Before Socialist Realism: The Field of Literature in the Independent Republic of Lithuania

The formation of the independent Republic of Lithuania on February 16, 1918 was undoubtedly the most significant factor in bringing structural changes in the field of national literature. Initially, in the early 1920s, the so-called literature of national idealism formed in the Lithuanian national movement in the nineteenth century held a fairly strong position. It confirmed that in the case of small nations seeking political recognition, literature becomes one of the main arenas to fight for the nation's survival.Footnote ⁴ The national dimension, whether it was openly alluded to thematically or not, had remained important in Lithuanian literature until 1940. Paradoxically, it gained strength again after the Soviet occupation of Lithuania.Footnote ⁵ At the same time, however, another direction—that of autonomization—was emerging. It featured a thematic and structural modernization of literature, diversity of literary life, an orientation towards western literature, and an attempt to introduce a non-ideological measure of the value of literature.

Autonomization gained momentum with the avant-garde movement Keturi vėjai (The Four Winds). Its members, who also published a magazine of the same title (1924–28), openly rebelled against Maironis (1862–1932), the bard of Lithuanian national revival, by declaratively refusing to subordinate literature to the political goals of the young state, renouncing the Lithuanian poetic tradition of the countryside, and trying to find alternatives to both the lyricism that dominated Lithuanian poetry and prose and the poetics inherited from folklore.

Some of the later years in the life of independent Lithuania were a period of economic and cultural normalization and consistent development, and literature was a part of this process.Footnote ⁶ In a young state that was considered a “mild” dictatorship (the president, Antanas Smetona, took power in 1926 after a military coup) and in which censorship formally existed, the literary field gained partial autonomy and became structurally “normal”; that is, it contained both heteronomous and autonomous principles.Footnote ⁷ In other words, Lithuanian literature covered almost all the structural positions of a literary field: popular and elite literature, politically engaged authors, and a conception of “art for art’s sake,” or the boundary point of the autonomous pole.Footnote ⁸ The culmination of this process of autonomization in literature is marked by Henrikas Radauskas’s (1910–70) first collection of poems, Fontanas (The Fountain, 1935), where he openly proclaimed the idea of denying art as reality and distanced himself completely from the main grand interwar narratives: the glorious past of Lithuania, a part of which was the myth of Vilnius, as well as the countryside as the nation’s cultural pillar.

Radauskas’s position in the interwar literary field can only be reconstructed retrospectively, as he was a little-known poet between the wars. The Fountain, which conversed with romantic and neo-romantic poetics and combined classicist forms with avant-garde images, went almost unnoticed. In 1944, like most Lithuanian writers, Radauskas escaped to the west. He was “consecrated” as a classic writer of Lithuanian literature by writers born in independent Lithuania, most of them also emigrants, who refused to view literature as a place of struggle for the survival of the nation. Algirdas Julius Greimas, the French semiotician of Lithuanian origin, later canonized Radauskas, declaring the poet a genuine “product of independent Lithuania” and his work a watermark of Lithuanian literature’s definitive shift from romantic poetics to western modernism.Footnote ⁹

Meanwhile, during the final decade of independence, the most acknowledged and recognized writers or groups of writers were those who took more heteronomous positions—in other words, those who did not totally separate literature from public or state affairs and who supported or, conversely, attempted to question the above-mentioned grand narratives. They were more receptive to the implementation of the new doctrine. The most important intermediaries between the structures of the old (partly autonomous) field of literature and its new order, which could be called an “apparatus,” became two groups of writers: the leftist avant-garde, in a very forthright way, and, more indirectly, the neo-romantics.Footnote ¹⁰ Of course, the Soviet system did not function according to strict structural principles, so it tried to involve even the most autonomous writers in the newly created structures, unless they left Lithuania.Footnote ¹¹ The more symbolic capital a writer had accumulated before the occupation, however, the greater the likelihood was that (s)he would be involved.

Between Moscow and Vilnius: The Relationship between the Center and the Periphery

Under Stalinism, the relationship between Moscow as the center of power and the Union’s republics, including Lithuania, was completely hierarchical, cultural management included. As Vilius Ivanauskas claims, “cultural workers and the nomenklatura had to absorb images of this ‘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).”Footnote ¹² The network of cultural institutions created in the Lithuanian SSR, which included the Lithuanian writers’ union and its periodical publications, constituted a copy in miniature of the central Russian model (for example, Lithuania had only one so-called thick literary journal).

