Sovietmečio literatūros pradžia: "šviesios" ateities projektai

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Sovietmetis; Sovietinė literatūra; Rašytojai; Socialistinis realizmas; Cenzūra.

ENThe author of this chapter seeks to describe and analyze the situation of Lithuanian literature of the first decade of the Soviet period (1940-1950) within official, public space. He devotes most of his attention to representations of a “bright” communist future that were dictated by the Communist Party and other Soviet state institutions. Various government authorities continuously stressed the political role of the author: to efficiently produce activist texts in prose or verse, regardless of their artistic merit - it was only crucial that they passionately promote socialism. Afraid of persecution and wanting to publish, or motivated by other reasons, writers succumbed to these demands. Kalėdas’s textual analysis focuses on the representative two-volume anthology Tarybinė lietuvių poezija. 1940-1950 (Soviet Lithuanian Poetry. 1940-1950) and Tarybinė lietuvių proza. 1940-1950 (Soviet Lithuanian Prose. 1940-1950). The poetry volume contains works by 29 authors, the prose volume the texts of works by 28 writers of different generations. As most of the texts operate according to a repertoire of common stylistic cliches, claims, and epithets, it is difficult to discern any distinct individual differences among them. It is like a collective creative work complied from rather disparate texts, as though the editors’ main priority was to fill the anthology pages with any kind of material as long as it created at least the slightest illusion of literature. The chapter’s author also offers a focused analysis of the mechanisms of manipulation in the prose of one of the most famous of the Soviet-era writers, Juozas Baltušis (1909-1919), showing how, during the first post-war decade, Soviet Lithuanian literature was wrenched from its national roots and forced to meet propagandist demands. [From the publication]