Patrick O’Brien, introduction by Toril Moi. New York: Paragon House, 1993. “Justino Marcinkevičiaus užrašų knygelė.” Santara 111/112 (2015). Korsakienė, Halina. Namas, kuriame gyvenome. Vilnius: Vaga, 1991.

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Kubilius, Vytautas. Dienoraščiai 1945–1977, edited by Janina Žėkaitė and Jūratė Sprindytė. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2006. Macijauskienė, Marija. “Protas ir humanizmas vaikšto pilkais drabužiais.” In: Po aukštus kalnus vaikščiojau: Memuarai. Jonava: Jonava, 2002. Marcinkevičius, Justinas. Dienoraštis be datų. Vilnius: Vaga, 1981. Mieželaitis, Eduardas. “Medinis filosofas.” Nemunas 3 (1970). Parnell, Christina. “Masks of Stagnation: Disillusionment in Mykolas Sluckis’ Novels on the Eve of Pre-Perestroika.” In Baltic Memory: Processes of Modernisation in Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian Literature of the Soviet Period, edited by Elena Baliutytė and Donata Mitaitė, 125–32. Vilnius: Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, 2011. Savickas, Augustinas. Žalia tyla. Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2002. “Siunčiame širdingiausius linkėjimus.” Literatūra ir menas, July 31, 1965. Sluckis, Mykolas. “Po 40 metų: Kalbantis su J. P. Sartre’u ir S. de Beauvoir.” Šiaurės Atėnai, June 4, 2005; June 11, 2005. ———. “Le séjour de Jean-Paul Sartre en Lituanie: huit jours inoubliables, 35 ans après.” Cahiers Lituaniens 1 (2000). Accessed May 13, 2017. http://www.cahiers-lituaniens.org/ sartre.htm. Vaintraubas, S. “Sartras: ‘Tokios pažintys praturtina.’” Vakarinės naujienos, July 27, 1965. ———. “‘Lietuviškos žemės sauja’—Žanui Poliui Sartrui.” Vakarinės naujienos, August 4, 1965. Venclova, Antanas. 1963 m. kovas–1965 m. spalis. Vol. 4 of Dienoraštis. Vilnius: Vilniaus memorialinių muziejų direkcijos Venclovų namai-muziejus. Zarzycka-Bérard, Ewa. “Sartre et Beauvoir en URSS.” Commentaire 14, no. 53 (1991): 161–68. “Žanas Polis Sartras išvyko iš Lietuvos.” Tiesa, August 4, 1965.

Loreta Mačianskaitė

The Production of Eimuntas Nekrošius’s Kvadratas as a Palimpsest of Soviet-era Memory

Theater is like cigarette smoke. Nothing remains after you exhale.1 Eimuntas Nekrošius Theater director Nekrošius’s staging of Kvadratas (The square) was the most famous play; it was politicized and the most scrutinized by censorship and has become legendary in the annals of Lithuanian theater, a static cultural monument that no one has attempted to decipher by using new interpretative tools. Current technological capabilities “reanimate” the performance and make it accessible to all: there are even several filmed versions that have now been digitized and are available on the internet.2 This allows us to raise some questions: why was Kvadratas so important in the late Soviet period and during the years of perestroika? How is it made, as the formalists would say? What “generators of meaning”3 did it trigger in the consciousness of spectators from different countries and of various experiences, that for many it became an event to remember for the rest of their lives? 1 From “Holland festival dagkort,” June 14, 1989, in Atsiliepimai, recenzijos, straipsniai užsienio spaudoje apie jaunimo teatro gastroles tarptautiniuose festivaliuose, užsienio gastrolėse (Vilnius: Jaunimo teatras, “Samizdat-as”, 1989), 155. Fund 516, Box 3, Folder 159, Lithuanian Archives of Literature and Art, Vilnius. 2 Eimuntas Nekrosius, “Kvadratas,” YouTube video, accessed December 20, 2017, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VrN7yjh27U. 3 Yuri Lotman, “Tekst i pliglotizm kul’tury”, vol.,  Izbrannye stat’i  (Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992), 144.

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This analysis was driven by the aim to examine the genesis of the play, and the effect of historical time which shaped its multilayered discourse. We attempted to discover whether aside from the political codes there are other configurations of meaning hidden within the performance that might be germane to the study of cultural memory and contemporary mentalities.

The Theater Where Kvadratas Was Born To understand the significance of Nekrošius’s work, taking place in the State Youth Theater, it is necessary to recall the arrangement of the most important positions in the field of Lithuanian theater. In 1940, according to the customary Soviet agenda, a special theater for young spectators was established in Kaunas; later, in 1965, a theater with the same mission was established in Vilnius. At first, the Vilnius Youth Theater, though popular among audiences, lacked particular prestige: due to special requirements for the repertoire, directors preferred to make a name for themselves in theater for adult audiences. The situation was transformed by theater director and teacher Dalia Tamulevičiūtė who beginning in 1971 started to develop a new esthetics, based on exposing an actor’s individuality and experience, improvisation in general. In the 1970s discord in stylistic methodology emerged between the Youth Theater and the main drama theater in Soviet Lithuania, i.e., the State Academic Drama Theater, which positioned itself as working with the officially accepted Stanislavski method, and was a typical literature-centric entity. This stylistic and spatial (city center vs. old town4) opposition of the Vilnius theaters is very similar to that of the theaters of Paris as described by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: “The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatre, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.”5 4

The Academic Drama Theater was and still is situated in the very center of Vilnius on the most important avenue; whereas the Youth Theater is in the less prestigious part of the city, in the territory of the former ghetto. To be sure, during the renovation projects for a long time theaters “migrated;” however, it was always obvious that the state prioritized the Academic Drama Theater and provided better facilities namely to it. 5 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 19, https://monoskop.org/ images/e/e0/Pierre_Bourdieu_Distinction_A_Social_Critique_of_the_Judgement_of_ Taste_1984.pdf.

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The Production of Eimuntas Nekrošius’s Kvadratas    LORETA MAČIANSKAITĖ

Pre-history of the Performance. The Director’s Choices In 1977 Nekrošius made his debut at the Youth Theater, and after a brief hiatus in Kaunas and mandatory military service, he worked at the Youth Theater constantly from 1979. Memories of repressed individuality experienced while studying under Andrey Goncharov6 at the Russian Institute of Theater Arts in Moscow and during his service in the Army are recognizable in many of his performances. Tamulevičiūtė, the principal director of the Youth Theater, appreciated her former student’s talent, but notwithstanding her protection, Nekrošius, like everyone else, had to comply with the requirements of the repertoire and the plans for the theater, which included performances based on the work of a Soviet author with a contemporary theme aimed at young people. Facing the Soviet coercion machine, Nekrošius had two options: to refuse to obey and eventually become a dissident (in doing so he would have forfeited the opportunity to work as a theater director), or to resign himself and withdraw from active participation. But there was also a third option—to find an alternative: to create a new artistic language and to present something that the censors would not recognize yet. As any artist working for an official state organization, Nekrošius had no choice but to obey, that is, he could not stage performances that did not convey the official Soviet themes prescribed by the government. However, he expressed his independence in that he did not produce the exact same play that he found unacceptable but offered his own dramatic variant. Such is the stance that surfaces in analyzing the genesis of Kvadratas—a performance created through actors’ improvisations, with the help of the playwright Saulius Šaltenis, yet with no literary work as its foundation. Information about the performance always asserts that it is based on motifs from Valentina Yeliseyeva’s documentary narrative, Tak ono bylo (It happened once),7 yet this is merely a protective shield, a legitimizing literary 6 Nekrošius remembers his student days at the Russian Institute of Theater Arts known as GITIS as a time of terror: “Goncharov demanded that we work strictly according to his dictates, he even controlled our intonation. He was our very own Stalin with his own Berias. When Goncharov turned his back on me, his assistants followed suit immediately. The entire theater trembled at a word of his, so much more did we, his students.” Quoted from “Helsing Sanomat,” October 9, 1988, in Atsiliepimai, recenzijos, straipsniai, 67. 7 At times translated as “It was like this.” See Fund 342, Box 5, Folder 1544, Archive of Lithuanian Literature and Art, Vilnius.

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citation that protected the producers from embarrassment.8 Nevertheless, archival sources show that there was another text, one suggested by the Ministry of Culture—a play based on Yeliseyeva’s story and called “Kvadratik neba sinego” (A small square of clear blue sky, 1978) by Soviet Russian playwright and twice laureate of the Stalin Prize, Alexander Stein (born Rubinstein). Nekrošius considered the play totally unacceptable and decided that he “would make a play without any text starting from zero, from the situation [we had three characters], He, She and Narrator.”9 These three existing discourses—Yeliseyeva’s story, Stein’s play, and Nekrošius’s performance—are related in a sense; they are based on a common plot that consists of the correspondence between a prisoner and a young woman, which grows into true love and is fated to endure many trials. Nevertheless, essential differences become apparent when we compare the literary texts and the theatrical performance.

A Story With “Something So Real” The documentary narrative, Tak ono bylo appeared in 1977 in Novyi mir (New world), the monthly literary journal of the Moscow Writers’ Union. It was published as a book in 1980 and was listed in library catalogues under the headings “Youth—USSR” and “Criminals—Reformed”10 although the book has very little to do with reforming criminals: Anatoly, the main male character, imprisoned while a teenager, is more likely a victim than a felon. The correspondence with Yevgeniya, a freshman studying education, begins when Anatoly believes that he will be released for good behavior; nevertheless, he is reassessed as a recidivist and is condemned to serve his entire sentence. The young woman arrives in Yakutiya to meet her correspondent with whom she has fallen in love, they marry, he is released, but their happiness is short-lived. Anatoly is attacked by his former friends, and in trying to defend himself he wounds one of them. He is then sentenced to another term as a recidivist. Afraid for her husband’s safety and concerned about his possible suicide, Yevgeniya starts to look for any and all possible ways to 8 Nekrošius insisted that he noticed “something” in Yeliseyeva’s tale. Not all the actors were pleased to work with a nonexistent literary text; for example, Vladas Bagdonas, the first actor to portray the prisoner, withdrew from the rehearsals. 9 Ludvika Apinytė Popenhagen, Nekrošius and Lithuanian Theater (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999), 32. 10 See NTUU KPI Library Catalogue, accessed September 14, 2017, http://library.kpi. ua:8991/F?func=find-b&request=000270278&find_code=SYS.

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have him released: an attorney in Moscow recommends that she go to the editorial offices of the newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta and ask for Valentina Philipovna Yeliseyeva in the Communist education department, that is, the author of this story. The journalist is successful; she arranges for the case to be reviewed, the sentence is dismissed, and the lovers’ correspondence is published as a documentary narrative. The book ends with a utopian Soviet family: Anatoly enrolls in the Institute, the couple has two sons, they live in a three-room apartment. However, Yevgeniya’s final letters to the author (unrelated to the story and written when the book was being prepared for publishing) are not at all optimistic: as a result of Anatoly’s earlier traumatic experiences, his vision is failing, and the family is facing new trials. The main female narrator abandons many of her illusions by the end of the story: “as an educator, I am losing the foundation beneath my feet, and you are unable to inspire students with ideas you don’t believe,”11—Yevgeniya admits to Yeliseyeva. Today, this story could be interesting from an anthropological and sociological perspective as a paradigm shift in consciousness: illusions prominent during the Thaw of the early sixties are replaced by experiences throughout the Brezhnev era, hope for the future is supported not by societal justice but by confidence in the good in various people.

A Play Despised by the Director A comparison of texts within Yeliseyeva’s narrative and Stein’s play based on the story clearly shows that the transformation of prose into drama was not only an intermedial transposition but also an ideological one, which changed the significance of the story without changing the storyline or the letters themselves: in Stein’s 1978 play, the love story is constructed as evidence of the unavoidable triumph of Socialist justice. Unlike the story, where the most important point in space is the editor’s office, because the plot lines converge in it; the play concentrates its action in the judicial zone (jail, forced labor camps, court). The play begins with the reading of a complaint demanding recourse for violated justice and ends with the court’s finding the complaint valid and the release of the hero with a gesture of respect to the Envoy. The Envoy, who did not figure in the tale, 11 Valentina Yeliseyeva, Tak ono bylo (Moscow: Molodaja gvardija, 1984), 105.

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acts as the central character in the play on whom all the episodes converge: he is the unofficial postal courier for the prisoners, the organizer of secret meetings, and the supervisor of the prison who disciplines prisoners when they react violently, and a nameless friend who consoles the young woman. He is the voice of Yeliseyeva’s story’s “readers” and the all-seeing eye of the government—“you can see it clear as day.”12 The Envoy performs the role of the chorus in the plays of antiquity: he explains how to interpret the situation correctly (the Envoy reminds the desperate prisoner of the Great Patriotic War and the Leningrad Blockade), he calms his emotional reactions (he subdues the prisoner by force and sweeps up the shards of the bottle he has broken), that is, he personifies the principle of absolute objectivity impervious to human factors and acting as a law of nature: “prison is, of course, prison, it cannot be good or bad, just as there cannot be a good or bad tuberculosis.”13 The hero of the play experiences trials that drive him to despair, he is like the Soviet version of the biblical Job: the actor’s victory is marked by the Envoy’s gesture of respect, whereby the former prisoner is glorified as a true Soviet man, redeemed by his suffering.

The Performance as an X-Ray of the Times Nekrošius’s production, despite the director’s acutely negative perspective, also has something in common with Stein’s play, primarily by its title and its structure of three characters, although its content is quite the opposite. Stein’s idea of the world “clear as day” is transformed into a universal prison in Nekrošius’s interpretation, a metaphor for a panopticon, which conceptualizes and organizes the stage setting of Kvadratas: a space subordinated for public viewing—the prison, the school, the hospital, the train station— these are the main settings for the action in the performance, and visual variations of the image of a prison. The performance begins and ends with a scene in a doctor’s office—a young woman identified as SHE (acted by Dalia Overaitė, Janina Matekonytė) and a former prisoner identified as HE (acted by Kostas Smoriginas), arrive for a consultation on HIS deteriorating health and on HER unwanted pregnancy, which the woman, SHE, unable to withstand society’s puritanical 12 Aleksandras Šteinas, Žydro dangaus kvadratėlis. Dialogas laiškais, trans. Stasys Sabonis, Fund 348, Box 5, Folder 1693, Lithuanian Archives of Literature and Art, Vilnius. Also, Alexander Stein, Žydro dangaus kvadratėlis (Kaunas: Šviesa, 1983), 49. 13 Stein, Žydro dangaus kvadratėlis, 10.

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attitudes with regard to a teacher’s “immoral actions” and the problems of her daily life, would like to terminate. The physician, acting as the representative of a disciplinary institution, uses a dual mode of communication: with HIM he speaks extremely loudly, using the same intonations as the prison’s supervisor; with HER he demonstrates compassion, encouraging her to tell all, though in reality, he is seeking to gain social control and isolate her from an unsuitable partner. A unique visual scene was found in the performance—an x-ray and an examination of the image, which allowed for speaking metaphorically of the penetration into the life of the soul and its observation, an interior viewing of the prison; thus, after the radiological procedure HIS suffocation at the finale is logically unavoidable. An important plot line for the SHE character is the space of the school as a disciplinary institution: an aspiring teacher is assigned14 to work in the Siberian city of Omsk and essentially this journey was not unlike deportation, thus the woman’s plea—“write to me”—on the train station platform sounds like a cry of despair, which bursts forth through the mandatory farewell rituals. The official with the loudspeaker who supervises the departing graduates of the Pedagogical Institute is transformed in the next episode as a prison warden, and later yet as the physician. There are interesting parallels between HER departure for Siberia to teach and HIS release from prison: both scenes are marked by a recurring action—a man with a loudspeaker cuts a red ribbon. There is an existential sensation that we live in constant proximity to punishment which is rendered as text in the woman’s letter: SHE recounts a dream wherein SHE is imprisoned because HER students failed to collect the required amount of scrap metal. In the scene showing the real visit to the prison the warden searches the woman and makes a list of her personal effects, he behaves in such a manner that it is obvious to the audience that the boundary between a free person and a prisoner essentially does not exist. In the prison space, the sounds of sirens going off, and loudspeakers announcing, “not allowed, it is forbidden” accompany the characters’ actions on stage, and that makes sense; however, the commands are heard even after the prisoner leaves the prison, and, as mentioned earlier, in the doctor’s office (the doctor can “see” the former prisoner even behind the closed doors of the lavatory).

14 In the Soviet era, graduates of universities or institutes were required to work for some years at some appointed location to compensate for their free education.

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The last hope of being able to escape from the disciplining system, from the “square,” and of being able to live a dignified life is lost as soon as the prisoner is released and, arrives at his beloved’s city and sees a postbox lying on the ground and addresses it: HE. I’m free. They’ve let me go. Freedom! Why are you lying down?.. Get up!.. Get up!.. (hangs the postbox on a pole). Stand the way I am standing! Stand! Do you want this? Here you are (takes off one shoe, then the other and stands in his bare feet). Do you want it? Take it? I am going out (As he takes his first steps a jail bell rings). It is forbidden to walk barefoot? I didn’t know that. But I have to go, they are waiting for me. And is it forbidden to play?15 But if a man wants to?.. I’ll play just a little, very quietly, let people sleep (a bell is heard). And is it forbidden to love? And what is not forbidden?16

In the final scene, the audience sees HIM exhausted and collapsed on the ground, next to their still unborn child’s crib. The crib has vertical slats that can also be interpreted as a transfiguration of the vertical bars of a prison cell. SHE holds the man in her arms and speaks words of encouragement about how much society needs HIM. These are accompanied by the physician’s peremptory and hypnotizing orders to breathe and to live, while a revolutionary march is heard in the background; the same march that sounded during HER send-off on the station platform (in the finale this march will be associated with a funeral march). Strange as it may seem, we can recall the term perekovka (reforging, rehabilitation), though having a different meaning from the way it was actively used in the Stalin era. Between the 1920s and 1930s, the term perekovka was used to describe the transformation of criminals into Soviet citizens who participate actively in manufacturing and social work. In the later years of the Soviet era, perekovka was no longer talked about, but it remained in use to suppress individuality and to produce passive and obedient homo sovieticus. Although there are marked differences between the Stalin and the Brezhnev eras, we can recognize the ideas (as Soviet culture scholar Evgeny Dobrenko interprets it) of the renowned Soviet educator, theorist, and practitioner of perekovka, Anton Makarenko, in the latter period too.

15 In an earlier episode, the actor played the accordion. 16 “Kvadratas,” 27. This excerpt has been edited for this book. (Ed.)

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Magical “education” has discipline at its heart. Makarenko took the idea of discipline to its logical conclusion: according to his theory, discipline is an end in itself; its goal is voluntary submission and the acceptance of coercion as an internal impulse toward the required action. In other words, the goal of discipline is self-discipline: complete manageability via reproduction of the memory of coercion.17

As Kvadratas ends, the main characters approach the condition of people controlled by fear and constant self-suppression: SHE apologizes for Herself and for HIM, prepared to suffer any of the doctor’s humiliations; HE shudders at the doctor’s every imperious word. We can interpret the final scene, when HE ceases to breathe, as a response to a command to obey orders, the ultimate form of protest, but we can also entertain another interpretation, that the man dies defenseless, allowing himself to be defeated. The performance changed slightly over the years: a comparison of the 1980 Lithuanian version with the 1990 translated English version shows that in the former finale, the woman encourages the man, followed by the physician’s orders to HIM to breathe and to live; in the English version, the woman screams “He isn’t breathing! He isn’t breathing”— and from this the audience understands that the hero has died. Each version has its own logic: the first was dictated by the realistic atmosphere of life in the late Soviet era—it was a call to persevere and to oppose a suppressive environment; the second expressed the sense of despair that accompanied the end of the Soviet era and the early years of independence, when people were confronted with the cruelties of the newly revealed world and the limits of freedom.18 The political subtext of the performance was easily understood by the audiences of the times; however, in the art world, this level was not the most important element. For example, in the early 2000s a Russian discussion by critics came to the opinion that, with the collapse of the USSR, Kvadratas died because its principal idea, that “our former USSR was nothing but a Gulag, has become a banality, and is not worth repeating aloud.”19 An opinion such as this shows the problems of perception among audiences formed in an imprisoned society—an exaggerated sensitivity to political 17 Evgeny Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 128. 18 Ramunė Marcinkevičiūtė, Eimuntas Nekrošius: erdvė už žodžių (Vilnius: Scena ir Kultūros barai, 2002), 96–97. 19 From Ol’ga Mal’tseva, Teatr Eymuntasa Nyakroshyusa: Poetika.

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innuendo and an impaired ability to understand artistic language as well as the illusions of the early Boris Yeltsin presidency—that in Russia the notion of state-as-prison is obsolete.

Constellations of Literary Intertexts To better understand the elements of Kvadratas that may be of interest not only to critics of totalitarianism, let us begin by examining the structure of its spoken text and discuss the literary texts of other authors who participated in the diegetic world of the performance. Initially, the audience hears two poems recited by SHE on the station platform, “Parizhanka” (The Parisian woman) by Vladimir Mayakovsky and “Pis’mo materi” (Letter to mother) by Sergey Yesenin, while the prisoner, having constructed a radio receiver, inadvertently picks up the broadcast of the graduates’ farewell. At first glance, it may appear that the poems recited aloud on the station platform by the girl are accidental and not at all related to the action of the performance as a whole, but certain connections can most certainly be found. The aforementioned poets are presented as arguments for fearlessness and loyalty to the self: the prisoner dreams that the young woman whose recitations HE has heard, asks for a letter to be written to HER, and in response to his warning that HE is forbidden any correspondence for fifteen years, SHE retorts with details of Mayakovsky’s (in some versions it was Yesenin’s) biography: “he wrote and wrote and while writing shot himself, if you don’t write to me I’ll shoot myself too” (with these words, the poet’s portrait descends, a gunshot is heard and a red bulb lights up at his temple). Mayakovsky’s poem describes a poor Parisian woman, who works in the restroom of an upscale restaurant handing a towel to the gentleman, spraying perfume, cleaning the floor. The Narrator finds this work demeaning, while the image of the woman is created as an inversion of an established image, which marks not the mythical but the true condition of Parisian women: “But it’s hard / for a woman to live / in Paris / If she has to work,— / not to sell her soul.”20 20 Vladimir Mayakovsky, “The Parisian Woman,” trans. Alec Vagapov, 1968; http:// poetrypoem.com/cgi-bin/index.pl?poemnumber=891412&sitename=vagalec& displaypoem=t&item=poetry

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In later scenes of the performance we see HER as a lonely teacher whose appearance, compared with the woman in Mayakovsky’s poem, is even more miserable: the Parisian woman wears cotton, not silk, stockings, while the young teacher having suffered a frostbitten toe in the Siberian winter is happy when SHE is given felt boots. The Parisian motif is accompanied by a musical theme: “La Marseillaise” is heard in the background during the recitations at the train station, later the prisoner hums the tune while tapping his cheek with his fingers and says that HE wants to send her a musical greeting through the air waves. Even later, the Parisian semantics are transformed into Western ones, for example, a song by Robertino Loretti, which the prisoner plays for the woman on his home-made radio receiver during their meeting in the prison. A motif from the quoted Mayakovsky poem is repeated in the meeting episode: “The woman’s job / is to help with a towel.” Granted, at first the man brings her water and a bowl to wash, but later—HE moistens HIS lips, touching the water as if it were sacred, HE sprinkles water on his head, and SHE gives him a towel and caresses HIM as though he were an overexcited child. The theme of motherhood is directly related to another poetic intertext within the performance—Yesenin’s “Pis’mo materi” is constructed as a city hooligan’s appeal to his devoted mother awaiting his return. The relationship between Mayakovsky and Yesenin is one of opposition: when HE hears the poem about the Parisian woman, the prisoner grimaces and giggles, but HE is moved by the “Pis’mo materi,” and so begins the transformation from prisoner #375 into a human being. At the end of Kvadratas the former prisoner’s beloved becomes HIS own symbolic mother—in the final scene they both sit beside the tiny crib, and SHE caresses the man’s head and utters words more fitting for a child than a man. The theme begun by Yesenin continues through Vasily Shukshin’s film, Kalina krasnaya (The Red Snowball Tree, 1974).21 In the performance HE describes the film to HER visiting HIM and becomes very emotional when HE recounts an episode of the hero’s, also a former prisoner’s, meeting his blind mother. There are distinct parallels between the performance and the film (and the story22), although Shukshin’s main character is murdered by his former cronies in revenge for his refusal to return to the criminal world; 21 The film is based on a story which was first published in 1973 in Nash sovremennik, no. 4. 22 Vasilii Shukshin, Kalina krasnaya, Bibliotekar’, accessed December 20, 2017, http:// www.bibliotekar.ru/shukshin/17.htm.

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meanwhile, in Kvadatas the man is slowly murdered by a disciplinary society that condemns him for not respecting its norms, as Hannah Arendt would say, “to live imprisoned in the subjectivity of his own singular experience.”23 In the performance, “the world between people”, using Arendt terms,24 is established through epistolary communication and is upheld by the cultural sphere. As was mentioned before, the prisoner’s first letter is influenced by the poetry that touched his heart; in their subsequent correspondence, and even more so in their first meeting, meaningful communication is achieved only through literary texts (through quotations, reformulations, and originally created pieces), because casual speech is totally incapable of bridging the chasm between strangers. The prisoner creates his identity through the written world of letters; he can only express himself and understand himself as an individual “on paper.” When HE is released, correspondence is unnecessary, just as literary references are unnecessary in everyday communication, nevertheless, the space of interpersonal love is inadequate for personal vitality; thus, when the cultural medium disappears so does the world itself. During their first meeting the young woman recounts Anton Chekhov’s “comical” story, “Ryb’ya lyubov’” (Fish love, 1892), and this episode anticipates a future situation, which becomes apparent only in the final episode of the performance. Chekhov’s carp, madly in love with a girl, swallows her fish hook, yet when he breaks free, he “didn’t have his lower jaw and finally went mad.” We can recognize the analogy between the prisoner in Kvadratas and Chekhov’s carp—freedom and love mean the loss of the self for both: the carp (Chekhov’s carp ironically represents a decadent poet) loses his jaw and symbolically loses his voice and consciousness; the prisoner loses his epistolary space—and consequently loses his voice as a manner of self-expression. The existential situation articulated in Nekrošius’s performance can be described as a condition common to people of the Soviet era—resistance to the pressures of society or the regime used to take place by establishing an alternative in the form of human warmth, nevertheless, denied the opportunity for creative

23 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 58, https://monoskop.org/images/e/e2/Arendt_Hannah_The_Human_Condition_ 2nd_1998.pdf. 24 Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” trans. Clara and Richard Winston, in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 3, https://signale.cornell.edu/text/humanity-dark-times-thoughts-about-lessing.

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expression or, at the very least, for minimal participation in a cultural environment, personalities disappeared into “worldlessness.” Paradoxically, the performance under discussion, which is considered to be the most prominent example of non-literary theater, is at the same time the most literature-centric. It contemplates the meaning of literature itself, being nurtured by plots and images of “great” literature (the Russian classics), and is meant for an audience who recognizes texts and themes learned at school—the theme of the little man, for instance. To put it grandly, Kvadratas is a glorification of literature and its deconstruction.

Beyond Words Besides the political discourse and literary intertexts, which may not have been recognized by everyone in the audience, the most important element in Nekrošius’s Kvadratas was something that is referred to as the so-called space beyond words.25 The emotional narrative in Kvadratas relies on corporeal and material theatrical language (everyday objects become symbols: a postbox, a stool, electrical cords, a tin cup, a cube of sugar) which appealed to all the senses of the audience. The most powerful scene in the performance is when the prisoner, after an unsuccessful attempt at a kiss and wanting to break the discomfiting silence, offers the young woman, who sits on the other side of the metal bed, a cube of sugar; HE places it in the middle of the space between their bodies and the woman rises and takes several steps toward the prisoner. And so the prisoner places one sugar cube next to another enticing HER to come closer, explaining that each sugar cube represents a day spent in the prison. Finally, HE takes all the sugar that he has hidden away and dumps it over HER head. Semantically, this scene is related to the ritualistic bathing and night of lovemaking scenes that appear later in the performance. The latter is executed in a minimalist manner: the man slowly slides down from the upper bunk to the woman on the lower bunk, a sheet is draped between the bunks, and the lovers’ dark silhouettes are projected as if on a white screen. They sit in profile facing one another and eventually merge into one figure. Before the embrace and the kiss, the man places a cube of sugar into the woman’s mouth. Many 25 The first time there was an intimation that there were important elements hidden between words came to light from Nekrošius himself in an interview “Kokia erdvė už žodžių” (What is the space behind the words), published in 1984 in Kultūros barai. See Marcinkevičiūtė, Eimuntas Nekrošius, 78.

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observers could have associated this act with a ritual in the Catholic mass— receiving the Host. The sacred nature of this act is emphasized in the textual description in the script—“it was a holy [emphasis mine—L. M.] night of love.”26 The musical accompaniment (it begins still in the bathing scene) is the “Qui tollis peccata mundi,”27 a variation of J. S. Bach’s Mass in B minor (equivalent to the “Breaking Bread” part of the Catholic mass, when the “Agnus Dei” (“Lamb of God”) is sung before the distribution of the Holy Communion). Therefore, we can recognize a religious element in Kvadratas reconstructed through steps of the Catholic ritual (the sequence of the ritual is not followed): blessing and sprinkling holy water, hymns of thanksgiving, and communion. The intertext of Christianity was probably recognized by some spectators in the audience through personal experience or memory, and by others—through the network of cultural reformation which sometimes included the music of Bach. A large part of the audience was affected by the power of Bach’s music, which, notwithstanding the listener’s interpretative skills, evoked sacred meanings. In an atheistic, anthropocentric society the expression of sacred phenomena was transposed into the sphere of art which recoded the sacred into vaguely relevant plots: the banal melodrama of the love between a prisoner and a teacher could have been read as the narrative transposition of the encounter between man and God. Hypothetically, we suggest that the foundational and most profound text of the performance (the prototext) is the Holy Scripture. In one way or another all of the intertexts of the performance are related to it, either as a recoded communion ritual or as a musical citation of the Mass. However, we can see another layer of text related to the Scriptures, although it belongs to another paradigm, that of folklore or literature. To generalize let us call it the hard labor camp or katorga novel (the most remarkable examples are the narratives describing the Decembrists wives’ journeys to Siberia). The tradition of the katorga romance did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union, indeed the most recent effort to cover this subject is Svetlana Alexievich’s 2013 book Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (English version 2016) in the narrative about the mother of three children who abandons her family for a prisoner she has known only through their correspondence. Alexievich describes the Russian phenomenon of centuries 26 Fund 516, Box 2, Folder 62, Lithuanian Archives of Literature and Art, Vilnius. 27 [Lamb of God] you take away the sins of the world.

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of love affairs with katorga prisoners as an entire culture of pity,28 but we would like to discuss this definition by comparing this phenomenon not only with religious tradition, but also with the history of Siberia and the appropriation of landmass for colonial and economic purposes which could be accomplished only through the exploitation of human energy. The history of Russia shows that the enduring tradition of pity for prisoners is directly related to a mistrust of the government and its judicial system. Therefore, the katorga romance as a vital element of a certain form of life is explicable as a fusion of religious ethos, romanticized eros, and unreflected political protest. Kvadratas can be considered a theatrical version of a katorga romance; however, in this instance the Soviet symbols are not as important as the references to Russian culture, most importantly the musical references: the songs “Step’ da step’ krugom,” “Chizhyk-pyzhyk, gde ty byl” and the revolutionary march. Through these historically marked references, the melodrama presented in the performance achieves an historical depth. It ceases to be a witness of the present time exclusively and elicits far-reaching associations for the audiences of ethnic Lithuanians affected by their Russian trauma.

Post-History with Several Conclusions The fact that Kvadratas made it past the censors in 1980 was considered no less than a miracle. Notwithstanding a certain initial opposition from Lithuanian theater critics, the majority of them, particularly those of the younger generation, defended the visual theatrical autonomy and the director’s intention to evoke compassion for the common man. Soviet rhetorical clichés about humanistic pathos, used by skillful reviewers, not only legitimized the performance, but also led to an award at the theater festival of the 26th Congress of the Soviet Union Communist Party. Audiences never expressed any antagonism: Kvadratas ran for sixteen years; it was performed 315 times to a wide array of audiences, including in prisons. Nevertheless, for a long time, the production was not shown beyond the borders of Lithuania (it was performed in Moscow only in 1987), performances for foreigners were forbidden (in 1987 it was shown to a delegation of Americans with a special 28 Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time. The Last of the Soviets, trans. Bela Shayevich (New York: Random House, 2016), 434–53.

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dispensation from the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, circumventing an injunction from Moscow). Kvadratas was performed for the first time in the West in 1988, in Finland, at a time when calls for independence resounded throughout Lithuania.29 Western critics focused on aspects of Kvadratas that were ignored by Soviet-era critics—eroticism and politics. There were attempts to explicate the fate of the main character as the tragedy of a dissident, although the director repeatedly asserted that the hero was an ordinary man. Some foreign reviews were unexpectedly over the top: “Today Helsinki is number one on the map of European theater thanks to our guests.”30 Kvadratas continued touring until about 1996, fascinating Western audiences. It is no longer performed in Lithuania, although it is considered legendary. The actor Kostas Smoriginas, who played HE, now reports that some spectators had saved the sugar cubes that were hurled into the audience for thirty years, and now present them to him as invaluable mementos.31 The director used to describe the performance of Kvadratas as a “shallow ‘American’ show during which you can laugh, you can cry,”32 although he probably did not realize the significance of what he had created through extraordinary artistic intuition rather than rational thought. The production emerged as the result of improvisations by a few actors, but it can be assessed as a palimpsest of cultural memory that surpassed the experience of its creators. It was created through the superimposition of varying literary and musical texts, thus forming a superb meandering creative constellation. An unanswered question remains about the structure of consciousness expressed by the performance: does it gravitate toward Russian 29 Only the year before the Lithuanian Freedom League, having organized a commemoration for the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by the monument to Adam Mickiewicz, the theater was required to condemn one of its members who was one of the organizers of the event. This was the price to be paid for being allowed to participate in the Chicago Theater Festival (Kvadratas was not allowed to be part of the playlist). Incidentally, at about the same time, Nekrošius had planned to produce Mickiewicz’s “Vėlinės” (All Souls’ Day), a nineteenth-century anti-imperialist poem, but he was denied permission to do so; typically, no reason for the cancellation was given. 30 Jukka Kajava, “Vilniečių gastrolėms prilygstančių nedaug. Kvadratas—žadą gniaužanti Nekrošiaus vizitinė kortelė,” Uusi Suomi, October 15, 1988, in Atsiliepimai, recenzijos, straipsniai, 82. 31 “Kostui Smoriginui mama vaikystėje įteikė keisčiausią dovaną,” Lietuvos rytas, May 8, 2017. 32 From Marcinkevičiūtė, Eimuntas Nekrošius, 75.

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culture, or does it echo Western pursuits, unknown directly but anticipated in Lithuania; or is this some kind of unique model of Lithuanian thought? The separation of Western and Eastern (Russian) cultural paradigms is evident after exploring the musical soundtrack: the melodies representing the West (Johann Sebastian Bach, Robertino Loretti, “La Marseillaise”) mark points in the performance that exhibit a transgression of boundaries or a longing for a different world; while the Russian musical line is directly related to the centralizing power, the characters’ efforts to extricate themselves, to retreat within themselves or within a tiny circle of their closest friends at the cost of losing the world.33 According to a theory proposed by Vytautas Kavolis, a LithuanianAmerican cultural sociologist, cultural modernization is a process occurring necessarily, though not always simultaneously, on three levels: the modernizing-antimodernist split at the center of the process; archaic programs of restoration at its depths; postmodern reconfigurations of differentiated entities in the outer space of its most experimental enterprises.34 Because it is impossible to establish a clear structure of the interrelationship of these texts, we can only propose a rather general conclusion, that it is archaism within modernism. From an aesthetic perspective, Kvadratas was revolutionary, it discovered a new theatrical language, although it simultaneously demonstrated the literature-centrism of society. On the political plane, it expressed an indisputable criticism of the system, though at the same time it marked the boundary of resistance—personal rebellion ends in resignation, escapism or voluntary suicide. Archaic values were of a different code of honor, a demonstration of alternative morality to the totalitarian system, or perhaps to the pragmatic West as well. We can compare this logic to the turning of the other cheek in the Gospels, an ethical challenge in the face of coercion. The principle of the palimpsest and intertextual poetics point to a tendency toward postmodernism, singularly combined with a culture of pity. Today we face a certain paradox: Nekrošius is recognized as a Lithuanian genius and elevated to world class notoriety, however, his past 33 Based on Etkind’s analysis of Hannah Arendt: Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning— Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013), 85. 34 Vytautas Kavolis, “Nationalism, Modernization, and the Polylogue of Civilizations,” Comparative Civilizations Review 25, no. 25, art. 7 (1991): 126, http://scholarsarchive. byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1236&context=ccr.

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performances are rarely actualized in public discourse, and their status on the international scene make them appear as though they are beyond Lithuanian culture. On the other hand, within the collective memory of the Soviet era, which has been reformatted after more than twenty years of independence, the ratings of the Academic Drama Theater are starting to rise. We have in mind the memoirs of former Party officials. Opinions of professionals are frequently ignored in battles of memory; the memoirists on the other hand, in an effort to authenticate the successes of Soviet Lithuania, refer to the Academic Drama Theater as an example, either “forgetting” the Youth Theater, or relegating it to some other transnational paradigm. In response to these copious memoirs, we can metaphorically offer a small cube of sugar preserved by a member of the audience for thirty years, and no doubt it will outweigh the other. The semiotician Yury Lotman has written that we can recognize the activity of models of communication and auto-communication in culturally significant texts. Human culture is a vast example of auto-communication. We can consider Kvadratas to be a similar message, sent by culture to itself. When society deciphers the message, it is understood differently than when it was originally created, yet the message forces the recipient to see himself in a different way.35 Kvadratas’s cube of sugar preserves memories of the past and examines the ability to not prevaricate and to recognize the truth.

