The Cold War in the history of literature

ENJohn Neubauer’s suggestion to re-evaluate national histories (which he expresses in History of Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries (since 2004) and The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium (2009)) encouraged me to take an other look at the new, more-complicated processes of integration and disintegration in histories of national literature during the Cold War (1946–1991). For this reason, the focus of my paper will be dual: on the internal hostility of national literary history and the splitting of national self-images caused by the Cold War, and on the need to preserve national memory and self-awareness. I will discuss the ambivalent identity of the Lithuanian literature: how it was disintegrated during the Cold War with the Bolshevik thesis about the existence of two cultures in each national culture, and how it preserved the basic features of integration. Although my research will be mostly based on examples from the history of Lithuanian literature, I believe it can also be relevant for other cultures that survived the Soviet period and ideological censorship. The goal of this article is to discuss how complicated the processes of “junctures and disjunctures” were in Lithuanian literary history during the Soviet occupation, and how they remain relevant in contemporary historiography. Keywords: Lithuanian literary history, Soviet occupation, national disintegration and integration, comparative historical research.

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