1. Christopher James Fort, “Inhabiting Socialist Realism: Soviet Literature from the Edge of Empire” (PhD diss., The University of Michigan, 2019), 18–19, at https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/153485/cfort_1.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed January 20, 2022).

2. Lithuanian literature joined the project of “Soviet multinational literature” during its development in the Stalin era, while the majority of other national literatures underwent this during the “unification” of literatures in the 1920s and early 1930s; see Dobrenko, Evgeny, “Soviet Multinational Literature: Approaches, Problems, and Perspectives of Study,” in Satkauskytė, Dalia and Jurgutienė, Aušra, eds., The Literary Field under Communist Rule (Boston, 2019), 6Google Scholar.

3. Loreta Jakonytė, “Socrealistų kalvė: Jaunųjų rašytojų mokymai ankstyvuoju sovietmečiu,” in Dalia Satkauskytė, ed., Tarp estetikos ir politikos: Lietuvių literatūra sovietmečiu: Kolektyvinė monografija (Vilnius, 2015), 113. Jakonytė and Fort explore the general notion of the literary field proposed by Pierre Bourdieu.

4. Casanova, Pascale, “La guerre de l’ancienneté,” in Casanova, Pascale, ed., Des littératures combatives: L’internationale des nationalismes littéraires (Paris, 2011), 22Google Scholar.

5. Some interwar modernists who fled west began to passionately declare their love for the lost homeland.

6. The concept of “normal” literature is proposed by Giedrius Viliūnas, see Giedrius Viliūnas, Literatūrinis gyvenimas Nepriklausomoje Lietuvoje: 1918–1940 (Vilnius, 1998), 11.

7. According to Pierre Bourdieu, in democratic societies, the fields of power and economy affect the cultural field, but do it indirectly and inconsistently: “The literary or artistic field is at all times the site of a struggle between the two principles of hierarchization: the heteronomous principle, favorable to those who dominate the field economically and politically (‘bourgeois art’), and the autonomous principle (‘art for art’s sake’).” See Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and introduced by Johnson, Randal (New York, 1993), 41Google Scholar.

8. Primarily right wing, but left-oriented literature and the literary press also existed.

9. Greimas, Algirdas Julius, Apie viską ir apie nieką: Žmogus, visuomenė, kultūra (Vilnius, 2019), 189Google Scholar.

10. For Bourdieu, “apparatus” is a pathological condition of a field “when all movements go exclusively from top down, the effects of domination are such that the struggle and the dialectics that are constitutive of the field cease.” See Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J.D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, 1992), 102.

11. As the Soviet army approached in 1944, almost two-thirds of the Lithuanian writers who were members of the Lithuanian Writers’ Association that was active before the first occupation left the country.

12. Vilius Ivanauskas, “Between Universalism and Localism: The Strategies of Soviet Lithuanian Writers and ‘Sandwiched’ Lithuanian Ethnic Particularism,” in Satkauskytė and Jurgutienė, eds., The Literary Field under Communist Rule, 39–40.

13. Švedas, Aurimas, In the Captivity of the Matrix: Soviet Lithuanian Historiography, 1944–1985 (Amsterdam, 2014), 54–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. See Ričardas Pakalniškis, “Lietuvių literatūros skilimas ir prieškarinės tradicijos,” in Vytautas Kubilius, ed., XX amžiaus lietuvių literatūra (Vilnius, 1994), 170–97.

15. Lankutis, Jonas, ed., Didžioji Spalio socialistinė revoliucija ir lietuvių literatūra (Vilnius, 1967), 395Google Scholar.

16. Katerina Clark proposes the notion of a master plot as the invariant structure of the Soviet novel. See Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981).

17. About the relics of the prewar Vilnius campaign in the early Soviet era see Davoliūtė, Violeta, The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War (London, 2013), 27–32Google Scholar.

18. I borrow the concept “Moscow time” from Taisija Oral, who in turn refers to Pascale Casanova and her proposed term, “the Greenwich meridian of literature.” Casanova argues that it is a common standard for measuring time in the international literary space, the point of “a present on the basis of which all positions can be measured, a point in relation to which all other points can be located.” See Taisija Oral, “Lietuva daugiatautės sovietinės literatūros metalauke,” in Satkauskytė, ed., Tarp estetikos ir politikos, 43; Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. DeBevoise, M.B. (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 82Google Scholar.

19. On the phases of the socialist realist canon see Hans Günther’s “Zhizn΄ennye fazy sotsrealisticheskogo kanona” in Hans Günther and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (St. Petersburg, 2000), 281–88.