Bibliography Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time. The Last of the Soviets. Translated by Bela Shayevich. New York: Random House, 2016. Arendt, Hannah. “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing.” Translated by Clara and Richard Winston. In Men in Dark Times, 3–31. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. https://signale.cornell.edu/text/humanity-dark-times-thoughts-about-lessing. ———. The Human Condition. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Accessed December 20, 2017. https://monoskop.org/images/e/e2/Arendt_Hannah_The_ Human_Condition_2nd_1998.pdf. Atsiliepimai, recenzijos straipsniai užsienio spaudoje apie Jaunimo teatro gastroles tarptautiniuose festivaliuose, užsienio gastrolėse. Vilnius: Jaunimo teatras, 1989. Fund 516, Box 3, Folder 159. Lithuanian Archives of Literature and Art, Vilnius. 35 Yuri Lotman, “O dvuch modeljach kommunikacii v sisteme kul’tury”, vol. 1 of Izbrannye stat’i (Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992), 86.

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The Production of Eimuntas Nekrošius’s Kvadratas    LORETA MAČIANSKAITĖ

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Accessed December 20, 2017. https://monoskop.org/images/e/e0/Pierre_Bourdieu_Distinction_A_Social_ Critique_of_the_Judgement_of_Taste_1984.pdf. Dobrenko, Evgeny. Political Economy of Socialist Realism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Etkind, Alexander. Warped Mourning—Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. Narrative Semiotics and Cognitive Discourses. Translated by Paul Perron and Frank H. Collins. London: Pinter, 1990. Kavolis, Vytautas. “Nationalism, Modernization, and the Polylogue of Civilizations,” Comparative Civilizations Review 25, no. 25, art. 7 (1991): 124–43. Accessed December 20, 2017. http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1236&context=ccr. “Kostui Smoriginui mama vaikystėje įteikė keisčiausią dovaną.” Lietuvos rytas, May 8, 2017. Lotman, Yuri. Vol. 1 of Izbrannye stat’i. Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992. Mal’tseva, Ol’ga. Teatr Eymuntasa Nyakroshyusa: Poetika. Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2013. Accessed December 20, 1027. http://teatr-lib.ru/Library/Maltseva/ nekrosius/#_Toc384385980. Marcinkevičiūtė, Ramunė. Eimuntas Nekrošius: erdvė už žodžių. Vilnius: Scena ir Kultūros barai, 2002. Marcinkevičiūtė, Ramunė, ed. Patirčių realizmas. Dalios Tamulevičiūtės kūrybinės biografijos studija. Vilnius: Kultūros barai, 2011. Popenhagen, Ludvika Apinytė. Nekrošius and Lithuanian Theater. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999. Šteinas, Aleksandras. Žydro dangaus kvadratėlis. Dialogas laiškais. Translated by Stasys Sabonis. Kaunas: Šviesa, 1983. Yeliseyeva, Valentina. Tak ono bylo. Moscow: Molodaja gvardija, 1984.

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The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets Their Illusions and Choices

General Characteristics of the Generation In the Soviet literary field the concept of generations is significant and has an established tradition of research.1 Following the example of the social and cultural historian Juliane Fürst, we will attempt “to consider generational experience as a complicated, dialectical process that connects social context with a certain age cohort”2; this article will discuss the path of compromise, illusion, and liberation of a generation of Lithuanian poets which was manifest in Lithuanian cultural and literary life in the decade of 1960 to 1970. The cultural and literary life of the time was closely tied to the political climate in the Soviet Union. The following political events were as important to literature as they were to the culture as a whole: Stalin’s death in 1953 (there are those who contend that the Stalin epoch ended not with his death, but when the Party Congress approved a resolution to remove his body from the mausoleum on October 30, 1961),3 the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the Prague 1 Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism. Oxford University Press, 2010, 408; Stephen Lovell, Generation in Twentieth-Century Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, Harvard University Press, 2011. 2 Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation, 19–20. 3 Lydia Chukovskaya, “Ne zlo pomniu, a znaniye o cheloveke,” Biografiya 5 (2015): 71.

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Spring in 1968. Alexei Yurchak, a scholar of the Soviet period, considers the Soviet army units entering Czechoslovakia in 1968 as the symbolic boundary of the Thaw and the Brezhnev stagnation.4 In Lithuania, the hope for liberalization of cultural life collapsed in 1972 when a nineteen-year-old in Kaunas, named Romas Kalanta set himself on fire, after writing in his diary: “We will never have freedom here, that is why people are expressly forced to busy themselves, even in completely useless work; the constitution ‘guarantees’ it, to keep us from examining ourselves, or others, or our history.”5 The ideological preservation of culture solidified after Kalanta’s self-immolation. The title “the generation of the 1930s” became established in Lithuania and became especially popular with Justinas Marcinkevičius’s poem, “The sixteen-year olds” (first published in 1965), in which the poet speaks namely about his own generation’s, still almost children’s, tragedy; many of them were killed in the postwar battles. The poem contains the lines, “Sixteen-year olds, sixteen-year olds / the generation of the 1930s.” “The 1930s generation”—a phrase that has been firmly established in Lithuanian criticism—usually refers to three poets: Algimantas Baltakis (born 1930), Alfonsas Maldonis (1929–2007), and Justinas Marcinkevičius (1930–2011). The literary critic Vitas Areška called his article “Agreement or Resistance. The Generation of the 1930s.”6 The poets too regarded themselves as a peculiar kind of unit and often supported each other’s initiatives in writing, dedicating their poems to each other. Relying on the statements or activities of their fellow writers or other cultural figures, they were linked by very diverse threads. The passage of time allows a disinterested analysis of the life and works of the aforementioned poets, neither heroizing nor vilifying them (precisely these types of polarizing views have dominated Lithuanian criticism), but rather examining their lives as objectively as possible. This article will draw not only from published texts, but archival documents and oral histories. With their first books published in the late 1950s, each of the three poets already held institutionally supported posts in the literary field in the 1960s and 1970s: Baltakis was the senior editor (1964–1976) of 4 Aleksey Yurchak, Eto bylo navsegda, poka ne konchilos’. Posledneye sovetskoye pokoleniye (Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2014), 86. 5 Alvydas Dargis, “Hair lietuviškas variantas,” Nemunas 3 (1990): 23. 6 Vitas Areška, “Pritarimas ir pasipriešinimas“, in XX amžiaus lietuvių literatūra, Vilnius: Vaga, 1994, 216–36.

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Pergalė (Victory), the journal of the Writers’ Union in Soviet Lithuania; Marcinkevičius served as secretary of the board of the Writers’ Union from 1959 to 1960, and later he was the vice-chair (1960–1965); Maldonis was the senior editor of the Vaga publishing house (1962–1970), which was the main publisher of belles lettres in Soviet Lithuania, and served as the vicechair of the Writers’ Union between 1970 and 1976 and then as its Head (1976–1988). During that time period, position and compromise were closely aligned. It is obvious that in choosing the necessary materials for an article about the generation of the thirties, one could write either an accusatory or an exculpatory essay, when in reality the positive and the negative are intertwined in many ways. The generation of the thirties, at least in part, were still products of independent pre-war Lithuania, who at that time had finished primary school, where students’ loyalty to the independent Lithuanian state was systematically formed. They knew about the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, but they adapted to the laws dictated by the new regime. This is how Baltakis puts it when asked about the incorporation of Lithuania into the USSR: “There were no illusions about how Lithuania was incorporated. We saw it with our own eyes. I remember Russian tanks rumbling down the streets in Kaunas… Or the deportations to Siberia…”7 Marcinkevičius or Maldonis probably would have answered similarly if asked the same question. The poets joined the Communist Party during the Thaw: Marcinkevičius and Baltakis in 1957; Maldonis in 1962. Like many other steps in their lives, this one was probably undertaken for more than one reason: the supposition, based on the prodding of senior colleagues, that the Communist Party would have a dominant influence in Lithuania, and the understanding that, with the serious duties you assume, you will have more impact on the culture by being a member of the Party. Of course, even members of the Party were limited in their level of influence: Juozas Bulavas, Rector of Vilnius University, who was a proponent of a nationally based hiring policy and tried to keep out any ideologically “correct” professionals sent by Moscow and encouraged free thought, was dismissed from his post at the University for this reason in 1958 and from the Party in 1959.8 It goes without saying

7 Interview with Algimantas Baltakis, May 13, 2009. 8 See Meilė Lukšienė, “Apie lietuvių literatūros katedrą...,” in Vilniaus universiteto Lietuvių literatūros katedra 1940–2000, ed. Giedrius Viliūnas (Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2002), 23.

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that talented young people had lofty ambitions, the desire to be seen, to be significant. Studying at Vilnius University was the first stage of an attempt to live “by the rules.” Both Maldonis and Marcinkevičius arrived in Vilnius, leaving behind their villages that had been impoverished by collectivization and exhausted by the partisan war and the Soviet counterinsurgency. Baltakis, calling himself “a suburban guy,” but really from Kaunas as well as Maldonis and Marcinkevičius were friends from their time studying together at Vilnius University. They were all in the Lithuanian Studies class of 1954, which was known for its famous poets and scholars; though, when asked about their university studies, both Baltakis and Marcinkevičius highlighted the high number of suicides (four students from their initial class of fifty). Marcinkevičius explained his friends’ inability to deal with life’s problems in part by the spiritual trauma of the war and postwar period: “Maybe the consciousness at the time was affected by the experiences they had sustained.”9 The classmates were especially affected by the death of Jonas Kazlauskas. Maldonis and Marcinkevičius were his very close friends. Kazlauskas defended a doctoral dissertation in philology in 1968 and published a monograph entitled Lietuvių kalbos istorinė gramatika (A historical grammar of the Lithuanian language), which was well received by Baltic studies scholars throughout the world. For a few years, he worked as the dean of the Philology Department at Vilnius University and edited the internationally-renowned scholarly journal Baltistica. Like many among his ranks, he constantly felt that the KGB was interested in him. This became acutely apparent when Kazlauskas was invited to lecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. The KGB attempted to recruit him as an informer, which he viewed as a dishonorable choice and refused to participate. Kazlauskas disappeared on October 8, 1970, and his body was found in the Neris River on November 17, 1970. Dominating opinion has it that Kazlauskas was murdered by the KGB or died during the interrogation, and his body was tossed into the Neris River to cover up the evidence. It is probable that the truth about the professor’s fate will never be revealed, because his KGB file was destroyed in 1987 before the statute of limitations expired: not after twenty years, as required by law, but after seventeen years. Incidentally, Kazlauskas was a member of the Communist Party from 1963 9 Interview with Justinas Marcinkevičius, May 11, 2009.

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on, which probably helped him to establish a career at the University (we must emphasize that the subject of his academic interests—historical grammar—was not a discipline related to ideology), but neither by any means did it provide a secure existence.

A Syndrome of Fear All three young men had something to fear when they entered the University. Baltakis had this to say: “My mother’s brothers are in America, my father— the organist at our church—is in prison.”10 While he was still a student at the gymnasium, Marcinkevičius had already tasted well over a month of imprisonment and intimidation by Soviet security forces. Maldonis’s situation was probably the most risky: during the war, his brother had been taken to work in Germany, he escaped from there and was killed in 1945 together with some Yugoslav partisans, but his fate was learned in Lithuania only in 1966. Maldonis’s sister’s husband was a policeman during the war and then joined the partisans, then for a time he hid out at his wife’s parents’ house. These were very black marks in the biography of a student during the Soviet period. Baltakis, Maldonis, and Marcinkevičius were friends from the very start of their studies, but neither they, nor their good friend, the conductor Saulius Sondeckis could say anything about Maldonis’s early life in the village or explain why he dropped out of middle school in Alytus, which was near his homestead and then completed Vilnius University preparatory courses before entering the University. The atmosphere of fear affected the young men, they never spoke about the “stains” in their biographies, which concealed difficult and traumatic experiences, with even their closest friends: “We did not talk about Maldonis’s childhood in the village. Postwar themes were not discussed.”11 Marcinkevičius, recalling the student flat he and Kazlauskas had rented, describes their conversations even more categorically: I was always curious about how he [Maldonis—D. M.] ended up in Vilnius because that wasn’t where he graduated secondary school. … Alfa never explained how he arrived in Vilnius. … And I didn’t try to ask him. If someone doesn’t want to talk, then he doesn’t want to… We didn’t pry in

10 Interview with Algimantas Baltakis. 11 Interview with Saulius Sondeckis, March 6, 2015.

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those days, even if the person was a friend. I think he fled to Vilnius in order to escape interrogations and repressions.12

People’s memories erase experiences of the past, sometimes modify them, though it is plausible that the dominating emotion of that time—the fear— reflects them honestly.

The Decision to Conform Enrolling in a university was already a decision to integrate into Soviet life, followed, clearly, by other, perhaps more important decisions. In his unfinished and unpublished autobiography (written during the last decades of his life), Maldonis, a true sceptic, looked back on his decisions soberly, without any pathos. I had to make an essential decision as I was completing my university studies, when I first had to tell myself what to do with those attempts at creative writing. Amateurish writing squirreled away in a desk drawer did not promise a future. To write and publish? This decision, even then, while it is intuitively understood, meant that you accept life as it is, and maybe a certain part of what had been. And what do you do if you don’t accept it? By working at some kind of meager state job, say as a teacher, do you indicate that you don’t accept it? Then why did you spend five years at university, why were you going to the trouble for then?13

The ultimate decision was to conform, but essentially this would have been the case for any young person seeking work with a university degree. Even though there were exceptions, a poet who writes only for the desk drawer during this long period of time either completely shuts down and becomes silent or adheres to the poetics of his youth. Maldonis explores this further in his autobiographical writings: We were the oppressed representatives of our agricultural clan, we had no rights, we clearly understood our wretchedness in life’s major issues. A certain conservatism, caution, a tendency to bow instead of presenting our chests, it was as if it was programmed in us. This is how I was taught by my father—and especially my mother. 12 Interview with Justinas Marcinkevičius. 13 Citations from Maldonis’s manuscripts taken from copies in the author’s personal archive.

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Without a doubt, these poets were not heroic figures, they just adapted to the requirements dictated by the regime, and we should consider a large part of their early work as adapting to official requirements. The best evidence of the fact that these poets had to conform is the radical variance in the poems found in the archives and those published officially some time later. This is most obvious in the case of Maldonis, even though he made many assertions that he destroyed much of his work because he sensed the unwanted interest of the Soviet security forces, his archive contains many of his early works. But even in the poems that remain from the early 1950s, one can see that he did not view collectivization of the farms optimistically, as he described in his first poetry collections, but as a source of trouble and deep misery for village life. The fate of the countryside in the Dzūkija region, leaving the homestead—these are the most important themes of Maldonis’s unpublished poems. The ironically sarcastic side of the future poet is reflected in the scenes depicted in the poems about the reality of the recently collectivized village: “Muddied shivering bands of horses / Struggle in the field and scrape at grass hoary with frost. // on the unsprouted rye / Crows waddle from side to side. / It is Sunday. The village sings from its heart, / Dizzy from the brightness of life and moonshine.” This is from a poem written in 1951. Scenes in the poems of a young Maldonis testify that what’s happening in Dzūkija is wrong: the people in his homeland are “humiliated, worn out,” a person here “desecrates a corpse, / A person tramples tears and bread.” “You have no future,” he says, addressing Dzūkija. Baltakis’s collection Pėsčias paukštis (Walking bird, 2013), has a poem entitled “Žadėt žadėjo—nepadėjo” (Promised to promise—didn’t help) that is dated 1950 and is about the partisan war in Lithuania: “Everyone promised. No one helped. / They left some to soak in blood. / Men fell like stone walls for an idea. / Only the Holy Ghost flutters above them.”14 Scholars of Socialist Realism maintain that from 1953 on “there was a progressive erosion of Socialist Realism.”15 The first books of the thirties generation namely disclosed this progressive erosion. Within these books (published in 1955) Baltakis and Marcinkevičius wrote about Lenin, the Party, the Kremlin, and the collective farms as they were required to do, and these poems were naïve, unequivocal illustrations of the official ide14 Algimantas Baltakis, Pėsčias paukštis (Vilnius: Alma littera, 2013), 9. 15 Hans Günther, “Zhiznennyie fazy socrealisticheskogo kanona,” Fedy, accessed July 14, 2016, http://www.fedy-diary.ru/?page_id=4539.

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ology, what Juliane Fürst calls “the officially prescribed culture of socialist optimism.”16 Maldonis, whose first book was published in 1958, was able to avoid these “glorifications” by turning to the theme of the partisan war, though at that time it had to be interpreted with the appropriate Soviet spin. In one way or another, all three poets treat the Soviet changes in Lithuanian life rather optimistically in their early published works. Without a doubt, fear does not explain everything, nonetheless these poets highlight this emotion not only when speaking about the years at university, but also about their youth in general: Although we were no longer children, in those days, certain things definitely had an impact, there were certain fears. If some loudmouth stood up waving his arms and throwing around accusations, almost identifying that you have published something that goes against the Party line or the general principles of Soviet literature, then it was uncomfortable. Later everything went in one ear and out the other, but at that time…17

In reading the minutes for a Party writers’ event that took place in 1957, it is clear that the writers felt the vigilant eyes of the Party ideologues, and it was as though they accepted this set of circumstances. This is apparent in the justified rhetoric of Baltakis’s official speech: “It’s easier to write about the past—it’s clearer, there’s less of a danger of a backlash.”18 The prose writer Alfonsas Bieliauskas underscores the sense of fear by talking about the lack of literary criticism: “The Lithuanian Institute of Literature trains few critics,—you get the sense that they’re afraid of saying anything, that they’re afraid of making any mistakes.”19 So, the feeling of insecurity and fear was highlighted in several ways. In this sense, the poem “Baimės bėgimas”20 (Fear is evaporating) written by Maldonis in 1963 is very important. Not only in its title, but in the text itself, the process, and not the final result, is explored: “Fear will not end with this day / But it begins to leave you. // Only in dreams, only in sleep, // Only in the span of a few minutes… / Like poison it slowly 16 Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation, 307. 17 Interview with Alfonsas Maldonis, March 21, 2001. 18 Valentinas Sventickas, ed., “‘Smogti ideologine kryptimi.’ LKP CK sekretoriaus A. Sniečkaus pasikalbėjimas su LTSR rašytojų sąjungos nariais komunistais 1957 m. sausio 18 d.,” Švyturys 22 (1989): 25. 19 Ibid., 24. 20 Alfonsas Maldonis, Šviesa pro lapus (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2009), 95.

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leaves / The cells of a young living body.” The attempt in post-Stalinist works to say what you truly want to say, and the inability to resist external dictates, coupled with the ambitions of being a popular, prominent poet are interconnected in every possible way. One of the clearest examples of this interconnectedness is Marcinkevičius’s poem Kraujas ir pelenai (Blood and ashes). The Lithuanian critic Rimantas Kmita assesses this poem rather negatively, stating that Marcinkevičius’s work “exposes the Soviet version of the Pirčiupių village massacre21 and its narrative is constructed from Socialist Realist clichés: the parallel between the Teutonic Order and the Nazis …, the cultivation of hatred of the enemy, cursing the Church.”22 I would think that in this situation, the literary critic, who has taken on the role of a demystifying force, trivializes the relationship between the prototype and the work, and concentrates on that which serves his concepts within the work itself. There are many Socialist Realist clichés in Kraujas ir pelenai, just as there are in much of Marcinkevičius’s early work, but we cannot ignore the fact that it is not the actual Pirčiupiai village that is important to him. The village is given a different name in the poem—Pamerkiai. It is clear that Marcinkevičius’s creative plan was conservative, but it’s in the poem Kraujas ir pelenai that for the first time, he clearly elaborates his most important theme of a forever “burning and indestructible” Lithuania. Without a doubt, it is shaped with symbolic natural, agrarian scenes; right alongside the “cultivation of hatred of the enemy” (the cultivation of love for the enemy would be hard to imagine in any epoch, and in this case, it is good to see that Marcinkevičius shakes up the representation of the “cruel, merciless Germans” that had dominated in the literature of the time. In his poem, hatred is not absolute: a German soldier saves one of the poem’s main characters, the pregnant Rasiuka, and the newborn child then symbolizes the hope of life). Moreover, the poem touches on love and youth, and other such themes. In writing about the history of Kraujas ir pelenai, Valentinas Sventickas emphasizes that a young, but recognized Marcinkevičius “becomes a tool” 21 The village of Pirčiupis was burned by the SS June 3, 1944. 119 villagers burned to death. According to the Soviet version, this was punishment because the villagers had supported the Soviet partisans. Today it is claimed that it was the SS’s revenge for many SS troops having been killed, when their truck went over a mined route. 22 Rimantas Kmita, “Laikysena ir jos dividendai,” in Tarp estetikos ir politikos. Lietuvių literatūra sovietmečiu, ed. Dalia Satkauskytė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015), 214.

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at that time because—as he says ironically, “Soviet intelligence appears very benevolently in this arena, as soon as they catch the scent that with this poem Soviet Lithuania can aspire to a Prize… the Lenin Prize, the USSR State Prize, etc.”23 In the hope that Lithuania, led by “wise men,” would become famous, the poet, who was young, but had already experienced intimidation in secondary school, endowed with a rather unheroic nature, or maybe he had indeed given in to the temptations of eventual glory, was ordered to insert a few lines into the poem. Unfortunately, he did. When the work was republished in 2007, Marcinkevičius admitted in the “Author’s Note” under what circumstances those inserted fragments appeared and that he was not proud of this.24 Perhaps the most famous is the following fragment: I blame—everyone, everyone, everyone Who taught Lithuanians humility! With a heavy word I blame the Church, Because it taught a man to kneel, And when you kneel you can only die, But not fight.25

Undoubtedly, blaming the Church is one of the clichés of Socialist Realism. Besides, it is also disgraceful because the Church was persecuted by the Communist government, consequently, after the regime in Lithuania changed, this fragment became one of the main indicators of Marcinkevičius’s complicity. And nevertheless, this clichéd fragment, which emerged from ambiguous circumstances, was inserted not because it was needed for the poem’s structure, but because it was what the people who dictated the fate of the poem wanted, remains complex in its understanding. Official avenues of criticism often use it to illustrate Marcinkevičius’s complicity, although in private conversations and in comments on the internet, the fragment is often cited to illustrate the cause for Lithuania’s submission to government decisions or general responses to a difficult situation.

23 Valentinas Sventickas, Apie Justiną Marcinkevičių (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2011), 105. 24 Justinas Marcinkevičius, Poemos (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2007), 75. 25 Justinas Marcinkevičius, vol. 2 of Raštai, (Vilnius: Vaga, 1982), 251.

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The Time of Illusions During the period of the Post-Stalinist “evaporating fear,” the representation of spring, which is a signal not only for nature’s renewal, became prominent. Beside the usual notion of Thaw in the Soviet tradition—which appeared when Ilya Ehrenburg wrote a story in 1954 with that title—the most important Thaws in Lithuanian literature were the commemorations of the nineteenth century’s Spring of Nations (the Revolts of 1848–1849) and the most important poetry book of that time, Maironis’s Pavasario balsai (The voices of spring). Marcinkevičius’s poem “Šių metų kovas” (March of this year) written in 1963, oscillated between “winter” and “spring”: Ditches and rivers found their voices —water like peaty smoke. a kind of uncertain waiting, a kind of muddy uncertainty. Legs crackle and crush The smoky glass of the thin ice. Everything is still so unreal, As though everything has stopped. Maybe it’s not spring, maybe only a new variation of winter? The earth, like the sun’s shore, is revealed through the snow and the cold.26

Readers today can understand this poem as a poetic reasoning about a person’s attempt to understand one’s place in nature and within himself. However, the “spring” and “variation of winter” within the poem was probably inspired by the political life in the Soviet Union. On March 8, 1963, Nikita Khrushchev—First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and effectively the leader of the entire Soviet Union at the time— gave a speech during a Party and government meeting with figures in the literary and art worlds. According to cultural historian Alexander Etkind, it was Khrushchev’s rhetoric: “unjustified repressions” (which meant mass arrests, torture, massacres, and internment camps) and “the cult of personality” (this concept was defined by forced ideological practices) that transformed Stalin into a scapegoat. The “unjustified repressions” implied that 26 Justinas Marcinkevičius, vol. 1 of Raštai (Vilnius: Vaga, 1982), 101.

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The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets    DONATA MITAITĖ

the former leader was the cause of senseless and unmotivated catastrophe. The quasi-religious idea of the “cult of personality” blamed Stalin for violating the Marxist norms of atheism, rationality, and equality.27 Writers of non-poetic public texts clearly succumbed to the Khrushchev rhetoric. Even more evident than in the poem cited earlier, Marcinkevičius’s 1966 poem entitled “Atšilo. Staiga atšilo” (It thawed. It suddenly thawed) explores the dual meaning of “spring:” And the mountain is vividly black. Even though winter has not yet abandoned it, but it’s insolent like laughter right in the face of the dogmatist28

In the early 1960s, Maldonis, supplementing the “criticism of dogmatism” in poetry, began to address the theme of building and taking down monuments in the Soviet period with irony: “They stand on a hill as though attached, / They serve as the sun for the blind… / And then they’re taken down with tractors / To sea level / or even to the bottom of the sea…”29 His collection Saulėti lietūs (Sunny rains)—at the time of the end of Stalinism and its illusions, and the fascination with the cosmic era, was the start of a new sobriety, but retained the remains of the clichés of Socialist Realism in earlier poetry. The combined belief in ideologized propositions, distrust and conformism is rather clear here. And still, there is a very evident layer of poems (or sometimes just individual scenes) that are related to “de-Stalinization” or simply the “cult of the Leader:” “Somehow the perceived essence faded, / The boundaries of human life were drawn / And persons wearing rough military jackets // From the great leader to house manager.”30 Marcinkevičius also engaged in self-analysis and self-criticism: “We must judge ourselves— / the closest and most well-known, / to admit / for the age and for the generation—guilty. … If you were—then never be again / neither sold nor bought.”31

27 Alexander Etkind, Krivoie gore. Pamiat’ o nepogrebennyx (Мoskva: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2016), 57. 28 Marcinkevičius, vol. 1 of Raštai, 132. 29 Alfonsas Maldonis, Auga medžiai (Vilnius: Vaga, 1965), 23. 30 Maldonis, Auga medžiai , 21. 31 Marcinkevičius, vol. 1 of Raštai, 152–53.

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The Eternal Empire Various sources indicate that people’s dominant long-standing view was that the Soviet empire is “eternal.” Saulius Sondeckis recalls: “The desire for independence was huge, but real thoughts… We knew that the atomic bomb exists. And what are the chances for independence? Just the conflict of the East and the West. Meaning, we have to preserve that which we can preserve, save what we can save.”32 Alexei Yurchak quotes Russian singer and composer Andrey Makarevich (who was much younger, born in 1953) from a 1995 television program asserting that “It never entered anyone’s mind that anything in this country could change. Neither adults nor children thought about this. Everyone was absolutely convinced that we would live this way forever.”33 Doubts regarding the longevity of the system surfaced only after 1989, when people began seeing signs of Gorbachev’s perestroika.34 There were very few individuals like political scientist Aleksandras Štromas who thought that the USSR regime would fail and even predicted the date of the fall: the years from 1985 to 1990.35 The famous poet Tomas Venclova, who emigrated to the West in 1977, in writing about the Lithuanian writer Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas (1893– 1967) and some of his conformist episodes, tactfully reproached the poet, who had asserted that he did not regret staying in Lithuania.36 In reviewing the books of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrey Voznesensky, however, Venclova criticized the Russian poets that they pandered to their government, but did not make any attempts to flee the Soviet Union. Living and working in Lithuania was, without a doubt, not just a source of compromise, but also a chosen destiny. Many years later, Maldonis—calmly weighing the positive and the negative—said the following about Venclova’s emigration: I was not an advocate for fleeing. I still thought that regardless of what happened, we needed to live here. Maybe this is wrong, I don’t know, but my view of emigration was negative. I thought that regardless of what happened to us here, we needed to stay. Of course, perhaps this position 32 Interview with Saulius Sondeckis. 33 Yurchak, Eto bylo navsegda, 29. 34 Ibid., 30. 35 Tomas Venclova, “Lietuvos ir pasaulio pilietis,” in Aleksandras Štromas, Laisvės horizontai, ed. Liūtas Mockūnas (Vilnius, Baltos lankos, 2001), 19. 36 Tomas Venclova, “Kas tęsia tradiciją, tas jau ne vienišas,” in Poezijos kryžkelės, ed. Ričardas Pakalniškis (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1994), 307.

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The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets    DONATA MITAITĖ

has many negative aspects, because a person who has escaped a certain environment examines himself on a totally different plane, with different opportunities, in a different space, in different cross-sections and crosswinds, and then this could yield unexpected benefits and a novel quality. The fertilization of literary ideas and literary techniques probably occurs in the face of these challenges, these fortunes, and these paths. Here everything seems unambiguous. But knowing his ability, his potential, his intellectual strength, he was very much needed here. Although … he would have been constantly tormented here and maybe would not have realized some of those opportunities.37

Maldonis sensibly states the differences between the views of his generation and those of the younger ones (Venclova, Štromas—D. M.): “They had a pragmatic view of their fate. We are tied down here, with our sentiments, with our archaic notions, romanticism, everything else, and they looked at this change of horses very freely.”38 And truly, their views were essentially different. Venclova recalls a night that he and Štromas spent walking around Vilnius before the latter’s emigration and “Štromas argued that it would make sense for me to emigrate as well: you can influence the homeland more effectively from the West than if you stayed here, where the opportunities for action are becoming more limited and demoralization is all the more probable.”39 The generation of the thirties fell under some illusions during the months of the Prague Spring, because the changing life in Czechoslovakia demonstrated that the system could be modified: “Alfa [Alfonsas Maldonis] was really affected by Dubček. He was our ideal of ‘socialism with a human face.’ And what else could we fantasize about while existing in that system? To improve this one.”40 It may be the case that, assessing from a contemporary view, some of the pro-Soviet poems came to be not out of a desire to ingratiate oneself with the system, but out of a naïve attempt to improve the un-improvable, and to humanize it. I would consider Marcinkevičius’s cycle “Šiandieninis Leninas” (Today’s Lenin) as this type of humanization: “And he still works. Makes mistakes sometimes, / Which obliges him to fix it. / He also thinks, ponders, debates, / and it’s not the letter, but his essence 37 Interview with Alfonsas Maldonis. 38 Ibid. 39 Tomas Venclova, “Lietuvos ir pasaulio pilietis,” 16. 40 Interview with Algimantas Baltakis.

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that’s just.”41 Besides, the illusion that Lenin was a humanist is characteristic not only of Marcinkevičius and other writers of his generation. Even Victor Sebestyen, born in 1956, who published a book entitled Lenin the Dictator. An Intimate Portrait in 2017, admits that The traditional European understanding was instilled in me that Lenin was an idealist, a Utopian who created abstractions, a visionary of the Kremlin. Those who subscribed to this concept blamed Stalin for the creation of the dictatorship of the Party bureaucracy. Even now, knowing that this is not the case, it’s still difficult for me to shake off these illusions.42

At that time, there was optimism and illusion not only in Lithuania. Mats Traat, an Estonian writer who was a bit younger (born in 1936) than the aforementioned poets, but who is identified in Estonia with this generation, which in some respects is similar to the Russian Sixtiers (shestidesyatniki) (Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Andrey Voznesensky, and others) perceived the need for the evolution of Estonian literature in the 1960s.43 But a generation of writers that could be compared to the one of those born in the 1930s in Lithuania never did form in Estonia, since the postwar literary situation in the two countries was somewhat different. In Latvia, however, the role of national poet was taken up by Imants Ziedonis, who was three years younger than Lithuania’s Marcinkevičius. After the Prague Spring was crushed, there were no remaining illusions about improving the Soviet system. Yevtushenko wrote about “our tanks driving over our hope,” about the terror that mounted, and he asked that the following words be written in place of an epitaph: “Russian poet. Crushed / by Russian tanks in Prague.”44 Without a doubt, the contemporaries (“This was the feeling of the generation,”45 said Marcinkevičius when asked about what connected them and the Russian shestidesyatniki) differed in their points of view on this topic: Lithuanians identified with the Czechs who were being murdered by the same empire that had destroyed Lithuania several decades before. Yevtushenko blamed the Soviet Union and felt his own 41 Marcinkevičius, vol. 1 of Raštai, 128. 42 Natal’ya Golicyna, “Byurokrat, diktator, lyubovnik,” Radio svoboda, April 1, 2017, accessed April 27, 2017, http://www.svoboda.org/a/28400484.html. 43 Mats Traat, “Predislovie,” in vol. 1 of Estonsky pisatel’-shestidesyatnik. Kuuekümnendate aastate eesti Kirjanik (Tallinn: Bri&Ko, 2010), 4. 44 Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Tanki idut po Prage,” Russkaya poeziya, accessed October 14, 2016, http://www.ruthenia.ru/60s/evtushenko/tanki.htm. 45 Interview with Justinas Marcinkevičius.

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The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets    DONATA MITAITĖ

guilt. One can also add that at the end of the 1980s, when Lithuania was liberating itself from the Soviet empire, the shestidesyatniki showed solidarity with their Lithuanian colleagues. At the first meeting of the “Sąjūdis” freedom movement in 1988, Andrey Voznesensky participated and read a poem dedicated to Marcinkevičius, in which he apologized for the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, signed by the Soviet Union and Germany, which destined the occupation of Lithuania. His lines read: “Forgive me, Justinas, for the songs / murdered, the dead water and the secret 1939 protocols.”46 Baltakis remembers Robert Rozhdestvensky’s phone call (“Lithuanian brethren, hang on.”)47 This was the night of January 13, 1991, when Soviet tanks were storming the Vilnius TV tower and fourteen unarmed civilians guarding the tower, had expected the tanks to stop on encountering a crowd of people. The Moscow poets did not identify with the forces of the Soviet Union, and understood that the Baltic States were occupied and seeking their freedom. The poets of the thirties generation did not write anything resembling Yevtushenko’s text about the crushing of the Prague spring in 1968 cited above. Although 1968 very clearly demonstrated that the empire was unsalvageable and that this was an unconventional boundary beyond which there were, in the words of Czesław Miłosz, features of the “captive mind” in the works of the thirties poets. There were no longer any conscious attempts to improve or humanize the system. There was also no public denunciation of the system. But there were more references to a deepening darkness, despair, and the unexpected winter in their poetry. In a poem written in 1968, Maldonis varies the theme of the unfulfilled spring, revealing the internal changes of a lyrical subject: “What skies, when will the sharp North wind / Blow, what a late spring / Like blooming lilacs / the snow of violent disgrace will fall on you. // So what if the eyes see, / that the color and pressure of the setting sun has changed. / You cannot return to the armor left behind,— / You ate away at them yourself like rust.” Maldonis addresses fear, blame and the hope for change in several poems from that year. In “Veršio istorija” (The story of the calf), a fable written in 1968 and published later, the poet ironically addressed the theme of submission: “And

46 Georgy Yefremov, My lyudi drug drugu. Litva: budni svobody 1988–1989 (Moscow: Progress, 1990), 189. 47 Interview with Algimantas Baltakis.

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the calf boasted that it didn’t walk, but rode / To where smoke plumed from the factory chimneys.”48

From Prague to the Rebirth of Lithuania Baltakis, who had programmatically renounced “sermons from the mount,” was beloved by readers in the late Soviet period as the author of ironic, sometimes auto-ironic poems about simple everyday domestic life. Many of his lyric love poems became the texts of popular songs. Baltakis’s position as one of the active players in the literary field was more evidently two-sided. Kęstutis Nastopka, a literary critic writing at the time, sensed this: Beneath the official face (the editor of a journal controlled by censorship, the Secretary of the Soviet Lithuanian Writers’ Union) was a poet who understood the real values of literature. During one Party meeting, to which some non-Party Union members were invited, he fiercely attacked the young writers for solipsism, aestheticism, and their lack of interest in politics. After the speech was published in [the newspaper] Tiesa (Truth), a few of us heretics … stopped by Baltakis’s house, where, with a bottle of vodka, a very different Baltakis was revealed. He no longer attacked, but justified … I argued with the editor about several of [his reviews—D. M.] in his office. He cited the expressed rebukes of the Party’s Central Committee ideologues, while I searched for words to compromise him. I sensed that in this game Baltakis as a poet was on my side.49

With a few exceptions we can say the same thing about Maldonis, the Chairman of the Writers’ Union. He understood the real value of his colleagues’ work, although due to his position he had to interact with Party ideologues, he had to search for formulas of compromise when interacting with others, giving speeches at never-ending meetings, plenary sessions, and congresses. In his poetry from the late Soviet period, Maldonis is often skeptical. He senses the existential drama of human existence in the world, which does not depend on ideology, and the tragedy of life in a 48 Alfonsas Maldonis, Mūs baltas ratas (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1996), 74. 49 “Apie Lietuvą ir pasaulį kalbasi Irena Veisaitė ir Kęstutis Nastopka,” Bernardinai, July 9, 2014, accessed March 15, 2017, http://www.bernardinai.lt/straipsnis/07-31-2014-apielietuva-ir-pasauli-kalbasi-irena-veisaite-ir-kestutis-nastopka/119436.

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The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets    DONATA MITAITĖ

certain epoch. His poem “Pabudimas iš miego”50 (Waking from slumber) reveals all of this. The poem was first published in 1978. Later, in a collection published in 1989, when there was a sense that the old order was crumbling, Maldonis gave a more substantial meaning to the title by adding a subtitle postscript: “Thinking about the death of J. K.,” a clear reference to the fate of Jonas Kazlauskas, who was discussed earlier in this article. His archive contains the first version of the poem, written in 1970 when Kazlauskas had disappeared, but his body had not yet been found. When asked if Kazlauskas’s friends believed that he would reappear alive, Baltakis categorically answered: no—no one harbored any such hope.51 So it’s logical that in his manuscript he speaks about coercion (in a dream “the bones broken by the torturer creak”), death, mourning (“the daughter ties a black ribbon in her braid.”) Revising his manuscript, the poet deleted any concrete references to history, even though in the final version we can see certain traits that connect it to the first draft and to Maldonis’s speech at Kazlauskas’s funeral. Undoubtedly, concrete details would have rendered the poem unpublishable, but it makes more sense to think that the poet was just seeking a more universal meaning. In his later work, Maldonis avoided domestic, personal, and political details altogether. Lithuanian critic Vitas Areška has this to say about the poem, which he considers the best of the poet’s canon: A scene is described—waking up from slumber, from a dream, like certain of life’s boundaries, when consciousness more acutely feels the connection with the unknown and the mystery of existence. The boundary between morning and night […] marks the understanding of the relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness or the rhythms of physical existence and psychological time, that repeats, but does not return.52

Nevertheless, it is clear that the poem not only addresses the mystery of existence, but also talks about the mystery of life in a totalitarian state. “Night before dawn” and “day before night” (in other words, the time of dreams and vigilance) in the context of the poem are similarly terrifying. There are many scenes of violence in the text: “After the nightmare / A bloodcurdling sound / Invades the heart. / How they cut off a leg. / How they open the 50 Maldonis, Šviesa pro lapus, 215–16. 51 Interview with Algimantas Baltakis, October 17, 2015. Manuscript, author’s personal archive. 52 Vitas Areška, Lietuvių tarybinė lyrika (Vilnius: Vaga, 1983), 426.

