Vol. 13 No. 1 (2019): XIII International Symposium Contemporary Issues of Literary Studies : Political Events of 1980-1990s and Literary Discourse
Politics and Literature - Ambivalent Integrity

Literature in The Political Context of The 1990s: Return of The Non-occupied

Jurate Landsbergyte-Becher
Lithuanian Culture Research Institute

Published 2019-12-20

Keywords

  • Literature,
  • Occupation,
  • Disinformation,
  • Non-occupied Testimony,
  • Transcendentality

Abstract

After the 1990s, the creators from the non-occupied areas rejoined Lithuanian literature: writers, poets, partisan leaders and deportees who survived Gulag camps and cold Northern death zones. The literature of non-occupied managed to avoid a powerful ideological interception of distorted times–disinformation covering the Soviet narrative of a long post-war history. Disinformation as a powerful weapon of occupants was and still is very influential to intellectuals of the world and unique to literature writers. The article explains this critical collision of history, politics and literature in Lithuanian literary field. The structure of disinformation and facts about the altered historical discourse is proven in the book Disinformation (2017) by Jon Pacepa and Roland Ryshlak. The Lithuanian literature of the un-occupied is based mostly in memoirs and diaries of deportation victims like Dalia Grinkevičiūtė (her book had a few titles Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea, 1988, and Shadows on the Tundra, 2018). Her and partisan writers’ testimonies, published after 1990, created a paradigmatic turn in Lithuanian literature, cinema, and visual arts. This kind of exploration of the freedom of historicism is essential to Baltic Self iin literature.