The reprisals against artists that took place in the center also had to be repeated in Lithuania, even maintaining the same roles of scapegoat and prosecutor. Still, the actors of the Soviet Lithuanian cultural field were more often accused of nationalism, and the harshest accusations were leveled against the “united stream” heresy, which implied a continuation of Lithuanian history as well as literary history on the basis of the nation rather than class. The persecution of the adherents of this “heresy” began in 1947 and 1949, and was repeated, with longer and shorter interruptions, almost until the end of the Soviet regime. This ideological concept caused great harm to the entire community of humanities-oriented cultural researchers and affected the entire cultural process in Lithuania.Footnote ¹³

The same center/periphery relations also dominated the creation of the Lithuanian version of socialist realism; however, this process still had some dynamism, which reverberated in literary texts. In 1940–41, when symbolic legitimization of the Soviet occupation was the most important thing, all means were considered suitable, including the poetics of neo-romanticism, the predominant trend of Lithuanian literature before Soviet occupation. It was evident in many works that welcomed the new Soviet system.Footnote ¹⁴ Soviet Lithuanian poetry and, in part, the prose of the war period, leaned on pre-war traditions even more. This was even promoted as a means of mobilization as in the other Soviet literatures of the period:

After the war, which ended with the second occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, the situation changed radically: a local version of socialist realism had to be created by using its already existing model. The pre-war literary tradition, poetics, and main narratives were unnecessary and dangerous; they urgently had to be replaced by the already established master plot and Grand Style.Footnote ¹⁶ In the application of socialist realism to the local conditions, however, the pre-war poetics and grand narratives of that time often intertwined. One of the best examples is the interpretation of Vilnius. Vilnius, which had belonged to Poland between the wars, functioned as the cultural symbol of national continuity. The poetic texts of socialist realism that worshiped the new Soviet Vilnius sometimes also contained images of Vilnius as the city of dukes, which had also been prominent in the interwar literature.Footnote ¹⁷

After Stalin’s death, as the dogmas of socialist realism were deteriorating or expanding; the relationship between the center and the periphery became more flexible and the forms of incorporation of tradition more complicated. It is during this period that Lithuanian socialist realism caught up with “Moscow time”: the decanonization phase of socialist realism in the western peripheries of the Soviet Union synchronized with the center.Footnote ¹⁸ The earlier phases of socialist realism—canonization and the application of the canon—can be distinguished logically rather than chronologically, since the time of their formation was much shorter than in Russian literature, covering the period approximately between 1940 and 1956.Footnote ¹⁹

Protocanon, or the Preparation Phase

The protocanon, which Hans Günther describes as a preparatory phase and a reservoir of the existing canon's texts, differed significantly in the case of Lithuanian literature from the same phase in the Russian version of socialist realism. Before the establishment and during the existence of the first Republic of Lithuania, several proletarian writers with leftist or social democratic views were active, but only on the periphery of the field of literature. Julius Janonis (1896–1917), a talented writer, even though he wrote very few poems, was the most famous. After 1940, he was posthumously made into a pioneer of socialist realism in Lithuania, as his work and biography probably most fitted the ideal of revolutionary culture. Coming from a poor family, a member of the Bolshevik Party, imprisoned for his revolutionary activities, suffering from TB and committing suicide at twenty-one, Janonis was the first Lithuanian poet-urbanist and an ideal candidate to become a Lithuanian revolutionary hero and martyr, a hybrid of Maksim Gor΄kii and Nikolai Ostrovskii. His case is interesting for several reasons.

The role of the Lithuanian pioneer of socialist realism had to be given to this poet, because either there was no prose writer with a fitting biography, or else a suitable biography could not compensate for his low literary standing. Therefore, the implementers of the socialist realist canon paid more attention, for example, to Jonas Biliūnas (1879–1910) than to the memoirs of Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas’ (1880–1935), the leader of Lithuanian Communist Party, entitled Caro kalėjimuose (In the Tsar’s Prisons, 1929), his only work and of low literary value as well.Footnote ²⁰ The early works of Biliūnas, who in his youth was involved in the social democratic movement, contain obvious criticisms of the tsarist regime, which could easily be interpreted as close to the “spirit of socialist realism.” Biliūnas has been a very important figure in the canon of Lithuanian literature due to his later works, written in the time when he stayed away from politics. He created a model of the modern psychological short story, featuring the subjective reflection of the narrator, a lyrical intonation, and a nonlinear representation of time. The themes of injustice, as well as the compassion and social themes that dominate Biliūnas's works, were important for different periods of the Soviet era: in Stalinist socialist realism, where they were applied as a means of ideological manipulation, and in the prose (and even poetry) of later years, where the type of social outsider was chosen as an alternative to the positive hero of socialist realism.Footnote ²¹

