Lietuvių egzilio literatūros iššūkiai

Abstract

The personal dilemma of a person living abroad and brushing up against several cultures in a bilingual situation becomes a problem for any emigrant at any time. It shows up in everyday life and in public space, but it acquires especially sharp contours in cultural contexts. We can discern two tendencies in Lithuanian exile literature. Members of the older generation of writers assign a particularly important role to traditional marks of Lithuanianism. Lithuanian historical topics occur frequently in their writings, many of which are straightforward historical novels. By contrast, writers who matured in exile or were born outside Lithuania emphasize the quest for a meaningful relationship with their Lithuanian identity and language. Some authors of Lithuanian descent who write in English have not turned their back on Lithuanian topics: autobiographical elements and details of their nation’s or family’s history are prominent in their works. Irene Mačiulytė- Guilford may be interesting in this respect; in her work two images of Lithuania collide: the (then) real one of Soviet Lithuania and the romanticized one she extracted from her parents’ stories and her education in Lithuanian Saturday-schools. The narrator of Valdas Papievis’s novel Vienos vasaros emigrantai (One summer’s emigrants) lives between two cities, Vilnius and Paris, as he is looking for his identity. The image of travels, wanderings, pilgrimages, of life as a never-ending road recurs constantly in this work of a Lithuanian prose writer living and working in Paris. Dalia Staponkutė is a philopher and translator who has lived for many years in Cyprus; the appearance of her book of essays Lietumi prieš saulę (By rain before the sun) was probably inspired by her own sense of double identity provoked by the clash of two experiential worlds, cultures, and languages. [...]