The Role of aesopian language in the literary field: autonomy in question

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Ezopo kalba; Cenzūra; Sovietmečio literatūra; Aesopian language; Censorship; Soviet literature.

ENThe 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 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 cliches, 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, and his poetry, at least in part, satisfied the Socialist Realist requirement of national form and socialist content. 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. [Extract, p. 33-34]