Since the national revival in the late nineteenth century, poetry occupied a very important place in the hierarchy of Lithuanian literary genres and in the literary canon, and the effects of the excess and overestimation of poetry can be felt even now.Footnote ²² Although poetry established the principle of literary autonomy during the interwar period, it remained a place for expressing national ideals and interests. Attitudes towards the homeland were sometimes critical, but irony, Pascale Casanova argues, could be a complex manifestation of national feelings.Footnote ²³ The role of the poet as the bard of the nation, which the representatives of the first Lithuanian avant-garde movement tried to deconstruct, was weakened between the wars; however, it did not disappear. It regained strength after the Soviet army occupied Lithuania. The role of the bard of the nation, which emerged from both the Romantic and neo-romantic eras, transformed into two versions. Bernardas Brazdžionis (1907–2002), who in 1941 wrote a poem calling for fighting against the Soviet occupation, “I call upon the nation, oppressed by GPU,” represented one of the versions. Later living in exile, he wrote declarative patriotic poems. To this day, Brazdžionis is sometimes called the second Maironis—the bard of the nation. The other version was represented by Salomėja Nėris (alias of Salomėja Bačinskaitė, 1904–45), one of the most famous Lithuanian neo-romantics of the interwar period. In 1940, she became a sort of “reverse” bard of the nation, almost literally and symbolically handing over Lithuania to the Soviets.Footnote ²⁴

The direct actions of the agents in the field of politics were also important in the protocanon phase: the Lithuanian Society for the Knowledge of the Peoples of the USSR that operated in interwar Kaunas, the temporary capital of Lithuania; the cultural work of the USSR embassy, which tried to attract left-wing Lithuanian writers; the attitude of local Communist Party activists towards culture (throughout the Soviet period, the position of the so-called national communists were quite strong in Lithuania), and so forth.Footnote ²⁵ Sometimes the writers’ personal qualities, such as plain naiveté or desire for honor, for which a Soviet system that emphasized the role of writers in society created the conditions for realizing, played an important role too. The creative trajectory of Salomėja Nėris demonstrates very clearly how the political and the personal intertwine, or more precisely, how politics takes advantage of the dispositions of writers or how some dispositions can be more malleable to ideological manipulation.Footnote ²⁶ It was also significant that Nėris was part of both groups—direct and indirect intermediaries—that introduced socialist realism into Lithuanian literature.

Nėris received recognition after publishing her first collection of poems, Anksti rytą (In the Early Morning, 1927). She was at the center of the Lithuanian literary community and society due to her scandalous lifestyle (after having an affair with a well-known university professor, she was sent to the Lithuanian provinces to teach). In 1931 Nėris, who wrote for Catholic cultural periodicals, shocked Lithuania by making a statement in the left-wing magazine Trečias frontas (The Third Front, 1930–31) that denounced her previous ideological and artistic position and promised her best efforts to transform her poetry into a weapon of “the exploited classes.” It is likely that the statement was written by the magazine's publishers, who also helped Nėris to write several avant-garde poems published in the same issue, because very soon she returned to the neo-romantic style that would characterize all of her Soviet-era poems. Why Nėris suddenly started cooperating with the Trečias frontas movement is still an obscure moment in Lithuanian literary history. The reasons were possibly not so much ideological as personal (perhaps a wish to provoke the conservative Catholique milieu or revenge against a former lover).

To paraphrase Tomas Venclova, Lithuanian proletarian and communist literature, which was created mostly by writers who immigrated to the Soviet Union, could be described as a withered and severed branch.Footnote ²⁷ It was little known in Lithuania and played almost no role in modernizing the country’s literature, but Soviet ideologues regarded it as part of an international proletarian project; as proof that socialist realism was a global phenomenon. A Moscow-based magazine, Priekalas (The Anvil, 1931–38), introduced socialist realism in Lithuanian as soon as it was accepted as the official doctrine of art in the Soviet Union. However, it was Trečias frontas, with which Nėris had unexpectedly begun to collaborate, and not the associates of Priekalas, that ultimately implemented socialist realism in Lithuania.Footnote ²⁸ After 1940, the writers who belonged to the literary group attached to Trečias frontas were turned into objects and subjects of the implementation of socialist realism or, according to Günther, active agents in the phases of canonization and, partly, applying the canon.Footnote ²⁹