20. The main means of establishing the canon were the high school literary curriculum and academic works on the history of literature. During the Soviet period, two of the latter were written: a four-volume work that began to be written during Stalinism (1957–68), and a two-volume one written in 1979–82. Both are identically titled—Lietuvių literatūros istorija (The History of Lithuanian Literature). See: Kostas Korsakas, Jonas Lankutis, and Bronius Pranckus, eds., Lietuvių literatūros istorija, 4 vols. (Vilnius, 1957–68) and Jonas Lankutis, ed., Lietuvių literatūros istorija, 2 vols. (Vilnius, 1979–82).

21. Among the numerous works on the anthropology and ethnography of the Far North published in the last four decades, I will mention only a few: Aleksandr Pika and Bruce Grant, eds., Neotraditionalism in the Russian North: Indigenous Peoples and the Legacy of Perestroika (Edmonton, 1999); Nikolai Vakhtin, “Native Peoples of the Russian Far North,” in Polar Peoples: Self-Determination and Development (London, 1994), 29–80; Igor Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia (Hanover, NH, 1999); Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY, 1994); expanded Russian edition: Yuri Slezkine, Arkticheskie zerkala: Rossiia i malye narody Severa (Moscow, 2008); Marjorie M. Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective (Princeton, 1999); Gail Fondahl, Gaining Ground? Evenkis, Land, and Reform in Southeastern Siberia (Boston, Mass., 1998); Andrei V. Golovnev and Gail Osherenko, Siberian Survival: The Nenets and Their Story (Ithaca, NY, 1999); Alexia Bloch, Red Ties and Residential Schools: Indigenous Siberians in a Post-Soviet State (Philadelphia, 2003); Peter Jordan, Material Culture and Sacred Landscape: The Anthropology of the Siberian Khanty (Walnut Creek, CA, 2003); Alexander D. King, Living With Koryak Traditions: Playing With Culture in Siberia (Lincoln, NE, 2011). A quite valuable overview of writing on Northern indigenous peoples is provided in Piers Vitebsky and Anatoly Alekseyev, “Siberia,” Annual Review of Anthropology 44 (2015), 439–55.

22. In Lithuania, the unofficial prestige of poetry grew even more during the Thaw, and it remained very high until the end of the Soviet period. This was due to two interrelated factors: first, the specifics of poetic language enabled the writer to indirectly criticize the regime—poetry having perfected the so-called Aesopian language; and second, censorship restrictions became a precondition for modernizing poetry, thus confirming Jorge Lois Borges’s famous dictum that “Censorship is the mother of metaphor.”

23. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 186.

24. By the reverse bard of the nation I mean the structural role, or the position in the literary field, not an ethical judgement.

25. On the activities of the Society and the USSR Embassy, see Tamošaitis, Mindaugas, Didysis apakimas. Lietuvių rašytojų kairėjimas 4-ame XX a. dešimtmetyje: monografija (Vilnius, 2010), 65–83Google Scholar.

26. Bourdieu defines disposition as the unconscious or semi-conscious tendencies in an agent’s social behavior. See “Disposition(s)” in Dictionnaire international Bourdieu (Paris, 2020). Kindle edition.

27. See, among many others: Ol΄ga Lagunova, “Anna Nerkagi: ‘Za sebia vosklitsaiu i za vsekh,’” in Sergei Komarov and Ol΄ga Lagunova, eds., Na moei zemle: O poetakh i prozaikakh Zapadnoi Sibiri poslednei treti XX veka (Ekaterinburg, 2003), 261–348; Viacheslav V. Ogryzko, V szhimaiushchemsia prostranstve: Portret na fone bezumnoi epokhi (Moscow, 2006); Sergei Komarov and Ol΄ga Lagunova, Literatura Sibiri: Missiia, etnichnost΄, aksiologiia (Tiumen΄, 2016). The majority of the articles in the anthologies: Petr Tkachenko, Tatiana Komissarova, and Viacheslav V. Ogryzko, eds., Khantyiskaia literatura: Sbornik, (Moscow, 2002) and, Viacheslav V. Ogryzko, ed., Nenetskaia literatura: Sbornik (Moscow, 2004) are permeated with a spirit of empathy for and solidarity with the research subject, which transforms them into semi-journalistic and at times memoiristic texts. These publications are nonetheless an invaluable source of information.

28. The majority of Lithuanian proletarian writers and journalists living in the Soviet Union were killed in 1937, during the Great Purge.

29. See Mark Lipovetsky and Mikhail Berg, “Literary Criticism of the Long 1970s and the Fate of Soviet Liberalism,” in Evgeny Dobrenko and Galin Tihanov, eds., A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism: The Soviet Age and Beyond (Pittsburgh, 2011).

