The Borderline situation and the border crossings in the Baltic prose at the turn of the 90's
ENThe article deals with the reflective, essay-type and bold prose in Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian literature of post-communist period which tends to go beyond all the borderlines marked in the literature of the Soviet period. The philosophically reflective prose helps us realise the Soviet / post-Soviet individual's identity problems and is one of the catalysts of the political changes in the Baltic states at the turn of the 90's. I have selected three novels from this prose tendency which can be described as novels of liminality and which have become like the border phenomena in their national literary contexts. They are the novels by the Lithuanian author Ricardas Gavelis: “The Poker in Vilnius” (“Vilniaus pokeris”, 1989), Latvian author Aivars Tarvids: “Transgressor” (Robežpārkāpējs, 1990), and Estonian writer Tönu Önnepalu (pen-name Emil Tode): “Border State” (“Piiririik”, 1993). The novels' protagonists can be called the borderline situation heroes. According to Bildungsnovel tradition they are outsiders who dissent from the surrounding world. I have characterized the novels of liminality from the point of view of post-colonial criticism because this kind of novel is a typical post-colonial prose variety. I have concluded that the mentioned prose texts of Baltic literature show this process of colonisation as a cultural bomb (using the theoretician of postcolonialism Wa Thiong'o Ngugi's concept) and a consequence of colonisation as colonisation of the mind or the captive mind (using Czesław Milosz's concept). All these three novels of the Baltic authors reveal us the Soviet/post-Soviet human being's unenviable condition at the end of the 20th century. The protagonists of the novels try to get free from the mind colonization, to break the disturbing physical and mental borders. They start their way to freedom but do not get free.Their development or Bildung is not possible, for they are real border situation figures. The mentioned novels of liminality uncover the fact that although the national border has formally been abolished, the mental border still exists.