The Trečias frontas movement is a controversial phenomenon within Lithuanian literature. Its participants, anti-fascist writers who sympathized with socialism and most of whom were not even members of the Communist Party, undoubtedly revived Lithuanian literature. They offered an artistic and ideological alternative (expressionist poetics and linguistic avant-garde playfulness) and raised not only the issue of relations with the nation but also that of social solidarity. The young artists were rebels, flirting with communist ideas but not seeking to destroy the independent state of Lithuania or introduce a communist dictatorship. They mocked Lithuanian cultural and literary traditions, neo-romanticism and lyricism in particular, but remained linked to them.Footnote ³⁰ The leadership of the illegal Lithuanian Communist Party closely watched Trečias frontas, which operated legally, and directly and indirectly pressured it to veer even further to the left. Their plan was successful: the fifth issue of the magazine, financed by the leadership of the local Communist Party, and in which Nėris announced her radical turn, proclaimed that literature must side with the exploited and become proletarian literature. Lithuanian censorship reacted to the statements by banning the magazine.Footnote ³¹

Communist Party activists, most of whom resided in Moscow, viewed the magazine as a potential source of propaganda but did not trust its publishers, considering them not revolutionary enough.Footnote ³² At the beginning of the Soviet occupation, however, the authors of Trečias frontas were made the main trailblazers of socialist realism, turned into an object of straight forward expropriation of tradition. Not everyone fit into this appropriation easily. Even Kazys Boruta (1906–65), the initiator of the magazine, did not make it into the canon in the early period of socialist realism's implementation, because he belonged to the Eser party and due to both the aesthetic qualities of his novels (magical realism based on folk narrative rather than open social criticism) and his rebellious character (he was jailed in both independent and Soviet Lithuania).

Antanas Venclova (1906–71) and Petras Cvirka (1909–47), both of whom before the Soviet occupation had written novels in a realistic style with elements of social criticism, were the most suitable candidates. Socialist realism openly appropriated their works. The two authors became important subjects for the consolidation of Lithuanian Sovietization and socialist realism in Lithuania: they were part of the delegation that in 1940 travelled to Moscow to “bring Stalin's sun to Lithuania.”Footnote ³³ Venclova served as Commissar of Education during the first years of Soviet occupation and, in 1950, wrote the lyrics for the Lithuanian SSR anthem. Cvirka published a couple of openly propagandistic collections of short stories after the Soviet occupation. However, his involvement with socialist realism had begun even earlier. The Russian translation of Cvirka's novel Žemė maitintoja (Breadwinning Earth, 1935; translated in 1937 by Aleksandras Bauža) also became a translation into socialist realism. In the Russian version, the ending of the novel was changed in conformity to the master plot of socialist realism: the protagonist, a volunteer in the 1918 fight for Lithuanian independence, becomes a strike organizer and a fighter for social equality. The story of how the novel's translation into Russian and the “correction” of the Lithuanian version was received in the Soviet Union shows that socialist realism in Lithuania was being produced even before the country's occupation (the novel garnered some very positive reviews).Footnote ³⁴ Both writers became central figures in the socialist realist canon. A monument that had stood in one of the squares at the center of Vilnius until the end of 2021 functioned as yet another sign of the canonization of Cvirka. It has been the object of heated discussions in today's Lithuania.Footnote ³⁵

According to Taisija Oral, however, “the source of Lithuanian cultural revival has always been the idea of regaining national statehood, and not a revolutionary explosion. An attempt was made to incorporate the idea of revolution into the discourse of Lithuanian culture by constantly repeating that ‘revolutionary changes’ had been taking place after the accession to the Soviet Union, but this idea had not taken root.”Footnote ³⁶ The indirect application of this tradition to socialist realism, and its support for the idea of statehood in the interwar period, was no less important than its direct expropriation. In fact, it was sometimes even more effective, as it at least partially enabled Lithuanian writers to perceive the imposed doctrine of art as something of their own, something national.

