“This collection brings a variety of perspectives to bear on the role and significance of literature in the USSR, specifically on the nature and function of what the editors call Soviet multinational literature. … This volume meets its stated ambition of overcoming the ‘dualistic schemes’ that often afflict research on Soviet literature through a judicious application of the concept of the literary field. The book should be of interest to students and teachers of history, politics, literature, Soviet studies, and related fields. It has a unique value for its sophisticated treatment of the subject matter and coverage of non-Russian literatures of the former USSR.” —Violeta Davoliūtė, Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, Lithuanian Historical Studies, vol. 23

Aušra Jurgutienė is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore. She has published more than 70 articles and is author of two monographs in Lithuanian: New Romanticism from Longing (1998), and The Art of Literary Interpretation: The Hermeneutical Tradition (2013). She is also the editor and co-author of academic textbooks and readers in literary theory.

Dalia Satkauskyte is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore. She is the author of monographs in Lithuanian Language Consciousness in Lithuanian Poetry (1996) and Profiles of Subjectivity in Lithuanian Literature (2008), and author of more than forty articles in Lithuanian, English, Russian, French, Polish, and German on contemporary literature, literary theory, and sociocriticism.

Preface

Introduction
Dalia Satkauskytė

Soviet Literature as Theoretical and Historical Problem

Soviet Multinational Literature: Approaches, Problems, and Perspectives of Study
Evgeny Dobrenko

The Role of Aesopian Language in the Literary Field: Autonomy in Question
Dalia Satkauskytė

Between Universalism and Localism: The Strategies of Soviet Lithuanian Writers and “Sandwiched” Lithuanian Ethnic Particularism
Vilius Ivanauskas

Contradictions in Lithuanian Literary Field

Atheist Autobiography: Politics, the Literary Canon, and Restructured Experience
Nerija Putinaitė

Sartre and de Beauvoir Encounter the Pensive Christ
Solveiga Daugirdaitė

The Production of Eimuntas Nekrošius’s Kvadratas as a Palimpsest of Soviet-Era Memory
Loreta Mačianskaitė

The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets, Their Illusions and Choices
Donata Mitaitė

The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism that Legitimated Soviet-era Modernism
Aušra Jurgutienė

Hermeneutics of Truth and Compromise in Literatures of Other Soviet Republics

Ukrainian Literature of the Late Soviet Period: The History of Three Generations of Poets
Valentyna Kharkhun

State of Emergency Literature: Varlam Shalamov Vs. “Progressive Humanity”
Pavel Arsenev

Reading Literary History through the Archives: The Case of the Latvian Literary Journal Karogs
Eva Eglāja-Kristsone

Hamlet and Folklore as Elements of the Resistance Movement in Estonian Literature
Anneli Mihkelev

Index
Biographical Notes