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wound. / How blood seeps. / How bones are broken / Creaking as they crumble.” There are many questions in the poem, but no answers, nothing is identified. As if speaking about the situation of choosing: “Either night before dawn? / Or day before night? / Not to abandon oneself / And lose everything? / Not to pity oneself, / Not forgetting others / Remembering others / And the nightmarish snake / Trample it like a heart?” The duality is clear: to trample the horrible snake, which would be good, but the comparison is to “like trampling the heart,” which is not good. The poet also says: “the truths crisscross” (namely the “truths” and not the truth or not truth). What remains is “the misunderstood step / The unknown desire”— in these words there’s both a positive and a negative. There is a return to banal reality, from a dream or a vision, without naming who was being tortured and questions unresolved, in the last stanza, “To the scuffed street, / To the trampled snow.” Marcinkevičius, who published his book Liepsnojantis krūmas (The burning bush) in 1968 without any reverence to Lenin and the Party, did not hold any official office. Steadily, he became the most popular poet in Lithuania at the time, although, in 1978 after publishing one of his best collections of lyric poetry Gyvenimo švelnus prisiglaudimas (The gentle hug of life) besides very positive reviews from critics, he was unofficially harshly criticized because it’s amoral to talk about life’s “gentle hugs” while living in what US President Ronald Reagan called the “evil empire.” Lithuanian exodus poet Kazys Bradūnas dedicated a poem to Marcinkevičius in which he reproached him for these “good things” and expressed pity for poets who were constrained by the totalitarian system and were unable to speak the truth.”53 Both points of view (both condemnation and understanding that only part of the truth could be found in these censored texts) are rather popular to this day. Alternately, Russian literary scholar Irina Podgajeckaya, found deep meaning in Marcinkevičius’s declarations of goodness: In my opinion, to awaken a sense of goodness and compassion is an attempt to preserve the “living soul” of one’s country, and not to precipitate an internally destructive anger and hatred, which is what happened to the Russian people … Resistance—this is not only an invitation to “grab the axes,’”but also the fear that a person’s individuality could be destroyed, which is why it should be directed to positive emotions.54 53 See Kazys Bradūnas, vol. 2 of Sutelktinė (Vilnius: Aidai, 2001), 229. 54 Irina Podgajeckaja’s letter to the author, March 15, 1990. Author’s personal archive.

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The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets    DONATA MITAITĖ

The poets themselves understood the ambivalence of their situation. In a letter dated September 27, 1991, to long-time Latvian friend and translator, Daina Avuotinia, Maldonis summarized: “Whatever happened—we endured, we survived. Even if the price for this was our stolen destinies, which the current situation paints in different colors.”55 It was only in the first part of the twenty-first century that a collection of Marcinkevičius’s pure poetry with his conformist poems left out was published. Its editor admits that he sought to “pull the name and works of Justinas Marcinkevičius from the political orbit and return it to the poetic,” because Marcinkevičius was “almost suppressed as a subtle master of reflection, a creator of philosophical lyric poetry.”56 This type of collection is an important attempt to show readers what in the poet’s work is free from ideology, and for scholars of the Soviet period, the entirety of his and other poets’ work is interesting.

Conclusions Archival material and oral history texts reveal the nuances of choices made and convictions held by a generation of poets who made their debut in the 1960s: postwar psychological trauma, self-preservation and a poetic ambition to be recognized in the society in which they lived. Having made a decision to work, write, and publish in the official press, the writers had no choice but to conform. Poetic works which began as completely conformist writing eventually became less restrained showing a gradual self-determination and an ironic evaluation of the poet’s life and choices. The thirties poets have written poems that must be treated as poetic works and not as illustrations of ideological schemas. That part of their creative corpus is relevant to today’s readers. To researchers of Soviet literature and culture, the texts and contexts, demonstrating complicity and attempts to circumvent ideological requirements, are no less important.

55 Copy of the letter in the author’s personal archive. 56 Arnas Ališauskas, “Trumpa postilė 2016-ųjų Justino Marcinkevičiaus poezijos rinktinei,” in Justinas Marcinkevičius, Viešpatie, nejaugi neprašvis? (Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2016), 370.

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Bibliography Ališauskas, Arnas. “Trumpa postilė 2016-ųjų Justino Marcinkevičiaus poezijos rinktinei.” In Justinas Marcinkevičius, Viešpatie, nejaugi neprašvis?, 369–71. Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2016. “Apie Lietuvą ir pasaulį kalbasi Irena Veisaitė ir Kęstutis Nastopka.” Bernardinai, July 9, 2014. Accessed March 15, 2017. http://www.bernardinai.lt/straipsnis/2014-07-31-apielietuva-ir-pasauli-kalbasi-irena-veisaite-ir-kestutis-nastopka/119436. Areška, Vitas. Lietuvių tarybinė lyrika. Vilnius: Vaga, 1983. ———. “Pritarimas ir pasipriešinimas.” In XX amžiaus lietuvių literatūra, Vilnius: Vaga, 1994, 216–36. Baltakis, Algimantas. Gimiau pačiu laiku. Iš dienoraščio. 1960–1997. Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2008. ———. Pėsčias paukštis. Vilnius: Alma littera, 2013. Bradūnas, Kazys. Vol. 2 of Sutelktinė. Vilnius: Aidai, 2001. Chukovskaya, Lydia. “Ne zlo pomniu, a znaniye o cheloveke.” Biografiya 5 (2015): 68–72. “Draugo N. Chruščiovo kalba partijos ir vyriausybės susitikime su literatūros ir meno veikėjais 1963 m. kovo 8 d.” Literatūra ir menas, March 16, 1963, 2–7. Dargis, Alvydas. “Hair lietuviškas variantas.” Nemunas 3 (1990): 20–26. Efremov, Georgij. My liudi drug drugu. Litva: budni svobody 1988–1989. Moscow: Progress, 1990, 189. Etkind, Alexander. Krivoie gore. Pamiat’ o nepogrebennyx. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2016. Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. “Tanki idut po Prage.” Russkaya poeziya. Accessed October 14, 2016. http://www.ruthenia.ru/60s/evtushenko/tanki.htm. Fürst Juliane. Stalin‘s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism. Oxford University Press, 2010. Golicyna, Natal’ya. “Biurokrat, diktator, liubovnik.” Radio svoboda, April 1, 2017. Accessed April 27, 2017. http://www.svoboda.org/a/28400484.html. Günther, Hans. “Zhiznennyie fazy socrealisticheskogo kanona.” Fedy. Accessed July 14, 2016. http://www.fedy-diary.ru/?page_id=4539. Lukšienė, Meilė. “Apie lietuvių literatūros katedrą....” In Vilniaus universiteto Lietuvių literatūros katedra 1940–2000, edited by Giedrius Viliūnas, 20–55. Vilnius: Vilniaus universiteto leidykla, 2002. Maldonis, Alfonsas. Auga medžiai. Vilnius: Vaga, 1965. ———. Mūs baltas ratas. Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1996. ———. Šviesa pro lapus. Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2009. ———. Vandens ženklai. Vilnius: Vaga, 1969. Marcinkevičius, Justinas. Poemos. Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2007. ———. Vol. 1 of Raštai. Vilnius: Vaga, 1982. ———. Vol. 2 of Raštai. Vilnius: Vaga, 1982.

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Sventickas, Valentinas, ed. “‘Smogti ideologine kryptimi.’ LKP CK sekretoriaus A. Sniečkaus pasikalbėjimas su LTSR rašytojų sąjungos nariais komunistais 1957 m. sausio 18 d.” Švyturys 22 (1989): 22–24. Traat, Mats. “Predislovie.” In vol. 1 of Estonskii pisatel’-shestidesistnik. Kuuekümnendate aastate eesti Kirjanik, 3–5. Tallinn: Bri&Ko, 2010. Venclova, Tomas. “Lietuvos ir pasaulio pilietis.” In Aleksandras Štromas, Laisvės horizontai, edited by Liūtas Mockūnas, 9–31. Vilnius, Baltos lankos, 2001. ———. “Kas tęsia tradiciją, tas jau ne vienišas.” In Poezijos kryžkelės, edited by Ričardas Pakalniškis, 304–22. Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 1994. Yurchak, Aleksey. Eto bylo navsegda, poka ne konchilos’. Posledneye sovetskoye pokoleniye. Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2014.

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The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism that Legitimated Soviet-Era Modernism

General Introductory Comments Much has been written about the former citizens of the Soviet Union and their complicity and compromise with the Communist regime. Alexei Yurchak described conformist writing, which neither validated nor directly opposed ideological discourse, as mimetic resistance.1 This term, linked to the designation of postcolonial mimicry, is significant because it essentially corrects the hierarchical opposition to the estimation of Soviet-era values (ideologues vs. aesthetes, public vs. private life, government enforcement vs. freedom of thought, etc.). The term mimetic resistance itself provides an opportunity to reflect upon its reciprocal saturation and the paradox of Soviet writing where in the diametrically opposed and logically inexplicable aforementioned contradictions reside. Moreover, the term mimetic resistance is important because it emphasizes the subconscious intersection of the writer’s fear and his compromise with the regime (internal censorship). According to Yurchak, because the fear that drives the writer toward compromise is oftentimes unconscious, the behavior of the con1 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 30. He appropriated the term “mimetic resistance” from Sergei A. Oushakine’s “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat.”

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The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism    AUŠRA JURGUTIENĖ

formist citizen of the late Soviet era was deemed “the most normal.” It was primarily associated with the peace-loving disposition of someone, who deserted the Cold War and did not identify with the fanatic ideologues of the Communist Party, nor with the dissidents who opposed them and who faced the threat of ostracism, deportation, or prison. This is neither a pronor anti-Soviet stance, but rather a publicly neutral a-Soviet choice which helped the “normal person” to distance himself from the enforced politics, but without ever feeling real freedom. In Lithuania, many scholarly articles eschewed a binary schema (collaboration / resistance) in favor of a more complex trinomial model (collaboration / conformism / resistance).2 Moreover, in Soviet Lithuania, as in the other Baltic Republics, conformism, pervasive during the political Thaw, differed from the Russian form. This is because conformity with the regime was not limited to the surreptitious pursuit of liberty and defense of human rights. At the time, the most urgent issues were the occupied homeland and the preservation of national identity through culture. Because the dominant language of government institutions and the common language among the citizens of the Soviet Union was Russian, literary works written in the Lithuanian language achieved a patriotic mission as a matter of course. Even most members of the Lithuanian Communist Party were nationalist communists, and were awarded the ironic epithet of “radish” after independence.3 The diaspora critic Violeta 2 Kęstutis Girnius proposes a trinomial approach to the theoretical analysis of totalitarian societies rather than one based on binary poles. Kęstutis Girnius, “Pasipriešinimas, prisitaikymas, kolaboravimas,” Naujasis Židinys 5 (1996): 268–79; Priklausomybės metų (1940–1990) lietuvių visuomenė: pasipriešinimas ir / ar prisitaikymas, ed. Albertas Zalatorius (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996); Valdemaras Klumbys, “Lietuvos kultūrinio elito elgsenos modeliai sovietmečiu” (PhD diss., Vilnius University, 2009); Rimantas Kmita, “Rašytojų santykis su valdžia sovietmečiu: metodologiniai sprendimai vokiečių literatūros moksle,” Literatūra 53, no. 1 (2011): 48–64; Elena Baliutytė, “‘Tyliosios rezistencijos’ metafora ir prisitaikymo strategijos sovietmečio literatūros kritikoje,“ Colloquia 19 (2008): 58–79; Dalia Satkauskytė, “Socrealizmo dekonstrukcija jo paties priemonėmis, arba mimetinės rezistencijos klausimu,” in Tarp estetikos ir politikos. Lietuvių literatūra sovietmečiu, ed. Dalia Satkauskytė (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas 2015), 343–68. 3 “And after 1956 they [Russian communists—A. J.] were replaced by Lithuanians. Then a good number of ‘radishes’ i.e., Lithuanians whose exterior was red, and the interior white, joined the party ranks, motivated not so much by ideology, but rather by the desire to accomplish something beneficial and to dislodge the Russians occupying dominant positions.” Visa istorija yra gyvenimas: 12 sakytinės istorijos epizodų, Edvardą Gudavičių kalbina Aurimas Švedas (Vilnius: Aidai, 2008), 220.

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Kelertienė generalized all forms of resistance to the regime and all efforts to circumvent censorship as manifestations of nationalism and actions to preserve the national identity.4 It is for this reason that for the first time in 1987, after Gorbachev announced perestroika and glasnost’, a group of Freedom League activists, while commemorating the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, bravely and publicly announced the secretly held objective of restoring Lithuanian independence and separation from the USSR at the monument to the Lithuanian and Polish patriotic romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. Unable to express himself under a totalitarian regime, a person seeks refuge to express his identity in fantasy, and modernist literature was the best substitute during the period of the Thaw (a phenomenon of that time—books of Lithuanian poetry were issued in print runs reaching 10,000 copies). Modernist literature created out of a longing for freedom, functioned as an alternative to dogmatic Socialist Realism. If, according to J.-P. Sartre, an author creates an aesthetic pleasure that is perceived by the reader, then the need for the neutral “pure beauty” of modernist literature, which liberated them both from political persecution, became an unwritten unifying contract between writer and reader (and critic as well). That is why, in Lithuania, beginning in the 1960s, politically ambiguous modernist literature, art and music, which, albeit with difficulty, replaced the Soviet Socialist Realism doctrine and creative works in general were so important. These works glorified Art arising from freedom of expression and replaced the disappearing time-honored values of God and Communism. Though the censors considered the aesthetic games and apolitical stance of modernism to be inappropriate, they were regarded as less harmful and preferable to dissident activities and outright opposition against the regime by intellectuals. Moreover, modernism itself was not uniform. In Lithuania, all modernists who appeared publicly after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party (1956), were united in a general condemnation of the cult of Stalin, and a legitimate rejection of post-war Stalinist Socialist Realism. Nevertheless, the first 4 Violeta Kelertienė, “Cenzūros apėjimo sovietiniais metais formos kaip nacionalizmo išraiška,” in Kita vertus: Straipsniai apie lietuvių literatūrą (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2006), 288–303. See also Violeta  Kelertas “Soviet Censorship in Lithuania 1945–1989” in History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and20th Centuries, vol. 3, ed. John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007), 125–34.

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The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism    AUŠRA JURGUTIENĖ

modernists of the Soviet era, Eduardas Mieželaitis, Alfonsas Bieliauskas, and others, who hurled criticism against Stalinist culture and nurtured hope in the political Thaw, separated themselves from the younger generation of modernists, who no longer held such aspirations. Modernist literature, especially the poetry of the latter group, exalted the power and beauty of the national language; they validated irony and the grotesque, also semantically thick forms of associative expression, and Aesopian language which promised personal and national freedom. More frequently, it functioned in opposition to the dominant discourse of government newspeak and the tradition of Socialist Realism.5 The modernism rekindled in the Soviet era assumed the national literary traditions of inter-war independent Lithuania, developed an affinity to the secretly circulating literary works of the diaspora, and promoted the supremacy of nationalism and Western attitudes over the force-fed ideal of the identity of the Soviet New Man.6 The alternative to Socialist Realism in modernist literature emerged with caution because a book published publicly had to accommodate opposing expectations—those of the ideologues and censors of the Lithuanian Communist Party and those of diaspora critics and intellectual readers. The coexistence of these oppositional voices—complicity with enforced official requirements and emancipation within the individual consciousness and its expression in text in those days was generally called the art of compromise. Intellectual, associative poetry that modernized folklore and mythology and adopted various modernist forms flourished in Lithuania (Eduardas Mieželaitis, Justinas Marcinkevičius, Vytautas Bložė, Jonas Juškaitis, Marcelijus Martinaitis, Judita Vaičiūnaitė, Sigitas Geda, Gintaras 5 As an example we can offer these poetry books which destroyed Socialist Realism: Sigitas Geda, Pėdos (Footprints, 1966); Tomas Venclova, Kalbos ženklas (The sign of language, 1972); Jonas Juškaitis, Mėlyna žibutė apšvietė likimą (The blue violet illuminated our fate, 1972); Marcelijus Martinaitis, Kukučio baladės (The ballads of Kukutis, 1977); Antanas A. Jonynas, Atminties laivas (The ship of memory, 1980); Vytautas Bložė Polifonijos (Polyphonies, 1981); Gintaras Patackas, Išvarymas iš rojaus (Expulsion from paradise, 1981), etc. 6 For Lithuanian modernists, the prime example of such aesthetic, apolitical poetry, which was circulated surreptitiously, was that of the diaspora writer, Henrikas Radauskas, “I do not build houses, I do not lead nations, / I sit beneath the branches of a white acacia, /and a heavenly breeze wanders among its leaves, / and a chirping bird builds its nest in it, / and a quiet melody sounds in the tree, / And I hear it and write it upon the sand.” Henrikas Radauskas, “Dainos gimimas,” in Eilėraščiai (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1994), 127.

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Patackas, A. A. Jonynas). The adoption of Western magical realism, stream of consciousness, and the techniques of intellectual constructivism, rejuvenated Lithuanian prose (Jonas Mikelinskas, Mykolas Sluckis, Juozas Aputis, Romualdas Granauskas, Vytautas Martinkus, Ričardas Gavelis, S. T. Kondrotas). At the same time, of course, a new mode of literary criticism had to be validated, one that changed the Soviet Socialist Realist doctrine that modernism was “decadent bourgeois art” (Vanda Zaborskaitė, Vytautas Kubilius, Vytautas Galinis, Donatas Sauka, Kęstutis Nastopka, Antanas Masionis, Viktorija Daujotytė, Aleksandras Krasnovas, Jūratė Sprindytė, Algis Kalėda, Saulius Žukas). Unavoidably, such criticism tended toward formal analyses of artistic aesthetics (trend, style, genre, prosody), adopted the structuralist Russian formalism and the semiotics of Yury Lotman. When in 1968, articles in the journal Pergalė (Victory) engaged in a discussion of “interior monologue” in Lithuanian prose and its probable genesis influenced by the works of James Joyce, Tomas Venclova translated and published excerpts from Ulysses in the same journal. He also published translations of Eliot’s The Wasteland, poems by Dylan Thomas, Charles Baudelaire, Osip Mandelstam, and plays by Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, and Alfred Jarry. At that time other works of Western literature were translated into Lithuanian, for example, Albert Camus’s L’étranger and La Peste, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela, Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and others. Lithuanian writers and critics also enjoyed the Russian journal Inostrannaya literatura, which published translations of Western literature. I will research compromised Lithuanian literary criticism which legitimized modernist literature of the 1960s and 1970s as a phenomenon of heterogeneous language: compromised writing as a violent act of betrayal and resistance writing as a moral act, asking how and to what degree texts were marked by the conflict of these two different types of writing. I will also demonstrate how the extant compromised texts differed and contest the popular notion that an examination of compromise in Soviet-era texts leads to an unwarranted conflation of categories of writers. To this end, I have selected the works of two Soviet-era writers, Ričardas Pakalniškis (1935–1994) and Albertas Zalatorius (1932–1999). Both were so-called “normal,” that is conformist literary critics. They were contemporaries and colleagues; both worked at the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature and published articles in the same publications.

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The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism    AUŠRA JURGUTIENĖ

Loyal Conformism: Ričardas Pakalniškis Pakalniškis’s article “Poezija ir gyvenimas (Kai kurie poezijos nagrinėjimo principai)” (Life and poetry [Analysis of poetry, a few principles]), published in the essay collection Šiuolaikinės kritikos problemos (Problems of contemporary criticism, 1975) is an excellent example of loyal conformism. In this article the critic questions, how the modernist Lithuanian poetry of the 1960s and 1970s should be regarded.7 At the time, this question was not easy for him to answer, because his texts were influenced by opposite powers: the ideological conventions that denounced any deviation from Socialist Realism as decadent, and scholarly conventions, which validated literary modernism. Thus, he capitulated in favor of both the first power, insisting that writers demonstrate social responsibility, and quoting from ideologically correct authors (Jonas Bielinis, Kostas Korsakas, Vincas Kapsukas, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Visarion Belinsky, A. V. Lunacharsky), and he also gave in to the second power, insisting on high artistry and quoting from renowned literary scholars and critics (Yury Lotman, Vytautas Kubilius, Vanda Zaborskaitė, T. S. Eliot, Roman Jakobson, René Wellek, Vytautas Kavolis, Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas). Provoked by these contradictions, Pakalniškis created a paradoxical concept of Socialist Realist modernism, diverse in artistic form, but still adhering to ideology. Although Pakalniškis’s article is noteworthy for many citations from a great variety of sources, nonetheless Lithuanian Communist Party slogans, dialectic and historical materialist clichés and newspeak are apparent. The article emphasizes historical progress, based on the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical model (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). According to Pakalniškis, the logical thesis is the ideologically harsh Stalinist era, when literature and literary criticism were Sovietized according to Communist party dictates. Its antithesis was the Thaw of the Khrushchev era, which denounced the cult of Stalin, his political errors, and the shortcomings of propaganda literature, and in turn granted greater creative freedom. In Pakalniškis’s article, “Poezija ir gyvenimas,” written during the Brezhnev administration, when the official message was the qualitatively superior “mature socialism,” 7 As examples of the modernist movement Pakalniškis identified Eduardas Mieželaitis’s poem Žmogus (Man, 1962) and his essays “Naktiniai drugiai” (Night moths, 1966), “Montažai” (Montages, 1969), “Antakalnio barokas” (Baroque in Antakalnis, 1971), “Iliuzijos bokštas” (The tower of illusion, 1973), comparing them to the poetry of Martinaitis, Bložė, Šimkus, Geda, Vaičiūnaitė, Juškaitis.

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which eschewed extremes, he formulated a new synthesis, namely “mature” criticism and “mature” modernist poetry from the thesis and antithesis mentioned above. Stalinist poetry was a poetry of ideas but lacked artistic value, poetry during the Khrushchev era was artistically sound but lacked ideas, therefore it was necessary to continue the dialectic progress of poetry from the opposing thesis and antithesis toward the flawless perfection of synthesis. It is not surprising to find a quote from a Communist Party of the Soviet Union Central Committee in the article: The Marxist-Leninist methodology grants equal value to ideological and aesthetic elements of creativity. This is emphasized in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Central Committee proclamation “On Literature and Artistic Criticism.8

This was the position not only in Pakalniškis’s article, but also in all of the official critical analysis of the time. An entrenched ideological cliché was frequently quoted requiring that all creative works be based on the rudiments of ideological and aesthetic principles, dialectical synthesis and organic unity and: “The Communist Party insisted that creative works should incorporate both high ideology and perfection of artistic form.”9 Accordingly, Pakalniškis applied this Party-inspired cliché to an evaluation of modernist Lithuanian poetry in his article, “Poezija ir gyvenimas.” The article presented an ambitious effort to revive a political theme equating poetry and life, to reinvigorate Socialist Realist theory and to demonstrate the possibility of applying these to modernist literary works, using the most current trends in literary scholarship and criticism. After a stroll down the circuitous path of formalist, structuralist and semiotic theory, Pakalniškis proclaims that the most important Party requirement for modernist poetry (where the essential position is a disinterested “art for art’s sake”) is to “serve the people,” and that critics must align art with Soviet life and society: “An analysis of the relationship between art and life, reveals the essential concepts of Socialist Realism— realism and social responsibility, social responsibility and citizenship.”10 Here he explains that he understands Socialist Realism as the reality of the 8 Ričardas Pakalniškis “Poezija ir gyvenimas (Kai kurie poezijos nagrinėjimo principai),” in Šiuolaikinės kritikos problemos, ed. Juozas Stepšys (Vilnius: Vaga, 1975), 265. 9 Vytautas Galinis, “Tarybinės lietuvių literatūros kritikos susiformavimas,” in Tarybinė lietuvių literatūros kritika, ed. Vytautas Galinis et al. (Vilnius: Vaga, 1980), 13. 10 Pakalniškis, “Poezija ir gyvenimas,” 266.

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The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism    AUŠRA JURGUTIENĖ

created work, the perceived socialist idea and the simultaneous freedom bestowed on the author to choose his literary form and style. In this way he promulgated the notion of Socialist Realism, as the French Communist Roger Garaudy did in his book D’un réalisme sans rivages (1963). This book was translated into Russian in 1966 and was well known to the literary scholars at the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature.11 We come face to face with a well-educated, forward-looking communist literary critic, though he acknowledged Lithuanian modernist poetry and had read Cleanth Brooks, T. S. Eliot, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but who nevertheless took every opportunity to educate writers ideologically and to admonish them to embrace “Marxist dialectical thinking” and to portray the ideological and artistic “synthesis” in their works. Pakalniškis explained the dangerous aberrations of modernist poetry, its deviation from the political to the personal domain, as the individualism of bourgeois creativity and indifference to populist principles. After he established the three important principles of poetic analysis in his article— realism, progressive ideas and public spirit—he sought to renew the poetic process in the spirit of Socialist Realism and current political directives. The stagnating (“mature”) socialism found its counterpart in stagnating (“mature”) literary criticism. Pakalniškis actualized the Marxist theory of the reflection of life in literature, which had grown weak in intellectual Lithuanian literature after it had cleansed itself of antiquated Stalinist ideas: “We regret that the expurgation of antiquated ideas inadvertently cast aside the concept of ‘writing about reality.’”12 On the other hand, amid copious quotations from Aristotle, Mikhail Bakhtin, Boris Eikhenbaum, Andrey Voznesensky, Marcelijus Martinaitis, Vytautas Bložė, Sigitas Geda, Jonas Juškaitis, he attempted to revive and expand the Marxist theory of the reflection of reality in literature, and to position modernist poetry within the Soviet literary field. Pakalniškis explained realism in poetry dialectically as a synthesis of the subject (imagination) and the object, arguing that it is neither a mirror nor a dismissal of reality: “Poetry reflects reality by recreating it freely.”13 This is why he defended and legitimized the relative forms which replaced descriptive texts in literature: “more complex works and those that are not 11 See also Jūratė Sprindytė, “Vidinio monologo romano kontradikcijos,” in Tarp estetikos ir politikos, 397–422. 12 Pakalniškis, “Poezija ir gyvenimas,” 268. 13 Ibid., 270.

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easily comprehended by those who are not educated in artistic interpretation are tolerated in socialist society.”14 Modernist works, rejected by ideologically dogmatic critics as incomprehensible to the working class because of its “formalist non-ideological decadent creativity,” thanks to this article, regained their value and stature in the field of Soviet literature. Moreover, while critics held the working class as the dominant audience, expectations of new intellectual readers were also legitimized. In the article, we find the notion of “unconstrained content” and the author’s “free self-expression” in a positive light! This is the gesture of a free-thinker. However, the good news is tempered. The critic has retained all the required political safety nets of “dialectical synthesis” and “mature socialism,” emphasizing the “fading socialist themes” and the capitulation to bourgeois apathy in poetry. He argues that the unconstrained content must be balanced against “obvious ideology,” and, finally, that “pure poetry” is essentially alien to any Soviet literature. Pakalniškis accused writers who did not understand or were unwilling to understand the “dialectical” requirements (to convey Communist Party ideology in modern poetry) of a deficiency in broad Marxist horizons, being behind with respect to historical evolutionary progress, far removed from reality, prone to isolation, and formalism. In short, modernist poets who were unable to view life from a Party perspective violated the truth of life. And that was the greatest condemnation of their creativity, not only ideologically but also aesthetically, banishing the untrustworthy poets to the footnotes of the literary field. Actually, it was Pakalniškis’s own Party-line assessments that began to diverge from the truth of life. Pakalniškis’s literary criticism became political and moral terrorism under the guise of political Thaw demagoguery. In his opinion, the primary mission of the critic is to stand watch over correct literature (balancing the opposing ideological and aesthetic poles according to dialectical principles), and to sound alarms, when the balance is unsteady and veers toward error. In Pakalniškis’s article, the so-called scholarly (dialectical) rhetoric directed overt ideological control mechanisms over literature by requiring political loyalty from every member of the literary field. Having separated the survey of the new literary criticism into two opposing directions of criticism, that of the emotional (the art of interpretation, Reader-response criticism) and the rational (structuralism, 14 Ibid., 318.

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The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism    AUŠRA JURGUTIENĖ

formalism, New Criticism), and having shown the merits and shortcomings of each, he draws the conclusion that only the most valid and scientific scholarship of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics can help to dialectically resolve all the weaknesses and discrepancies found in the then current trends of criticism. Modernist literature became entrenched together with demagogic humanist socialist (“socialism with a human face”) slogans, which were necessary for the express reason to ensure that people would be even more subordinated, entirely, wisely, to aspirations of their natural spiritual perfection and to the shining ideals of Communism. This is clearly demonstrated in Pakalniškis’s article. There was no room for shattered consciences or for any wretched contenders in literature or criticism: Civic poetry reveals the polarity and complexity of life, in accentuating the idea of human integrity … Inspired by the Communist ideal of the harmonious man, the poet does not get lost even in the face of the most complex paradox.15

In Pakalniškis’s articles, all the humanist speeches about the free and happy Soviet man who conquers the most complex inconsistencies of life and creativity, was a fog of beautiful words and the creation of a myth, based on the Hegelian-Marxist explanation of human freedom as a “perceived prerequisite” and remaining silent about the existing political control: In Marx’s words, beyond the confines of the materialist sphere “the development of human powers emerge, itself an objective, toward the true kingdom of freedom, which can blossom only within its own domain— within this kingdom of necessity.” Marxist Leninism reveals the correct path to “the true kingdom of freedom,” attainable only through economic and political conflict, and draws poets and artists toward revolution.16

The diaspora literary scholar, Rimvydas Šilbajoris, was quick to dismiss the Soviet literary critics’ convoluted discourse on the dialectic of the dual kingdoms between freedom and necessity as a philosophy of slavery in the Soviet era.17 And according to the Polish émigré writer, Czesław Miłosz, a human mind is enslaved when “dialectical materialism is injected into it” 15 Pakalniškis, “Poezija ir gyvenimas,” 314. 16 Ibid., 288. 17 Rimvydas Šilbajoris, “Socialist Realism and the Politics of Literature in Occupied Lithuania,” in Mind against the Wall: Essays on Lithuanian Culture under Soviet

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and when the historical imperative is a conflict between the old and the new and evolves as the victory of Communism.18 During the Stalinist period, Lithuanian literary critics were taught Marxist Leninism under threat of punishment and fear of deportation, but Pakalniškis’s aspirations reached higher levels, that Communist ideals should become his and all writers’ inner faith, and not just a superficial message! To support this belief, he seizes on the Soviet model revolutionary, Anatoly Lunacharsky’s dictum: “if you are a true Communist, then your art will also be Communist.”19 Pakalniškis’s adaptation of modernism to Socialist Realism in this article is the most conclusive evidence of his loyal conformism. In the literary field, he validated only modernism à la Mieželaitis, his poem Žmogus (Man, 1962) was published in Russian and awarded the Lenin Prize, and fit the Communist Party and the Socialist Realist canon; he dismissed as worthless the modernism that did not.20 Only when we consider those values which he believed to be the most valuable, can we discern the indicators of a thoroughly enslaved mind. The deconstructionist close reading approach, which directs a reading toward the incompatibility and countless contradictions within the text, allows us to better see that, in this article, the conformist concept of modernism, based on the dialectic synthesis of ideology and aesthetics, is not devoid of fractures and that these contradictions cannot be as easily unified “dialectically” as the author himself had presumed. The article’s introductory hypotheses contradict one another, proposing that “Marxist Leninism encourages an analysis of the qualitative uniqueness of manifest reality, a familiarity with the laws of the object under scrutiny, and a continual examining of one’s actions against these laws” (to quote Lunacharsky). A second Occupation, ed. Rimvydas Šilbajoris (Chicago: Institute of Lithuanian Studies Press, 1983), 105. 18 Czesław Miłosz, Pavergtas protas, trans. Almis. Grybauskas (Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2011), 231. Zniewolony umysł by Czesław Miłosz was published in Polish in Paris by the Instytut Literacki in 1953. This translation into English by Jane Zielonko was published in 1953 by Secker and Warburg.  19 Pakalniškis, “Poezija ir gyvenimas,” 289. 20 A. J. Greimas, one of the most prestigious diaspora critics evaluated Mieželaitis’s works quite differently in his article “Apie Eduardą Mieželaitį ir jo Paryžių” (Eduardas Mieželaitis and his Paris) published in the newspaper Dirva in 1963. He criticized Mieželaitis’s modernism calling it the modernism of yesteryear, which copied the art forms of the interwar period, and disparaged the volumes of the latter’s essays, highly praised by Pakalniškis, wherein Western culture is viewed through the narrow and dark glasses of Communism.

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The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism    AUŠRA JURGUTIENĖ

hypothesis proposing that poetry “belongs to those artistic domains whose essence is not readily understood through scholarship” (to quote Yury Lotman)21 was defended with an attempt at a “synthesis” that was never “synthesized” and resulted in a fog of abstract ideological newspeak ruminations. Pakalniškis inadvertently admits that it is practically impossible to keep Lithuanian poetry at the pinnacle of a rationally contrived dialectic of ideology and aesthetics, and he is forced to admit that in practice, he is frequently confronted with dangerous “unbalanced” works: Alas, as practice has shown, though poetry succeeds in some instances, it frequently upsets the “balance” between creativity and fidelity toward the truth of life. In his effort to embrace external reality, the poet risks losing the “sensation of form,” and becomes prosaic. Or in contrast, striving to concentrate on the minute details of life, he focuses on form and loses the sensation of reality in its entirety.22

The quote unwittingly reveals the acknowledged dangerous dominance of “unbalanced” poetry and discloses one fact, that his espousal of Marxist dialectics and the Socialist Realist concept of modernism was a failure in practice. Regardless of which demagogic theory the critic may have proposed, conflating the modernist slogan “art for art’s sake” with the ideological slogan “art for the working class,” did not resonate with the poets.23 Pakalniškis’s rhetoric regarding creative freedom in Soviet culture and life, while circumscribing it with the “established obligation” of Party ideology is the most contradictory and ridiculous aspect of his article. If we accept the notion that the critic is a subject who is not a closed system and is integral, being the same at any one time, then we must admit that his identity is constantly being created through his writing and reading, while routinely succumbing to deconstructive processes. In Pakalniškis’s article we can see not only the dominance of Communist ideology, but also an occasional tendency for it to unravel—the simultaneous coexistence of semantic contradictions. The most significant paradox 21 Pakalniškis, “Poezija ir gyvenimas,” 262. 22 Ibid., 281. 23 The Lithuanian modernists focused on nationalist ideology, “the art of national memory,” in their works which resulted in the proliferation of so-called archaic modernism. Modernist expression was distinctly and expertly applied to national mythology, pre-Christian culture and folklore (the poetry of Geda, the music of Bronius Kutavičius, the art of Petras Repšys, etc.) This type of poetry was greatly influenced by the works of the diaspora poet, Kazys Bradūnas.

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is that his article, like many Soviet texts which propagated the logic of dialectical materialism, became its own antagonist—demonstrating the implausibility and impotence of its logic. Throughout the article, ideological loyalty dominates, yet we can discern instances of deconstruction: the critic’s article is a compromised one, not rejecting but accepting modernism as an element in the Soviet cultural field and in the Socialist Realist method; however, it constantly loses its resemblance to the discourse of the Communist regime. Pakalniškis encouraged the modernization of poetic language, while subconsciously encouraging the modernization of poetic thought.24 Within his concept of Socialist Realist modernism is threatened by a ticking bomb ready to explode, because modernist creative freedom and Party doctrine are diametrically opposed and cancel one another out. Perhaps this is the reason why during the fall of the Soviet Union, he was able to migrate effortlessly toward the opposition discourse of the Sąjūdis movement and to seek an intimate dialogue with the Lithuanian diaspora in his book, Poezijos kryžkelės: dialogai apie dvi poezijos šakas išeivijoje ir Lietuvoje (The Crossroads of poetry: a dialog regarding two branches of poetry in the diaspora and in Lithuania, 1994).

Rebellious Conformism: Albertas Zalatorius Albertas Zalatorius’s literary criticism has merited considerably more notice and esteem compared to Pakalniškis’s. Some called it “a radically modernized methodology” in Lithuanian literary scholarship and criticism,25 while others praised it for “the most successful dismemberment of Soviet discourse in Lithuania before the Sąjūdis movement,”26 still others related it to the methodology of “interpretive art”27 described in depth in his article “Prozos interpretavimo problemos” (Problems of prose interpretation). It 24 Tomas Venclova described the psychoanalytic causes of subconscious rebellion: “Within the subconscious of almost every writer—exceptions are rare and belong to the realm of consummate pathology—lies not only the censor, but his opposite: a devilishly clownish seducer, a filthy and incorrigible being who persistently rebels against censorship.” Tomas Venclova, “Žaidimas su cenzoriumi,” in Tekstai apie tekstus (Chicago, Ill: Mackaus knygų leidimo fondas, 1985), 122. 25 Vytautas Kubilius, Lietuvių literatūros istorija: XX amžiaus literatūra (Vilnius: Alma littera, 1995), 701. 26 Tomas Venclova, “Albertas Zalatorius—kritikas jėgų viršūnėje,” Kultūros barai 6 (1993): 31. 27 Aušra Jurgutienė, Literatūros suvokimo menas: hermeneutikos tradicija (Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos instituto leidykla, 2013), 398–427.

