Kostas Korsakas ankstyvuoju kūrybos ir visuomeninės veiklos laikotarpiu

Abstract

Based on the numerous documentary data, the article attempts to discuss the peculiarities of activities of the professor and academic of the Soviet Lithuania and a long-lived director of the Lithuanian Institute of Literature and Folklore (1952–1984) Kostas Korsakas during his early period and the first years of the occupied Lithuania. The study allows to assert that in defence of himself and his ideological views in the first half of the 1930s, Korsakas boldly criticised the managing bodies of the underground Lithuanian Communist Party. From the mid – 1930s, Kostas Korsakas joined the leftwinged group of the Lithuanian writers and was one of its leading figures. Korsakas criticised the authoritarian regime of Antanas Smetona and tried to go hand in hand with the writers of Western Europe, who openly declared their deep sympathies to the Soviet Union and did not avoid closer contacts with the communists. That allows to speak about the reduced opposition between Kostas Korsakas and the communists and the gradual rise of this writer at the outset of Lithuania’s occupation in June 1940.