Fear. This word perhaps best describes this decade in Lithuanian literature – from the start of Stalin's rule in Lithuania in 1945 up to his death in 1953, and several years thereafter. Writers who did not wish to risk their lives withdrew to the West. Those that did not, and who were considered suspicious, were deported to the East. Those that believed in communism became the creators of "Soviet Lithuanian literature", even if no gesture of loyalty, no amount of praise showered upon the new order, or any effort to praise the genius of Stalin, the leader of nations, could guarantee them peace and protect them from prison, exile or destruction. There could be no talk of any kind of resistance or creation of anti-Soviet works.
Creative silence was also no protection. Silent authors who stopped writing were accused of hostility to the Soviet government and were punished. Writers had to become, in Stalin's words, "engineers of the soul", educating readers and creating the new Soviet man. If you were brave and you wanted to fight, you had only one option: retreat to the forests and become a partisan fighter, knowing full well that this was a death sentence. Unique parisan literature was created by people who, under different circumstances, would most likely have lived out their lives without writing any literature. Another part of Lithuanian literature was created in Siberian prisons and refugee camps in Western Europe.
In Lithuania, meanwhile, people were learning how to survive. And surviving without encountering newly established institutions was impossible. Writers had to belong to the Writers' Union, otherwise they could be accused of and punished for "freeloading." It was safer still to join the Communist Party. Unavoidable dependency upon institutions meant an unavoidable obedience. Everywhere – in new publishing houses, magazines, newspapers and the offices of the KGB – writers were being educated, trained and taught to write. If this failed to work, there was always Glavlit, the main institution of censorship.
The government not only issued extensive instructions for writing, it monitored how they were followed and it itself took on the role of author. One editor added text to Antanas Vienuolis' Puodžiūnkiemis, while Salomėja Nėris, upon receiving a revised and renamed collection entitled Lakštingala negali nečiulbėti (The Nightingale Cannot not Sing), pushed away the publication as she lay in her hospital bed.
Writers were educated and accused of incorrect world views and ideological errors, and were taught how to write at various conferences, during which they were entitled to admit their guilt and promise to correct themselves. One of the most important of these gatherings was the general writer's conference of October 1-2, 1946, during which — in the spirit of a decision by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party "Regarding the magazines 'Zvezda' and 'Leningrad'" — the "manifestations of literary apoliticism and modernism" were angrily attacked, and the "dawdling of undecided writers" was condemned. One of the most important teaching tools of the day was the public acknowledgement of "mistakes" and self-castigation by writers. Writers had only one choice: to become "a solder on the ideological front", and to be "healthy, industrious, and determined to walk in step with all of the Soviet people and the Party," in the words of Kazys Preikšas. Rašytojas pokario metais: Dokumentų rinkinys, sudarė Laima Arnatkevičiūtė [ir kt.], Vilnius: Vaga, 1991, p. 66.
A new canon of "Soviet literature", based on the "method" of socialist realism, was to be created, with Salomėja Nėris and her conjunctural poetry works identified as the founder of such literature (Poema apie Staliną – A Poem About Stalin), alongside the works of other authors who had travelled to Moscow in 1940 to "bring back the sun": Petras Cvirka, Liudas Gira, Antanas Venclova. Included in this canon was Julius Janonis, who committed suicide in 1917, and who wrote poems about worker solidarity, and some of the satirical works of Teofilis Tilvytis, who ridiculed the state of affairs in independent Lithuania under then President Smetona (Artojėliai – Farmers, and Dičius), but who had more difficulty joking around under the Soviets (Usnynė – The Thistle Patch).
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