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The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism    AUŠRA JURGUTIENĖ

was published adjacent to Pakalniškis’s article, which I discussed in the previous section: “Poezija ir gyvenimas (Kai kurie poezijos nagrinėjimo principai),” published in the same essay collection, Šiuolaikinės kritikos problemos (Problems of contemporary criticism). Zalatorius, like Pakalniškis, admitted that literary scholars live within a complex, confusing “tower of Babel” of various literary theories. He sought a solution, not through subservience to the ideological Communist Party pronouncements, as did his colleague, but through a professional integrity, even though to do so was very difficult because of the extant mandates of censorship. In his article “Prozos interpretavimo problemos,” he proposed a radically innovative suggestion to replace the genetic and historical literary scholarship, rife with the Soviet notion of literary “realism,” with interpretative analyses which focused on the impact and reception of literature. He suggested that the standard question posed by Soviet critics, how well does the work reflect reality, be replaced by a new question, how suggestive is the work, and how does it influence the reader. It was diametrically opposed to Pakalniškis’s proposals. Zalatorius practiced a methodology of “interpretive art” (Emil Staiger, Roman Ingarden, Mikhail Bakhtin), which arrived in Lithuania by way of Polish literary scholars (Juliusz Kleiner, Jan Prokop, Stanisław Eile, Derwent May, Janusz Słwiński). He studied New Criticism and the works of semiotician Lotman. To understand the world of literature, Zalatorius believed, we must discover our own relationship to it: “Generally, the challenge of the interpretative method—is not to explain why a work is what it is, but to answer the question, what does it mean to the reader.”28 He also practiced a mode of criticism that Pakalniškis called emotional criticism, but rejected naïve, emotional “sensational” reading, and searched for a more concrete and rational vocabulary for literary analysis. Much like the theorists of the Konstanz school, Zalatorius incorporated the concept of betrayal of a reader’s expectations to measure the significance and value of a work: “If an author cannot describe a proposal for a short story in the simplest words without causing turmoil in the listener’s soul, it is doubtful that he will be able to do so through narrative technique.”29 Consequently, according to Zalatorius, good literature causes turmoil in the reader’s soul, and upsets his tranquil life. Good criticism should disable the fossilized conventions of aesthetics and disrupt the Soviet author’s tranquil life. 28 Albertas Zalatorius, “Su novele dviese,” in Prozos gyvybė ir negalia (Vilnius: Vaga, 1998), 112. 29 Albertas Zalatorius, “Keli žodžiai apsakymo byloje,” ibid., 17.

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Rebellion was the measure of the quality of writing in literature and literary criticism. Zalatorius opposed the aesthetic and ideological dogmatism of Lithuanian literary criticism in the Soviet era; Pakalniškis sustained it. Rejecting the baggage of positivist methodology and ideologically Marxist genetic (culturally historical) literary analysis, he very courageously for those times prodded the immovable “objective truths” and promoted the changeable “interpretative truths,” found along the path of the critic’s individual inquiries. To examine how Zalatorius actualized his theoretical convictions and what concrete obstacles he encountered with his rebellious criticism, we can see copiously illustrated in his review of “Žalčio žvilgsnio šaltis ir sugestija“30 (The coldness and suggestiveness of The Glance of a Serpent) on Kondrotas’s novel Žalčio žvilgsnis (The glance of the serpent, 1981). The novel is remarkable for its innovative characteristics and it instantly stood out in the general context of Lithuanian prose. The very title of the review implies that, substantiated by methodologies of “interpretative art,” the evaluation of the novel will be a contradictory one. Primarily, the critic views the novel from the perspective of a Soviet reader or critic under the influence of traditional Socialist Realism and censorship and dismisses it. He describes its coldness: 1. the novel is too difficult for the reader, because the plot and composition are overly complicated and illogical, the work is full of inconsequential episodes and the characterization lacks coherence, psychological depth and social verisimilitude; 2. the nineteenth century is described in exotic and abstract terms, it contradicts historical fact, its descriptions of society are tepid; the author does not address the most relevant social and nationalist ideas current at the time; 3. creativity carries a social obligation, therefore, the author should not abandon himself to caprices of imagination, lose himself in games of fantasy, unmotivated narrative coincidences, grotesque pathologies; 4. the novel is too shocking and intellectualized (constructed); 5. the novel’s text does not uphold the practice of psychological identification in the reader, therefore, it cannot elicit an emotional response; 6. the novel creates an extravagant world that deviates from traditional norms and hence alienates the reader. The first half of Zalatorius’s review reminds us of the article by Pakalniškis, where modernist works are maligned for incompatibility with literary tradition and the interests of the working class. But, halfway 30 Albertas Zalatorius, “Žalčio žvilgsnio šaltis ir sugestija,” Pergalė 2 (1982): 133–42.

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The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism    AUŠRA JURGUTIENĖ

through, Zalatorius’s article takes an unexpected turn, the critic’s mask is removed, and the novel is approached from a personal perspective, raising the question of reception—why was the critic himself interested in reading it? It seems as if the second half of the review was written by another person, one who has dispensed with the habitual ideological mode of reading. A paradoxical reversal has occurred, the negative aspects of Kondrotas’s novel are turned upside down and the enumerated weaknesses of the novel become its strengths: 1. the novel examines themes of the biblical fall of man and his sinfulness, therefore, historical accuracy is unnecessary; 2. the author comprehends the condemnation of mankind within the context of the Old Testament, he creates a distance from the optimism of Soviet humanism and his narrative becomes penetrating, unconventional and creative; 3. the author knows how to write about complex subject matters in a clear and logical style; 4. love is treated analytically with unusual eroticism, avoiding moral judgment; 5. the author is particularly interested in the reasoning of a rational man and the general demystification of rationality; 6. an intellectual narrative is welcome in a Lithuanian literature marked by sentimentality; 7. the dialog between the novel’s characters never provides a direct answer to questions of moral culpability or moral purity, driving the reader to “remain constantly alert,” the novel draws him into its field of suggestibility. The reversal of values in the language of this review would delight the deconstructivist, providing an excellent opportunity to discuss the indeterminate meaning of the text. However, we have a different purpose—to note how even the most rebellious and intellectual critics were forced to their knees by ideological compromise and “internal censors.” We mentioned the first half of the review being written as though from the perspective of an ordinary (working class) Soviet reader. It was customary in Soviet-era criticism to review a book under the cover of an ordinary Soviet reader: “It was not unusual to find formulaic statements such as ‘the Soviet reader is dissatisfied,’ ‘the reader regrets the absence of,’ the work ‘is not responsive to the needs of a mature Soviet reader.’”31 This was a typical convention of Marxist criticism accentuating the social status of the reader, where the simple and traditional tastes of the “working class” replaced those of “decadent bourgeois urbanites.” We have to ask whether the section of Zalatorius’s article that discusses the 31 Galinis, “Tarybinės literatūros susiformavimas,” 15.

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chill of Kondrotas’s intellectualism, and his claim that “the book is alien to the Soviet working class” are Soviet-era conventions of literary criticism, and judge what are the critic’s real thoughts, how much is irony or play acting? Each reader will answer these questions in their own way; nevertheless, the presence of a mask and irony is incontrovertible. How else would an opposing evaluation of the novel have appeared in the review? A present-day evaluation of Zalatorius’s review draws us to the most compromised and disappointing conclusion, where he dialectically summarizes the two opposing evaluations of Kondrotas’s novel—the conventional view, which chills the Soviet reader, that of the individual critic who has succumbed to its suggestions. Zalatorius recommends that the author strive for the compromised “golden mean” and synthesis of opposing poles—to break through literary traditions and not wander about in cold extravagant intellectualism, to be mindful of “the anxieties of the nation and its people” in future works. Perhaps this was an effort to demonstrate that the conclusions were comprehensive? But today it looks like the practiced habit of a dialectically vacillating analysis: to obscure an intellectual and provocative review of a novel under the guise of a disappointed Soviet reader. Is that why the novel’s postmodernist style was ignored in his review? The novel portrayed a historical past to demystify the mythology of rational man and the progress of rational humanity (lurking behind this were the resolutions of the Communist Party and the doctrine of Socialist Realism). Regrettably, at the close of his article, the revolutionary Zalatorius admonishes the author to strive for the “golden mean” which brings us back to the phrasing of the ideologically loyal Pakalniškis (the balance of the kingdoms of freedom and necessity in creative works, the “synthesis” of politics and aesthetics, the “dialectic” of realism and modernism). But there is one essential difference between the two critics. In his review of Kondrotas’s novel, Zalatorius used the phrase “synthesis of opposites,” which in this instance refers to the aesthetic integrity and not the synthesis with Communist Party ideology: “The novel’s integrity is readily apparent. … A well-constructed novel, aside from its many meanings, also has the sense of an expertly executed work and rivets the reader’s attention.”32 For this reason he demonstrated the novel’s value and meaning with its immanent aesthetic quality and its effect (suggestion) on the reader, and not with a “lofty ideological relevance.” Maybe that is why we do not find any instances of newspeak typical of Pakalniškis’s 32 Zalatorius, “Žalčio žvilgsnio šaltis ir sugestija,” 137.

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writing in Zalatorius’s criticism: there is no disquiet regarding the renewal of Marxist terminology or the proliferation of Socialist Realism, there is no exaggerated rhetoric on the superiority of the Soviet citizen or the progress of history. It is no wonder that in Zalatorius’s article, the “Prozos interpretavimo problemos,” the appearance of manifest subservience to the censor, such as “every new effort to find meaning in a literary work should be congratulated, of course, if it does not contradict the principles of general scholarly inquiry—dialectical and historical materialism,”33 appears to be decorative, because it does not flow from the heart and does not coincide with his internal beliefs, as Pakalniškis used to ask for.

Conclusions The application of a trinomial schema (collaboration, conformism, resistance) to the public posture of its actors, effectively erases the characteristics of rebellion in modernist writers, and they are subsequently scattered among the aforementioned groups in the literary field. Of course, the great majority belong to the politically neutral group (“normal persons”), and only a few are in the group of collaborators (Eduardas Mieželaitis, Alfonsas Bieliauskas, and others) and the true resistance group (modernist writers who demonstrated an “uncompromised determination” were forced to emigrate to the West—Tomas Venclova, S. T. Kondrotas, stage director Jonas Jurašas). The modernist writers distanced themselves from the demands of Socialist Realism. They quietly countered the noisy propaganda of Soviet patriotism with the perfection of the Lithuanian language, the Communist utopia—with a poetic utopia and the conservative national cultural values, but they avoided outright confrontation with the regime.34

33 Albertas Zalatorius, “Prozos interpretavimo problemos,” in Šiuolaikinės kritikos problemos, 233. 34 It should be noted that due to the much shorter Stalinist period in effect in the Baltic countries (only from 1944 to 1953) more modernist literature was officially published there and its interpretation was much more complicated than in other USSR republics: “Socialist Realism, the officially sanctioned doctrine of Soviet Literature and Arts, was defined through the contrast to the modernist method. To put it another way, the positioning against modernist aesthetics served as a means of finding the precise contours of the self-identity of Soviet aesthetics.” (Alina Volynskaya, “Modernizm kak sovetsky antikanon: literaturnye debaty 1960–1970-kh godov,” Logos 6, no. 121 [2017]: 200.)

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The two literary critics we have discussed belong to the largest politically neutral group of modernists; one came close to collaboration, the other drew near to the boundary of resistance. The comparison of the articles by Pakalniškis and Zalatorius clearly shows how their compromises were similar and how they differed. In short, both contributed to the modernization of Lithuanian literature, and to the dissolution of Socialist Realist doctrine, yet neither one was able to avoid the conventions of the “Soviet reader” and Marxist dialectics. Nevertheless, Pakalniškis chose the  more secure, ideological path of loyal analysis of literary works, his style is replete with newspeak, rhetorical conventions of abstract, semantically complex phrases and ideological clichés. Today his texts appear outdated and are difficult to read. For literary analysis, Zalatorius chose arguments based on theories of aesthetic and “interpretative art” that were more appropriate for modernist works. Furthermore, his rebelliously compromised texts unavoidably polemicized against the Soviet myth of a new man (homo sovieticus), abundant in the texts of Pakalniškis and other loyal literary critics. Today he is relevant and interesting. It is only in rebelliously compromised texts, such as those of Zalatorius, that we can find internal conflict, a distress over one’s fears, ambivalent irony, and a painful dissonance between heroic and anti-heroic rhetoric. In his memories of the Soviet era, Zalatorius likened complicity with conflict: Let us not fear the word “complicity,” it is no better than the word “conflict.” … Complicity requires as much energy and stamina as conflict, because the forms of complicity are more dramatic and painful—they require constant duplicity and self-control. The Soviet system was the most refined of all 20th century systems to have threatened human nature.35

Zalatorius, the rebellious critic, encouraged authors to write a complex and genuine literature, which did not resemble the directives of Socialist Realism. However, presenting an impressively intellectual and professional interpretation of Saulius Kondrotas’s modernist novel Žalčio žvilgsnis, he allowed ample space for the conventional notion of receptions by the “Soviet reader,” and statements about the dialectical synthesis of opposites in the article’s conclusion—subconsciously demonstrating the boundaries of his own freedom to write. 35 Albertas Zalatorius, Literatūra ir laisvė: kritika, esė, pokalbiai (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1998), 21.

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The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism    AUŠRA JURGUTIENĖ

The compromised discourse of Soviet-era literary criticism, which I compare to the establishment of politically neutral modernism, was multi-faceted because it depended on the author’s conscience and talent. For this reason, the assignment of a general concept of mimetic resistance for writing of this kind is modified in this article. We further divide it into the narrower concepts of loyal (supporting Socialist Realism) and rebellious (transgression of Socialist Realism) conformism. In this article, I hope to demonstrate the value of analysis based on close deconstructive reading when studying texts of that period, focusing on their internal semantic contradictions (differences) and the disparities between literary critics. A deconstructive approach allowed me to analyze more carefully the rebellious elements in loyal texts and to discover the elements targeted by rebellious texts. Future studies should address the writings of loyal and rebellious compromise in depth, to further deconstruct the erroneous abstraction of these two literary concepts, and to reveal the games of compromised writing that are typical of each author.

Bibliography Baliutytė, Elena. “‘Tyliosios rezistencijos’ metafora ir prisitaikymo strategijos sovietmečio literatūros kritikoje.” Colloquia 19 (2007): 58–79. Galinis, Vytautas. “Tarybinės lietuvių literatūros kritikos susiformavimas.” In Tarybinė lietuvių literatūros kritika, ed. Vytautas Galinis, Juozas Stepšys, Jūratė Sprindytė, Elena Baliutytė, 7–24. Vilnius: Vaga, 1980. Garodi, Rozhe. O realizme bez beregov. Moscow: Progres, 1966. Girnius, Kęstutis. “Pasipriešinimas, prisitaikymas, koloboravimas.” Naujasis Židinys 5 (1996): 268–79. Greimas, Algirdas Julius. “Apie Eduardą Mieželaitį ir jo Paryžių.” In Iš arti ir iš toli: Literatūra, kultūra, grožis, edited by Saulius Žukas, 478–93. Vilnius: Vaga, 1991. Jurgutienė, Aušra. Literatūros suvokimo menas: hermeneutikos tradicija. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos instituto leidykla, 2013. Kelertienė, Violeta. “Cenzūros apėjimo sovietiniais metais formos kaip nacionalizmo išraiška.” In Kita vertus: Straipsniai apie lietuvių literatūrą, 290–304. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2006. Kelertas, Violeta. “Soviet Censorship in Lithuania 1945–1989.” In History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. 3, edited by John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope, 125–34. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007. Klumbys, Valdemaras. “Lietuvos kultūrinio elito elgsenos modeliai sovietmečiu.” PhD diss., Vilnius University, 2009.

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Kmita, Rimantas. “Rašytojų santykis su valdžia sovietmečiu: metodologiniai sprendimai vokiečių literatūros moksle.” Literatūra 53, no. 1 (2011): 48–64. Kondrotas, Saulius Tomas. Žalčio žvilgsnis. Vilnius: Vaga, 1981. Kubilius, Vytautas. Lietuvių literatūros istorija: XX amžiaus literatūra. Vilnius: Alma littera, 1995. Mieželaitis, Eduardas. Žmogus. Vilnius: Valstybinė grožinės literatūros leidykla, 1962. Miłosz, Czesław. Pavergtas protas. Translated by Almis Grybauskas. Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2011. Pakalniškis, Ričardas. “Poezija ir gyvenimas (Kai kurie poezijos nagrinėjimo principai).” In Šiuolaikinės kritikos problemos, edited by Juozas Stepšys, 262–320. Vilnius: Vaga, 1975. Priklausomybės metų (1940–1990) lietuvių visuomenė: pasipriešinimas ir / ar prisitaikymas?, edited by Albertas Zalatorius, Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996. Radauskas, Henrikas. “Dainos gimimas.” In Eilėraščiai, 127. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1994. Satkauskytė, Dalia. “Socrealizmo dekonstrukcija jo paties priemonėmis, arba mimetinės rezistencijos klausimu.” In Tarp estetikos ir politikos, edited by Dalia Satkauskytė, 343–68. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 2015. Sprindytė, Jūratė. “Vidinio monologo romano kontradikcijos.” In Tarp estetikos ir politikos, edited by Dalia Satkauskytė, 397–422. Vilnius: Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos instituto leidykla, 2015. Šilbajoris, Rimvydas. “Socialist Realism and the Politics of Literature in Occupied Lithuania.” In Mind against the Wall: Essays on Lithuanian Culture under Soviet Occupation, edited by Rimvydas Šilbajoris, 74–106. Chicago: Illinois Institute of Lithuanian Studies Press, 1983. Venclova, Tomas. “Žaidimas su cenzoriumi.” In Tekstai apie tekstus, 121–28. Chicago, Ill: Mackaus knygų leidimo fondas, 1985. ———. “Albertas Zalatorius—kritikas jėgų viršūnėje.” Kultūros barai 6 (1993): 29–31. Visa istorija yra gyvenimas: 12 sakytinės istorijos epizodų, Edvardą Gudavičių kalbina Aurimas Švedas. Vilnius: Aidai, 2008. Volynskaya, Alina. “Modernizm kak sovetsky antikanon: literaturnye debaty 1960–1970-kh godov.” Logos 6 (121) (2017): 173–202. Zalatorius, Albertas. “Prozos interpretavimo problemos.” In Šiuolaikinės kritikos problemos, edited by Juozas Stepšys, 227–62. Vilnius: Vaga, 1975. ———. Prozos gyvybė ir negalia. Vilnius: Vaga, 1998. ———. “Žalčio žvilgsnio šaltis ir sugestija.” Pergalė 2 (1982): 133–42. ———. Literatūra ir laisvė: kritika, esė, pokalbiai. Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1998. Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Valentyna Kharkhun

Ukrainian Literature of the Late Soviet Period The History of Three Generations of Poets

The main aspects of Soviet literature development can be identified through the establishing, constituting, and debunking of Socialist Realism as the “main method of Soviet art.” In his analysis of Socialist Realism as canonical, Hans Günter identifies several periods of its existence, highlighting that all had times of expanding and narrowing of Socialist Realist norms and requirements. Günter considered 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, as the beginning of “the decanonization period,” characterized by “an irreversible tendency to expanding,”1 meaning that the canon started to lose its predominance in the context of Soviet literature. Although many other scholars analyzed this period in Soviet art, Günter discusses Vladimir Pomerantsev’s article, “On Sincerity in Literature” as a first attempt to reconsider Soviet literature and its Socialist Realist content. Published in Novy mir at the end of 1953, the article was thought-provoking, because it raised the issue of ideological clichés being dominant in Soviet literature as well as the idea of Socialist Realism being “humanized.” Later, in 1956, during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin’s cult of personality was debunked. In the Khrushchev period of the Thaw, when de-Stalinization begins, liberalization was proclaimed at the 1 Khans Gyunter, “Zhiznennyye fazy sotsrealisticheskogo kanona,” in Sotsrealistichesky kanon: sbornik statey, ed. Khans Gyunter and Yevgeny Dobrenko (St. Petersburg: Akademichesky proekt, 2000), 283.

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political level. This remarkable event opened a less ideologically controlled perspective for the development of Soviet culture. Moscow’s cultural life was, and still is, recognized as an icon in representing cultural activity during the late fifties and the beginning of the sixties,2 but cultural changes were also happening in all Soviet republics, demonstrating the strength, dimensions, and national diversity of a new artistic era in Soviet culture. Interest in the non-Russian part of Soviet cultural history increased at that time, symbolizing a shift from the Russian model as dominant in examining post-Stalinist times to the other republics, providing examples of different ways of expressing national and artistic liberation.3 As an example, I will analyze Ukrainian literature and examine the fate of three generations of poets in the post-Stalinist period. Thus, you will observe the creation of a canonic image of the Ukrainian literary Sixtiers (shistdesyatnyky) and its role in the formation and existence of the next two generations. I will also discuss how the three generations broke the connection with Soviet literature’s Socialist Realism by creating new artistic values and forming different types of literary activity. In discussing post-war Ukrainian literature, I will apply a generational concept which has a long history.4 This concept was widely used in analyzing late Russian and Ukrainian Soviet culture or rather in the depiction of those phenomena which were already not Soviet anymore in the Stalinist sense and provided a basis for new national values. The Sixtiers being bound by social tiers and symbolic solidarity were regarded as the main 2 See for example, Stephen Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007); The Thaw. Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, ed. Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2013). 3 See for example, Jamil Hasanli, Khrushchev’s Thaw and National Identity in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1954–1959 (London: Lexington Books, 2015); Joshua First, Ukrainian Cinema. Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015); Violeta Davoliūtė, The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). The interest in national issues in the context of Soviet culture can be seen in the 7th Vilnius Symposium on late Soviet and post-Soviet issues, “Equal Nations, Classless Society: hierarchies, tensions and conflicts in a Socialist State,” organized by the Lithuanian Institute of History, December 1–2, 2015. 4 Boris Dubin, “Pokoleniye: sotsiologicheskiye granitsi ponyatiya,” Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya 2 (2002): 42–46; Agnieszka Matusiak and Mateusz Svietlitcky, “Kategoriya Pokolinnya u Suchasnych Suspil’no-kulturnykh Doslidzhenyakh,” in Postkolonializm. Generatsiyi. Kultura, ed. Tamara Hundorova and Agnieszka Matusiak (Kyiv: Laurus, 2014), 129–45.

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Ukrainian Literature of the Late Soviet Period    VALENTYNA KHARKHUN

subjects when discussing the issue of generations. Based on the separate decades, groups of writers who debuted later than the Sixtiers were considered to be unique generations and named the Seventiers (simdesyatnyky) and Eightiers (visimdesyatnyky). This attempt is discussed broadly and even debunked by the approach to use the non-generational principle for those authors who were recognized as loners and not belonging to any particular group.5 Despite the very controversial and disputed status of the “generational” concept, it is still actively used in research projects6 and for describing contemporary social and cultural situations7 as well as literary processes.8 In my research, I am following the encyclopedic description of generation as a social and cultural phenomenon regarding a group of people who share specific ideas and values or a world view as well as similar traumatic or non-traumatic historical experiences. I am also considering Voycech Szumowsky’s theory of a “special symbolic structure, and thus a defined resource of ideas, symbols and procedures through which a сertain generation takes on group identification.”9 In regard to this same issue, Barbara Fatyga considers a generation as a specific group of people bound by a common experience, creating a self-image through narratives which to others is perceived as symbolic violence.10 In continuing with this reasoning, I will discuss the generations and their self-provided narratives, or rather 5 Pozadesyatnyky: Poetychna Antologiya (Lviv: Prestyzh Inform, 1999). 6 I participated in two events: VI Baikal International School of Social Research “Historical Memory and Generational Analysis” (August 27–September 2, 2013); International Interdisciplinary Conference “Fathers and Children: Generational Factor and the Possibility of Postcolonial Studies in the Literature of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans” (Kyiv, May 15–16, 2014). 7 Otci i deti: pokolenchesky analiz sovremennoy Rossii, ed. Yuri Levada and Teodor Shanin (Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2005).  8 Nataliya Lebedyntseva, “Yavyshche literaturnogo pokolinnya v Ukrain’skiy literaturi kintsya XX stolittya,” Naukovi pratsi. Filologiya. Literaturoznavstvo: Naukovo-metodychny zhurnal 118, no. 105 (2009): 35–40; Tatiana Rytova, “Pokoleniye kak kategoriya sovremennogo literaturnogo protsessa,” Vestnik Tomskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Filologiya 4, no. 8 (2009): 87–98. As a most recent project I can mention conference Generational Phenomenon as a Revolt and De(con)struction held in Lviv National University, April 27–28, 2017. 9 “W Poszukiwaniu Pokoleniowej Tożsamości. Z Wojtkiem Szumowskim Rozmawia Agnieszka Kosinska,” Dekada Literacka 3 (1996), accessed March 17, 2017, http:// nowadekada.pl/nowa-dekada-literacka/archiwum-dekady-literackiej-1990-2004/ dekada-literacka-1996-nr-3-115/. 10 Barbara Fatyga, Dzicy z Naszej Ulicy. Antropologia Kultury Młodzieżowej (Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski, 1999), 152.

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their “narrative templates” (James Wertsch). Considering the connections, disconnections, and struggles among these “narrative templates” depicting the Sixtiers, I will discuss the coexistence of three generations of poets in late Soviet literature. For my research, I chose only poets because poetry is favored in Ukrainian literature and clearly reveals its uniqueness during the second half of the twentieth century. The main hypothesis of this research is that the creation of the different attitudes toward Soviet life can be recognized as one of the crucial principles of distinguishing generations in Ukrainian literature in the second half of the twentieth century. In discussing this hypothesis, I am going to focus on the following problems: Whether all three poetic generations were self-sufficient in producing a new aesthetic practice and the “narrative templates” about themselves? What are the peculiarities of this interrelation? How does each generation deviate from Soviet norms? There were numerous phenomena representing key changes in the dismantling of Socialist Realism during the Khrushchev Thaw, but the most important one was that of the Sixtiers: Lina Kostenko, Dmytro Pavlychko, Vasyl’ Symonenko, Ivan Drach, Mykola Vinhranovsky, Vasyl’ Stus, Ihor Kalynets, Hryhir Tyutyunnyk, Yevhen Hutsalo, and many others. 1962 is officially recognized as the starting point of this generation, when several poetry and prose collections appeared: Vinhranovsky’s Atomni Preliudy (Atomic preludes), Symonenko’s Tysha i Hrim (Silence and thunder), Drach’s Soniashnyk (The sunflower), Borys Oliynyk’s Byut’ u Krytcyu Kovali (Blacksmiths beating in steel), Volodymyr Drozd’s Lyublyu Syni Zori (I love blue stars), Hutsalo’s Lyudy sered Lyudey (People among people). These works and the large group of new writers who debuted had a similar type of world view as well as a specific style of writing. They represented an idea of unity which made them recognizable as a cultural generation. The most important aspects of their writing are nationalism, humanism, and the propagation of culture; in the sense of style, they preferred to experiment and to create new poetic forms. In both content and style, they were completely different from the older Socialist Realist generations of Soviet Ukrainian writers. The image of the Ukrainian Sixtiers prevailing in contemporary literary criticism is mainly canonized by the Sixtiers themselves. The center of the canon is constituted by the sacralized figures of the two “Vasyl’s:” Vasyl’ Symonenko and Vasyl’ Stus.

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Ukrainian Literature of the Late Soviet Period    VALENTYNA KHARKHUN

Symonenko’s very short life was highlighted by several major events. He is a well-known Ukrainian poet who graduated from Kyiv State University and worked as a journalist in several newspapers in the Cherkasy Region. In 1962 Symonenko together with his friends Alla Horska and Les’ Tanyuk found the burial places of citizens murdered by the NKVD in Bykivnia, near Kyiv. He then appealed to the Kyiv City Council for answers as to why this burial site had been hidden from public knowledge. In 1963 Symonenko was brutally beaten by the militia at the Smila Railroad Station. He suffered kidney failure and died soon after on December 13, 1963. Many researchers argue that there is a deep connection between Symonenko’s discovery of Bykivnia and his subsequent beating: the supposition being that the militia punished him and stopped his intentions to reveal the site, as the disclosure would have been problematic for the Soviet authorities. Despite the absence of any documented proof, Symonenko’s death is mostly recognized as having been caused by the KGB, and Symonenko is considered a martyr and victim of the Soviet system. The Ukrainian Sixtiers Dissident Movement Museum in Kyiv holds to the opinion that Symonenko’s life and death had an impact on the rise of the national democratic movement in Ukraine. Symonenko authored two collections of poetry. His debut book of poems, Tysha i Hrim, appeared in 1962 alongside with other poetry collections showing the appearance of a new literary generation. The second poetry collection, Zemne Tyazhinnya (Earth’s gravity) was published in 1964 after Symonenko’s death at the age of twenty-seven. So his literary heritage is not huge; moreover, it is characterized by journalistic writings, which are simplistic, and absent of poetic experiment. Instead, he created several poems articulating the main ideas of his generation which became the moral canon for Ukrainians: “For you’re a human on the earth / And whether you want that or not—/ Your smile is unique. / Your misery is unique. / Your eyes are unique”; “Do you know that you’re a human?;” “For you can choose anything at all, my son, / But of Fatherlands for you there’s only one;” “The Swans of motherhood;”11 “My nation is! My nation lives eternally! / And no one will destroy my nation’s life;” “Where are you now, oh torturers of the nation?”12

11 Trans. Andriy M. Freishyn-Chirovsky. 12 Trans. Andriy M. Freishyn-Chirovsky.

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The key factors of Symonenko’s cult are determined by his early death in 1963, which halted the poet’s artistic formation at its highest point. The basis for his canonization is created in several publications13 that established the basic principles of the poet’s codification: he is “more than himself,” “the soul of the national and cultural revival in Ukraine, of the movement that later was named ‘The Sixtiers’” (Ivan Dziuba), “the greatest Sixtier among Sixtiers” (Vasyl’ Stus), “the flag of this and other generations” (Stanislav Telnyuk). The uniqueness of Symonenko’s evaluation and canonization becomes apparent in light of the literary context of that time. The 1960s are characterized by freedom from ideological burdens and aspiration to new forms of artistic expression. Therefore, experimenting poets, who used complicated poetic utterances and transformations of genre forms, claimed the dominant position in literature. Hence the success of such experimental poets as Vinhranovsky and Drach, the author of the well-known “Balada pro Vyprani Shtany” (The ballad of the laundered pants). Symonenko, on the contrary, declared himself a traditionalist in content and in form. He was essentially a “non-innovator” according to Stus. Symonenko’s poems are characterized by simplicity, sometimes reaching banality, but as Stus stated, Symonenko overtook all innovators, because he was more courageous, he “lived with trembling inner readiness for a feat” (Ivan Svitlychny). Dziuba notes that being “a moral and civic creature” in poetry and life, Symonenko presented a lesson in civic ethics, showing the height of civil behavior. Understanding of the major role Symonenko played was inherited by the next generations. Oksana Zabuzko, a representative of the Eightiers generation and one of the best known contemporary Ukrainian writers, criticized the Sixtiers like Lina Kostenko strongly. She made an exception for Symonenko, however, by pointing out: “this is already ‘haute literature’ which with one explosion, broke all of the Socialist Realist mainstream and gave life to a whole generation: all our Sixtiers de facto descended from him.”14 13 Yevgen Sverstyuk, “Symonenko—Idea,” in Vasyl’ Symonenko, Vybrani Tvory, ed. Anatoliy Tkachenko and Dana Tkachenko (Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2010), 671–76; Ivan Svitlychny, “Slovo pro Poeta,” in ibid., 617–20; Ivan Dziuba, “Vystup na Vechori, Prysvyachenomu 30-littyu z Dnya Narodzhennya Vasylya Symonenka v Budynku Literatoriv 16 Sichnya 1965 r.,” Suchasnist’ 1 (1995): 153–58; Vasyl’ Stus, “Sered Hromu i Tyshi,” Suchasnist’ 1 (1995): 138–48.  14 Oksana Zabuzhko, “Vid Liny Kostenko ya Navchylasya, yak ne Mozhna Povodytysya z Lyudmy,” Insider, October 15, 2015, accessed April 21, 2017, http://www.theinsider.ua/

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Comparison with Taras Shevchenko, the major Ukrainian poet and central figure of the Ukrainian literary canon; calling him “the poet of civic courage;” emphasizing his moral and ethical superiority—these approaches have been used for Symonenko’s canonization. It is noteworthy that the same principles became appropriate for the canonization of Stus. The phenomenon of canonical “continuity” is defined by the fact that some of the identity formulas used for the Symonenko cult were proposed by Stus. The Stus cult was formed against the backdrop of the Symonenko cult’s resurgence. (See, for example, several publications about Symonenko in 1995 issues of the Suchasnist’ journal). Hence the Sixtiers formed a “mirror-like” double-placed canon, introducing themselves into the context of Ukrainian literature. Stus represented the dissident wing of the Sixtiers. He began writing almost simultaneously with the other representatives of his generation, but his poetry collections were never officially published in the Soviet Union, since liberalization ended in the mid-sixties, and were followed by the first arrests. Nevertheless, Stus’s poetry has been published abroad and won great acclaim: Ukrainian diaspora critics even wanted to nominate Stus for the Nobel Prize. Meanwhile in the Soviet Union a prisoner’s fate awaited Vasyl’ Stus. Openly resisting Soviet ideology, he was arrested twice, spent approximately ten years in the camps and died in the Perm region under unknown circumstances in 1985. According to one version he was killed by prison guards (that is to say the KGB) because they did not want him to get world recognition by winning the Nobel Prize. There are several issues with the creation of the Stus canon. First is the problem of his codification. Stus debuted later than other representatives of the Sixtiers and his poetry style does not have much in common with their writings. It lacks social populist issues, being much closer to Kyiv school writers with their deeply rooted philosophical and existential writings as well as hermetic poetry. Thus, Stus’s status is seen as a special case, since he is classified by researchers as both a representative of the “Second Wave” of Sixtiers and as a “Post-Sixtier.” Second, unlike Symonenko’s poetry, Stus’s writings are hermetic with a high aesthetic standard which means they are hardly accessible to the non-proficient reader. Therefore, it is difficult to utilize Stus’s poetry art/oksana-zabuzhko-vid-lini-kostenko-ya-navchilasya-yak-ne-mozhna-povoditisyaz-lyudmi/.

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for canonization purposes, creating a contradiction between national missionary goals and aesthetic values. The first obviously predominates in the social consciousness, and as a result from the poet’s rich heritage creators of the canon chose only several poems for school and university textbooks, simplifying Stus’s poetic genius and making his image one of a poet with strong social thought. Thus, the basic Stus canon includes poems such as “Na Kolymi Zapahlo Chebretcem” (The smell of thyme in Kolyma), “Na Kolymskim Morozi Kalyna” (Guelderrose in Kolyma frost), “Yak Dobre Te, Shcho Smerti Ne Boyus’ Ya” (I have no fear of dying), “Sto Rokiv, Yak Skonala Sich” (One hundred years since Sich died). The quote from his poem “Yak Dobre Te, Shcho Smerti Ne Boyus’ Ya” became the canonical: “My people, It is to you I am returning. / In death I somehow find my fate.” Despite the problems regarding Stus’s canonization, he was the perfect challenger for creating a canon. Unlike Symonenko, who wrote a few poems using Soviet style, discussing Communist Party issues, and who did not act openly against the Communist regime in Ukraine, Stus embodied the impressive example of struggling against Communist rule in Ukraine and against Soviet writing in Ukrainian literature; he was a representative of the anti-Soviet movement. The specific nature of the Stus canon creation is defined by its time: it was established in the early years of Ukrainian independence (beginning in the 1990s), when the nation was in need of new values of a morally and an aesthetically perfect writer who had suffered from the Soviet regime’s oppression against claiming national principles. Stus, who openly opposed the Soviet system, fought for Ukraine and revealed himself as a poet of genius was the best figure to symbolize the aspirations of the Ukrainian people at the initial stage of state-building. Until the current moment, when Ukraine is reconsidering its national canon of heroes, Stus was regarded as the best candidate for national hero. Ukrainian historian, Georgiy Kasyanov, in discussing the issues of contemporary canon creation suggests that Stus is a perfect Ukrainian hero. Kasyanov gave the following portrait of Stus: “Vasyl’ Stus is a talented poet, a heroic man in the sense of upholding his ideals, he knew that he was going to die, but he continued to struggle.”15 Despite the difficulties with Stus’s codification as a Sixtier, similar to Symonenko’s cult, the Sixtiers played a decisive role in creating the Stus 15 “Mify zamedlennogo deystviya. Istorik Georgy Kasyanov o Bandere, russkom yazyke i shchelchkakh istorii,” Fokus, February 10, 2017, accessed April 26, 2017, https://focus. ua/society/366016/.

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canon.16 In their conception, Stus appears as a poet martyr, symbolizing the idea of sacrifice and paving the road to national independence. Therefore, the collective canon of the Sixtiers is embodied in the basic personal canons of Vasyl’ Symonenko and Vasyl’ Stus. It is aimed at the image of a Poet, whose biography and works symbolize an otherness with respect to Soviet writers’ stereotypes, manifested in acts of civil courage, and being perceived as a martyr. The personal canons of the “two Vasyl’s” which dominated in the representation of the phenomena of the Sixtiers, hide the controversial issues of loyalty of some representatives of this generation, such as Ivan Drach, Dmytro Pavlychko, and Oliynyk to the Soviet system, promoting recognition of the Sixtiers as a dissident movement. In assessing the Sixtiers’ vision of themselves as a canonical model, contemporary literary critics, writers, and journalists take different perspectives. Besides a purely objective assessment of the Sixtiers as the central phenomenon in twentieth-century culture, their perception is determined by a subjective approach: in an attempt to accept or reject the Sixtiers, subsequent generations tried to find their own identity code and their own place in the context of Ukrainian culture. The importance of the Sixtiers, which even the most skeptical researchers admit, is that they are the successors to “the Executed Renaissance,” the 1920s generation, as they restore the continuity of literary and artistic traditions which was interrupted by Socialist Realism. There are different opinions as to the “quality” of this restoration. Oksana Pakhlovska relates Ukrainian Sixtiers to the notion of cultural (moral, ethical) revolutionaries, and introduces them as such into the European cultural and historical context. The researcher positions the Sixtiers in three value-oriented areas: first, as the most conscious and most consistent European form of civil resistance of the intellectual elite to the totalitarian system; second, as a cultural revolution, reproducing the aesthetic and civil tension of Ukrainian modernism of the 1920s. Hence it should be considered as a natural part of European modernism. Thirdly, as the Ukrainian variant of existentialism based on an attempt to counter the meaninglessness of the contemporary world by the clarity and courage of individual conscience. Pakhlovska notes that the Sixtiers created a genetic 16 Mykhaylyna Kotsyubyns’ka, “Vasyl’ Stus u konteksti sohodnishnoyi kulturnoyi sytuatsiyi,” Slovo i Chas 6 (1998): 17–28; Mykhaylyna Kotsyubyns’ka, “Fenomen Stusa,” Suchasnist’ 9 (1991): 26–36; Yevhen Sverstyuk, “Netsenzurny Stus,”  Kur’yer Kryvbasu 168 (2003): 127–41. 