30. Venclova, Vilties formos, 309.

31. There are a few studies about several of these little-known authors, for example, individual chapters of the dissertation by Alla Poshataeva, “Literatury narodov Severa: Rol΄ dukhovnogo naslediia v khudozhestvennom opyte sovremennosti” (PhD diss., The Gorky Institute of World Literature, 1989). See a synopsis of her theses at: https://rusneb.ru/catalog/000199_000009_000044654/ (accessed 2/16/2022). Sergei Komarov divides the Siberian native authors into three generations: the older, born before the 1930s; middle, born before 1945; and the youngest, born after the war, see “Mladopis΄mennye literatury v sostave literatur Tiumenskogo kraia [opyt obshchei kharakteristiki],” Literatura regionov v svete geo- i etnopoetiki: Materialy XIII Vserossiiskoi nauchnoi konferentsii Dergachevskie chteniia—2018 [g. Ekaterinburg, 18–19 oktiabria 2018 g.] (Ekaterinburg, 2019), 302. Nevertheless, this classification is on the whole a relative one, since quite a few authors born after the war had to create texts in their own dialects for the first time. Hence, in this article I use the plural term “first generations.”

32. The writers of Trečias frontas were not welcomed into the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in Moscow (MORP). See Tamošaitis, Didysis apakimas, 49.

33. This phrase is attributed to Kazys Boruta, who called the Constitution of the USSR “the sun of Stalin.” The phrase was used in informal circles during the Soviet era and in the post-Soviet period as an ironic designation for the Soviet occupation.

34. Tamošaitis, Mindaugas, “Tarp iliuzijų ir tikrovės: Petras Cvirka priešokupaciniu dešimtmečiu,” Colloquia 24 (2010): 50–66Google Scholar.

35. The first monument to a Lithuanian writer built in Soviet Lithuania (in 1959) survived for a long time, until November 2021, due to protests from various groups in society. One group argues that the monument is a sculpture of the famous sculptor Juozas Mikėnas, while another claims that the monument was built for a talented interwar writer and not for Petras Cvirka, a Soviet political figure whose biography is further tainted by his complaints against other writers. A third group defends the square itself, contending that if the monument is removed, the square can simply fall into the hands of real estate developers. During the writing of this article, the Vilnius City Municipality demolished this monument to the “traitor of the nation.”

36. Bruce Grant, “Siberia Hot and Cold: Reconstructing the Image of Siberian Indigenous Peoples,” in Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine, eds., Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture (New York 1993), 231.

37. This political turn was crucial for many intellectual trajectories, including that of Greimas: “How I then became French, the merit goes to Mr. Hitler. It’s Hitler who decided to blackmail Lithuania, not to accept its exports. Lithuania thus had to reform its economy and politics and turn to France. . . the government decided: now we’re going to create French lycées. But there weren’t any professors of French. So three hundred guys were sent to France with scholarships to learn French and become French professors. I was a law student. I told myself: why not go to France?” See Thomas F. Broden “Toward a Biography of Algirdas Julius Greimas (1917–1992),” Lituanus 57, no. 4 (Winter 2011), at http://www.lituanus.org/2011/11_4_01Broden.html (accessed June 28, 2021).

38. The poetry of Brazdžionis is an exception. For example, an idea that unifies the nation in his poetry is the myth of Vilnius, which is strongly represented in his collection of poems Kunigaikščių miestas ([Vilnius, the] City of Dukes. Vilnius, 1939).

39. Caroline Levine defines the affordances of literary forms and patterns as particular social constraints and possibilities, the link between formal and social; “those patterns and arrangements carry their affordances with them as they move across time and space.” See Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (New Jersey, 2015), 6.

40. Nėris wrote the poem at the behest of Vladimir Dekanozov, Deputy Chief of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. Nikolai Pozdniakov, the Soviet ambassador in Lithuania, commissioned it, a fact that Nėris’s friends remember the poet herself confirming. See Ignas Malėnas, “Mano bičiulė Salomėja Nėris,” Aidai 6 (1958): 59–66.

41. Literal translation. For the Lithuanian original, see Salomėja Nėris, Raštai II (Vilnius, 1984), 30. In the same year, Nėris published the poem “Eglė žalčių karalienė,” (Eglė, the Queen of Grass Snakes, written 1937–40), which was based on a folk narrative. It contains no traces of socialist realism; however, the themes of choice and betrayal are central.

42. Čiurlionis’s “Fairy Tale of the Kings” has functioned as a pretext, motif, or intertext in many emblematic works of Lithuanian poets, written by both classic writers of socialist realism (for example, Antanas Venclova’s “Čiurlionis,” 1941) and the younger generation of poets, the latter viewed as the wreckers of socialist realism. In almost all those cases, as in Nėris’s poem, the small size of the native land is either mentioned directly, or else the impression of smallness is created using the details of the landscape.

