Balsai iš metalinių slėpyklų : pokario partizanų poezijos pseudonimai ir anonimai

Abstract

After a long interval of time I‘ve attempted to return to those paths that I, as a historian of literature, had embarked upon after encountering collections of poetry surreptitiously published during Soviet times and after becoming interested in the pseudonyms used there. Delving into the publications of a partisan group active in Western Lithuania, I sought to become acquainted (earlier than others did) with the diverse legacy of the resistance; to read what no other researcher had yet held in his hands; and to create my own criteria of evaluation. The result of my publications and researches, the 1991 anthology Kovos keliu žengiant is based on two identically named collections from 1948-49 and 1950 of poetry written by partisans and extensively supplemented with poems selected from local periodicals. Some of the author identifications were useful to the two-volume dictionary Lietuviškieji slapyvardžiai of Lithuanian pseudonyms (2004). In this retrospective essay I‘ve recalled the activities of two active distributors of archival material; without these activities I would not have commenced my own complex researches. I‘ve also recreated several episodes of public bibliographical searches. The most important discovery regarding pseudonyms I would hold to be the unique phenomenon of the partisan poet Aušrė, already revealed in Nemunas magazine in 1993 but fallen out of all contexts. I also call attention to the encipherment of three authors of anonymously published poetry.