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code of a new Ukraine, returning to the value of an ethical ideal, which stimulated Ukraine’s exit from Soviet-era historical oblivion and opened a way for the struggle for independence in the 1980s.17 It should be noted that Pakhlovska is the daughter of Kostenko, one of the main representatives of the Ukrainian Sixtiers. Pakhlovska’s perception of that generation is subjective: among other things, it is an attempt to represent herself and the generation of the 1980s in the context of the Sixtiers as seeing them as their “fathers.” Despite the fact that Pakhlovska’s research is very qualified and well argued, she appears to exaggerate the significance of the Sixtiers, and her text can sometimes sound very emotional. Attempts to glorify the Sixtiers is not shared by many researchers who believe that the Sixtiers were biased and their phenomenon was very controversial. Most of Sixtiers tried to evade the support of the authorities, but at the same time they adhered to canonical Soviet ideology, or rather, Marxism-Leninism. Tetyana Maslovska points out that the Sixtiers made a last desperate attempt to reconcile communist ideology with the humanistic concepts of the Ukrainian traditional world view.18 A similar opinion about the “duality” of the Sixtiers is shared by the most famous contemporary researchers, such as Vira Ageeva, Nila Zborovska, Oksana Zabuzhko, Volodymyr Morenets, and others. It is symptomatic that the Sixtiers themselves are willing to admit the truth of this statement.19 The moderate and critical attitude to the Sixtiers increasingly transforms into an intention to challenge the cultural potential of this phenomenon and to make public the examples of collaboration of the Sixtiers with the Soviet regime. This surge of the “anti-Sixtiers” trend is reinforced by its duplication in a different sphere—in literature, research, mass media, and public discussions. Oles Doniy’s article, “Death of the Sixtiers,” in the newspaper Dzerkalo Tyzhnya (2001), which declared the destruction of the myth of the Sixtiers, was in the limelight in the 2000s. This attempt of debunking and “demolition” penetrates Volodymyr Yeshkilev’s newspaper article, “Mystery of Justice” (Stolichnye novosti, 2001) and Halyna Palamarchuk’s contribution, “It’s in the Air” (Literaturna Ukraina, 2002). The poem by Serhiy Zhadan, who represents the 1990s generation, can be considered the best literary example for criticizing the Sixtiers. Zhadan’s poem, “Prodazhni 17 Oksana Pakhlovska, “Ukrains’ki Shistdesyatnyky: Filosofiya Buntu,” Suchasnist’ 4 (2000): 65–84. 18 Tetyana Maslovska, “Shche Raz pro Shistdesyatnytstvo,” Slovo i Chas 11 (1999): 33–37. 19 Yevhen Sverstyuk, Bludni Syny Ukrainy (Kyiv: Znannya Ukrainy, 1993).

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Ukrainian Literature of the Late Soviet Period    VALENTYNA KHARKHUN

Poety Shistdesyatykh” (Corrupt poets of the 1960s), is written in the genre of postmodern (punk) invective: Продажні поети 60-х мали б тішитися, що все закінчилося так успішно; адже стільки було небезпек, а бач – вижили, повернули кредити, хіба що бойові рани нитимуть під час циклонів, ніби під час місячних. The corrupt poets of the 1960s might be comforted, that all ended up so successfully; though there were so many dangers, and see—they survived, returned credits but for the battle wounds which will whine during cyclones, as if in a time of menstruation.20

This poem demonstrated Zhadan’s clear desire to dissociate himself from the Sixtiers, a generation that he believed discredited itself by collaboration with the Soviet regime and the corrupt post-Soviet authorities. To present a complete picture of the perception of the Sixtiers, I should highlight that since Ukraine gained its independence, the representatives of this generation were engaged in state-building and received numerous prestigious state awards, such as the title of “Hero of Ukraine” (Ivan Drach, Dmytro Pavlychko, and Borys Oliynyk became laureates, while Lina Kostenko refused to accept this award). Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, a period of revision and critical attitude toward the Sixtiers generation by writers and researchers was a very intense time for public canonization for its “dead representatives”—the “two Vasyl’s.”21 20 Trans. mine. 21 In 2005, a Symonenko monument was installed in his native village, Biyivtsi, in the Poltava region, another was opened in 2010—in Cherkasy where he lived and worked until his death, and yet another in 2015 near Kyiv University where he studied. In 2015, Ukraine celebrated the eightieth anniversary of Vasyl’ Symonenko’s birth on the state level. In 2001, a Stus bas-relief was opened in Donetsk University where he studied. It was later destroyed by the occupation authority in 2015, which shows the potential of national Ukrainian memory about Stus. In 2005, Stus was posthumously awarded the

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The analysis shows that two images of the Sixtiers were created. The first is associated with glorification of the Sixtiers as “state builders,” and with the canonization of the “two Vasyl’s” as perfect heroes who represent the whole generation as a dissident movement. The second is associated with the critical attitude of this generation as exemplified by their loyalty to Soviet power or by producing Soviet-style writings. As Volodymyr Morenets states, the Sixtiers “by their roots and the basis of poetic thinking, [are] set in Socialist Realist soil.”22 Thus, the Sixtiers who appeared as a generation after Stalin’s death, during the “liberalization period,” are a “two-faced” phenomenon, complicating the history of Ukrainian culture of the twentieth century. The Sixtiers include a variety of writers with different world views and artistic skills. That is why it is impossible to wholly identify them as an alternative to the Socialist Realist canon. Moreover, I would suggest that it is not appropriate to apply a collective canon to the Sixtiers, rather it should be preferable to distinguish the personal canons of the individual Sixtier representatives as an alternative to Socialist Realism. Since 1965 Ukraine has experienced several waves of arrests of intelligentsia, each one proclaiming that a different period has begun. The 1970s, known as the “Brezhnev era,” or in the Ukrainian version the “Malanchuk23 period,” is characterized, among other things, by an attack on literary and artistic life, driving it into the zone of Socialist Realism. Mykola Shamota’s24 article “In Favor of the Specific Historical Portraying Life in Literature,” published in the journal, Komunist Ukrainy (1972), serves as an example of ideological pressure. It offers lists of authors and works found “undesir“Hero of Ukraine” award. In 2002, a Stus monument was built in Vinnytsya, another in 2016 in Lviv, and yet another in 2007 with his bas-relief appearing near his native village. In 2017, during the dramatic memory wars between Poland and Ukraine, the city council of Warsaw, Poland, decided to name a city square after Stus. 22 Volodymyr Morenets, “Slovo, shcho Vypalo z Movchannya Filosofiv,” in Mykhaylo Hryhoriv, Sady Mariyi (Kyiv: Svitovyd, 1997), 14. 23 This concept is associated with the name of Valentyn Malanchuk, leader of the Communist Party in Soviet Ukraine. The period of Malanchuk’s tenure as a Chief of the Committee of ideology (1972–1979) was called “the era of Malanchuk,” which was characterized by a sharp increase in political repression, hard ideological pressure on the intelligentsia, devastating destruction in Ukrainian culture. 24 Mykola Shamota is a Ukrainian literary critic, an academician; between 1961 and 1978 he was Director of the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, the National Academy of Ukraine, headed the department of Socialist Realism, received the Shevchenko Prize (1978) for the monograph, Humanism and Socialist Realism.

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Ukrainian Literature of the Late Soviet Period    VALENTYNA KHARKHUN

able” to the Soviet authorities as well as prohibited themes and images. In literary and artistic life, the role of “campaigns” strengthens as in Anatoly Zhdanov’s era, known as zhdanovshchina or “late Stalinism.” For example, the 1970 plenary meeting of the Board of the SPU (the Writers’ Union of Ukraine) on the topic, “Man of Labor in Modern Ukrainian Literature,” paved the way for the emergence of many time-serving works written in accordance with the Party’s decisions. In addition, many conferences and research discussions held throughout the 1970s were aimed at maintaining the status of Socialist Realism in Soviet literature. The 1970s, when the nomenklatura predominated in all spheres of life, is often called the period of “stagnation,” or the period of “no time,” as Ivan Drach qualified it,25 and does not have distinct aesthetic characteristics. This codification is primarily based on an aesthetic evaluation of poetry (the prose written during the 1970s is seemingly always evaluated highly enough), which, at first glance, has no generational characteristic, unlike that preceding the Sixtiers and with the following Eightiers. However, the detailed historiographical restoration of 1970s events led to the opposite assessment. At that time three generations of poets—the Sixtiers, Seventiers, and Eightiers—represented themselves in the official and informal literature as dissidents and “internal emigrants.” In describing the generation of the 1970s, I should cite the names of Lyubov Holota, Mykhailo Shevchenko, Mykhailo Pasichnyk, Kateryna Motrych, Mykhailo Slaboshpytsky, Dmytro Ivanov, Halyna Palamarchuk, and Stepan Sapelyak, who created an expressive personal style. All were widely recognized: four of them (Holota, Slaboshpytsky, Ivanov, and Sapelyak) received the Shevchenko National Prize, others were distinguished by various national and international awards. Stepan Sapelyak is also well known as a participant in the dissident movement. However, although while being interesting artistic personalities and creative poets, they did not produce the so-called “language of the generation,” that is a particular type of language which makes a generation recognizable as a creative community in comparison with others. The specifics of the 1970s poetic decade are determined by their predecessors, the poets who debuted in the 1960s, that is in assessing this period, it is much more appropriate to use “decade” and “chronological” 25 Ivan Dziuba, “Shodzhenya do Sebe,” in Hryhory Chubay, Plach Yeremiyi (Lviv: Kalvaria, 2001), 10.

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codification than the generational one. In officially published literature, one of the most notable examples is Kostenko: in 1977, she published her most interesting collection of poetry, Nad Berehamy Vichnoyi Riky (Above the banks of an eternal river), and later she wrote Marusya Churay, a novel in verse which was awarded the Shevchenko National Prize. It is notable that, being recognized as one of the main representatives of the Sixtiers, Lina Kostenko revealed her talent during the seventies and eighties, making the generational principle more questionable. In non-official literature, we find Stus’s Palimpsesty (Palimpsests) collection of poetry, Ihor Kalynets’s collection, Nevilnycha Muza (Captive muse) and Hryhory Chubay’s poem, Vidshykuvannya Prychetnoho (Searching for the implicated). These examples would seem to testify that the decade of the seventies has its own expressive “face” and made a great contribution to the demolition of the status of the Socialist Realist canon. Roksolana Svyato proves that the 1970s were the first Ukrainian cultural decade, when it was possible to exist outside socialist ideology and Socialist Realist practice. The researcher states: “Deprived of the ability to publish their works, the authors—as paradoxical as it sounds—got the inner freedom that their predecessors hadn’t possessed. They didn’t need to resort to Aesopian language, they were free to write about everything, though for their desk drawer. And—even more strange—they did not need to respond to concrete reality.”26 The eighties were full of traumatic experiences including the Afghan war, Chernobyl and the perestroika period which completely changed the nature of Soviet cultural life, influencing new trends in literature. The final break with the aesthetics of Socialist Realism took place immediately after the “Malanchuk period” in the early 1980s before perestroika. This change in Socialist Realism was brought about not by historical events, but rather by the natural artistic development of the literature of the 1980s. In analyzing the poetry of the eighties, Nataliya Lebedyntseva distinguishes three different participants of the literary process. First, the poets who debuted in the second part of the sixties but had to go underground during the seventies and gained the possibility to publish their poetry only in the eighties. Second, the “Eightiers themselves” who debuted in the first part of the decade, but their poetic thinking was created during the 26 Roksolana Svyato, “‘Problema Literaturnych Pokolin:’ ‘Period Bezchassya’ i Ukrains’ka Poeziya 70-kh Rokiv XX st.,” Naukovi Zapysky 72, Filologichni Nauky (2007): 72.

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seventies. Third, the poets of the second half of the eighties, representatives of the Ukrainian avant-garde, whose world view was formed by the legacy of the Soviet period, the atmosphere of perestroika and the Chernobyl syndrome.27 The first phenomenon is represented by the Kyiv school of poets which got its name in 1969 and consisted of Viktor Kordun, Vasyl’ Holoborodko, Mykhailo Hryhoriv, Mykola Vorobyov, Vasyl’ Ruban, and others. Most of these poets, who established themselves in the late sixties, graduated from the Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, which was considered the most important and prestigious Ukrainian university of the Soviet and post-Soviet period. With the debut of those poets comes the problem of the links between the Kyiv school of poets and the Sixtiers. Ukrainian literary studies are dominated by the idea that despite the generational closeness of the Kyiv school to the Sixtiers, they can be regarded as post-Sixtiers due to their non-conformist stance. The Kyiv school was totally different from the Sixtiers ideologically and aesthetically. While the Sixtiers were seeking freedom, the poets of the Kyiv school had already gained their independence, giving up any kind of ideology including the national idea. They were innovators practicing pure poetics, searching to discover new artistic values in the context of the national theme in particular. Instead of making proclamations, they created a poetic image of Ukraine, appealing to the original, mythic principle of its existence. Their poetry is characterized by a return to the basic elements of Ukrainian mythological thinking; by the transformation of the mythological perception into images of contemporary poetry; by a return to the primary lexical sources altered into symbols; by focusing on the themes of “nature,” “man,” and “universe;” and by creativity without assessing their own feelings and the feelings of others. The importance of the Kyiv school is also reflected in the transformation of the literary process. In supporting this idea, it is important to recall two things. Firstly, the Kyiv school’s poetic voices became the subject of a heated debate on the purpose of poetry in the newspaper, Literaturna Ukraina (1984). The age-old dilemma of art—should literature serve society or symbolize creative independence—was solved following late-period Soviet trends. Despite the active support of Soviet literature’s 27 Nataliya Lebedyntseva, “Yavyshche Literaturnoho Pokolinnya v Ukrain’skiy Literaturi Kintsya XX Stolittya,” Naukovi Pratsi. Filologiya. Literaturoznavstvo: Naukovometodychny zhurnal 118, no. 105 (2009): 37.

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service function, it became clear that Soviet unanimity was ruined by this discussion, programing a subsequent split of the “Socialist Realist zone.” Secondly, the activities of the Kyiv school marked the unification of the continental and diasporic branches of Ukrainian literature. For more than sixty years they had been developing separate ideological zones: the homeland Ukrainian literature during the Soviet period focused on the principles of Socialist Realism, while diasporic Ukrainian literature was propelled by anti-totalitarian trends and the postulation of a national idea. These two branches of Ukrainian literature produced hostility and counter-propaganda from the late 1920s until the late 1980s. Only in the early 1990s did the representatives of the Kyiv school unite their efforts with the New York Group. The latter group existed from the mid-1950s, until the mid-1990s, and unlike their predecessors—the diaspora writers—they professed non-conformism, insensitivity to any ideology, and were intrinsically nationalist, focused on aesthetic experiments.28 The end result of the interaction of the Kyiv school and the New York Group was Switowyd magazine which became a noticeable phenomenon in Ukrainian culture throughout the 1990s. Overcoming the boundaries between the two branches of Ukrainian literature can be considered to be one of the most significant blows to the elimination of Soviet priorities in the organization of literary and artistic life. The second phenomenon, representing this decade were the Eightiers themselves and included stylistically different poets. In discussing the literature of the first part of the eighties, the literary critic, Mykola Ilnytsky, distinguishes the poetry of Leonid Talalay, Volodymyr Basylevski and Volodymyr Zatulyviter, all of whose poetic talents emerged during this time and showed a new tendency in Ukrainian literature.29 Nataliya Lebedyntseva mentions Vasyl’ Herasym’yuk, Ivan Tsarynny, Lyubov Holota, Ihor Rymaryk, Pavlo Movchan, Stanislav Chernilevs’ky, Antonina Tsvyd30 as representatives of the Eightiers. An Anthology of New Ukrainian Poetry of the 1980s, created by representatives of this generation and published abroad, included many more poets showing this decade as a triumph

28 Maria Rewakowicz, Literature, Exile, Alterity. The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014). 29 “1960–1990-ti roky,” in vol. 2 of Istoria Ukrains’koyi Literatury XX Stolittya, ed. Vitaly Donchyk (Kyiv: Lybid’, 1995), 56. 30 Lebedyntseva, “Yavyshche literaturnoho pokolinnya,” 38.

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of poetry.31 Volodymyr Yeshkilev in trying to create the generalized image of the Eightiers, distinguishes several peculiarities of this generation: the formal side of the literary work takes the main position; a transition from narrative to intertextual symbolism, and a search for the meaning of intertextuality as nostalgia for the salon; a lack of pretension to create “the main” texts; a desire to gain charisma through “recognition in the West,” and related to their complexes and frustrations seek a conceptual urban individualism; and an attraction to synthetic methods of creativity.32 The third phenomenon of the Eightiers is represented by the literary performance group named “Bu-Ba-Bu.” It was organized by three Ukrainian writers, Yuri Andrukhovych, Viktor Neborak and Oleksandr Irvanets in April 1985, based in Lviv. The group’s three syllables represent “burlesque, balagan, and buffonada,” revealing carnival as the main trend in the poets’ actions as they opened “an era of buffoonery” or a Ukrainian version of postmodernism. In describing this literary group, Mykhaylo Naydan notes: They rejected the rigidly nationalistic canonical approach to their Ukrainian literary antecedents, the aesthetically bereft Socialist Realist content of much of Soviet Ukrainian literature, and even their immediate predecessors in the literary establishment the Writers of the Sixties who, although treated as heroes within traditionalist Ukrainian culture, were perceived as oldfashioned and too pragmatically nationalistic for the modern aesthetic of the younger generation. These new writes focused, too, on a new freer Ukrainian language that broke both Soviet and nationalistic taboo.33

The aesthetics of postmodernism with its artistic experimentation and provocation destroy the status of Socialist Realism altogether. Postmodernism is regarded as the main gravedigger of Socialist Realism: usually “serious” Socialist Realism, characterized by the domination of straightforward thought and artistic expression alien to any ironic duality, entered the zone of irony. It is irony that annihilates the already dead Socialist Realism, 31 Poets of the Eighties. An Anthology of New Ukrainian Poetry, ed. Ihor Rymaruk, introd. Mykola Riabchuk (Edmonton, Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1990). 32 Povernenya Demiurhiv. Pleroma. 1993, vol. 3 of Mala Ukrains’ka Entsyklopediya Aktualnoyi Literatury, ed. Volodymyr Yeshkilev, Yuri Andrukhovych (Ivano-Frankivsk: Lileya, 1998), 39. 33 Michael M. Naydan, “Ukrainian Avant-Garde Poetry Today: Bu-Ba-Bu and Others,” The Slavic and East European Journal 50, no. 3, Special Forum Issue: “Contemporary Ukrainian Literature and National Identity” (2006), 456.

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transforming it from the main aesthetic principle to the object of carnival games and collage. Framed in this irony is a poem by Volodymyr Tsybul’ko, a representative of the postmodernist wing of the Eightiers, which is very symbolic and indicates the total death of Socialist Realist “narrative templates”: Я був в Мавзолеї. Я Леніна бачив. В гробу. I was in the mausoleum I saw Lenin. In a coffin.

The analysis shows that three Ukrainian poetic generations coexisted, interacted, and overlapped, rarely struggling against each other. Instead they had the Soviets as a common target for struggle, creating their own types of poetic thinking. Thus, poetic generations can be distinguished by their relations to Socialist Realism and Soviet literature in general. The Sixtiers, being controversial and demonstrating a different attitude to the Soviets, still were “rebellious,” the first generation who debunked the priority of Socialist Realism in the context of Soviet literature, making it marginalized. The Seventiers, who were “brothers” to the Sixtiers, continued with this style of poetic thinking, living under different circumstances of repression and stagnation which however gave them the possibility to avoid reproducing the Socialist Realist style of writing. During the seventies, the anti-Soviet discourse, created by representatives of the dissident movement, showed a strong opposition to state-supported Soviet literature. The Eightiers, being chronologically “brothers” also for the Sixtiers, became “others” in comparison to them, demonstrating a completely different attitude toward anything Soviet: they went beyond the Soviet, aesthetically not belonging to it anymore. It is noteworthy that the struggle against Socialist Realism started by the Sixtiers ended when the myth of the Sixtiers itself was debunked by their “children.” The debunking was started by the postmodernist wing of the Eightiers and was finished by the generation of the Ninetiers which became “non-Soviet.” They represented the situation “in between:” being educated in the Soviet school, they witnessed the postmodernist time, in which everything Soviet took its place in a museum exhibition.

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Bibliography “1960–1990-ti roky.” Istoria Ukrains’koyi Literatury XX Stolittya, vol. 2, edited by Vitaly Donchyk. Kyiv: Lybid’, 1995. Anninsky, Lev. “Shestidesyatniki, Semidesyatniki, Vos’midesyatniki. K dialektike pokoleniy v russkoy kulture.” Literaturnoye obozreniye 4 (1991): 10–14. Bittner, Stephen. The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007. Davoliūtė, Violeta. The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Dubin, Boris. “Pokoleniye: sotsiologicheskiye granitsi ponyatiya.” Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniya 2 (2002): 42–46. Dziuba, Ivan. “Bil’shy za Samoho Sebe.” In Vasyl Symonenko, Vybrani Tvory, edited by Anatoliy Tkachenko and Dana Tkachenko, 655–70. Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2010. ———. “Shodzhenya do Sebe.” In Hryhory Chubay, Plach Yeremiyi, 10–20. Lviv: Kalvaria, 2001. ———. “Vystup na Vechori, Prysvyachenomu 30-littyu z Dnya Narodzhennya Vasylya Symonenka v Budynku Literatoriv 16 Sichnya 1965 r.” Suchasnist’ 1 (1995): 153–58.  Fatyga, Barbara. Dzicy z Naszej Ulicy. Antropologia Kultury Młodzieżowej. Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski, 1999. First, Joshua. Ukrainian Cinema. Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. Gyunter, Khans. “Zhiznennyye fazy sotsrealisticheskogo kanona.” In Sotsrealistichesky kanon: sbornik statey, edited by Khans Gyunter and Yevgeny Dobrenko, 281–88. St. Petersburg: Akademichesky Proekt, 2000. Hasanli, Jamil. Khrushchev’s Thaw and National Identity in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1954–1959. London: Lexington Books, 2015. Kotsyubyns’ka, Mykhaylyna. “Fenomen Stusa.” Suchasnist’ 9 (1991): 26–36. ———. “Vasyl’ Stus u Konteksti Sohodnishnoyi Kulturnoyi Sytuatsiyi.” Slovo i Chas 6 (1998): 17–28. Lebedyntseva, Nataliya. “Yavyshche literaturnogo pokolinnya v Ukrains’kiy literaturi kintsya XX stolittya.” Naukovi pratsi. filologiya. literaturoznavstvo: naukovo-metodychny zhurnal 118, no. 105 (2009): 35–40. Maslovska, Tetyana. “Shche Raz pro Shistdesyatnytstvo.” Slovo i Chas 11 (1999): 33–37. Matusiak, Agnieszka, and Mateusz Svietlitcky. “Kategoriya Pokolinnya u Suchasnych Suspil’no-kulturnykh Doslidzhenyakh.” In Postkolonializm. Generatsiyi. Kultura, edited by Tamara Hundorova and Agnieszka Matusiak, 129–45. Kyiv: Laurus, 2014. “Mify zamedlennogo deystviya. Istorik Georgiy Kasyanov o Bandere, russkom yazyke i shchelchkakh istorii.” Fokus, February 10, 2017. Assessed April 26, 2017. https://focus. ua/society/366016/.

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Morenets, Volodymyr. “Slovo, shcho Vypalo z Movchannya Filosofiv.” In Mykhaylo Hryhoriv, Sady Mariyi. Kyiv: Svitovyd, 1997. Naydan, Michael M. “Ukrainian Avant-Garde Poetry Today: Bu-Ba-Bu and Others.” The Slavic and East European Journal 50, no. 3, Special Forum Issue: “Contemporary Ukrainian Literature and National Identity” (2006): 452–68. Otci i deti: pokolenchesky analiz sovremennoy Rossii, edited by Yuri Levada and Teodor Shanin. Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2005. Pakhlovska, Oksana. “Ukrains’ki Shistdesyatnyky: Filosofiya Buntu.” Suchasnist’ 4 (2000): 65–84. Poets of the Eighties. An Anthology of New Ukrainian Poetry, edited by Ihor Rymaruk, introduction by Mykola Riabchuk. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1990. Povernenya Demiurhiv. Pleroma. 1993. Vol. 3 of Mala Ukrains’ka Entsyklopediya Aktualnoyi Literatury, edited by Volodymyr Yeshkilev, Yuri Andrukhovych. Ivano-Frankivsk: Lileya, 1998. Pozadesyatnyky: Poetychna Antologiya. Lviv: Prestyzh Inform, 1999. Rewakowicz, Maria. Literature, Exile, Alterity. The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014. Rytova, Tatiana. “Pokoleniye kak kategoriya sovremennogo literaturnogo protsessa.” Vestnik Tomskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Filologiya 8, no. 4 (2009): 87–98. Stus, Vasyl. “Sered Hromu i Tyshi.” Suchasnist’ 1 (1995): 138–48.  Sverstyuk, Yevhen. Bludni Syny Ukrainy. Kyiv: Znannya Ukrainy, 1993. ———. “Netsenzurny Stus.” Kur’yer Kryvbasu 168 (2003): 127–41.  ———. “Symonenko—Idea.” In Vasyl Symonenko, Vybrani Tvory, edited by Anatoliy Tkachenko and Dana Tkachenko, 671–76. Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2010. Svitlychny, Ivan. “Slovo pro Poeta.” In Vasyl’ Symonenko, Vybrani Tvory, edited by Anatoliy Tkachenko and Dana Tkachenko, 617–20. Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2010. Svyato, Roksolana. “Problema Literaturnych Pokolin’: ‘Period Bezchassya’ i Ukrains’ka Poeziya 70-kh Rokiv XX st.” Naukovi Zapysky 72, Filologichni Nauky (2007): 67–73. The Thaw. Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s, edited by Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2013. “W Poszukiwaniu Pokoleniowej Tożsamości. Z Wojtkiem Szumowskim Rozmawia Agnieszka Kosinska,” Dekada Literacka 3 (1996). Accessed March 17, 2017. http:// nowadekada.pl/nowa-dekada-literacka/archiwum-dekady-literackiej-1990-2004/ dekada-literacka-1996-nr-3-115/. Wyka, Kazimierz. Pokolenia Literackie. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1989. Zabuzhko, Oksana. “Vid Liny Kostenko ya Navchylasya, yak ne Mozhna Povodytysya z Lyudmy.” Insider, October 15, 2015. Accessed March 17, 2017. http://www.theinsider.ua/ art/oksana-zabuzhko-vid-lini-kostenko-ya-navchilasya-yak-ne-mozhna-povoditisya-zlyudmi/. Zborovska, Nila. “Shistdesyatnyky.” Slovo i Chas 1 (1999): 74–80.

Pavel Arsenev

State of Emergency Literature Varlam Shalamov vs. “Progressive Humanity”

The Natural School and its Heirs In opposing Sentimentalist cliché for its falsification of depictions, Russian realism demanded that language be constantly brought into contact with the senses. Readers who had acquired a taste for immediacy of the senses, in no small part due to Sentimentalism, now saw the latter as tainted by the sin of inauthenticity. But since the ideal of authenticity had been preserved, it was simply transferred from the compromised region of the senses to the region of social reality. Realism declared this project to be a process of demedialization, a striving to overcome any and all kinds of code conventionality, to radically curtail literary methods and to effectively abolish the distance between the one depicting and the thing depicted in the interest of approximating “reality itself.” It is characteristic, however, that the use of rhetoric began to be recognized as a hindrance not only on the path to artistic well-being but to this approximation of social reality as such. This followed de facto from the new definition of the social functions of literature, but the problem lay in the fact that the scale for evaluation itself was an attribute of this state of affairs, which had still to be confirmed in the struggle for the “démontage of eloquence.”1 Thence follows the paradoxical demand for a nonliterary literariness. 1 As is demonstrated in Renate Lachmann, Die Zerstörung der schönen Rede. Rhetorische Tradition und Konzepte des Poetischen (München: Fink, 1994).

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By emphasizing the transition from the “authentic” (with regard to the truth of the senses) to the “real” (with regard to social reality), the Natural School turned to the gold standard of all revolutions—the as-yet-nonrhetoricized “low style,” which, naturally, looked like a rejection of style out of hand. The eloquence latent in the rejection of eloquence is usually perceived as a long-awaited liberation from conventionality generally. The vulgarity and simplicity discovered in the prose of the 1820s would by the 1840s be considered indicative of stylistic perfection. Naturalism owes its invention to the situation expertly constructed by Belinsky, wherein the “natural” was opposed to the “rhetorical;”2 this rhetorical move beat down adherents of Sentimentalism, but with the help of an argument that had previously been used by them against their own opponents (the Archaicists, who had fought for a return to even more classicist rhetoric.) Thus, Belinsky razed both preceding camps in one fell swoop and strategically averted the possibility of a revanche, previously guaranteed by the alternation of the two sides—truth senses and power of rhetoric. In this way, the realism of the Natural School made rhetoric (as something opposed to the natural) synonymous with both the routine use of existing artistic devices and with social conservatism. But while Belinsky himself still believed fervently in the possibility of rejecting rhetoric out of hand (as a practice of the ruling classes), later modernist calls for a rapprochement with reality would express ever greater doubts in the possibility of a total rejection of all filters. This would nevertheless make their calls for rejecting all mediation only more ambiguous. The documentary approach, as a euphemism for authenticity, appears regularly on the horizon of literary history at moments of radical breaks in the literary canon, often in accordance with revolutionary politics. Maybe the most interesting incarnation of this tendency in the history of Russian literature was the radical project of overcoming “fictions and prettiness” in writing, usually linked to the Literature of the Fact school and the review Novyi LEF. Just as Productionist art had proclaimed a transition from the forms of easel painting to the production of real objects, Productionist literature Literature of the Fact (henceforth—LF) was aimed at liquidating the “life-descriptive” forms of literature and transitioning to a literature 2 Which got its name, as is often the case with artistic movements, from a castigating opponent—Bulgarin, who criticized the “exclusion of the senses and of pathos in favor of dark and dirty scenes.”

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of “life-building” or a “productive-utilitarian” literature, in which facts themselves would appear as real, non-abstract objects. What can literature do to participate in the formation of a new everyday reality and a new human being? Put simply: it can stop being merely itself. That is, literature should not simply narrate the new but should work to destroy the very “inert literary forms” of utterance and thought (the LF theoreticians understood ideology as implementation of form, and [literary] form as a derivative of ideology). As in any rejection of a former self, however, LF left a gap open for ambiguity. As Shklovsky mentioned, “we believe that the old forms of literature are useless for the formation of new material, and that today’s stance overall favors material, fact, and message.”3 This kind of formulation is obscure: either literature as a whole (with all of its old forms) is not useful, or it is only the old forms of literature that are useless (which would imply a demand for the invention of new forms). For the LF theoreticians, however, this was dialectic rather than ambiguity: even an imaginary plot is not understood to be an error per se but rather a historically obsolete device. Thus, during Nicholas’s reign historical necessity turned social activists toward the path of belles-lettres as the most viable form available at the time. But the “literature of idle imagination” ceased to be an “abstractly-progressive” phenomenon when the social atmosphere was changing, as Chuzhak depicts it.4 The life-building pathos of production literature led to a rejection of the thesis about the activity of the superstructure, within which it had previously had to operate: “The revolution fundamentally abolished those prerequisites that had driven the writer away from facts and forced him into invention. All need for the imaginary fell away and in its place there grew a demand for facts.”5 In the context of these new “practical tasks of 3 Viktor Shklovsky, “V zaklyucheniye,” in Literatura fakta: Pervyy sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEF’a, ed. Nikolay Chuzhak (Moscow: Zaharov, 2000), 192. 4 “Vague symbolism, reticence, Aesop-like muddle … gave the writer the opportunity to push through certain forbidden little notions even under the harshest censorship of Tsar Nicholas’s reign. … People experienced ‘real life’ in novels, and this was a comfort to them. … It was as if people had silently agreed to take this innocent counterfeit as real life, and in essence everyone gave themselves a conditional sort of break to imagine things as they wished. So-called realism was a conventional language for them … and no one to this day has yet exposed its conventionality.” Nikolay Chuzhak, “Pisatel’skaya pamyatka,” in Literatura fakta, 5. 5 Ibid., 15.

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the new literary culture, which have nothing in common with the aesthetic influence of literary classics,” priority is given to “sketches as truthful as reflexes.”6 Thus, the very designation “Literature of the Fact” is already somewhat inconvenient in connection with the epistemological status of the type of discourse described. This genitive assumes two different ideas: 1. Literature immediately striving to be fact, that is a literature that proclaims factualness as a property of a certain kind of writing that is moving away from literature “as such” toward the documentary (in this case “of the fact” plays the role of an adjective—literature of what? i.e. what kind of literature?), 2. and simultaneously the activity of the fact itself, taking literature’s initiative and place, i.e. a literature that the actual fact is produced as a reflex, and the fact is registered— importantly—by a nonprofessional author (while still striving to abandon its status and move toward a sort of legitimate literary existence). This ambiguity is quite significant given that our epistemological perspective depends on the choice of what we see as the authority that provides the impetus to a literature of the fact: we will assume either a particular documentary viewpoint, which enables us to view and constitute reality thanks to its specific construction (just as Vertov’s technique of kino-eye enables viewing processes otherwise hidden to the human eye), or a reality that speaks for itself (which is ultimately free from all the limitations of tsarist censorship and thus can replace imperfect and bureaucratized devices of literature.) The way we understand the status of LF in its struggle with the “old literary relationship to things” will also depend on the logic of this expression and arising from here an epistemological perspective: LF can be either an avant-garde literary movement (struggling for a new relationship to things) or even a gnoseological challenge non-literary relationship to them (attempting to exclude the very figurative nature of language). On the one hand, this was a defense of the new socialist material from the danger of spoilage and deformation by old literary devices (“it is becoming clear that this Party man came out of the literary tradition rather

6 Petr Neznamov, “Derevnya krasivogo opereniya,” Novyi LEF 8 (1928): 8.

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than the local committee;”7 “the complex is being built up north according to the laws of a very special kind of engineering: the laws of the A. Bely school”).8 Here some remarkable metaleptic effects are found: the hero should come only from life, otherwise he is an agent of (modernist) literary tradition. On the other hand, given that half the editorial board was made up of Formalists, they were aware that in order to let new material live, they needed not only to abandon old plot and stylistic constructions (in favor of “life itself ”) but also construct new ones.9 The factographer, whose efforts were previously directed wholly toward the precise registration of facts (despite all of the aforementioned ambiguity of this procedure,) is now expected to engage in practice as well, in production. “We do not conceive of a break between the writer and the object he is writing about.”10 This thesis seems to pretend to be refuting the entire modern Western comprehension of the subject-object relationship. The efforts of authors treating only the revolutionary theme or even—in addition to this—experimenting with form appeared insufficient (to the editors of Novyi LEF) since these authors “are only observing but not participating in the building of life.”11 A merely thematic and formal approach to the revolution was not enough; artists must swear allegiance on the pragmatic level, that is, they should speak only after having become a part of what they describe. Having recognized that the category of fact was theoretically problematic and ideologically ambiguous, the LF theoreticians shifted or complicated the deictic utterances about “facts” as such by the pragmatic imperative “to reorient literature toward action.”12 But the performative quality of language (including literary or quasi-literary language) is fraught with still more epistemological problems. Since presenting facts “as they are” was no longer adequate, LF rearranged things as it went along: “for us, the men of fact, there cannot exist

7 Petr Neznamov, “Dradedamovyi byt,” Novyi LEF 6 (1928): 23. 8 Vladimir Trenin, “Intelligentnyye partizany,” Literatura fakta, 101. 9 Of course, in order to perceive or formulate something, that something must be deformed. Thus, backed up by the Formalists, the LEF artists would never speak out against Constructivist principles, but merely clarified that the deformation necessary for perception should be conditioned by technique rather than psychology. 10 Chuzhak, “Pisatel’skaya pamyatka,” 15. 11 Ibid., 16. 12 Ibid., 15.

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facts as such”13; “a person does not merely see a defect, he is already thinking about this defect and making a suggestion as to how it can be amended.”14 In this way LF approached the realm of practical activity (which brought it closer to American pragmatism or to Vygotskian anthropology, according to which meaning emerges in the world of human actions in connection with the aims and interests of speakers—and in relation to them—and, consequently, also has a pragmatic aspect.) Thus, in a fairly roundabout way (through the idea of a transitive language), LF arrived at the idea that things do not have their “own names,” just as there are no facts outside of a certain—practical—relationship to things; and that facts are fabricated in acts of (linguistic) interaction. LF rejected an objectivist epistemology of language but not its old dream of bringing facts into literature. If there are no facts that can be impartially registered, then they must be fabricated—on the one hand through the factographer’s direct involvement in production and participating observation, and on the other through a special linguistic technique of objectifying language’s own materiality. “Factual material can be introduced into literature only by means of the LEF devices of selection and montage of facts.”15 This technique, consisting exclusively of selection and montage (combination), does not differ at all from Roman Jakobson’s description of the work of language. The factographer works with reality like a native speaker with her paradigmatic and syntagmatic toolbox. The method of LF coincides, as it were, with the most natural sign system known, speaking through the pieces of reality itself. Thus, on the way of transitioning from the production of representations of reality to the latter’s immediate transformation, not only the old form (with the conservative social manner of being a writer) appears, but also the obstacle of language itself. To duly acknowledge the theoretical intuition of the factographers, it should be said that they were fully aware

13 Sergey Tretyakov, “Prodolzheniye sleduyet,” Literatura fakta, 282. 14 Tretyakov, “Prodolzheniye sleduyet,” 223. Cf. another statement by a leading LF theoretician: “there cannot be a single artwork that does not aim to register facts. … Only two things can be done with facts: they can be used in reports or in proclamations. The report does not distort the facts—it registers them in all their reality. The proclamation does not register facts, but rather uses them and distorts them in the direction most useful to it.” Оsip Brik, “Blizhe k faktu,” ibid., 81. 15 Vladimir Trenin, “Nuzhno predosterech’,” in ibid., 217.

