Sovietinės lietuvių literatūros istorijos metodologinis pervertinimas

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Sovietmetis; Literatūra; Patriotizmas; Propaganda; Istorizmas.

ENThe author of this chapter draws on contemporary historiographic methodologies to examine the writing, under the supervision and editorship of the director of the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature, Kostas Korsakas, of a four-volume Soviet academic Lietuvių literatūros istorija (History of Lithuanian Literature, 1957-1968), and considers what kind of model of literary development it offers. This work developed a Marxist understanding of the national literature’s evolution and reinforced the Socialist Realist canon, which constituted the most important orientation of Soviet-era Lithuanian literary studies and school literary textbooks. The most interesting thing in this history is the paradoxical intersection of the work’s declared purpose (scientific, objective truth) and its non-academic (propagandist, mendacious) result. Marxist ideology led the authors of Lietuvių literatūros istorija to explore the complex question of what produces literature. They were unsatisfied with the argument, by previous “bourgeois” historians, that the source of literature was individual talent, and tried to identify the elements that literature unconsciously absorbs from its social environment. In Soviet literary history, however, Marxist principles were dogmatized, the hermeneutics of suspicion serving its primitive propaganda and equally primitive, so-called criticism of bourgeois literature and aesthetics.All of Lithuanian literature was reorganized according to the classical opposition of “progressive” (centred around the literary figures of “Trečias frontas” (The Third Front) versus «reactionary» (post-war čmigrčs were excluded). But the largest portion of the text was dedicated to an ideologically schematic evaluation of the classic figures of Lithuanian literature, both recognizing the importance of their works and applying a Marxist critique that viewed them as ideologically limited. Despite its ideological specificity and critique of “bourgeois histories,” the historiographic methodology of the Soviet period should not be seen as opposed to bourgeois modernity, as it enabled the metanarrative to flourish. In its ideological re-working of Lithuanian national literary history, Soviet literary history retained its metanarrative and did not generate anything qualitatively significant. Dedicated to entrenching Soviet patriotism, its metanarrative cannot be characterized as a pure alternative to “bourgeois nationalist” historicism and is better interpreted according to ideas of deconstructive hybridity. [From the publication]