43. Literal translation. For the Lithuanian original see Nėris, Raštai II, 31.

44. Lijana Natalevičienė, “Metal Art for the Public and for the Home,” at http://www.mmcentras.lt/cultural-history/cultural-history/applied-arts/19551974-folkloric-modernism/metal-art-for-the-public-and-for-the-home/76987 (accessed June 20, 2021).

45. Benedikts Kalnačs, Jūratė Sprindytė, Jaan Undusk, eds., 300 Baltic Writers: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania: A Reference Guide to Authors and Their Works (Vilnius, 2009), 223.

46. Nėris uses the same Lithuanian word “kelias” for both path and road.

47. Vytautas Kubilius and Ričardas Pakalniškis, eds., Rašytojas pokario metais: Dokumentų rinkinys (Vilnius, 1991), 57, 112.

48. Kubilius and Pakalniškis, eds., Rašytojas pokario metais, 83.

49. On the “Mieželaitis affair” see also: Elena Baliutytė-Riliškienė, Eduardas Mieželaitis tarp Rytų ir Vakarų: Pasivaikščiojimas su Waltu Whitmanu ir staugsmas su Allenu Ginsbergu (Vilnius, 2019), 122–26.

50. Evgeny Dobrenko, “Socialist Realism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Cambridge, Eng., 2011), 102.

51. Jonas Lankutis, Socialistinis realizmas lietuvių literatūroje (Vilnius, 1959), 72.

52. Jakonytė, “Socrealistų kalvė,” 127.

53. Rimvydas Šilbajoris, Netekties ženklai: Lietuvių literatūra namuose ir svetur (Vilnius, 1992), 233.

54. The novel of the so-called internal monologue had become an “export quality brand” of Soviet literature. See Jūratė Sprindytė, “Vidinio monologo romano kontradikcijos,” in Satkauskytė, ed., Tarp estetikos ir politikos, 397–421. For a postcolonial interpretation of Bieliauskas’s novel, see Rasa Balockaite, “Bourgeoisie as Internal Orient in the Soviet Lithuanian Literature: Roses Are Red by A. Bieliauskas, 1959,” Journal of Baltic Studies 47, no. 1 (January 2016): 77–91.

55. On the beginnings of Lithuanian national communism, see Vladas Sirutavičius, “National Bolshevism or National Communism: Features of Sovietization in Lithuania in the Summer of 1945 (The First Congress of the Intelligentsia),” The Hungarian Historical Review 4, no. 1 (2015): 3–28.

56. Tūtlytė, “‘Socialistinio humanizmo’ literatūra,” 88.

57. Anna Mikonis-Railienė and Lina Kaminskaitė-Jančorienė, Kinas sovietų Lietuvoje: Sistema, filmai, režisieriai (Vilnius, 2015), 221.

58. Censorship did not fail to take note of part III of Avyžius’s novel. Part IV was published only in the perestroika years. The censors banned the publication of Jonas Mikelinskas’s novel, Juodųjų eglių šalis (The Land of Black Firs), written in 1962–67, because it openly doubted the official version of “historical development.”

59. Vilius Ivanauskas decribes “sandwiched” ethnic particularism as “the gravitation to the All-Union level and adaptation of Soviet universalism while at the same time reacting to local demand and supporting expressions of ethnic particularism.” See Vilius Ivanauskas, “Between Universalism and Localism,” in Satkauskytė and Jurgutienė, eds., The Literary Field under Communist Rule, 53. About the generation of the 1930s see Donata Mitaitė, “The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets: Their Illusions and Choices,” in Satkauskytė and Jurgutienė, eds., The Literary Field under Communist Rule, 116–37.

60. Paulius Subačius, “Liminalios tapatybės Justino Marcinkevičiaus sovietmečio lyrikoje,” in Aušra Jurgutienė, ed., XX amžiaus literatūros teorijos: Konceptualioji kritika (Vilnius, 2010), 370–88.

61. The main character of Marcinkevičius's poetic drama Mažvydas (1977), one of the parts of his dramatic trilogy, is the author of the first Lithuanian book, The Simple Words of Catechism (1547). Mažvydas was a Protestant pastor, but the drama does not problematize religion at all. Recent research by Lithuanian historians has revealed that the themes of history and nationality in Marcinkevičius's dramatic trilogy do not go beyond the boundaries drawn by Soviet historiography. See Aurimas Švedas, “J. Marcinkevičiaus drama Mindaugas sovietinės ideologijos, istorijos politikos ir istoriografinių konjunktūrų lauke,” Colloquia, No. 30 (2015): 30–55; Nerija Putinaite, Skambantis molis: Dainų šventės ir Justino Marcinkevičiaus trilogija kaip sovietinio lietuviškumo ramsčiai (Vilnius, 2019).