| Abstract [eng] |
New Historicism is a category that has fundamentally shaken the world of late 20thcentury Lithuanian and Latvian prose and is inextricably linked to the fundamental thematic, structural and stylistic changes in the novel. The new rewriting of history was first and foremost linked to the authors’ desire to recreate the authentic past through individual experience, emphasising not so much the history of the past, but the psychological reality itself, the imprints of the past in human consciousness. It can be said that Lithuanian and Latvian prose of the late 20th century was more than ever on the path of such “authentic” historicity; especially in the 1980s and 1990s, Baltic literature flourished with the rise of memoir prose and the documentary novel. Tragic memoirs about Soviet concentration camps in Siberia, the repressions in Lithuania and Latvia after the Second World War, and the partisan struggles became perhaps the most widely read books of that period. V. Adomėnas’ Who will deplore their fate, Alė Rūta’s Children of a Poor Homeland, and I. Grebzdė’s Inga are novels that combine to form a broad discourse of trauma and collective memory, representing a painful period in the lives of the Lithuanian and Latvian peoples in the 20th century. They focus mainly on the theme of exile and resistance, which has been frozen for decades by censors and other state institutions. The relevant themes of exile, resistance and emigration in these works are closely related to the experience of personal and collective trauma, the violation of fundamental structures – the breakdown of the usual social and cultural order, the undermining of values and group identity, the foundations of collective pride, the reflection on the common boundaries between order and chaos, the sacred and the secular, the destruction of the good and the evil, and the perceived identity crisis. The Soviet occupation leads to the horrific exile of the Baltic people to Siberia, and triggers the resistance – a resistance to defend the fundamental values of communities, national dignity and human self-esteem. |