Neo-Romanticism as the part of Protocanon

The Lithuanian neo-romantics were a generation of young poets born at the beginning of the twentieth century who graduated from gymnasiums in newly independent Lithuania, studied at Kaunas University, and established themselves in the Lithuanian literary field in the 1930s. The most prominent representatives of this generation were Jonas Aistis (alias of Jonas Aleksandravičius, 1904–73), Brazdžionis, Salomėja Nėris, and Antanas Miškinis (1905–83). They all collaborated with several neo-Catholic cultural periodicals, but did not publish any manifestos themselves. Literary critics designated them as neo-romantics, thus trying to emphasize the continuity and, at the same time, the renewal of the poetic tradition that had begun with the nineteenth century national movement. From the current point of view, the neo-romantic poets were quite typical modernists who were enthusiastic about western culture as an aesthetic landmark, but were nonetheless overwhelmed by a catastrophic mood brought on by causes not only cultural (Oswald Spengler, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer were popular in Lithuania) but also political: after Hitler's rise to power, the young republic felt threatened and changed its political and cultural orientation from Germany to France.Footnote ³⁷ They are characterized by a conspicuous turn to individualism, the incorporation of elements of symbolism and avant-garde poetics into the lyrical poem, and literary self-consciousness. “Concern for the nation” and patriotic themes remained present in their poetry. However, their patriotism did not consolidate the nation for a common idea; it was instead local, expressing love for a specific place, detail, or situation.Footnote ³⁸ The emblematic landscape of Lithuania created by the neo-romantics is no longer panoramic, as in the literature of the national revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but local, as if woven from the details of the native village, and much less sublime. One can find in it completely mundane elements and traces of social criticism. Poverty and emigration were the two biggest problems in Lithuania, mentioned in the poems of every neo-romantic. Folklore played a major role in the works of neo-romantics, both structurally as an element of the poetic imagination, and as a worldview. These features of neo-romantic discourse at least partly presented affordances to socialist realism.Footnote ³⁹ Folkloric structures have the potentiality to express socialist content using national form. The emblematic image of Lithuania created by the neo-romantics was also convenient for creating a socialist realist model of Lithuania as a little homeland (in Russian: malaia rodina), making the doctrine more intimate and homelike for the local reader and later, in the post-Stalinism period, contributing to fostering national feelings within the framework of the Soviet regime. One of the most prominent emblematic landscapes in Soviet Lithuanian literature was created by Antanas Venclova in the poem Tėviškė (Homeland, 1942). Venclova started his writing career as an avant-garde poet and later chose a neoromantic and classicist style more acceptable to socialist realism.

It is likely that the implementers of the Soviet system and socialist realism also paid special attention to the neo-romantics because they occupied a central position in the field of Lithuanian literature. They were both popular among readers and officially recognized. Three of the four principal neo-romantics received state prizes, including Salomėja Nėris. Having writers of this rank in the socialist realist canon was important to demonstrate that the Lithuanian cultural elite welcomed and legitimized the advent of the Soviet regime. The fate of the neo-romantics during the Soviet occupation symbolically reflected the fate of the entire writer community: Aistis and Brazdžionis retreated to the west in 1944; Miškinis participated in anti-Soviet resistance and spent eight years in Soviet prison camps; and Nėris became the pioneer of the Lithuanian socialist realist canon.

Phases of Canonization and of the Application of Canon

Nėris's Poema apie Staliną (A Poem about Stalin), written immediately after the Soviet Union de facto occupied Lithuania in 1940, was the first work to legitimize the Soviet occupation. It was a typical socialist-realist ode, praising the glory of Stalin and offering an ideologically correct interpretation of Lithuania's historical path. In Lithuanian culture, this poem functioned not so much as a text in which elements of neo-romantic topographies (the path and the “free wind of meadows,” the latter an especially obvious poetic element from the poet's pre-Soviet poetry) were translated into the language of socialist realism, but as a performative act. Nėris went to Moscow with a delegation of the Lithuanian Seimas (Parliament) and on August 3, 1940, read an excerpt from the poem in the session of the USSR Supreme Soviet during which Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁴⁰

In the Lithuanian canon of socialist realism, the Nėris poem “Bolševiko kelias” (The Path of the Bolshevik), dedicated to Lenin and written in the same year, occupied a more important place. The work functioned in Soviet times as a more powerful text than “A Poem about Stalin” and, though it sounds paradoxical, as one of greater artistic value. “The Path of the Bolshevik” is not just another work that worships Lenin; it also declares the necessity of adopting the doctrine of socialist realism (the last part of the poem is dedicated to this). It is better rhymed, its intonation is flowing, and it creates the impression of an intimate relationship with a new ideology. The ode's intonation is constantly interrupted by the narrator's intimate comments (neo-romantic insertions of landscape), and the scene of mourning Lenin is reminiscent of the author's 1934 poem “Tėvelis miega” (Dad Is Asleep), written after her father's death. As it functioned in cultural memory, the poem indirectly became an intermediary that helped to transform Lenin, the distant leader of the peoples, into the father of the Lithuanian nation.