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of this circumstance.16 This is precisely why it is necessary to analyze the inventive doctrine within which the LEF theoreticians conceived the literary utterance as a locutionary event, that either exposes its speculative nature or in its pragmatics approaches the language of ideology. Despite the fact that this linguo-pragmatic orientation toward a “mobilization of facts” seems to indicate the starting point of a movement leading to the speculative language of Soviet bureaucracy, it actually conceals peculiar safety measures of linguistic representation. The refusal to naturalize facts uttered (énoncé) and the objectivization of the fact of utterance (énonciation) might suggest propaganda, but it would be a propaganda that “exposes the devices of influence rather than obscures them.”17 Thus LF, as a radicalization of the ideas of the Natural School, acknowledging both the suspension of the referential status of “all that has been written above” and the inescapable figurality of language, moves from a search for a guiltless language and transparent communication to a maximally speculative version of Brechtian realism, emphasizing the very conditions of seeing and understanding. We cannot avoid mentioning Platonov as well as an example of a no less paradoxical interception of the realist tradition by means of a realism of language: one that preserves socialist construction as a referent of narration, but that also demonstrates the deconstructive effect a self-criticism of language can have on it. At the same time, Platonov shifts the communist ideal from the content of the utterance (its glorification or critics) into the very construction of the act of utterance itself, laying out the only possible communism, a communism of speech (the interconnection of all functional styles and voices) in his writing [cf. Walter Benjamin, “exporting communism” in his Moscow Diary]18). In this context, Shalamov—henceforth our main topic of interest—represents a different type of a way out of the LF paradox: a realism of the body. 16 “Can a ‘living’ person exist in literature? We think that there can—allowing for the deformational qualities of the word. Even the most objective photograph does not register the object with absolute accuracy, since by its very nature it is two-dimensional and thus distorts the three-dimensionality of things. The word too has its own particular ‘two-dimensionality,’ and it is only by taking into account the degree of deformation of this lexical ‘two-dimensionality’ that we can talk about ‘objective’ methods of depiction.” Тeodor Gritc, “Mertvyy shtamp i zhivoy chelovek,” in ibid., 134. 17 Boris Arvatov, “Agit-kino i kino-glaz,” Kino-zhurnal A.R.K. 8 (1925): 3. 18 Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, trans. Richard Sieburth, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

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The subject of Shalamov’s prose is more of an extended than a thinking substance, nearly naked life, devoid—by the catastrophe of history—of conceptual mechanisms of mediation but also placing a taboo on any kind of didacticism in literature overall. The “report-like” quality of Shalamov’s writing not only departing from the factographic “epic of the newspaper,”19 but also Platonov’s broken “bureaucratic” sociolect.20 For Shalamov, speaking is performed by the ruined body of history, and the style of report is used to register its voice. This is an obvious conflict between functional styles: the confession and the interrogation report,21 the blood-stained document that nevertheless still carries juridical force (as is usually the case with documents that bear the traces of bystanders) and actually only intensifies it. The document is a genre of testimony of certain facts in a maximally unambiguous form and, in some sense, also a material object, all the more so as it is not subject to rhetorical redistribution. In any case, the document is something that is maximally protected from the aberrations of individual readings. It can be personal, that is identify its subject, but it cannot be understood subjectively. Everything subjective, emotionally colored, etc. belongs to a diametrically opposed means of using language. These lexicological observations are necessary in order to feel the full ambiguity of the following statement: 19 Shalamov was familiar with the LF project and always correlated himself with it: “Sergey Mikhailovich Tretyakov tried to consolidate the newspaper, to give it priority. Neither Tretyakov or Mayakovsky ever managed to make anything out of this attempt. … Literature of the Fact is not literature of the document. It is just a particular case inside of the big documentary doctrine. The LEF artists produced a whole series of articles recommending ‘documenting facts,’ ‘collecting facts.’ … But that is a calculated distortion. There is no fact without its being presented, without the form of its registration.” Varlam Shalamov, “O moyey proze,” in Sobraniye sochineniy (Moscow: Khudlit, 1998). 20 Besides constant references to this kind of official-business genre as a report, we can also point to the story “The Snake Charmer,” which tells the tale of a screenwriter, Platonov, and his life in the labor camp. This Platonov demonstrates something Shalamov himself found unacceptable: the illusion that he would acquaint the thieves and criminals with real literature. We can see in this a hint of a no less ambitious task set by Shalamov himself: to acquaint the world of literature with the camps. 21 Platonov exists “on both sides of utopia,” thanks to the level of the sign’s figural quality; Shalamov meanwhile invents his own type of duality at the level of the pragmatics of the artistic utterance: he feels himself to be both victim (thus “blood-stained”) and guilty before the judgment of history (thus the obsessive reporting of the underground Trotskyite unable to stop the Thermidor). Cf. Hans Gyunter, Po obe storony ot utopii: Konteksty tvorchestva A. Platonova (Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2012).

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The documentary prose of the future is emotionally colored, a memoir document stained by blood and the soul, where the whole thing is document and at the same time represents emotional prose. The task here is simple: to find a verbatim report of the protagonists and specialists involved, about one’s own work and one’s own soul.22

If something secondary to the simple registration of facts (as well as their institution) slips into the document, then the latter drops out, as it were, of its genre, ceasing to be a document. On the other hand, if something gets blood-stained or people start talking about things like “the soul,” then we can forget about any objectivity. This is evident at the level of language, and yet in Shalamov the legal metaphoric of writing gets systematically confused with the spiritualist one. Furthermore, this kind of prose seems to exclude the question of “How was it made?” If a tale about a little man and a titular councilor demonstrates its own stylistic accentuation and calls for Formalist deconstruction; but such “big” topics as the siege, war, and labor camps place a prohibition on dismantling the construction, while also hinting that there is nothing there to dismantle, one should just pay attention. But in truth, rather than the state of emergency represented in such literature, attention should be paid to the state of emergency instituted in literature itself through such gestures.

The Epistemology of Emergency: Hesitation Shalamov was constrained by an extremely equivocal relationship not only to some dictionary meanings but also to such constitutive definitions of literariness as fiction and style. To compare him with LF as a point of negative reference: LF stood both “against fiction” and “against prettiness,” transforming this from manifesto declarations into linguistic facts. They may have blundered to some extent with regard to the real linguistic possibilities of such a démarche and the finality of the solution to the problem (art, as we know, prefers to rework and embrace first and foremost its critics and destroyers), but in any case we understand what they meant. In Shalamov’s case, we know that such meta-utterances about the nonfictional character, the “precision of the blood-stained report” and other rhetorical structures calling for a rejection of rhetorical structures are necessary 22 Shalamov, “O moyey proze.”

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because the author suffered from crushing doubts as to the possibility of bringing writing to bear on this kind of state of emergency.23 On the one hand, Shalamov assumes that the referential world of his prose has the right not to care about style; on the other hand, this world is not only uttered before our very eyes but also equipped with an additional emergency quality ingrained in the very act of such an utterance. In other words, while Western European modernism experimented with the fragmentation of narrative conventions and referential instability, Shalamov, the Soviet convict, is allowed not to worry about even the bare minimum of formal proficiency and rhetorical knowledge; all he has to do is give testimony, fill out a “blood-stained” report. And yet Shalamov does demonstrate this proficiency and this knowledge. It might sound like a truism to say that Shalamov is no adherent of formalism or of the ornamentalist understanding of writing. But look at how he himself sums up the ancient dispute connecting the technical to the thematic: “A new, unusual form for registering a unique condition and unique circumstances.”24 This surfeit of the unusual and the unique prevents us from determining what is going on here: is this about form performing the decisive work of novelty, or about the unique circumstances that will have all the more impact the less literary processing it is subjected to? Obviously, new referential objects entail a redistribution of expressive means, while new form by definition tends to contemporary material. But in any of these cases the order of the initial initiative is preserved, and Shalamov meanwhile consistently avoids verb copulas: “a form for a state.” If form “was necessary,” then it would follow the material and yield to it; if form itself “made demands,” then it would be possible to estimate the referential object of Shalamov’s prose—only as an “occurrence of style” (as formalists did on the different material). But while the ode could still be described as belonging to the oratorical genre as something paradoxically required by external series and at the same time requiring them itself merely

23 Cf. “The astonishing union of rhetorical figures and anti-rhetorical utterances demand attention.” Elena Volkova, “Teksty ‘Kolymskikh rasskazov’ Varlama Shalamova v rakurse neoritoricheskikh i antiritoricheskikh smysloporozhdeniy Y. M. Lotmana,” in K stoletiyu so dnya rozhdeniya Varlama Shalamova. Materyaly konferentsii (Moscow: DerDiDas Grupp, 2007), 25–32. 24 Cf. “The Kolyma Tales are a registration of the exclusive in a state of exclusion.” Shalamov, “O moyey proze.”

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as motivators of its form,25 this kind of perspective on Shalamov’s short stories seems prohibited by the distinctly extreme, “emergency” quality of the referent, which as it were exceeds the ontological horizon of any and all literature. We do not intend to doubt the legality of this prohibition, but nevertheless are compelled to analyze the conditions under which excellent literature is still produced by means of the rejection of literature. “The Kolyma Tales lie outside of art, and nevertheless they possess both artistic and documentary force.”26 Owing to this paradoxical situation, when something is breaking out of its own cage and simultaneously striving to arrange it in its own image, Shalamov is forced to stand up for the priority both of the authentic material and of its artistic quality at the same time, while also satisfying the rules of art. At the same time, he seeks to establish his own rules, called upon to refute art (the “leaky pot” strategy). This is why it is possible to speak with the same seriousness about both Shalamov’s formalism and his anti-formalism. “I had such reserves of novelty that I had no fear of any repetitions.”27 Once again something external feeds the agent’s movement inside the space of literature, lending him less professional finesse than confidence in his strength to stand against it. Evidently, if you have something new to say (hitherto still external to literature), you need not fear repetition. But perhaps this tautology should be understood as a declaration of the absence of fear in the face of intentionally inertial form, rather than the triviality of the material? And even as an indirect confirmation of that form’s “peculiar richness” given the material’s particular “reserves of novelty.” “I considered the novelty of the material the primary and sole quality that gave it the right to live.” It would seem again that this utterance lies completely on the side of the referential; it particularly recalls Schopenhauer’s phrase, “In essence the primary and sole prerequisite for good style is the situation in which you have something to say.” However, just as in this famous simpletons’ slogan, the self-sufficient state of “having something to say” or possessing “reserves of novelty”—theatrically tearing down the criteria of (Ornamental) literariness—is nevertheless forced to justify its 25 Yury Tynyanov, “Oda kak oratorsky zhanr,” in Poetika. Istoriya literatury. Kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 227–52. 26 Shalamov, “O moyey proze.” 27 Note that Shalamov acknowledges the impending contradiction and strives to avert it: “My material would rescue any repetitions, but there were no repetitions, for my qualifications and training proved their worth, I simply had no need to use anyone else’s models, similes, plots or ideas.” Ibid.

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existence within the bounds of literature (evidently, what Shalamov has in mind but characteristically leaves out of the phrase “the right to life” is in literature—after all, one doesn’t need any reserves of novelty for physical survival.) This is where the contamination in Shalamov becomes evident: the “living” qualities are brought forth before the court of literature, presented as preparations of writing and not anything else that might be utterly unable to submit to a Hamburg reckoning. But in literature itself such a combination brings about a state of emergency. In a word, all of these epistemological contradictions in Shalamov’s testimonies (collected for the most part in his manifestos and notes on literature) show that his prose need not be examined only on the thematic and formal levels between which thought usually flits, but rather on the level of the pragmatics of the artistic utterance.

Emergency Pragmatics: Mixing As Mikhail Ryklin demonstrates on two stories by Shalamov, war is that which can only be interesting to someone spared the extreme experience of the camps: Andreev has more important things to do: get bread, buy sacks, rest on his hospital cot after the punishing labor of the camps. If the inhabitants of the camp underworld noticed the impact of the war at all, it was only through increases in the strictness of the regime and the manufacturing norms and cuts in their already miserly rations.28

Along with the epistemological, the pragmatic level of Shalamov’s prose immediately becomes evident in this light. Shalamov’s prose has “more important things” to do than just witnessing extreme anthropological circumstances too. The camp theme, broadly interpreted and fundamentally understood: this is the main, the most important question of our time. … This question is much more important than the theme of war. War in some sense plays the role of psychological camouflage (history tells us that during wartime the tyrant 28 From Mikhail Ryklin, “The camp and the war. A history of the defeated from Varlam Shalamov” (paper presented at the conference The Fate and Work of Varlam Shalamov in the Context of World Literature and Soviet History, Moscow, July 16, 2011), accessed December 20, 2017, http://shalamov.ru/events/23/9.html.

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grows closer to his people.) There are attempts to hide the camp theme… behind war statistics.29

Establishing a hierarchy of degrees of emergency (between war and camp), Shalamov makes a sovereign decision regarding literature, even if he doesn’t want to. Appealing to the documentary quality appears as a regularly repeating gesture of laying claim (to the establishment of rules) to new art, but in Shalamov’s case, this intention has a paradoxically mixed character, since it gets combined with undisguised linguistic arbitrariness. Alongside the confusions described (the very experience that generates the radical claim of Shalamov’s literature), he speaks in nearly Bourdieusian terms, emphasizing his understanding of this experience’s value: “the experience in prison will not go to waste. Regardless of all circumstances that experience will be my moral capital, the incommutable ruble of life to come.”30 We thus realize that Shalamov’s claim (unlike the claim of LF) works not so much on the level of an ultimatum for the documentary quality of the new material or the strange cogency of weak form, but rather on some third level. This is why it is tempting to extend Schmidt’s famous formulation about the sovereign as one “who makes decisions about emergencies”31 to the sphere of narrative fiction that Shalamov belongs to at least bibliographically. Within this sphere, Shalamov manages to extend the description of extreme experience leading to writing to the state of emergency of the very experience of writing, thereby suspending the laws of artistic circulation. In this way literature, going outside the bounds of the law of language’s fictive and rhetorical qualities in cases of serious internal or external threat (diagnosed by the selfsame literature), turns out to be literature that establishes a state of emergency. It is no longer literature talking to us, but Necessity itself. Independently of how self-aware literature is, we still have to clarify a few more characteristic features of this kind of specific formation. The new writing, pointing out both the inadmissible didacticism and the unforgivable remoteness of old literature, seeks not just to present extreme material or suggest extreme stylistic solutions but to establish a certain emergency method of action, a special pragmatics of writing.32 As 29 Warlam Schalamow, Uber Prosa (Berlin: Mathes und Seitz, 2009), 30. 30 Shalamov, “Butyrskaya tyurma,” in Sobraniye sochineniy. 31 Karl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George D. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004). 32 The particular existential circumstances sketched out place strategic stylistic limitations onto writing itself as well. “And the pattern has no time to bloom / To keep the meter /

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a result of this search, “new prose” gets distanced from both the old order of writing and, more generally, the order of writing per se, thus approaching an existential act: “Descriptions are not enough for our times. The new prose is the event itself, the battle and not its description. That is, a document, the author’s direct participation in life events. Prose experienced as document.”33 Shalamov seems to extend the emergency from the referential to the pragmatic level of his prose. Manifestos constitute one of the most public spaces for the expression of artistic pragmatics: marked by a type of subordination to tradition and contemporaries, manifestos also lay down the foundation for how things should look in the future. Just as in the questions discussed above regarding the relationship between material and construction, here there is a strategic blurring of the relationship between predecessors and contemporaries. Shalamov’s symbolic gamble lies in the simultaneous adherence to and démarche of tradition: “After all, I write documentary prose, and in some sense I am a direct descendent of the Russian realist school—documentary like realism. My stories criticize and refute the very essence of literature, such as is studied in textbooks.”34 Shalamov amazingly manages to combine his crusade against the “common sense” of literature with statements presenting himself as its only heir. In this way, “new prose” becomes synonymous with the documentary; the latter paradoxically emerges from both the extremely traumatic experience that transcends the value and logic of pure literature, and from a maximally precise understanding of the rules of literary succession and prevalence. And thus, Shalamov’s suggested construction of relations between material and technique and between convention and innovation is distinguished by a captivating inconsistency. We could try to explain it by means of such as yet uncoordinated factors as Shalamov’s being a professional literary figure and yet having had experiences that deny all possible literature. On the one hand, Shalamov was always wary of the literary-intellectual betrayal of unbearable reality; on the other hand, he was also irritated by the populist approach to questions of art.35 Both his particular perspective For the old Sermon on the Mount / Is a daunting example.” 33 Shalamov, “O ‘novoy proze,’” in Sobranie sochineniy, 157–60. 34 Shalamov, “O moyey proze.” 35 “The Russian writer is not attending to his own profession, his own activity. The topic of writer is only important for Chernyshevsky or Belinsky. Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov. In journalistic terms, each of them understood nothing about literature,

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on writing and unprecedented hybrid of realist modernism (using these terms in Lifshits’s sense, implying mutual exclusion) are rooted in these nearly physically incompatible circumstances. On the one hand, Shalamov seems to be a writer who scorns excessive attention to language, denies the value of careful editing and literary frills;36 on the other hand, he is enchanted by the very idea of language, inspired by all of its legends and concerns. To start with the most obvious, we should say something about the speculative rapprochement of the act of writing with physical labor: “Inspiration as a miracle, as an illumination, does not happen every day; when it does you are utterly powerless to stop writing, you only stop when forced to by the purely muscular exhaustion of the hand holding the pencil. The muscles ache just as they do after felling trees or chopping wood.”37 With one movement of a fountain pen, the subtle and free labor of artistic creation is likened to crude, forced manual labor. This kind of seemingly innocuous comparison conceals a whole program of philosophy of language, while the physical metaphor acts simultaneously as an epistemological argument and a pragmatic gesture. Shalamov talks about creative labor as physical not only in order to explain the degree of its difficulty, but to contrast himself with the adepts of other (more idle) writing doctrines within literature itself. Every time the movement of the pen and the spade (the axe, the bayonet, etc.) draw close, innocent language gets targeted and Shalamov declares his loyalty to the “language of the lumberman.” In his constant insistence on the similarity between the writing-table and the camp saw-bench,38 Shalamov declares himself a close colleague of the carpenter Roland Barthes. This takes us to the entirely recognizable morality of form, which can be boiled down to certain recommendations of writing skills. But it is much more interesting to stay at the level of the pragmatics of writing displayed in the rapprochements of the creative act with rather dangerous existential actions: “They have no finishing touches, but there is closure: a story like ‘The Cross,’ written in one sitting, in a state of nervous and if they evaluated it, it was in application to the previously given political usefulness of the author.” Ibid. 36 “In prose of the Kolyma Tales-type, however, this correction stays beyond the tongue, the gullet, even beyond thought.” Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 “Thus there is an inspector in the brain, a selector who pushes the unnecessary log on the raft toward the narrow neck of the factory power saws.” Ibid.

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excitement, for immortality and death—from the first to the final phrase.”39 The state-of-emergency circumstances inherited by the act of utterance from that utterance’s content place a prohibition on both stylistic procedures such as “finishing touches” and compositional elements such as the suspiciously self-sufficient description: “At one point I took a pencil to one of Babel’s stories and crossed out all of the beauty, all of the fires that resembled resurrections, and then looked at what was left. Not much Babel was left, and absolutely no Larisa Reisner.”40 Pragmatics is always encoded in the model of a tool (or weapon)41 the action of which is tantamount to writing: this is Kharms’s poem that breaks the window when it strikes, and Mayakovsky’s demand to write by means of war. The tool always assumes one or another stage of writing—“stage” more in the theatrical than the psychoanalytical sense. In Shalamov’s case this is the staging of an interrogation, perhaps even of torture: the report will be spattered with the “living blood of history,” while the document will be torn from the paws of oblivion. In any event, it will bear the traces of quick but well thought-out actions: “Every one of my stories is a slap in the face of Stalinism and, like every slap, has laws of a purely muscular character;” “Another piece of advice—there are no unnecessary phrases in the story… A slap should be short and resonant.”42 The slap as a pragmatic metaphor, also ultimately boiling down to its “muscular character.” Following the slap formula, Shalamov analyzes a few other means of action in writing, revealing a sensitivity to the perspective of instrumental analyses of the artistic utterance: A phrase can be measured according to Flaubert’s measure—the length of a breath—and there is some physiological ground for this. Literary scholars have often said that the tradition of Russian prose is a shovel that needs to be stuck in the ground and then wrenched upward to extract the deepest layers. We can let economists busy themselves with digging up those layers, but not writers and littérateurs. For the latter this kind of digging up seems like strange advice.43

39 Ibid. 40 Shalamov, “O moyey proze.” This reminds us that Shalamov had passed his young years in Literature of the Fact circles. 41 In total agreement with the idea of one thing transforming into another during wartime. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid.

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Shalamov usually manages metaphors of literary tools, like the shovel, more artistically than the nineteenth-century realists he criticizes.44 He is usually reduced to an impartial mechanism of recording horrors, a transparent registrar, but his key self-definitions always reveal a paradoxical enchantment with the opposite: the deforming activity of this apparatus: “My story—a document—is also an improvisation. And still it remains a document, a personal testimony, a personal bias. I am the chronicler of my own soul. No more.”45 The biased recording apparatus and, moreover, its internal processes—this is the ideal (rather dissonant with the era of scientific progress he constantly refers to) of the machine of Shalamovian inspiration. In general, Shalamov’s dialogue with the hard sciences (which he understands to encompass both the science of matter and in terms of cybernetics and structuralism) is no less polemical than that with the tradition of nineteenth-century realism. Ultimately, Shalamov does not oppose “normal literature” to expressive documentalism, but literature in general (which Shalamov simultaneously repudiates and takes forward) to scientific epistemology (“The scientist cannot quote from a work of poetry, for these are different worlds.”46) Though all of his prose relates to both the history of realism as literary tradition and to realism as an epistemological principle of a number of scientific traditions. Alternating the roles of the plaintiff and the defendant, the two parties in this dispute are raw facts and the viewpoint that forms them, empirical reality and the transcendental apparatus, extralinguistic reality and speech activity. Along with other objects of the physical world, Shalamov uses the stone (featured on the banners of formalists as well) to oppose something non-resident, speculative, seeking always to violate the borders of fact: “If it is a person’s hand [doing the writing]—then my work is imitation, unoriginal. If it is a stone’s hand, a fish’s or cloud’s—then I give myself over to that other sphere, perhaps without having any say in the matter. How can anyone check to see where my will ends and where the boundary of the stone’s authority lies?”47 However, the traditional epistemological skepti44 45 46 47

Shalamov, “Artist of a Shovel.” Shalamov, “O moyey proze.” Ibid. There are other formulations that recall the LEF program even more strongly: “The thing about influence more dangerous than influence (itself)—to fall prisoner to someone against one’s own will—the precious material is wasted and it turns out that it recalls someone else’s work, which is to say it kills the story.” Shalamov, “O moyey proze.”

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cism (widely spread in the last decade) reappears in the very next sentence, in the context of a purely practical literary task: “But logs are often selected, hooked into the neck of the timber mill, the power-saw, before which all kinds of other standard logs are floating, all of which have the right to turn into phrases.”48 In other words, the mystery of Shalamov’s “depth” lies in the fact that the notorious state of emergency of the described circumstances turns out to be furthermore faced with another war—linguistic, epistemological (but no longer just literary). This would seem to be blasphemy if it did not also advertise the emergency state of the writing itself. When pondered, reducing the camp experience to a metaphor of the cognitive processes going on during the creative act can turn out to be no less radical than wishing to acquaint the world with the horrors of the Stalinist labor camps. This is why traditional criticism has immured this line of thought, but it goes on slyly peeking out of virtually every one of Shalamov’s phrases; his prose attracts people for whom the camps and Soviet history are far from topics of primary interest. Certainly, Shalamov himself never makes this explicit, but it lies on the surface of all of his statements. One need only describe the “emergency conditions” in slightly greater detail and they immediately take on the attributes and features of a purely linguistic catastrophe, a rout of / by language itself. For instance, the story “Through the Snow,” which opens the Kolyma Tales, provides an entirely transparent hint toward the pragmatic gesture, in which the emergency of the experience described turns out to be a metaphor for the emergency experience of writing itself and of artistic invention. In two short paragraphs (which make up the entire piece), describing in detail and with practical recommendations how the convicts dig out a road through unbroken snow, in a landscape against which the rest of the Kolyma Tales will take place, Shalamov closes the text with words that unexpectedly take us into the context of literary pioneering: “It is not writers riding on the tractors and horses, but readers.”49 Thus, at every stage the corruption of representation leads to the actualization of the idea of the material and indexical quality of expression: with the Natural School it was the project, erected in the name of social progress, of radical demedialization, the rejection of the fracturing of representation 48 Ibid. 49 Shalamov, Sobraniye sochineniy, 7.

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that separated the signifier from the signified; with early Literature of the Fact it was the positivist project of direct registration of facts in the rawest form possible for the needs of the revolution; and finally, with Shalamov, it is “life itself ” taking on the features of naked life (Agamben). He is testing that life’s ability to speak on its own when he establishes a state of emergency in literary history and simultaneously “saves [literature] from the Auschwitz of scrap-paper.”50 In a certain sense, state-of-emergency literature connotes not only the historical and anthropological circumstances that generate it but also the modernist convention of the emergency state of literature and art themselves. After a certain point they are summoned to live in a mode of renewed self-abnegation. Aesthetic significance has been wedded once and for all with the procedure of its own démarche and of a reassessment of its foundations (excluding the principle of self-abnegation itself, which becomes a meta-criterion). Having become autonomous, art develops (reproduces) through performative acts, which paradoxically reject the right of everything (or almost everything) to call itself art. This preceded the author of the new act, which simultaneously expropriates from everyone the category of art itself.59 The paradox here is rooted in the fact that the struggle unfolds around an “empty name” or empty term: for if everything that belongs to its history is refuted on the basis of its not (any longer?) corresponding to its essence, then wherein does that essence actually lie? If it has no historical precedents of a correct realization, then in the name of what is it even possible to struggle? It is astonishing that in order to be faithful to art today, one must refute all of the precedents of art, wherein consists its only negative essence.51

Bibliography Arvatov, Boris. “Agit-kino i kino-glaz.” Kino-zhurnal A.R.K. 8 (1925): 3. Benjamin, Walter. Moscow Diary. Translated by Richard Sieburth, edited by Gary Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.

50 Shalamov, “O moyey proze.” 51 It is also important to take into account the fact that even the responses that sound forth against this logic of self-undermining, insisting that “this is not art,” ultimately strengthen the very logic of the theory of performative acts of art, but in a negative mode. They say, as it were: “this is an unsuccessful speech act,” thereby unwittingly becoming hostages to the category of agreement.

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Brik, Оsip. “Blizhe k faktu.” In Literatura fakta: Pervyy sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEF’a, edited by Nikolay Chuzhak, 80–85. Moscow: Zaharov, 2000. Chuzhak, Nikolay. “Pisatel’skaya pamyatka.” In Literatura fakta: Pervyy sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEF’a, edited by Nikolay Chuzhak, 9–28. Moscow: Zaharov, 2000. Gritc, Тeodor. “Mertvyy shtamp i zhivoy chelovek.” In Literatura fakta: Pervyy sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEF’a, edited by Nikolay Chuzhak, 132–35. Moscow: Zaharov, 2000. Gyunter, Hans. Po obe storony ot utopii: Konteksty tvorchestva A. Platonova. Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2012. Lachmann, Renate. Die Zerstörung der schönen Rede. Rhetorische Tradition und Konzepte des Poetischen. München: Fink, 1994. Neznamov, Petr. “Derevnya krasivogo opereniya.” Novyi LEF 8 (1928): 8. ———. “Dradedamovyy byt.” Novyi LEF 6 (1928): 23. Ryklin, Mikhail. “The camp and the war. A history of the defeated from Varlam Shalamov.” Paper presented at the conference The Fate and Work of Varlam Shalamov in the Context of World Literature and Soviet History, Moscow, July 16, 2011. Accessed December 20, 2017. http://shalamov.ru/events/23/9.html. Schalamow, Warlam. Uber Prosa. Berlin: Mathes und Seitz, 2009. Schmitt, Karl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George D. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Shalamov, Varlam. “Butyrskaya tyurma.” In Sobraniye sochineniy. Moscow: Khudlit, 1998. ———. “O moyey proze.” In Sobraniye sochineniy. Moscow: Khudlit, 1998. ———. “O ‘novoy proze.’” In Sobraniye sochineniy, 157–60. Moscow: Khudlit, 1998. Shklovsky, Viktor. “V zaklyucheniye.” In Literatura fakta: Pervyy sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEF’a, edited by Nikolay Chuzhak, 192–93. Moscow: Zaharov, 2000. Trenin, Vladimir. “Nuzhno predosterech.” In Literatura fakta: Pervyy sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEF’a, edited by Nikolay Chuzhak, 217–18. Moscow: Zaharov, 2000. ———. “Intelligentnyye partizany.” In Literatura fakta: Pervyy sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEF’a, edited by Nikolay Chuzhak. Moscow: Zaharov, 2000. Tretyakov, Sergey. “Prodolzheniye sleduet’.” In Literatura fakta: Pervyy sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEF’a, edited by Nikolay Chuzhak, 97–101. Moscow: Zaharov, 2000. Tynyanov, Yury. “Oda kak oratorskiy zhanr.” In Poetika. Istoriya literatury. Kino, 227–52. Moscow: Nauka, 1977. Volkova, Elena. “Teksty ‘Kolymskikh rasskazov’ Varlama Shalamova v rakurse neoritoricheskikh i antiritoricheskikh smysloporozhdeniy Y. M. Lotmana.” In K stoletiyu so dnya rozhdeniya Varlama Shalamova. Materyaly konferentsii, 25–32. Moscow: DerDiDas Grupp, 2007.

Eva Eglāja-Kristsone

Reading Literary History through the Archives The Case of the Latvian Literary Journal Karogs1

A national literary journal might be defined as a periodical which in the history of Western society has always existed as a non-commercial enterprise. Such a periodical is a substantial part of every national culture as one of its most important institutions. It is a crucial element of literary infrastructure, since periodicals serve as a tool for literary development and thus move beyond the function of being a critical platform. In my article, I concentrate on the Latvian literary journal Karogs established in 1940; until its closure in 2010, it provided one of the most important venues for publication and discussion of literary texts. Even taking into account the restrictions imposed by Soviet censorship, the monthly was widely read, and at its peak was published in more than forty thousand copies. The activities and publishing policies of the journal deserve a thorough investigation. The purpose of this paper is, however, more restricted. Here I focus on the problematic aspects of the archives of the journal in the context of archival studies of Soviet period materials in general. The main aspect worth attention is the fact of the archives of the monthly being incomplete and fragmented, and the reasons behind this fact. Paradoxically the 1 This work was supported by State research program “Letonika” project “Culture and identities in Latvia: heritage and modern practice” ID Nr. 4.2.; Latvia’s Government Commission for KGB Research (grant Contract Number VDKKOM-D/11).

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archives have been located in two different places, one of which is the state archive but another one is a private archive. The lack of documents does not allow for researching many aspects of the activities of Soviet censorship and hide internal discussions on literary works that were first published in the monthly and turned into public and partly even political scandals. The literary journal Karogs (The flag) was a monthly journal devoted to literature, art, and socio-politics; it was issued by the Soviet Latvian Writers’ Union. It was founded in 1940 and up to the late 1980s acted as an ideological mouthpiece for the promotion of Soviet literature and the activities of the Writers’ Union. A reform of literature and publishing started on a grand scale immediately after the Soviet occupation in 1940. The previous system of printing and periodicals was destroyed, writers’ organizations abolished, and authors were strictly divided according to their political affinities. The first lists of prohibited books were created, and those publications considered harmful were subjected to destruction. Already within three months after the occupation the first issue of the new monthly Karogs was ready to print. It has a portrait of Stalin on its title page. The guidelines for the journal were expressed in the declaration which stated that: …war has to be declared to the empty formalism in literature, painting, and scenic art in all its manifestations. The main principle for creative activities is to follow the prescriptions of Socialist Realism. This is also our main demand at the beginning of our work. Many will have to abandon their empty pretensions and self-glorification. The requirements will be high, and responsible fulfillment of everyday tasks will provide the only criterion for the evaluation of each individual in the Soviet Socialist Republic. Karogs will be the leading journal on the literary front, and the rules set by it will be relevant to each and every author.2

The monthly journal remained the only literary periodical until 1945 when the weekly newspaper, Literatūra un Māksla (Literature and art), also started to appear. This was a common practice of centralization especially characteristic for the early years of Soviet rule which allowed easy supervision of all activities on behalf of the authoritarian state. The first general editor of the journal was Andrejs Upīts, and other writers—Vilis Lācis, Jūlijs Lācis, Arvīds Grigulis, Jānis Niedre, and Žanis Spure, who mostly took on the political responsibilities—were employed as editors. 2 Žanis Spure. “Darbu sākot,” Karogs 1 (1940): 3.

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Reading Literary History through the Archives    EVA EGLĀJA-KRISTSONE

All these authors might be considered to be the early promoters of the principles of Socialist Realism in Latvia. During World War II (1941– 1945), Karogs was issued in Moscow as a yearly anthology of Latvian literature. It published Latvian literature and translations of literary texts from other so-called republics of the USSR. Starting from the second half of the 1940s, Karogs gradually established its position on the literary scene, slowly moving from being an outspoken propaganda venue toward providing reliable insight into the growing diversity of literary processes. Up to the early 1990s, when the editorial policies and economic background radically changed, it might be said that most of the outstanding literary works of Latvian literature created under the Soviets experienced their first publication in Karogs, and almost every printed text was discussed in the criticism section. The journal published literary masterpieces as well as texts, which have by now completely fallen into oblivion. Also serving as the  organ  of  the  Soviet Latvian Writers’  Union, the journal revealed the main directions of literary policies of each period.  Its counterparts in the Baltic States are the Lithuanian literary journal Pergalė (Victory) issued between 1942 and 1990 and published by The Writers’ Union of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic; as well as the Estonian literary journal Looming (Creation) which is the oldest literary journal in Estonia, established in 1923 by the writer, Friedebert Tuglas, and still exists unlike Karogs and Pergalė. During the  Soviet occupation,  Looming  was under the control of the Soviet Estonian Writers’ Union. It is also important to mention the general editors of the monthly, since the personality of the editor leaves its mark on every periodical with regard to its content and goals. The general editors of the monthly have been the following: 1940–1941; 1945–1946: Andrejs Upīts; 1946–1948: Ignats Muižnieks; 1948–1963: Andrejs Balodis; 1964–1967: Kārlis Krauliņš; 1967–1989: Andris Vējāns (Donats Kalnačs); 1989–2010: several editors (Māra Zālīte, Māris Čaklais, Ieva Kolmane) in succession. All the documents of Karogs available at the State Archive of Latvia (Fund no. 660) were collected and shelved only in 1978 by the editor in chief

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Andris Vējāns and this fact shows the flaws of the Soviet archival system very clearly. Taking into account the history of Karogs as a mouthpiece of the Soviet Latvian Writers’ Union and its importance in the historical context, it seems almost peculiar that the archive of its first two decades is completely inaccessible to the broader public while still being kept in a private collection. The  State Archives of Latvia  (Latvijas Valsts arhīvs, abbreviated as LVA in Latvian) is an institution forming part of the The National Archives of Latvia. At the State Archives a fund of the literary journal Karogs is available, which is relatively incomplete. The documents have been collected and preserved only from 1964 on. As stated in the nomenclature of the archives: “by that time [1964] the most valuable materials were transferred to the respective museums; the records of the transfer have not been maintained.”3 There is no notification to which museums the materials have been sent, and no records explain what kind of materials were collected until 1964. A small note reports that the personal dossiers of the technical and creative staff as well as the orders of the general editor from 1964 on are kept in the archives of the publishing committee for newspapers and magazines of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party. However, there are no corresponding documents found in this archive. The available documents of the State Archives of Latvia also have substantial deficiencies. For example, the protocols of the editorial board meetings are available for the years between 1966 and 1967 as well as between 1972 and 1974. They provide an insight into the creative and practical activities of the editorial process, reveal different opinions and personal clashes as well as document the main trends and regulations of cultural policies. The following types of documents are accessible for research: written records of the editorial board meetings; manuscripts of the discussed texts (only some of them); internal reviews of the manuscripts; letters from different people to the editorial board of the journal; feedback on published materials from several institutions or individuals; artists’ illustrations for the journal. 3 Fund 660, Archival description 1, The State Archives of Latvia.

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Reading Literary History through the Archives    EVA EGLĀJA-KRISTSONE

The crucial question about the archival practices of the Soviet period is raised by the stamp on the archival description of the documents marked as “REMOVED (FROM THE LIST).” There is no clear answer to the question as to why these files were removed and when it happened. The documents were moved to the archives in 1978, as confirmed by the signature of Andris Vējāns, the general editor of the monthly at that time. A list of the documents for each year is provided, and the number of pages of each document is also mentioned. An archivist of the publishing house of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Latvia has compiled a list of documents. But in thirteen cases which cover the period between 1964 and 1978 the stamp with an inscription ‘removed’ has been added. The stamps on the archival lists can give us only some clues in regard to which kind of information might be looked for. If it would be possible to find at least a part of the missing documents, we would acquire a much better idea concerning the interactions in the fields of literature, power, and economics during the Soviet era. Up to the re-establishment of state independence, the archives in Latvia had to follow the common rules established in the Soviet Union. All Soviet archives worked according to the same set of prescriptions and orders which were issued in Moscow. The employees of each particular archive were allowed to classify documents but the decisions in regard to how these documents are to be kept were made in the Soviet capital. Soviet historians, sensitive to state policies and state secrets, moved rather cautiously into the new era of glasnost’ but tentatively began to extend the range of what was permissible to investigate and to write about. They were encouraged by Gorbachev’s pronouncement in response to an opinion that critical analysis of Soviet history was like “indulging in a striptease for the whole world to see” in March I987 that “there should be no blank pages in history and literature. Otherwise, it is not history or literature, but artificial constructions.”4 Journalists and historians alike began to probe these “blank pages,” still wondering whether and where limits would be drawn. Later that year Gorbachev even announced that he wanted to give a major address on the “blank spots” of Soviet history and intellectuals rejoiced at least temporarily. 4 Philip Taubman, “Dismantling the Stalin Myth: New Effort under Gorbachev,” New York Times, March 15, 1987, accessed May 13, 2017, http://www.nytimes. com/1987/03/15/world/dismantling-the-stalin-myth-new-effort-under-gorbachev. html?pagewanted=all.

