CHAPTER FIVE

Lithuanian Voices

1. Lithuanian Letters in the U.S. The list of American works featuring Lithuanians is short; it apparently consists of three novels. However, for such a small nation, not a “global player” in Franzen’s words, three novels authored by Americans can be seen as sufficient and even impressive. After all, three American authors found Lithuanians interesting enough to make them the main characters of their works. Two of those works, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, became bestsellers and popularized the name of Lithuania in the U.S. and the world. The third work, Margaret Seebach’s That Man Donaleitis, although overlooked by critics and readers, nevertheless exists as a rare token of admiration for an obscure and oppressed people of the Russian empire. Many other small nations never made it to the pages of American texts. The best they could do was to present themselves to Americans in their own ethnic writing in English. However, the mere existence of such ethnic texts did not guarantee their success with the American audience. Ethnic groups from Eastern Europe for a long time presented little interest to Americans. As noted by Thomas Ferraro, autobiographical and biographical narratives of “immigrants from certain little-known places of Eastern Europe . . . did not attract much attention” (383). He mentions texts by a Czech, a Croatian, a Slovakian and a Pole written between 1904 and 1941, and explains the lack of attention to them from American public: “the groups they depict remained amorphous in the national imagination and did not seem to pose too much of a cultural threat” (383). The latest work of Warner Sollors offers a new, or heretofore well- forgotten, approach to American literature as not just multicultural but multilingual. Among the formidable tasks that Sollors sees lying ahead are the discovery and study of immigrant literature in all European languages (7). He anticipates new work on American literature in such languages as Lithuanian (8). According to Sollors’s new definition of American literature, Lithuanian-American authors and their Lithuanian language texts are seen as part of American literature. However, if applied to Lithuanian émigré authors who arrived in the U.S. in the 1940s, the recent attitude to the multilingual heritage of American literature faces certain conceptual complications. The Lithuanian intellectuals who retreated to the West as a result of Stalinist Russia’s annexation of their country for a long time considered themselves Lithuanians in exile rather than Lithuanian Americans. Therefore, literature in Lithuanian written in the U.S. between 1946 and now presents more interest to Lithuanian readers and scholars than it does to Americans. The language is a minor issue, while the literary tradition and material are big ones in this case. As noted in Lithuanian Literature, Lithuanian writers in 124 Aušra Paulauskienơ residence in the U.S. such as Petras Tarulis, Antanas Vaiþiulaitis and others “did not renounce their customary styles or favorite themes” (Kubilius 346– 347). If exile adjusted their themes at all, it was in the opposite direction from what one might expect. Instead of adding American themes, enforced emigration only strengthened the nostalgic motif of the homeland (347). These principles of patriotic content and traditional expression were continued by the new generations of émigré authors, Birutơ Pukeleviþinjtơ, Alơ Rnjta, and Aloyzas Baronas among them, in whose works “Lithuania remains the basic thematic centre” (Kubilius 347). At the same time the works of younger writers are “somewhat more open to Western cultural influence and to realities of non-Lithuanian life and problems” (347). In such works, émigré sensibilities are addressed in the tradition of psychological Lithuanian prose but revealed through the eyes of a modern person born and raised in post-war Western world (347). Despite this latter body of literature which dramatizes the escape to the West or focuses on the psychological aspects of émigré life, even the younger émigrés in most of their works preserve the vision of the homeland and continue to write about the old Lithuanian village and the legendary Lithuanian past (Kubilius 347–348). Moreover, they continue to write in Lithuanian, which for younger generations of Lithuanian émigrés has become a second, not the first, language. Such tenacious clinging to the Lithuanian tradition, even by those who were born and raised in the U.S., can be explained mostly by the recent political status of Lithuania as a country and people in bondage and the responsibility assumed by Lithuanians in exile to preserve Lithuanianness abroad. Since not only the country but also the minds of its inhabitants were in danger of Soviet contamination, the political as well as cultural tradition of Lithuania had to stay alive in the free world. Thematic choices of individual writers were influenced by the political goals of the Lithuanian exile community as a whole. The recent collection of short autobiographies, Egzodo rašytojai [Writers in Exile]26, published in Lithuania in 1994, reveals that, in some cases, Lithuanian writers in the West felt restricted in their literary choices and resented the imposition of political goals on their artistic expression. Agnơ Lukšytơ, residing in Australia, refers to these restrictions as a “muzzle” put on a writer (Egzodo rašytojai 470). Émigré literary critics demanded that émigré authors write only about life in independent Lithuania and only about Lithuanians, Lukšytơ claims (470). If a literary work portrayed other cultures, its non-Lithuanian theme diminished its value in the eyes of Lithuanian émigré critics (470). From Lukšytơ’s reminiscences, one can conclude that ideological and thematic uniformity of Lithuanian literature in exile was imposed and guarded by literary critics. Even though many émigré writers chose nostalgic themes by their free will, others were pushed to conform. Regardless of how big a role the critics played in the writers’ choice of their subject matter, the fact remains that Lithuanian themes prevalent in