In the culminating part of the poem, Nėris creates an emblematic image of Lithuania—a neo-romantic landscape, a configuration of warm and intimate details representing the country:

The metaphor of Lithuania in the narrator’s palm has a cultural equivalent—the famous painting “Karalių pasaka” (Fairy Tale of the Kings, 1909) by Mikalojus Konstatinas Čiurlionis.Footnote ⁴² However, Nėris, who wrote the series of poems Iš Čiurlionio paveikslų (From Čiurlionis’s Paintings) in the same year, radically changed the meaning of the metaphor: the care and protection were “altered,” becoming a gift to Lenin, the new patron of Lithuania:

The place of the poem in Soviet Lithuanian culture is important in many aspects. As mentioned earlier, it adapts the elements of neo-romantic poetics to socialist realism, suggestively transforming the figure of the poet/bard of the nation into a glorifier of the Soviet leader. The stanza I quoted became a typical representation of Lithuania's Sovietization. It was included in high school curricula, and all students of Soviet Lithuania had to learn it by heart. In addition, it can be assumed that it contributed or at least was related to one of the material practices of Soviet Lithuania, when amber functioned not only as a poetic trope but also as a material metonymy of Lithuania: a “gift from Lithuania.” This practice was also borrowed from interwar Lithuania, which regarded amber as an archetypal sign of Lithuanianness.Footnote ⁴⁴

After the war, landscape became the most important element for expressing pure aesthetics and nationalism, and lyricism served as evidence that the writer had not yet mastered socialist realism. Nėris and Eduardas Mieželaitis (1919–97), the future winner of the Lenin Prize, were the two main authors who found themselves in this remake of paradigms.

Nėris spent several years in Russia and away from declarative socialist realism during the war. While in Russia, she wrote poems that are still considered among the best works of the reserves of Lithuanian literature. The tension in Nėris's poetry of these years arises from both the atmosphere of death she felt and her desire to live, a yearning for the homeland, and the realization of guilt and isolation.Footnote ⁴⁵ She prepared her last collection of poetry, Prie didelio kelio (By the Big Road), in which the metaphor of the road had a completely different meaning than in The Path of the Bolshevik and could be read as the antithesis of the latter.Footnote ⁴⁶ A small nation at a crossroads of history and politics, the tragic destiny of a human being in the face of great historical events, guilt and repentance, religious motives—all of this did not escape censorship. Ideologically re-edited, the manuscript was published under the title Lakštingala negali nečiulbėti (The Nightingale Cannot Help but Sing) in 1945, while an edition reflecting the author's true intentions would not appear until 1994. Were it not for her severe illness and early death, Nėris likely could have been openly condemned for adhering to the “bourgeois” tradition, as Mieželaitis was.

Mieželaitis's book of poetry, Tėviškės vėjas (The Wind of the Homeland, 1946), became the key target of ideological criticism at the General Meeting of Writers (Visuotinis rašytojų susirinkimas) that took place on October 1–2, 1946. The meeting was a local reaction to an August 1946 resolution of USSR Communist Party Central Committee that targeted the literary journals Zvezda and Leningrad. Kazys Preikšas, the Lithuanian Communist Party Secretary for Propaganda and Agitation, to this day called the Lithuanian Zhdanov, condemned Mieželaitis's book as a tool of bourgeois ideology, an attempt to cover up the “nationalist mess” in poetry.Footnote ⁴⁷ In an attempt to justify himself, Mieželaitis only increased his “guilt” by pointing out that he had taken his lead from neo-romantics, “individualists and formalists,” who, in turn, had studied with “decadent” French authors.Footnote ⁴⁸ The General Meeting, as well as the entire campaign of condemnation of Mieželaitis that took place that year, confirmed that a phase of enforcing the canon had begun.Footnote ⁴⁹

The logic of this phase was exactly the same as in other national Soviet literatures: the Lithuanian socialist realist canon was supposed to repeat the structure and development of the great canon (that is, Russian literature), apply the already established ideological and aesthetic doctrinal principles of literature to the local environment, and create a similar genre hierarchy and Grand Style, with the big genre forms in the center.Footnote ⁵⁰ Coming to occupy such a center was the novel Kalvio Ignoto teisybė (The Truth of Blacksmith Ignotas, 1948–49) by the NKVD General Aleksandras Gudaitis-Guzevičius (1908–69), which was awarded the Stalin Prize. This novel played a special role both in adapting the socialist realist canon to the Lithuanian environment and once more legitimizing Soviet occupation. The novel narrates the struggles for Soviet rule in Lithuania in 1919 and develops a typical socialist realist master plot, foregrounding a typical Soviet positive hero—a conscientious representative of the proletariat, the blacksmith Ignotas. These struggles are interpreted as the origins of the Soviet regime's establishment after the 1940s, and thus of the Soviet occupation.