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In Latvia the Archive Law was passed in March 1991. That year the archive of the monthly Karogs was examined along with other archival materials. There is a version that exactly at this point the above mentioned materials were removed. According to the State Archive employees, the reason for this might be the fact that the materials had already been removed for unknown reasons, or they were considered to be of less importance and therefore destroyed. Arup Banerji, the author of the book Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work, also mentions that throughout the Soviet decades, documents, particularly about people who disappeared, and that the authorities regarded as unnecessary, unimportant, or dangerous were destroyed.5 Discussing regulations in regard to access to public information, during the plenary session of the Parliament of Latvia on October 29, 1998, the deputy Ilga Kreituse informed that there is an utmost necessity for the regulation of access to public information and the obligation of the state not only to grant such access, but also to maintain and safeguard information. Kreituse mentioned as the most menacing case that the archives destroy historical documents because there is no actual regulation of the archives. She warned that the archives without proper regulation suffer from the malicious intent of civil servants. Taking into account the arguments used by Ilga Kreituse, it seems that there might be important documents destroyed without any sound reason during the early 1990s before the regulation in regard to the access to public information and to the archives came into effect. Without sufficient knowledge and investigations on the archival practices in Lithuania or Estonia, it is difficult to draw further conclusions. However, this certainly turns out to be a very acute question in Latvia as demonstrated by the investigations of the fate of the archives of the monthly Karogs. Unfortunately, there is a possibility that insufficient efforts were undertaken after the re-establishment of independence to prevent substantial documents from destruction and to make the public immediately aware of the importance of maintaining periodical documents in order to understand the totalitarian mechanisms. Another collection of documents in regard to the literary monthly which for obvious reasons is similarly incomplete is preserved in the extensive personal archive of the literary historian, Ilgonis Bērsons. According to his testimony, he got access to a number of documents, when he was 5 Arup Banerji, Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work (New Delhi: Social Science Press Berghahn Books, 2008), 240.

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Reading Literary History through the Archives    EVA EGLĀJA-KRISTSONE

employed by Karogs from 1959 as an editor responsible for the chapter on critics and the Soviet Latvian Writers’ Union where he worked between 1965 and 1972 as one of the Union’s secretaries. Besides the materials of Karogs, he also possesses important original documents of the Latvian Writers’ Union which relate to the events of 1940 and 1941. There are no corresponding documents at the Latvian State Archives. According to Bērsons, he collected disorganized documents which at this point were in a state of total disorder. Saving them from destruction, the first secretary of the Union, Valdis Lukss, did recommend that Bērsons preserve them in his private archive. It is interesting to note how a story like this one relates to the havoc within the seemingly strict rules of the Soviet bureaucracy. The state archives have never inquired about the existence of the documents, so they are still part of a private collection. The scope of documents kept in this archive differs slightly from those preserved at the Latvian State Archives. There are the following main groups: 1. incoming and outgoing articles up to 1962; 2. correspondence with authors, 1975–1978; 3. payments of royalties, 1952–1959. A substantial missing part is made up of the editorial board meeting protocols as well as of submitted manuscripts; their analysis might make it clearer how the process of evaluation was organized. However, from the available letters and some other documents it is partially possible to reconstruct some of the editorial proceedings from the 1950s onward. Letters to the editors which are found in both collections touch on the content of the specific issues of the monthly as well as on such possibly minor aspects of publication practices as design and cover images. For example, in 1970 there is a letter from an anxious reader who had found the cover image of the third issue of that year made by the renowned artist and illustrator, Gunārs Krollis, totally inappropriate. The reader asks the editors, whether they have …ever seen such a crippled woman as the one presented to the many thousands of readers of the monthly. If the artist can only provide such crippled images, is it permissible to follow him in this? The monthly should always keep in mind the necessity of representing the Soviet flag presumably

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indicated in its title, and not to open its pages to the subjective whims of an artist who, of course, would find his own excuses, and would stress that the people are not yet ready to understand his ideas.6

The writer ends his letter speaking in full conviction that all Soviet readers share his contempt of such covers with images of crippled people. This kind of minor problems in the preserved documents somehow also distracts the attention of a scholar from the principal issues at stake which might be of real interest. It is difficult to come to a conclusion whether this impression might be made on purpose in the process of conscious destruction of the most valuable documents. From the existing sources we get almost no access to the important cases of most severe criticism which appeared on the pages of the journal as well as to the ban imposed on the printing of certain texts. There is no reference to such aspects in the documents available for researchers as particular parts of the archives are missing in both collections. Thus, the most interesting cases are possibly those outside the archives, as we do not have access to such documents as protocols from internal discussions and dictates from the Central Committee before 1964. If we look at the publications in Karogs, however, and at their reception, quite a few pitfalls once stirred literary circles. All texts underwent harsh censorship before their publication, and the most dramatic literary and ideological conflicts directly affected the publication. From the available archives of the journal, we can extract a number of interesting nuances about the discussions and individual opinions on a number of literary works submitted for publication from 1964 and up to the late 1980s. Many texts created by the most outstanding Latvian writers and poets of the Soviet era first appeared in Karogs which was almost constantly engaged in cat and mouse games with the authorities. It was a case of keeping the wolf happy while at the same time saving the goat, and as such it required a fine sense of balance,7 especially from the general editors of the monthly. After the re-establishment of independence a number of articles tracking the public hunting of two talented writers, Visvaldis Lāms (real family name Eglons) and Ēvalds Vilks, appeared. The works written by Visvaldis Lāms and Ēvalds Vilks were published at somewhat different times, but the 6 Fund 660, Archival description 18, The State Archives of Latvia. 7 Vieda Skultans,  The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 172.

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Reading Literary History through the Archives    EVA EGLĀJA-KRISTSONE

methods used in their criticism from the ideological point of view were almost the same. There is no doubt that Karogs itself hardly ever contributed to this ideological fight. The main protagonists involved in these battles were close colleagues who wrote harsh, sometimes anonymous reviews in other periodicals and gave speeches at writers’ congresses. Both talented writers were subjected to the role of scapegoat. Sadly enough, this was not a demand from Moscow or from the Glavlit, the Central Committee or KGB, which might have inspired or requested this kind of witch hunt which was guided by fellow authors. In 1958 the Communist parties of the non-Russian republics held their congresses. Nationalism was again attacked, and particular attention was paid to “unhealthy moods” among intellectuals. Writers such as Visvaldis Lams (Eglons) were castigated for their failure to conform. One of the first cases which violated the permissible limits and norms of Soviet literature was the novel Kāvu blāzmā (In the glow of the northern lights, 1958) by Visvaldis Lāms. It depicts the events of World War II in Latvia. The publication in the journal was interrupted, and the novel could be published in book form only thirty years later. The publication of Lāms’s works was stopped for six years, and he was forced to work in a variety of low-skilled and low-paid jobs. When analyzing the case of Visvaldis Lāms, there are at least three circumstances which made him vulnerable. First, it was his political past because after the establishment of the Latvian Legion he was mobilized in 1943 and returned from the filtration camp only in 1946. Secondly, the envy of other writers was inspired by his obvious artistic superiority. Third, he was disliked for his fair and ironic attitude toward Soviet reality which allowed no compromises or sidesteps. All of this made him a target for attack. The older generation of writers wanted to keep their status quo in Latvian literature and therefore wanted to castigate those who had other convictions. However, the ban on publications in the 1960s was mostly temporary, while the works of writers with such or similar past experience were still printed from time to time with the aim to demonstrate to the compatriots in the emigration that there is democracy in their homeland. The talented writer, Visvaldis Lāms (known as Visvaldis Eglons till 1968), who dominated Latvian prose for several years in the mid-1950s, also wrote the novel Baltā ūdensroze (The white water lily, 1958). This widely read and discussed work is unusually colorful for that time, precise and penetrating, wholly original and profoundly emotional. Through his

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fictional characters Lāms presents the desire for freedom, for innovation, for boldness and authenticity in literature, and we also discover an outspoken criticism of the principles of Soviet literature in the question, “how to portray the hero of our epoch?” The anxieties and worries of a Soviet writer are reflected in one of the main heroes, and Lāms has an illuminating passage showing that the theories advanced by official criticism remind him of the Procrustean bed: You cannot even imagine how bitter the writer’s daily bread is. Editorial offices are filled with people who have absolutely no grasp of literature. Nevertheless, they think of themselves as geniuses and they cross out as many passages as they please from your manuscripts. ... To be sure, there are theories of literary criticism, but they remind one suspiciously of the Procrustean bed. More experienced authors only wait for the opportunity to find and criticize your work for exactly the same faults which they themselves had committed on a much larger scale.8

The next example is the short story, “Divpadsmit kilometri” (Twelve kilometers), by Ēvalds Vilks, published in 1963, in which the author came to the conclusion that socialist dogmas are incompatible with elementary humanity. The campaign against Vilks at least externally was conducted differently. Unlike Lāms, Vilks as a writer belonged to the favorites of those in power. He was awarded the medal For Outstanding Work in 1956, and in 1958 he was also awarded the State Prize of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. He also received respectable criticism and positive feedback, and certainly was not considered to be in the opposition or a dissident. The main problem turned out to be Vilks’s honesty and his unwillingness to engage in the play behind the scenes. A unique view of life and his realistic style that had nothing to do with the prevailing Socialist Realism as well as his great popularity among readers created quiet aversion in the leading elite of the Writers’ Union and in the older generation, waiting for the opportunity to deal with Vilks. The main trouble began after the story “Divpadsmit kilometri” was published in the third issue of Karogs in 1963. In this psychologically well-motivated story Vilks implied that all nations, both in the East and the West, are to be blamed for the injustices and cruelties committed in 8 Visvaldis Eglons, “Baltā ūdensroze,” Zvaigzne 12 (1958): 21.

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Reading Literary History through the Archives    EVA EGLĀJA-KRISTSONE

their respective homeland during the war. In addition, the author raised the question as to why the Soviet regime had such numerous opponents both in the Soviet Union and beyond its borders. There is no doubt that before its publication the story had gone through the journal’s internal censorship and hence was considered politically correct. In the next issue of the Latvian literary and artistic newspaper, Literatūra un Māksla, however, an anonymous article appeared which marked the starting point of the campaign against Ēvalds Vilks. The story “Divpadsmit kilometri” was thrown out of the short prose books in Latvian and Russian, and there were twenty-four (!) corrections made by the censorship (Glavlit) before the story was published in the collection, Mežonis (Savage) in 1968. Vilks was unable to overcome the shame, as it even physically affected his health. In the following years, the author wrote very few texts, not wanting to produce and publish lies. Apparently, this time was marked by the shift or transition from the domination of factual censorship to a discursive censorship. All complexities of the described process are no longer detectable both because of the lack of manuscripts and due to missing memories of contemporaries and authors. Visvaldis Lāms and Ēvalds Vilks were the most scandalous writers in the field of Soviet Latvian literature at the end of the 1950s and during the 1960s. Journal Karogs provided the platform for their texts as a leading journal in the field of literature. At least externally, Karogs patiently and peacefully overcame the scandals which these publications raised, but internally gradual changes took place. Two general editors were fired during the 1960s, and in 1967 a new general editor, already representing a different generation of authors, was finally approved. The delay in the publication of certain texts, which were not even allowed to appear in book form, and differences in printed text versions point to the rigorous ideological monitoring of all publications of the Soviet era. The changes made to the texts which can be detected in the comparison of different publications also help to understand the ideological demands of the censorship and point to the policies in regulating literature. Changes made in the texts such as deletions and alterations are usually not only linked to the content of the works, but also to their ideological contexts, while in the censorship process texts are seen not in their artistic entirety, but as a source of information, and suspicious places are treated accordingly. Unfortunately, in many cases the missing archival materials do not

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support this kind of research. Not very many authors have left their notes or memories regarding such matters even if forced text alterations was a constant practice during the Soviet period. The last major clash of ideology and literature on the pages of the journal was linked to the publication of Māra Zālīte’s controversial poetry cycle “Kad svešu spārnu sašķelts gaiss” (When alien wings crack the air) in the seventh issue of Karogs in 1980. The ideological pressure was still so strong that the respective issue was removed from the shelves of bookstores. The literary works discussed, along with a number of similar examples, occupy a peculiar place in Soviet Latvian literature. They suggest an attempt to demolish the hierarchy of values set by Soviet ideology, signaling an internal opposition to the regime. This trend was developed by the generation of authors who started to publish their works in the second half of the 1950s. This allows marking the mentioned period as a new and different stage in the history of Soviet Latvian literature and encourages us to talk about the generation in Latvian letters that started to release the unwritten canons of literature of the Soviet period. This fight was, however, still full of compromises. Different versions of the published texts document the battle with the efforts of the official Soviet ideology to maintain the already collapsing hierarchies and with the supervisory obstructions, which the authors of this time had to overcome.

Bibliography Banerji, Arup. Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work. New Delhi: Social Science Press Berghahn Books, 2008. Eglons, Visvaldis. “Baltā ūdensroze.” Zvaigzne 12 (1958): 18–21. Fund 660, Archival description 1, The State Archives of Latvia. Fund 660, Archival description 18, The State Archives of Latvia. Skultans, Vieda. The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Spure, Žanis. “Darbu sākot.” Karogs 1 (1940): 3–4. Taubman, Philip. “Dismantling the Stalin Myth: New Effort under Gorbachev.” New York Times. March 15, 1987. Accessed December 1, 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/15/ world/dismantling-the-stalin-myth-new-effort-under-gorbachev.html?pagewanted=all.

Anneli Mihkelev

Hamlet and Folklore as Elements of the Resistance Movement in Estonian Literature

Most of all literary works under the communist regime demonstrate the main problem of closed communities: the relationship between power and the mind, or between political power and human freedom. Although Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural and literary field “involves an analysis of the position of the field within the broader field of power,”1 Bourdieu’s concept is different, because it does not include totalitarian regimes. According to Bourdieu, …the literary and artistic field is contained within the field of power, while possessing a relative autonomy with respect to it, especially as regards its economic and political principles of hierarchization. It occupies a dominated position (at the negative pole) in this field, which is itself situated at the dominant pole of the field of class relations. It is thus the site of a double hierarchy: the heteronomous principle of hierarchization, which would reign unchallenged if, losing all autonomy, the literary and artistic field were to disappear as such (so that writers and artists became subject to the ordinary laws prevailing in the field of power, and more generally in the economic field).2

1 Randal Johnson, “Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature and Culture,” editor’s introduction to The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature by Pierre Bourdieu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 9. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 37–38.

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The literary field is a heterogeneous and hierarchical field (the hierarchy of genres and styles, exile literature, and literature in the homeland, etc.). Under the Soviet regime the field of Socialist Realism occupied a dominating position within the field of power which was situated at the dominant pole of the field of class relations. Other literary styles, including the field of exile literature, were situated at the dominated position (the negative pole) of the field of class relations. According to Bourdieu, “the dispositions lead to opposite aesthetic or political position, depending on the state of the field in relation to which they have to express themselves.”3 Estonian culture and literature suddenly became divided into two parts in 1944: nationalist ideology was preserved in exile, while communist ideology emerged in the homeland; both were closed communities and were monolingual systems in a cultural sense because these systems avoided dialogue and the influence of other signs. These systems passed through a stage of self-description and underwent changes. According to Yury Lotman: …assigning to [themselves] clear boundaries and a considerably higher degree of unification. … Thus, the self-description of culture makes a boundary of the fact of its self-consciousness. The moment of selfconsciousness defines the boundaries of cultures and the inclusion of governmental and political considerations has repeatedly added a dramatic character to this process.4

These dramatic developments took place in Estonian culture. Those who escaped to Western countries did not assimilate in their new homelands, because they thought that the exile would be temporary, and that they could return to the homeland very soon. The political terror imposed restrictions on literature in the homeland. Maire Jaanus has written in the article “Estonia and Pain: Jaan Kross’s The Czar’s Madman” that: Power and trauma have always been allied. Trauma is the destruction of the fragile layers of civilization covering a human being or a nation. ... Stripped of the symbolic and imaginary identification that are our support against dissolution—such as our name, nation, citizenship, language, 3 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 70–71. 4 Juri Lotman, Culture and Explosion, trans. Wilma Clark, ed. Marina Grishakova (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009), 172.

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Hamlet and Folklore    ANNELI MIHKELEV

gender, profession, our constitutional and legal rights, and our beliefs and families—we encounter the voided self or the nothingness that we are.5

Literary texts have played a major role in the formation of national and cultural identity and cultural memory. Estonian literature is quite young and most of our early texts are connected with the construction of national identity. For example, the main aim of our epic Kalevipoeg (1857–1861), written by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, was to construct Estonian national and cultural identity, which means that a society can create its cultural memory because some historical pictures are reinforced in the memory through literature. Literature can be one of the tools with which societies construct and interpret history and their identities, according to Aleida Assmann.6

Surrealism and Freedom Both poetic and ideological innovations began in exile literature. Ilmar Laaban was the most innovative and Surrealistic Estonian poet in exile. Surrealism as a style reveals what is hidden in the unconscious of a poet or a person or even in the collective memory of a nation. Laaban was already innovative in his homeland, although Surrealism was out of the mainstream in Estonian literature before World War II (actually it has never been in the mainstream in Estonian literature). Surrealism has played a certain role in our literature, but it has been different from French Surrealism, a uniquely Estonian Surrealism. In 1945 the poem, “Elada vabana või surra” (To live free or die) was published and it is very similar to Paul Éluard’s (1895–1952) poem, “Liberté.” Laaban remained close to French Surrealism until 1944; after that his style became more distanced from the French version. French Surrealism was connected to political movements and the Communist Party. Laaban’s Surrealism was against the Communist Party after 1944, because he had escaped from his homeland, when the Soviet occupation began. But the idea of freedom was still one of Laaban’s main themes and most probably it was due to the influence of French Surrealism. 5 Maire Jaanus, “Estonia and Pain: Jaan Kross’s The Czar’s Madman,” Journal of Baltic Studies 31, no. 3 (2000): 257. 6 See Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (München: Beck, 2006).

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To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the first Manifesto of Surrealism, Laaban published the article “The perspectives of Surrealism” in 1944. He wrote that Surrealism was a new world view that was not only aesthetic, but also ethical and moral.7 Laaban’s texts are sometimes ironic, and that aspect is revealed in sound and intonation when these texts are read. Irony and Surrealism are actually problematic phenomena: the question arises as to whether it is possible to write automatically, if the text must be ironic. Estonian exile literature was both experimental and imitative after World War II: Ilmar Laaban developed his own original style which used elements of the European avant-garde, but at the same time gave freedom to poetic language in Estonian literature in general. Estonian surrealism developed from the political fight for freedom in a broad sense, including creative freedom and free thinking. Surrealist art as well as fantasy and science fiction had the ability to hide some aspects of reality and the ability to reveal what is hidden in the unconscious. The radical textual innovations in Estonian literature in the homeland took place at the beginning of the 1970s: the poetic language became more ironic, wordplay became more important, and the borders between poetry and prose, literature and folklore were blurred. The rhythm and style of runo song, consisting of eight-syllable verses, became more and more popular. Regilaul, or runo-song, contains eight-syllable verses, quantitative trochaic tetrameter with alliterative and assonating rhyme. The best example of this is the poetry of Hando Runnel: Ilus, ilus, ilus on maa, ilus on maa mida armastan Beautiful, beautiful is the land, beautiful is the land I love.8

7 Ilmar Laaban, “Sürrealismi perspektiive”, Eesti Looming 2 (1944): 82; Sirje Olesk, Tõdede vankuval müüril. Artikleid ajast ja luulest (Tartu: Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum, 2002), 114. 8 Hando Runnel, Punaste õhtute purpur (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1982), 96; Hando Runnel, A Beautiful Land, trans. Jüri Talvet and H. L. Hix, Web Estonian Literature Centre, 2003, accessed March 15, 2017, http://www.estlit.ee/elis/?cmd=writer&id=18505&txt=48637.

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Hamlet and Folklore    ANNELI MIHKELEV

One of the musicians who is famous as an enthusiast of old songs and ancient folklore was the composer Veljo Tormis. According to professor Urve Lippus: During the past century Estonia has had more hard times than those of joy. Tormis is speaking about the same theme once using the words of his contemporaries Paul-Eerik Rummo, Jaan Kaplinski, and Hando Runnel, then poems by Juhan Liiv, Gustav Suits and Henrik Visnapuu from the first half of the century.9

One of Tormis’s masterpieces is the cantata-ballet “Estonian Ballads;” libretto by Lea Tormis, text arranged by Ülo Tedre. Tormis has written: “‘The Estonian Ballads’ are based on the lyro-epic regilaul... Authentic texts  ... and original melodies from various parts of Estonia have been used ... I was captivated by the deep inner drama inherent in these lyrical songs. In a way they remind me of the antique tragedies.”10 The premiere of the “Estonian Ballads” took place in Tallinn on July 27, 1980 by the National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre Estonia as a part of the cultural program of the Olympic Regatta. Lea Tormis, Veljo Tormis’s wife remembers: The 1980 Olympic Regatta in Estonia also included a national program of culture. A new work was commissioned for the Estonia Theatre for the occasion. Veljo Tormis was approached, as this time there was no need for ideologically “correct” music, but for something typically national. These ballads describe people’s choices, mistakes and regrets. The songs do not manifest any specific political ideology, but tackle problems common to all. Times have always been different, and man cannot choose when and to what kind of society he is born. But despite everything he can decide how he behaves, what attitudes he has, and take responsibility for that. All these old stories have a moral that reminds people of their responsibility and the timelessness of human values. In 1979, when Veljo was approached with the idea for a new work, Russification in Soviet Estonia had again emerged with a vengeance. The hopes for the language and culture that were relatively well founded in the 1960s, by the beginning of the stagnation period of the 1970s were once more looking rather vague and doubtful. However, precisely because of the 9 Urve Lippus, introduction to Vision of Estonia I CD by Veljo Tormis (Tallinn, 2000). 10 Veljo Tormis, foreword to Eesti ballaadid CD (Tallinn: Forte, 2010).

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political pressure coming from above, people started looking to their roots as a means to understand who they are and where they come from, and what is truly theirs that they can rely on.11

Paul-Eerik Rummo and Hamlet At the same time as Estonian poetry was more connected with rock and pop music, poetic messages were not expressed directly, but authors conveyed them through allusions. The historical and political situation in Estonia was very similar to that in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, represented in the First Folio’s phrase about Denmark being a prison. This dialogue, especially the Folio-only passage characterizes a totalitarian society, such as the Soviet Union, Soviet Estonia, and other Eastern European countries. Paul-Eerik Rummo was one of the major authors of the Estonian poetry innovation of the 1960s. His poem “Hamleti laulud” (Hamlet’s songs) was published in 1964 in his second collection of poetry, Tule ikka mu rõõmude juurde (Always come to my joys). The Estonian researcher Lauri Sommer has stated that Rummo’s “early writing was lyrical,” and that the “universal quality of his thoughts stems from their gently tragic, self-ironic and playful framing.”12 It is obvious that more serious aspects, together with a sense of danger and the realization of life’s fragility, are represented in Rummo’s second collection, especially in the poem “Hamlet’s songs.”13 The most influential part of the play Hamlet is the famous monologue of Prince Hamlet (Rummo’s poem also refers to the same monologue): “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Hamlet’s monologue expresses a complicated situation, in which there is no good solution, and the protagonist thinks about what to do, to be a rebel or to be a conformist, and this is an existential question for him. Paul-Eerik Rummo and other Estonian poets adapted to the surrounding reality, but attempted to change it, using the artistic world they had created, which was based on personal memories and historical memory, and 11 Lea Tormis, “The Story of Estonian Ballads,” Estonian Culture 1 (2005): 22–25. 12 Lauri Sommer, “Paul-Eerik Rummo,” in Tuulelaeval valgusest on aerud. Valik eesti moodsat luulet = Windship with Oars of Light. Estonian Modern Poetry, ed. Doris Kareva (Tallinn: Huma, 2001), 131. 13 See Sirje Olesk, “Paul-Eerik Rummo,” in Epp Annus et al., Eesti kirjanduslugu (Tallinn: Koolibri, 2001), 444.

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Hamlet and Folklore    ANNELI MIHKELEV

existential rebellion. Paul-Eerik Rummo focused on the idea of freedom, which was more important to him than any risk or adaptation to circumstances. Personal and social motifs and interests are connected in Rummo’s poetry, and his own pain represents the pain of all nations. For many centuries the historical and political situation in Estonia was very similar to that in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, represented in the First Folio’s (1623) phrase about Denmark being a prison. This dialogue, especially the Folio-only passage characterizes a totalitarian society, such as the Soviet Union, Soviet Estonia, and other Eastern European countries or the Russian Empire.14 One of the best examples of Hamlet as a symbol of political resistance is Boris Pasternak’s (1890–1960) banned novel Doctor Zhivago (1957). Pasternak’s novel ends with the poem “Hamlet” where the poetic “ego” of Pasternak identifies with Hamlet’s and Christ’s destiny and mission.15 The first verse of the Rummo poem “Hamlet’s Songs” establishes a dangerous and threatening atmosphere: something is ominous, and nature creates a tangible feeling of fear. The sawgrass and a child who has injured his hand on the sawgrass represent that situation; it is an inexplicable feeling. The atmosphere is quite similar to the atmosphere of Shakespeare’s play: The sea withdraws into itself. It is ebb tide. On the dunes a streak of storm—foam fades. Listen: what is the breeze rustling, Ominous and lurking? Sawgrass, oh friend, sawgrass. And a gathering before us a cloud—mass.16

The next lines of the poem introduce an unexpected contrast: a couple of lovers who run fearless along the beach, barefoot,

14 See Ann Thompson, Neil Taylor, introduction to Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 115–22; William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 466. 15 Ülle Pärli, “Boriss Pasternak ja ‘Doktor Zhivago,’” in Boriss Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1999), 558. 16 Paul-Eerik Rummo, “Hamlet’s Songs,” translated by Jüri Talvet and H. L. Hix, in On the Way Home. An Anthology of Contemporary Estonian Poetry, ed. Jüri Talvet and H. L. Hix (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons 2006), 8–9.

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barefoot and in their veins the windwine— — — Sawgrass, oh friend, sawgrass.17

The lovers express positive and optimistic emotions in the poem; they do not fear the stormy sea and the cutting grass, although these are dangerous: All those who wish to remain children hoping that the cloud, the large black one, never touches their love,— ... for a moment heaven got mixed up with earth for a moment I understood: no longer can I stand hesitating and silent where one should simply cry the bad into the good...18

The second part of the song sounds like an answer to Shakespeare’s protagonist Hamlet: Yes, to be, to be, certainly to be ... and from the scabbard of doubts and boredom ... to draw the sword, when meanness and stupidity ... threaten to drown my childish childhood streams ... in the mud of deceptions.19

Between these lines, above the lines in brackets and italics,20 repeat as a refrain: (Ah, only one lap, only one lap on which to rest my head!)21

17 18 19 20

Rummo, “Hamlet’s Songs,” 8–9. Ibid. Rummo, “Hamlet’s Songs,” 9. See Paul-Eerik Rummo, Tule ikka mu rõõmude juurde. Teine vihik luuletusi (Tallinn: Eesti Riiklik Kirjastus, 1964), 62. 21 Rummo, Tule ikka mu rõõmude juurde, 62.

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Most probably the refrain alludes to the contradictory and tense dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia in the second scene in the third act of Shakespeare’s play. Although there is a dialogue between Rummo’s and Shakespeare’s texts, the meanings of Rummo’s and Shakespeare’s texts are opposites. Rummo’s text was written at the beginning of the 1960s in Soviet Estonia; it sounds like a hippy poem from the USA or Western Europe in the mid 1950s to 1960s. The last verse intensifies the idea of anti-violence or anti-war: Then to be, and at the same time to know that life is not our struggle, to know that what is coming is greater than me and also greater than my enemy. Then to be, and at the same time to think of the children yet unborn whose laugher destroys the swords of both of us.22

Veljo Tormis and Hamlet The composer Veljo Tormis wrote the choral work “The Song of Hamlet” in 1965 (words by Paul-Eerik Rummo, music by Veljo Tormis). Tormis has explained that he used the principle of two choruses: one chorus expresses nature as a background element and the other chorus expresses Hamlet’s thoughts.23 Tormis’s music and Rummo’s text express a dialogue between nature and the human being, and also Rummo’s poetic persona which identifies with Hamlet in this poem. This is the source of the similarity between Rummo’s and Pasternak’s poems. The same poem by Rummo has also influenced Estonian theater: the performance of “Hamlet’s Songs” (directed by Mati Unt) was staged on April 14, 1978. That performance dealt not only with Paul-Eerik Rummo’s works, but with Estonian poetry from 1960 to 1970. It is significant that the motif of Hamlet became a symbol which connected different Estonian poets and poems, but at the same time the title of the performance also refers to Rummo’s poem. Thus, it created ambivalent play with the motif of Hamlet, and we can legitimately ask: is it a dialogue with Shakespeare’s 22 Rummo, “Hamlet’s Songs,” 9–10. 23 Priit Kuusk, Veljo Tormis. Jonni pärast heliloojaks! (Tallinn: Prisma Prindi Kirjastus, 2000), 120.

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text or is it a dialogue with Rummo’s text or maybe both are possible? But it is a fact that Hamlet always exists at least symbolically in Estonian theater. Rummo’s poem was a new approach to the topic of anti-war in the Soviet context, because the idea of love and children expresses the main idea of the poem. Rummo brought more humanity and bright feelings to Soviet Estonian poetry, and the poem also demonstrates influences from Western Europe culture. Hamlet’s existential question gets a definite and vital answer, and this answer brings new meaning in the context of the existential paradigm which had a strong influence in Estonian culture in the 1960s.24 Rummo’s poem “Hamleti laulud” (Hamlet’s songs) was innovative in Estonian literature, being used in choral music at the beginning of the 1960s, and forming a prologue to the innovations in Estonian theatre in the second half of the 1960s. Rummo’s play Tuhkatriinumäng (Cinderella game, 1969), which alludes to Prince Hamlet, is one of the significant plays in the development of Estonian drama.25 Luule Epner has pointed out the keywords of the change in Estonian drama in the 1960s: play, myths, especially literary myths, and ritual. The most important mythical and symbolic figures were Antigone and Hamlet, with Hamlet being the more significant.26 Consequently, Hamlet as a literary figure has been a very important and influential motif in Estonian literature and culture, and Rummo’s text forms the axis around which not only written texts, but also theatre performances and music revolve.

Jaan Kross The Estonian prose writer Jaan Kross’s novel Keisri hull (The Czar’s Madman, 1978) contains implicit play with the motif of Hamlet: the protagonist of 24 See Rein Veidemann, “Eksistentsialistliku paradigma avaldusi 1950.–60. aastate eesti Kirjanduses,” in Taasleitud aeg. Eesti ja soome kirjanduse muutumine 1950–1960. aastatel. Kadonneen ajan arvoitus. Viron ja Suomen kirjallisuuden uuttuminen 1950.– ja 1960-luvulla, ed. Luule Epner, Pekka Lilja, vol. 2 of Tartu Ülikooli eesti kirjanduse õppetooli toimetised (Tartu: Tartu Ülikool, 2000), 50. 25 Piret Kruuspere, “Is It Ghosting? The Motifs and Allusions of Hamlet in Estonian Drama,” in Different Inputs—Same Output? Autonomy and Dependence of the Arts Under Different Social-Economic Conditions: The Estonian Example, ed. Cornelius Hasselblatt (Maastricht: Shaker Publishing BV, 2006), 35–47. 26 Luule Epner, “Kahe ‘Libahundi’ vahel ehk Antigone ja Hamlet,” in Traditsioon ja pluralism, ed. Marin Laak (Tallinn: Tuum, 1998), 170–76.

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the novel Timotheus von Bock is declared mad for criticizing the Tsarist regime. Mardi Valgemäe indicates that Kross plays with Soviet censorship: the plot of the novel Keisri hull pretends to be about the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, but actually it is an allusion and connotes the twentieth century Soviet regime. This means that even motifs from Western literature may reference local connotations. Kross does not directly refer to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but there are similar conflicts and motifs of madness and / or non-madness or pseudo-madness in both literary works. The protagonist of the novel, Jakob, used a similar scheme in his diary: when he writes about the Russian romantic poet Zhukovsky, he actually concentrates on the life of Timotheus von Bock.27 It means that Vassili Zhukovsky means Timotheus von Bock in Jakob’s diary and the nineteenth-century Russian Empire means the totalitarian Soviet regime in the twentieth century. Kross’s novel is a perfect political allegory which also uses the motif of Hamlet to indicate madness or the schizophrenic situation which may lead to madness. Maire Jaanus analyses Kross’s novel according to Lacanian psychoanalysis and compares that novel with classical tragedies in the article “Estonia and Pain: Jaan Kross’s The Czar’s Madman.” She describes the significant motifs of the novel: first how Timo lost his teeth and how his mouth was locked up to silence his speech, his thoughts, his emotions.28 It means that in his novel Kross describes how the totalitarian system works with pain and terror. Timo fights against the power of the Russian tsarist regime and totalitarian politics and illustrates his “need to establish control and gain surety, to halt his panic, to think himself and his identity by sheer Descartian mental exertion and repetition. “Estonian exile society underwent a metaphorically similar experience like Timo in Kross’s novel: the same need to establish control and gain surety, to think itself and its identity, and finally to halt its panic. The most important activity in that situation is the active mental suffering which is “already an emergence from the pure helplessness that is the condition of the void as well as from the pure anxiety that arises from the perception of absolute danger.”29 27 Mardi Valgemäe, “‘Keisri hull’ ja ‘Hamlet,’” in Metamorfiline Kross.Sissevaateid Jaan Krossi loomingusse, ed. Eneken Laanes (Tallinn: Underi ja Tuglase Kirjanduskeskus, 2005), 74. 28 Jaanus, “Estonia and Pain: Jaan Kross’s The Czar’s Madman,” 253. 29 Ibid., 258.

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Maire Jaanus explains the tragic situations using Lacan’s theory: …suffering is already a tragic tolerance of anxiety. In Lacan’s schema it is a drive and drives are active, circular, and self-reflexive. Suffering is beyond anxiety because suffering is a drive, and although it is a painful, repetitive, and hooked to the gravity of death, it is nonetheless an active striving against death and thus a very rudimentary form of sublimation compared to pure anxiety.30

According to Lacan “anxiety is a terrified falling, the drive of destruction of the self, but suffering is the repetitive, circular activity of thinking or running that is the other side of the drive, which is the desire to begin again.”31 It means that “A signifier is binary and can be repeated, unlike infinite anxiety which has no binary or any polar opposite. Thus, compared to pure anxiety, even suffering is already a bit of mobility, and, therefore, of freedom.”32 Maire Jaanus explains the difference between the two notions “pain” and “suffering” and she is of the opinion that Estonians have survived because they have known how to turn pain into suffering:33 “Pleasure very obviously wants repetition, continuance, extension, and prolongation. Such excess disturbs and disrupts consciousness and because it can do so, it makes an impact.”34 Jaan Kross’s novels and also Estonian exile literature present the fundamental images of opening or closing, escaping or staying, and of flight or fight. According to Maire Jaanus “It is the issue fundamentally of freedom as the interplay of desire and law” in Kross’s novels. Kross’s novel Paigallend (Treading Air, 1998) contains a metaphor of a static sublimation or the writing in place: It is a painful metaphor in that it is an image of a bird confined and restricted in the exercise of its most fundamental activity. But it is also a pleasurable image in that flying is inherently a dream image of freedom, both spatial and erotic. ... Thus, flying even if only in a limited space and in a limited way, is still a way to continue to assert one’s essence: the human drive for self30 Ibid., 259. 31 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter, vol. 7 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (New York and London: Norton, 1992); Jaanus, “Estonia and Pain: Jaan Kross’s The Czar’s Madman,” 259. 32 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 259. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 262.

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symbolization, love and an ethical thinking that is a special human privilege and consequence of its unique condition.35

Another important topic in this novel (the second excerpt) is madness or more precisely, who is mad and how can one speak the truth? Key words would be power and trauma, metaphors of pain, irony.

Conclusion All these examples mentioned above demonstrate how the borders between poetry and prose, literature and folklore, literature and music and even different genres were blurred in Estonian cultural space in the 1970s and 1980s. Estonian literature and culture were exploring new ways to express forbidden ideas, the ideas of freedom and (political) resistance. The motifs of old folk songs or runo songs and even motifs from literary myths like Hamlet conveyed connotations, and the main ideas or messages existed between the lines. The literary field under the Soviet regime presented the fundamental images of opening or closing, escaping or staying, and of flight or fight, and how political power dominated in the literary field and how the resistance movement existed beside the dominant field.36

Bibliography Assmann, Aleida. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: Beck, 2006. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Epner, Luule. “Kahe ‘Libahundi’ vahel ehk Antigone ja Hamlet.” In Traditsioon ja pluralism, edited by Marin Laak, 169–84. Tallinn: Tuum, 1998. Jaanus, Maire. “Estonia and Pain: Jaan Kross’s The Czar’s Madman.” Journal of Baltic Studies 31, no. 3 (2000): 253–72. Kruuspere, Piret. “Is It Ghosting? The Motifs and Allusions of Hamlet in Estonian Drama.” In Different Inputs—Some Output? Autonomy and Dependence of the Arts under Different Social-Economic Conditions: The Estonian Example, edited by Cornelius Hasselblatt, 35–47. Maastricht: Shaker Publishing BV, 2006. Kuusk, Priit. Veljo Tormis. Jonni pärast heliloojaks! Tallinn: Prisma Prindi Kirjastus, 2000. 35 Ibid. 36 This study was supported by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (IUT18-4) and the project TAU16078 “Estonian Studies Centre of Excellence.”

