| Abstract [eng] |
The dissertation seeks to newly conceptualize the situation of the Baltic post-war exile and the way it was reflected in the Lithuanian and Latvian novels through the lens of the postcolonial criticism. Forced emigration after the Second World War is related to cardinal changes, thus the following post-colonial concepts marking the shifts become the analytical instruments: liminality (V. Turner), hybridity and mimicry (H. Bhabha), imagined community (B. Anderson), nostalgia (S. Boym), and trickster (M. Bachtin). The analysis focuses around the Latvian and Lithuanian exile novels of the second half of the 20th century about war and life in exile written by the authors who suffered the same fate. The researcher uses a binary scheme of physical and mental colonization to consider the selected body of works. The chapter “Physical Colonization” analyzes war novels along the male/female gender lines. The “Mental Colonization” chapter explores works that reflect the scale of the survival strategies; the scale ranges from attachment to one‘s own culture to its voluntary renunciation. Three means of interface with the new countries stand out, which help to shed light onto the three stages of identity transformation of an emigrant, namely anti-colonization, hybridization, and self-colonization. The post-colonialism used in the analysis of Baltic novels and its proposed definitions proved to be functional and effective. The conclusion can be drawn that the emigration experience and identity transitions don‘t exclusively pertain to the ethnic nature, but rather are universal. |