The narrative of Gudaitis-Guzevičius's novel demonstrates that one of the main goals of Lithuanian socialist realism was to present a new interpretation of Lithuanian history so as to show the Lithuanian people's path towards class consciousness. The first step towards this goal was to unmask “bourgeois” Lithuania and the exploitation that flourished within it. This role was performed by works about the village and the Lithuanian kulak, which were the most prevalent genre in Lithuanian literature. They were now often criticized for paying little attention to the urban proletariat and its struggle for Soviet rule.

The historical novel, transporting the reader back to earlier epochs and demonstrating the advent of the Soviet regime as the natural result of historical development, should have advanced this goal even further. However, during the phase of adapting socialist realism, Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas created perhaps the only Lithuanian historical novel, Sukilėliai (The Rebels, 1957), and it only partially performed its designated function. For Part I of his historical novel, in which he interprets an 1863–64 uprising as the origin of the revolutionary proletarian movement, the author received the State Prize of the Lithuanian SSR. In Part II, however, written after Stalin's death and published in 1967, the writer calls indirectly for the preservation of national identity under occupation in Aesopian language. It already demonstrated the transition to the decanonization phase. The return of pre-nineteenth-century Lithuanian history, although covered by taboo zones, became a sign of the canon's disintegration (perhaps the biggest taboo subject was the Grand Duchy of Lithuania).

At this phase, reliance on national tradition was undesirable but still difficult to avoid. It still played a role in regulating the formation of the local socialist canon, and inserted itself into the structure of literary texts. There was not a very strong tradition in Lithuanian literature of novels (or prose in general) that did not deal with the agrarian world, so it was difficult to maintain the hierarchy proposed by the canon of socialist realism. Therefore, in order to perform all the functions required of literature, the help of other genres came in useful. For example, “Broliška poema” (The Fraternal Poem, 1954), written by a “re-educated” Mieželaitis and dedicated to the local “great construction” (the Drukšiai hydroelectric power plant) and the friendship of nations, performed the functions of industrial literature. Similarly, literary critics interpreted Algimantas Baltakis’s (1930–) the collection of poems Velnio tiltas (Devil's Bridge, 1957) as the equivalent of an educational novel in poetry.Footnote ⁵¹

Neo-romantic poetics, though fiercely criticized, remained the biggest problem in the process of forging new writers of socialist realism. Jakonytė, who researched the training given to young writers in the early Soviet period, analyzed some of the attempts to solve the problem. For example, one of the advisers criticized romanticism as an inappropriate relic in new literature and suggested replacing it with socialist realist “romance,” that is, “feelings for Soviet reality and man.”Footnote ⁵² An exiled literary critic, Rimvydas Šilbajoris, noting how neo-romantic motifs and “official” themes intertwine “spectacularly” in Lithuanian poetry, ironically summed things up:

Postscript, or the Phase of Decanonization

During the Thaw, Lithuanian and other Soviet literatures began again to incorporate recognizably individual persons. This happened in many different versions, and the relationship of this return to the formally valid doctrine of socialist realism and Soviet ideology was different. The official “communist man” came closest to the doctrine. This ideal was worshipped by Mieželaitis, who became the most famous Soviet Lithuanian modernist for his cycle of poems, Žmogus (Man, 1961 in Russian and 1962 in Lithuanian), which received the Lenin Prize (1962). The communist “with a human face” constituted a separate branch. Such a person is the protagonist of the so-called internal monologue novel: hesitant, admitting his mistakes, but not questioning the official policy of the party. The pioneer of this branch is Alfonsas Bieliauskas, with his novel Rožės žydi raudonai (Roses Are Red, 1959). Even though the novel's protagonist experiences a conflict between love for a bourgeois girl and the duties of a communist youth (an element of the master plot), this is portrayed as a psychological dilemma of the protagonist.Footnote ⁵⁴ His opposite is the unofficial man, or simply a man in the so-called literature of non-Soviet Lithuanian modernism. A Lithuanian person who had adapted to the system, or the literary version of the national communist, occupied the intermediate position.Footnote ⁵⁵ The authors employing the two latter versions openly returned to Lithuanian literary traditions, although they used them differently, creating completely dissimilar aesthetic and ideological effects. The literature of non-Soviet Lithuanian modernism, although it contained imprints of the Soviet era, such as Aesopian language, had almost nothing in common with socialist realism anymore. The most problematic case is literature in the intermediate position. In today's Lithuania, this version of literature remains the subject of heated discussions that go beyond the academic sphere.