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Laaban, Ilmar. “Sürrealismi perspektiive.” Eesti Looming 2 (1944): 82. ———. “To Live Free or Die.” Estonian Literary Magazine 8 (1999): 8–9. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960. Vol. 7 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. New York and London: Norton, 1992. Lippus, Urve. Introduction to Vision of Estonia I CD by Veljo Tormis. Tallinn: Alba, 2000. Lotman, Juri. Culture and Explosion. Translated by Wilma Clark, edited by Marina Grishakova. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009. Olesk, Sirje. “Paul-Eerik Rummo.” In Epp Annus, Luule Epner, Ants Järv, Sirje Olesk, Ele Süvalep, Mart Velsker, Eesti kirjanduslugu, 444. Tallinn: Koolibri, 2001. ———. Tõdede vankuval müüril. Artikleid ajast ja luulest. Tartu: Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum, 2002. Pärli, Ülle. “Boriss Pasternak ja ‘Doktor Zhivago.’” In Boriss Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago, 551–58. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1999. Rummo, Paul-Eerik. “Hamlet’s Songs.” Translated by Jüri Talvet and H. L. Hix. In On the Way Home. An Anthology of Contemporary Estonian Poetry, edited by H. L. Hix, 8–10. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2006. ———. Tule ikka mu rõõmude juurde. Teine vihik luuletusi. Tallinn: Eesti Riiklik Kirjastus, 1964. Runnel, Hando. A Beautiful Land. Translated by Jüri Talvet and H. L. Hix. Web Estonian Literature Centre, 2003. Accessed March 15, 2017. http://www.estlit.ee/ elis/?cmd=writer&id=18505&txt=48637. ———. Punaste õhtute purpur. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1982. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Sommer, Lauri. “Paul-Eerik Rummo.” In Tuulelaeval valgusest on aerud, Valik eesti moodsat luulet = Windship with Oars of Light. Estonian Modern Poetry, edited by Doris Kareva, 131. Tallinn: Huma, 2001. Thompson, Ann, and Neil Taylor. Introduction to Hamlet by William Shakespeare, 1–137. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Tormis, Lea. “The Story of ‘Estonian ballads.’” Estonian Culture 1 (2005): 22–25. Tormis, Veljo. Foreword to Eesti ballaadid CD. Tallinn: Forte, 2010. Veidemann, Rein. “Eksistentsialistliku paradigma avaldusi 1950.–60. aastate eesti Kirjanduses.” In Taasleitud aeg. Eesti ja soome kirjanduse muutumine 1950.–1960. aastatel. Kadonneen ajan arvoitus. Viron ja Suomen kirjallisuuden muuttuminen 1950.–ja 1960-luvulla, edited by Luule Epner, Pekka Lilja. Vol. 2 of Tartu Ülikooli eesti kirjanduse õppetooli toimetised, 41–50. Tartu: Tartu Ülikool, 2000. Valgemäe, Mardi. “‘Keisri hull’ ja ‘Hamlet.’” In Metamorfiline Kross. Sissevaateid Jaan Krossi loomingusse, edited by Eneken Laanes, 72–76. Tallinn: Underi ja Tuglase Kirjanduskeskus, 2005.

Biographical Notes

Pavel Arsenev, PhD student, Faculté des Lettres at Université de Genève Most  recent publications: “K konstrukcii gramaticheskoi poetiki,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 138 (2016): 117–32; “Literatura fakta vyskazyvaniia: ob odnom neznamechennom pragmaticheskom povorote,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 138 (2016): 182–95; “La littérature du fait d’énonciation: un tournant pragmatique inaperçu au cœur de l’avant-garde russe,” Ligeia: dossier sur l’art 157 (2017): 146–57; “Kollaps ruki: proizvodstvennye travmy pis’ma i instrumental’naia metafora metoda,” Logos 6 (2017). Research interests: history of the Soviet avant-garde, literature of fact, productivism, literary pragmatics, mediology and anthropology of literature. [email protected] Solveiga Daugirdaitė, PhD in Humanities, senior researcher at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius Author of monographs:  Rūpesčių moterys, moterų rūpesčiai: Moteriškumo reprezentacija naujausioje lietuvių moterų prozoje  (Caring women, women’s cares: the representation of femininity in the most recent Lithuanian women’s prose fiction, 2000); Švystelėjo kaip meteoras: 1965-ieji su Simone de Beauvoir ir Jeanu Pauliu Sartre’u (They flashed like a shooting star: glimpses from the 1965 visit of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, 2015). Research interests: autobiographical writing, gender studies, modern literature. [email protected] Evgeny Dobrenko is professor of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK

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Author, editor, and co-editor of twenty books, including  Russian literature Since 1991  (2015),  A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond  (2011),  The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (2011), Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style  (2009),  Museum of the Revolution: Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History  (2008),  Political Economy of Socialist Realism (2007),  Soviet Culture and Power A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (2007),  Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural Theories (2005), The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (2003), The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture  (2001),  The Socialist Realist Canon  (2000),  The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (1997), Socialist Realism without Shores (1997) and more than 300 articles and essays which have been translated into ten languages. He was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, Amherst College, New York University International Center for Advanced Studies, a Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, and Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. He has also been a recipient of the Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, British Academy and AHRC research grants, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the EURIAS Senior Fellowship, and in 2012 he was awarded the Efim Etkind Prize for the best book about Russian Culture. [email protected] Eva Eglāja-Kristsone, PhD, senior researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art (ILFA) of the University of Latvia Published articles and broader investigations about Baltic literature, one of the authors and editors of the encyclopedia, 300 Baltic Writers: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (2009), and the collective monograph Latvieši, igauņi un lietuvieši: literārie un kultūras kontakti (Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians: Literary and cultural contacts, 2008). Her own monograph Dzelzsgriezēji. Latvijas un Rietumu trimdas latviešu rakstnieku kontakti (Iron cutters. Cultural contacts between Soviet Latvian and Latvian exile writers, 2013, 2016), which received the Award for Latvian Literature in 2015, is a study on Latvian cultural contacts, the KGB and the role of literature on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Her research

Biographical Notes

also covers the fin de siècle period, nation-building and women’s writing in the nineteenth century. She is one of the authors of the collective monograph Fin de siècle literārā kultūra Latvijā (Fin de siècle Latvian literary culture, 2017). Research interests: Baltic literature, comparative literature, Cold War studies, literary anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, women’s writing. [email protected] Vilius Ivanauskas (1979–2018), senior researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History In 2012–13, he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of California Berkeley. His newest book on nationalism and Soviet writers, Įrėminta tapatybė:  Lietuvos rašytojai  tautų draugystės imperijoje (Framed identity: Lithuanian writers in the “friendship of nations” empire), was published in 2015. His first book Lietuviškoji nomenklatūra biurokratinėje sistemoje: tarp stagnacijos ir dinamikos (1968–1988) (The Lithuanian nomenklatura in the bureaucratic system: between stagnation and dynamics, 1968–88) was published in 2011. The article on writers was also published in the major international journal, Europe-Asia Studies (66, 2014). Research interests: Soviet intellectuals, ethnic particularism in the Soviet peripheries, party and cultural elites in Lithuania.  Aušra Jurgutienė, PhD in Humanities, senior researcher in the Department of Modern Literature at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore in Vilnius She has more than 70 Lithuanian and international publications and is the author of two monographs: Naujasis romantizmas iš pasiilgimo: lietuvių neoromantizmo pradininkų estetinė mintis (The longing for New Romanticism: the aesthetic thought of the founders of Lithuanian New Romanticism, 1998) and Literatūros suvokimo menas: Hermeneutikos tradicija (The art of literary interpretation: the hermeneutic tradition, 2013). Jurgutienė was chief editor and co-author of academic textbooks and readers in literary theory: XX amžiaus literatūros teorijos (20th-century literary theory, vol. 1, 2006; vol. 2, 2010; vol. 3 and vol. 4, 2011). She was one of the founders of the Lithuanian Association of Comparative Literature in 2005 and continues to be a member of its Council.

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Biographical Notes

Research interests: literary history, literary theories of the twentieth century (hermeneutics, reception, deconstruction, comparative literature), Soviet literature, identity studies. [email protected] Valentyna Kharkhun, Professor in the Ukrainian Literature and Journalism Department, Mykola Gogol State University (Nizhyn, Ukraine) She is the author of two books The Socialist Realist Canon in Ukrainian Literature: Genesis, Evolution, Modification (in Ukrainian) (2009) and Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s Novel Snubnosed Mephisthopheles’s Notes: Generics, Semantic Sphere and Imagology (in Ukrainian) (2011) and six textbooks and more than 100 articles. She was the recipient of several Fulbright fellowships (Pennsylvania State University, 2005–6; Columbia University, 2011–12), also of J. Mianovsky and Queen Jadwiga fellowships at Jagellonian University, Poland (2008, 2009), the Ivan Vyhovsky fellowship at Warsaw University (2014–15), the George F. Kennan fellowship (Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, 2016). She currently resides in Alexandria, Virginia. Research interests: memory about communism in the museums, the projection of the “Soviet” phenomenon in the modern world, the aesthetic paradigm of Soviet totalitarianism, the Socialist Realist canon and its reflection in Ukrainian literature, methodologies of literary studies, and Vynnychenko studies. [email protected] Loreta Mačianskaitė, PhD in Humanities, senior researcher at the Institute  of  Lithuanian Literature  and  Folklore; Associate Professor at Vilnius University Major publications: “Three Articulations of Isaac in Lithuanian Literature,” in Transitions of Lithuanian Postmodernism: Lithuanian Literature in the Post-Soviet Period (Rodopi: Amsterdam–New York, 2011); “Being Ninety Percent Lithuanian and Ninety Percent French, and Extensive Expression of Greimas’s; Lithuanian Discourse,” in Our World: A Kaleidoscopic Semiotic Network, vol. 3 of Proceedings of the 11th World Congress of the IASS/AIS (2014); “Metafory svobody v fil’makh Litovskoi kinostudii po scenariiam Icchokasa Merasa,” Studia Sovietica 3 (2014).

Biographical Notes

Research interests: semiotics of culture, Soviet studies, interactions between literature and other arts. [email protected] Anneli Mihkelev, PhD in Semiotics and Cultural Studies at the University of Tartu Monograph: Vihjamise poeetika (The poetics of allusion, 2005). She works as a senior researcher at Tallinn University, her current research project is Estonia between East and West: The Paradigm of “Own”, “Other”, “Strange”, “Enemy” in Estonian Cultures at the End of the 19th and in the 20th Century. She has published articles on these topics in international and Estonian publications. She is also an editor of the reference guide to authors and their works 300 Baltic Writers: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (2009), and the collections of articles We Have Something in Common: the Baltic Memory (2007) and Turns in the Centuries, Turns in Literature (2009). Research interests: Estonian literature, allusions in literature and culture, comparative literature (mainly Baltic literatures). [email protected] Donata Mitaitė, PhD in 1989 at the Moscow Institute of World Literature; senior researcher at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore in Vilnius She published a monograph analyzing the biography and poetry of Tomas Venclova, along with several articles and reviews in academic and cultural periodicals. Donata Mitaitė has translated scholarly works by Mikhail Bakhtin, Aaron Gurevich, and Yury Lotman. She has compiled several books (memoirs, scholarly articles and others). Research interests: literary history, contemporary Lithuanian literature, comparative studies. [email protected] Nerija Putinaitė, associate professor and senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University She specializes in identity studies, including Soviet, national, and European identity. She focuses on questions of the contemporary identity of the nation, Europe and the EU; Lithuanian identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; Soviet Lithuanian identity, accommodation and resistance in Soviet Lithuania. She is the author of four books in Lithuanian.

231

232

Biographical Notes

The fifth book on Soviet atheization politics and society, Nugenėta pušis: Ateizmas kaip asmeninis apsisprendimas tarybų Lietuvoje (Atheism as personal choice in Soviet Lithuania) was published in 2015. [email protected] Dalia Satkauskyte, PhD, senior researcher at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, chair of the Institute’s Research Council, director of the program “Historical Research of Soviet period Lithuanian Literature” (2012–16) She has published several monographs: Lietuvių poezijos kalbinė savimonė: raidos tendencijos (Linguistic consciousness in Lithuanian poetry, 1996) and Subjektyvumo profiliai lietuvių literatūroje (Profiles of subjectivity in Lithuanian Literature, 2008) and more than 40 articles in Lithuanian, English, Russian, French, Polish and German; she was editor of the collective monograph Tarp  estetikos  ir politikos: Lietuvių literatūra sovietmečiu (Between aesthetics and politics: Lithuanian literature of the Soviet period, 2015). Research interests: semiotics, semiotics of culture, sociology of literature, sociocriticism, modern Lithuanian literature.

Index

A

Academic Drama Theater (Lithuania), 98, 114 Adomo Šerno priešmirtinis laiškas (The deathbed letter of Adomas Šernas), see Šernas, Adomas Aesopian language, ix–xii, xvi–xvii, 18–34, 46, 141, 174 “Agreement or Resistance. The Generation of the 1930s,” see Areška, Vitas Aitmatov, Chingiz, 7 Alexievich, Svetlana, 110–111 Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, 110 All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP), 6–6 Altorių šešėly (In the shadow of the altars), see Mykolaitis-Putinas, Vincas Amiredzhibi, Chabua, 8 An Anthology of New Ukrainian Poetry, 176–177 anti-Soviet discourse, xiv, 26, 139, 168, 178 anxiety, 154, 210, 223–324 Aputis, Juozas, 23, 46, 53, 142 Areška, Vitas, 117, 133 “Agreement or Resistance. The Generation of the 1930s,” 117 art of compromise, xiv, xvi, 21, 31, 46, 49, 116, 118, 128, 132, 138–857, 181, 209, 212 Asian economic and political formation, 16 Assmann, Aleida, 215 Ateizmas ir dabartis (Atheism and the present), 66–67 atheism, xiii, 59–98, 110, 127, 232 Atomni Preliudy (Atomic preludes), see Vinhranovsky, Mykola autobiography, xiii, 59–78, 81, 121, 227 autonomy of literary field, x, xiii, 18–84, 213 Avyžius, Jonas, 7, 34, 42–24 Sodybų tuštėjimo metas (The time of emptied farmsteads), 34

B

“Baimės bėgimas” (Fear is evaporating), see Maldonis, Alfonsas “Balada pro Vyprani Shtany” (The ballad of the laundered pants), see Drach, Ivan Baltakis, Algimantas, 41–13, 46–68, 117–720, 122–223, 131–133 Pėsčias paukštis (Walking bird), 122 Baltā ūdensroze (The white water lily), see Lāms (Eglons), Visvaldis Baltistica, 119 Banerji, Arup Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work, 206 de Beauvoir, Simone, xiv, 80–95 Tout compte fait (All Said and Done), 81 Beekman, Alexander, 7 Belarus, 4, 7–7, 16 Bērsons, Ilgonis, 206 Bieliauskas, Alfonsas, 7, 23, 141 Bourdieu, Pierre Langage et pouvoir symbolique (Language and Symbolic Power), 21 Brezhnev era, 101, 104, 117, 143, 172 Bu-Ba-Bu, 177 Bulavas, Juozas, 118 Bulgakov, Mikhail Master and Margarita, 47 Bykov, Vasyl, 7 Byut’ u Krytcyu Kovali (Blacksmiths beating in steel), see Oliynyk, Borys

C

canon, xiii, 5, 9, 16, 67–77, 133, 148, 161–162, 164–174, 177, 182, 212 Catholicism, 61–63, 67, 71, 110 Čekys, Jonas, 27 censorship, xi, xvi–xvii, 12, 21–29, 31–34, 46–47, 80, 97, 99, 111, 132, 134, 138, 140–041, 150n24, 151–153, 155, 184, 201–102, 208, 211, 223

234

Index

Chekhov, Anton “Ryb’ya lyubov” (Fish love), 108 Chernobyl, 174–475 Chiladze, Otar, 8 Christianity, 65, 68, 110 Chubay, Hryhory Vidshykuvannya Prychetnoho (Searching for the implicated), 174 Čiurlionis, Mikalojus Konstantinas, 41, 82, 87 Clark, Katerina, viii, 76 collective memory, 114, 215 Community of European Writers (COMES) Congress, 91 cosmopolitanism, 7, 27 cultural modernization, 23, 30, 51–12, 113, 156 Cyrillic alphabet, 3 Czechoslovakia, 86, 117, 129

D

Daugirdaitė, Solveiga, 80–95, 227 “Death of the Sixtiers,” see Doniy, Oles deconstructive reading, 149, 157, 187 de-Stalinization, 6, 127, 161–162 destruction, 10, 170, 202, 206–608, 214, 224 Dienoraštis be datų (Diary without dates), see Marcinkevičius, Justinas “Divpadsmit kilometri” (Twelve kilometers), see Vilks, Ēvalds Dobrenko, Evgeny, 104 Doctor Zhivago, see Pasternak, Boris documentalism, 197 dominated position, 213–214 Doniy, Oles “Death of the Sixtiers,” 170 Drach, Ivan, 164, 166, 169, 171, 173 “Balada pro Vyprani Shtany” (The ballad of the laundered pants), 166 Soniashnyk (The sunflower), 164 Drozd, Volodymyr, 7, 164 Lyublyu Syni Zori (I love blue stars), 164 Duluman, Evgraf Pochemu ya perestal verit’ v boga (Why I ceased believing in god), 65–66 Dumbadze, Nodar, 8 D’un réalisme sans rivages, see Garaudy, Roger Dzhambul Dzhambaev, 11–15

E

economic field, xii, xvii, 16, 111, 147, 203, 205, 213 Eightiers (visimdesyatnyky), 163, 166, 173–374, 176–677

“Elada vabana või surra” (To live free or die), see Éluard, Paul Éluard, Paul “Elada vabana või surra” (To live free or die), 215 “Estonia and Pain: Jaan Kross’s The Czar’s Madman,” see Jaanus Maire “Estonian Ballads,” see Tormis, Veljo ethnic particularism, xii, 37–73, 229, 237 ethnic relations, 3, 9–91, 41–13, 49–51, 53, 111 exile society, 214–416, 223–324, 228

F

factography, see literature of facts field of power, 18, 21, 33–34, 213–214 folklore, vii, xi, xvi, 9, 11–13, 15–56, 42, 87, 110, 141, 149n23, 213–325 fakelore, 9 formalism, 97, 142, 144, 146–147, 185, 189–191, 197, 202 French Communists, 93, 145 “friendship of nations,” 43–34, 49, 51–13, 229

G

Garaudy, Roger D’un réalisme sans rivages, 145 Gavelis, Ričardas, 23–34, 29–90, 142 Geda, Sigitas, 23, 30–02, 53, 141, 145 Komunarų gatvė (Komunarų [Defender of Communism] street), 30–31 “Lietuvos gimimas” (The birth of Lithuania), 32 Gelbak, Pavel, 49 Georgia, xii, 4, 7, 16, 45–56, 53, 89 Goncharov, Andrey, 99 Gorky, Maxim, 11–12 Granauskas, Romualdas, 23, 46, 142 Gyvenimo švelnus prisiglaudimas (The gentle hug of life), see Marcinkevičius, Justinas

H

Hamburg reckoning, 192 Hamlet, 218–825 Rummo, Paul-Eerik, 218–221 Tormis, Veljo, 221–222 “Hamleti laulud” (Hamlet’s songs), see Rummo, Paul-Eerik Hegelian-Marxism, 143, 147 “Hero of Ukraine,” 171 Holy Scripture, 110 homo sovieticus, 104, 156 Hungarian Revolution of 1956, 116

Index

Hutsalo, Yevhen, 7, 164 Lyudy sered Lyudey (People among people), 164

I

identity, xiii, 3, 10, 37–78, 44, 51, 53, 108, 139–141, 167, 169, 215, 223, 230, 231 Ilchenko, Oles, 7 “In Favor of the Specific Historical Portraying Life in Literature,” see Shamota, Mykola Inostrannaya literatura, 142 Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature, 82, 142, 145 International Critics’ Symposium, 93 intertextuality, xv, 106–607, 109–910, 113, 177 Ir apsiniauks žvelgiantys pro langą (And those looking out of the window will frown), see Kondrotas, Saulius Tomas irony, 5, 91, 127, 141, 154, 156, 177–178, 216, 225 Ite, missa est!, see Ragauskas, Jonas “It’s in the Air,” see Palamarchuk, Halyna

J

Jaanus, Maire, 214, 223–324 “Estonia and Pain: Jaan Kross’s The Czar’s Madman,” 214, 223 Lacan’s theory, 224 Jauniškis, Bronius, 60–01, 68, 70, 72, 74 Peržengę kryžkeles (Beyond the crossroads), 60 Vienuolis ir tikėjimas (The monk and faith), 60 Joyce, James, 91–12, 142 Ulysses, 142 Jüngar, Harri Literatures of the Soviet Peoples: A Historical and Biographical Survey, The, 5 Juškaitis, Jonas, 31, 141, 145 Rašytojas ir cenzūra (The writer and censorship), 31

K

“Kad svešu spārnu sašķelts gaiss” (When alien wings crack the air), see Zālīte, Māra “Kaip aš nustojau tikėjęs” (How I ceased believing), 60 Kalanta, Romas, 48, 117 Kalevipoeg, see Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold Kalina krasnaya (The Red Snowball Tree), see Shukshin, Vasily Kalynets, Ihor, 164, 174 Nevilnycha Muza (Captive muse), 174 Karogs, xvi–xvii, 201–212

Kashnicki, Igor, 49 katorga, 110–011 Kavolis, Vytautas, 113, 143 Kāvu blāzmā (In the glow of the northern), see Lāms, Visvaldis Kazakhs, 11, 40 Kazlauskas, Jonas, 119–920, 133 Lietuvių kalbos istorinė gramatika (A historical grammar of the Lithuanian language), 119 Keisri hull (The Czar’s Madman), see Kross, Jaan khimernyi roman (chimera novel), 7 Khrushchev, Nikita, 40, 49, 52, 61, 67, 83, 126–627, 143–344, 161, 164 Kmita, Rimantas, 30, 124 Kolyma Tales, see Shalamov, Varlam Komjaunimo tiesa (The truth of the Komsomol), 63 Komunarų gatvė (Komunarų [Defender of Communism] street), see Geda, Sigitas Komunist Ukrainy, 172–173 Kondrotas, Saulius Tomas, 24–45, 29–90, 142, 152–253, 154–456 Ir apsiniauks žvelgiantys pro langą (And those looking out of the window will frown), 25 Žalčio žvilgsnis (The glance of the serpent), 152, 156 Korsakas, Kostas, 70, 82, 85, 94, 143 Kostenko, Lina, 164, 166, 170–071, 174 Kraujas ir pelenai (Blood and ashes), see Marcinkevičius, Justinas Kreituse, Ilga, 206 Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold Kalevipoeg, 215 Krollis, Gunārs, 207 Kross, Jaan, 7, 222–225 Keisri hull (The Czar’s Madman), 222–223 Paigallend (Treading Air), 224 Kukučio baladės (The ballads of Kukutis), see Martinaitis, Marcelijus Kuliev, Kaisyn, 7 Kunčinas, Jurgis, 94 Kuusberg, Paul, 7 Kvadratas (The square), see Nekrošius, Eimuntas “Kvadratik neba sinego” (A small square of clear blue sky), see Yeliseyeva, Valentina

L

Laaban, Ilmar, 215–516 Lāms (Eglons), Visvaldis, 208–211

235

236

Index

Baltā ūdensroze (The white water lily), 209–210 Kāvu blāzmā (In the glow of the northern), 209 Langage et pouvoir symbolique (Language and Symbolic Power), see Bourdieu, Pierre Latvian literature, 203, 209, 211–212, 228 Lenin, Vladimir (also Leninism), 9, 32, 38, 62–23, 78, 122, 129–930, 134, 144, 147–748, 170, 178 Leniniana, 9 Lenin Prize, 23, 34, 40, 44, 81, 86, 125, 148 Liepsnojantis krūmas (The burning bush), see Marcinkevičius, Justinas Lietuvių kalbos istorinė gramatika (A historical grammar of the Lithuanian language), see Kazlauskas, Jonas “Lietuvos gimimas” (The birth of Lithuania), see Geda, Sigitas Lippus, Urve, 217 literary criticism, 123, 138–157 literary field, x, 18–34, 57, 213 Literatūra un Māksla, 202, 211 literature-centrism, xv, 10, 15, 98, 109, 113 literature of fact, 181–189, 197, 199, 227 Literatures of the Soviet Peoples: A Historical and Biographical Survey, The, see Jüngar, Harri Literaturna Ukraina, 170, 175 Literaturnaya gazeta, 101 Lithuanian literature, vii, xii–xv, 20, 23–26, 29, 34, 39–90, 42–44, 48–50, 52, 57–757, 203 Lithuanian theater, xv, 97–98, 111 Litva literaturnaya, 49 localism, 37–53 Looming, 203 Lotman, Yury, 114, 142–243, 149, 151, 214, 231 Lukss, Valdis, 207 Lyublyu Syni Zori (I love blue stars), see Drozd, Volodymyr Lyudy sered Lyudey (People among people), see Hutsalo, Yevhen

M

madness, 223, 225 magical realism, 142 Maironis, 41, 126 Pavasario balsai (The voices of spring), 126 Makarevich, Andrey, 128 “Malanchuk period,” 172, 174 Maldonis, Alfonsas, 43, 117–123, 127–729, 131–133, 135 “Baimės bėgimas” (Fear is evaporating), 134 Saulėti lietūs (Sunny rains), see 127

“Man of Labor in Modern Ukrainian Literature,” 173 Mano lyra (My lyre), see Mieželaitis, Eduardas Mano mokytojas—gyvenimas (Life is my teacher), 60 Marcinkevičius, Justinas, xiv, 34, 41–14, 46, 50, 52–23, 64–45, 69, 90–93, 95, 117–122, 124–427, 129–931, 134–435, 141 Dienoraštis be datų (Diary without dates), 90–93, 95 Gyvenimo švelnus prisiglaudimas (The gentle hug of life), 134 Kraujas ir pelenai (Blood and ashes), 124 Liepsnojantis krūmas (The burning bush), 134 Publicistinė poema (Publicist poem), 64 Markonis, Stasys, 60, 65, 68 “Marseillaise, La” 107, 113 Martin, Terry, 38 Martinaitis, Marcelijus, 23, 27, 29, 46–67, 53, 141, 145 Kukučio baladės (The ballads of Kukutis), 47 Martinkus, Vytautas, 142 Marx, Karl, 6, 143 Marxism (also Marxism-Leninism), xii, 6–6, 10–01, 14, 16, 25, 62–25, 67, 78, 82, 127, 143–347, 149, 152–253, 155–556, 170 Maslovska, Tetyana, 170 Master and Margarita, see Bulgakov, Mikhail materialism dialectical, 147–748, 155 historical, 155 scientific, 61–12, 67, 72, 77–78 “mature socialism,” 30, 143–146 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 106–607, 196 “Parizhanka” (The Parisian woman), 106 “Medinis filosofas” (Wooden philosopher), see Mieželaitis, Eduardas metaphors, xii, xv, 13–15, 22, 24, 47, 52, 102–203, 114, 186, 195–598, 223–325 Mieželaitis, Eduardas, 23–34, 40–04, 46, 48, 50, 52, 81, 83–36, 88, 90, 95, 141, 148, 155 Mano lyra (My lyre), 86 “Medinis filosofas” (Wooden philosopher), 85–56, 90 Miłosz, Czesław, 131, 147–148 mimetic resistance, xiv, 138–139, 157 Ministry of Culture, 100, 112 modernism, xiii, xviii, 14–45, 22n6, 23–34, 30–01, 34, 46, 87, 113, 138–157, 169, 182, 185, 190, 195, 199 “Mongol yoke,” 15

Index

monolingual system, 214 Mykolaitis-Putinas, Vincas, xiii, 69, 128 Altorių šešėly (In the shadow of the altars), 69 “Mystery of Justice,” see Yeshkilev, Volodymyr

N

“Na Kolymi Zapahlo Chebretcem” (The smell of thyme in Kolyma), see Stus, Vasyl’ “Na Kolymskim Morozi Kalyna” (Guelderrose in Kolyma frost), see Stus, Vasyl’ nationalism, xii, 6–7, 25, 27, 40, 48, 139–141, 152, 164, 176–677, 209, 214, 229 nation-building, 8, 168, 171, 229 Natural School, 181–189, 198 negative pole, 213–214 Nekrošius, Eimuntas, 97–114 Kvadratas (The square), 97–714 Nemunas, 48, 85 Nevilnycha Muza (Captive muse), see Kalynets, Ihor New Criticism, 147, 151 nomenklatura, 39, 41–12, 51, 173, 229 Novyi LEF, 182, 185 Novyi mir, 100

O

October Revolution, 31, 93. See also Russian Revolution Old Testament, 153 Oliynyk, Borys, 164, 169, 171 Byut’ u Krytcyu Kovali (Blacksmiths beating in steel), 164 Olympic Regatta (Estonia), 217 Osipov, Aleksandr Put’ k duchovnoy svobode (The path to spiritual freedom), 66

P

Paigallend (Treading Air), see Kross, Jaan pain, 214, 219, 223–225 Pakalniškis, Ričardas, xiv, 142–152, 154–456 “Poezija ir gyvenimas (Kai kurie poezijos nagrinėjimo principai)” (Life and poetry [Analysis of poetry, a few principles]), 143–345, 147–749, 151 Šiuolaikinės kritikos problemos (Problems of contemporary criticism), 143–344, 151 Pakhlovska, Oksana, 169–970 Palamarchuk, Halyna, 170, 173 “It’s in the Air,” 170

Palimpsesty (Palimpsests), see Stus, Vasyl’ “Parizhanka” (The Parisian woman), see Mayakovsky, Vladimir Pasternak, Boris, 219, 221 Doctor Zhivago, 219 Pavasario balsai (The voices of spring), see Maironis Pavlychko, Dmytro, 164, 169, 171 Pergalė, 118, 143, 203 Pėsčias paukštis (Walking bird), see Baltakis, Algimantas Peržengę kryžkeles (Beyond the crossroads), see Jauniškis, Bronius “Pis’mo materi” (Letter to mother), see Yesenin, Sergey Pochemu ya perestal verit’ v boga (Why I ceased believing in god), see Duluman, Evgraf poetics, xiii, xv, 20, 33, 113, 121, 175 “Poezija ir gyvenimas (Kai kurie poezijos nagrinėjimo principai)” (Life and poetry [Analysis of poetry, a few principles]), see Pakalniškis, Ričardas political allegory, xvii, 29, 31223 political power, 22, 213, 225 postmodernism, 113, 154, 177–178 post-Stalinist period, ix, xiii, xv, 8, 40–45, 52, 124, 126, 162 pragmatics, 53, 64, 77, 113, 129, 177, 185–187, 192–196, 198 Prague Spring, 116–117, 129–932 “Prodazhni Poety Shistdesyatykh” (Corrupt poets of the 1960s), see Zhadan, Serhiy “Prozos interpretavimo problemos” (Problems of prose interpretation), see Zalatorius, Albertas Publicistinė poema (Publicist poem), see Marcinkevičius, Justinas Put’ k duchovnoy svobode (The path to spiritual freedom), see Osipov, Aleksandr

R

Ragauskas, Jonas, 59–90, 63–38, 70–05, 77 Ite, missa est!, 59–95, 67–68, 71–13, 75, 77 Rašytojas ir cenzūra (The writer and censorship), see Juškaitis, Jonas Reagan, Ronald, 134 regilaul, 216–217 religion, 5, 8, 10, 61–68, 70–74, 76, 87, 110–011, 127 Roeder, Philip C., 38 romanticism, 14, 24, 111, 129, 140, 223 Rozhdestvensky, Robert, 41, 44, 130–031 Rummo, Paul-Eerik, 217–722

237

238

Index

“Hamleti laulud” (Hamlet’s songs), 218, 222 Tuhkatriinumäng (Cinderella game), 222 Tule ikka mu rõõmude juurde (Always come to my joys), 218 Runnel, Hando, 216–617 runo song, see regilaul Russian Revolution, 11 Russification, 9, 42, 44–45, 217 “Ryb’ya lyubov” (Fish love), see Chekhov, Anton Ryklin, Mikhail, 192

S

Šaltenis, Saulius, 30, 99 Sandomirskaja, Irina, 19, 25, 27n28, 29 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xiv, 80–95, 140 Saulėti lietūs (Sunny rains), see Maldonis, Alfonsas Savickas, Augustinas, 82–23 Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, see Alexievich, Svetlana self-censorship, xi, 26–67 self-consciousness, 214 self-description, 214 semiotics, 114, 142, 144, 151, 231–132 Sentimentalism, 181–182 Šernas, Adomas, 60, 68, 70–02, 74 Adomo Šerno priešmirtinis laiškas (The deathbed letter of Adomas Šernas), 60, 71 Seventiers (simdesyatnyky), 163, 173, 178 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 218–221, 223 Shalamov, Varlam, xvi, 181–199 Kolyma Tales, 190n24, 191, 195n36, 198 Shamota, Mykola “In Favor of the Specific Historical Portraying Life in Literature,” 172–173 Shevchenko, Taras, 167 Shevchuk, Valeri, 7 Shukshin, Vasily Kalina krasnaya (The Red Snowball Tree), 107 Šilbajoris, Rimvydas, 30, 147 Šimkus, Vladas, 23 Šiuolaikinės kritikos problemos (Problems of contemporary criticism), see Pakalniškis, Ričardas Sixtiers (shistdesyatnyky), xiii, 41, 43–44, 130, 162–178 Slezkine, Yuri, 38 Sluckis, Mykolas, 7, 23, 50, 81, 83, 88–89, 142 Socialist Realism, viii, xi–xiii, 11, 13, 16, 21, 34, 74–48, 87, 122, 124–425, 127, 140–145,

148, 152, 154–157, 161–162, 164, 166, 169, 172–274, 176–178, 202–203, 210, 214 sociology of literature, 28–83, 232 Sodybų tuštėjimo metas (The time of emptied farmsteads), see Avyžius, Jonas “Song of Hamlet, The,” see Tormis, Veljo Soniashnyk (The sunflower), see Drach, Ivan Soviet archives, 204–405 Soviet literature, vii–viii, ix–xiv, xvi–xvii, 1–34, 116, 123, 135, 145–547, 161–162, 164, 173, 175, 178, 202, 209–210 Soviet multinational literature, ix, xi, 3–16 Soviet writers, 39, 86, 94, 169, 210, 229 Stalin, Josef, 9–92, 15–56, 116, 127, 130, 140, 143, 161, 172, 202 Staliniana, 9–11 Stalinism, viii, 11, 15–56, 37, 39–90, 49–90, 127, 162, 173, 196 Stalinismus Orientalis, 11 Stalinist period (Stalin era), viii, 4, 6–60, 15, 21, 27, 39–40, 51–53, 61, 74, 76, 83, 104, 116, 140–041, 143–345, 148, 198 Stalsky, Suleiman, 11–12, 14–45 Starkus, Vytautas, 69 state of emergency, xvi, 181–199 State Prize of the Lithuanian Republic (1960), 61 “Sto Rokiv, Yak Skonala Sich” (One hundred years since Sich died), see Stus, Vasyl’ Strauss, Leo, 23 structuralism, 142, 144, 146, 197 Stus, Vasyl’, 164, 166–669, 174 “Na Kolymi Zapahlo Chebretcem” (The smell of thyme in Kolyma), 168 “Na Kolymskim Morozi Kalyna” (Guelderrose in Kolyma frost), 168 “Sto Rokiv, Yak Skonala Sich” (One hundred years since Sich died), 168 Palimpsesty (Palimpsests), 174 “Yak Dobre Te, Shcho Smerti Ne Boyus’ Ya” (I have no fear of dying), 168 suffering, 10, 64, 76, 86–87, 102, 223–224 Surrealism, 215–218 Switowyd, 176 symbolic capital, 23, 24n14 Symonenko, Vasyl’, 164–169, 171n21 Tysha i Hrim (Silence and thunder), 164–165 Zemne Tyazhinnya (Earth’s gravity), 165

Index

T

Tak ono bylo (It happened once), see Yeliseyeva, Valentina Tiesa, 59–90, 68–80, 132 Thaw, the, ix, xiii, 21, 47, 49, 52, 61–12, 76–67, 83, 101, 117–718, 126–627, 139–941, 143, 146, 161, 164 Tormis, Veljo, 217, 221 “Estonian Ballads,” 217 “The Song of Hamlet,” 221 totalitarianism, x, xv, 20, 31, 80, 106, 113, 133–334, 139n2, 140, 169, 176, 206, 213, 218–819, 223, 230 Tout compte fait (All Said and Done), see de Beauvoir, Simone trauma, 63–64, 69, 75–76, 101, 111, 119–120, 135, 163, 174, 194, 214, 225 Tule ikka mu rõõmude juurde (Always come to my joys), see Rummo, Paul-Eerik Tysha i Hrim (Silence and thunder), see Symonenko, Vasyl’ Tyutyunnyk, Hryhir, 164

U

Ukraine, xv, 4, 6–6, 16, 88–89, 161–178, 230 Ulysses, see Joyce, James unconsciousness, 95, 133, 138, 215–216 universalism, xii, 20–01, 37–53 Upīts, Andrejs, 202–203

V

Vaga (publishing house), 27, 118 Vaičiūnaitė, Judita, 31, 141 Valašinas, Karolis, 69 Vējāns, Andris, 203–305 Venclova, Antanas, 84–85 Venclova, Tomas, 28, 31, 47–48, 128–829, 142, 155, 231 Vetemaa, Enn, 7 Vidshykuvannya Prychetnoho (Searching for the implicated), see Chubay, Hryhory Vienuolis ir tikėjimas (The monk and faith), see Jauniškis, Bronius Vikertienė, Anastazija, 68, 70 Vilks, Ēvalds, 208, 210–011 “Divpadsmit kilometri” (Twelve kilometers), 210–211 Vinhranovsky, Mykola, 164, 166 Atomni Preliudy (Atomic preludes), 164

Voznesensky, Andrey, 44, 128, 130–031, 145 Vygotskian anthropology, 186

W

World War I, 75 World War II, 13, 64, 82, 203, 209, 215–216 Writers’ Congress (the 1st), 12 Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work, see Banerji, Arup

Y

“Yak Dobre Te, Shcho Smerti Ne Boyus’ Ya” (I have no fear of dying), see Stus, Vasyl’ Yavorivsky, Volodymyr, 7 Yeliseyeva, Valentina, 99–102 “Kvadratik neba sinego” (A small square of clear blue sky), 100 Tak ono bylo (It happened once), 99–100 Yeltsin, Boris, 106 Yesenin, Sergey, 106–607 “Pis’mo materi” (Letter to mother), 106–107 Yeshkilev, Volodymyr, 170, 177 “Mystery of Justice,” 170 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 50, 128, 130–031 Yurchak, Alexei, 46, 117, 128, 138

Z

Zaborskaitė, Vanda, 25, 142–243 Zabuzko, Oksana, 166 Zagrebelny, Pavlo, 7 Zalatorius, Albertas, xiv, 24–25, 142, 150–156 “Prozos interpretavimo problemos” (Problems of prose interpretation), 150–151, 155 Žalčio žvilgsnis (The glance of the serpent), see Kondrotas, Saulius Tomas Zālīte, Māra, 203, 212 “Kad svešu spārnu sašķelts gaiss” (When alien wings crack the air), 212 Zemliak, Vasyl, 7 Zemne Tyazhinnya (Earth’s gravity), see Symonenko, Vasyl’ Zhadan, Serhiy “Prodazhni Poety Shistdesyatykh” (Corrupt poets of the 1960s), 170–171 Zhdanov’s campaign (zhdanovshchina), 39–90, 52, 173 Ziedonis, Imants, 130

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