The literary tradition and certain geopolitical factors also affected the structure and development of Lithuanian socialist realism, particularly in the decanonization phase. For example, the canonical works of Lithuanian socialist realism had to present, in one way or another, a “correct” evaluation of the post-war situation, that is, to interpret post-war anti-Soviet resistance as a class conflict, a struggle against “bourgeois nationalists.” This almost decade-long “war after the war” and the change in its interpretation perhaps most clearly attest to both the erosion of socialist realism and the stability of its ideological clichés. During the Thaw, the “struggle against bourgeois nationalists” was replaced by “the fight of a Lithuanian against another Lithuanian, brother against brother.” Thus treated in Justinas Marcinkevičius's (1930–2011) cycle of poems, 1946-ieji (The Year 1946, 1966), and Mykolas Sluckis's (1928–2013) novel Laiptai į dangų (Stairs to Heaven, 1963), anti-Soviet resistance assumed a tragic undertone and foresaw a dramatic situation of personal choice. These writers already viewed anti-Soviet resistance not according to a class dimension, but on a human scale. However, according to Rita Tūtlytė, their humanism nonetheless remained “socialist,” and it utilized strategies of indirect ideological manipulation and “sincere efforts to mobilize a tired and opposed society on all fronts.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The film Niekas nenorėjo mirti (Nobody Wanted to Die, 1965) by internationally acclaimed director Vytautas Žalakevičius (1930–96) could be considered the culmination of this kind of ambivalent interpretation of the post-war period. This dynamic film, with a western narrative structure, created to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Soviet Lithuania, “was a good pretext to awaken Lithuanian national culture under the banner of socialism and various social initiatives.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Jonas Avyžius's (1922–99) novel, Sodybų tuštėjimo metas (The Time of Emptying Farmsteads, 1970), the first part for which the writer received the Lenin Prize, spoke much more openly than the works of his fellow writers about the fate of a small nation in a dangerous geopolitical situation. He described the drama of armed resistance and dared to show the existential cul-de-sac of both a decent person and the nation, but the main interpretation of the protagonist remained socialist: the author considered his hesitation and inability to choose to be a weakness and an ideological mistake. Any more radical attempt to oppose the official interpretation of the armed resistance also meant going beyond the strictures of socialist realism, ending in an equally radical intervention of censorship.Footnote ⁵⁸

In contemporary Lithuania, the most heated debates have been not about the so-called Soviet classic writers such as Sluckis or Avyžius, but about Marcinkevičius, the most prominent representative of “the generation of the 1930s,” who's position was characterized as a “sandwiched particularism.”Footnote ⁵⁹ A large part of Lithuanian society calls him one of the bards of the nation, perhaps the greatest promoter of national self-awareness in the Soviet era. The most important themes of his works, both poetry and dramas, are the genesis of Lithuanian culture, statehood, the mother tongue, and the peasant's harmony with the world. Marcinkevičius created an emblematic and idyllic Lithuanian poetic landscape, following the example of the neo-romantics. He kept away from the Christian elements characteristic of pre-war poetry, however. For example, in one of the poems, in an obvious paraphrase of the neo-romantic Aistis, he replaced the cross with a river. Some historians and literary scholars have inquired whether Marcinkevičius, who wrote typical, clearly socialist works in his youth, perhaps “interbred” the literary tradition with the “truth of the colonizers,” and whether the national form perhaps concealed a socialist content.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although the idyllic scenery of Marcinkevičius's poems does not contain manifest elements of socialist realist poetics, it still hides the possibility of perceiving Lithuania as a little homeland (Rus. malaia rodina). His historical dramas, the theatrical productions of which evoked collective emotions (at the end of the play Mažvydas, the audience would chant the word “Lie-tu-va” [Lithuania]), could at the same time be described as both Soviet and Lithuanian manifestation of identity.Footnote ⁶¹

These continued discussions about Marcinkevičius's works, or those regarding the monument to Cvirka, clearly testify that the legacy of socialist realism is not an obsolete part of Lithuania's past. The debate covers several areas: first, the participation of the intelligentsia in the Sovietization of Lithuania, and the question of whether this could be explained only by the dichotomy of collaboration and resistance; second, the revision of the canon of Lithuanian literature and the representation of the writers of the socialist realist canon in the public sphere. As I was writing this article, Russia's war against Ukraine was breaking out, and the debate on both of these issues only intensified.