Violeta Kelertas
“Come into My Time.” Lithuania in Prose Fiction, 1970-90
Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Pp. 251. $39.95; $15.95
Reviewed by Diana Spokiene

Come into My Time serves the important purpose of introducing a text of Lithuanian prose fiction to the contemporary English reader. It contains the introduction, written by the editor of this volume, Violeta Kelertas, and fifteen short stories in English translation, represented here by several Lithuanian writers, including Romualdas Granauskas, Birute Baltrušaityte, Juozas Aputis, Saulius Šaltenis, Eugenijus Ignatavicius, Ramunas Klimas, Rimantas Šavelis, Ricardas Gavelis, and Saulius Tomas Kondrotas.

In her informative introduction, Kelertas offers the reader a brief survey of the historical, political, and literary contexts in which Lithuanian literature has to be understood, because history and culture in this part of the world “have been more intertwined than they normally are elsewhere” (3). Geopolitical realities have historically determined the development of Lithuanian literature. As Kelertas points out, Lithuania has always been a crossroad for political occupiers: two centuries under the czarist Russian regime, two decades of re-established independence between the two world wars, and then an abrupt end of freedom as a result of secret clauses in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939. Because of this, Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union, and at the end of World War II had once again become subject to the Soviet regime.

During the period of the Soviet occupation, the maintenance of political and cultural identity was crushed by Stalin’s mass deportations and suppressions of the Lithuanian intelligentsia. Writers who stayed in Lithuania had to support the politics of the “people’s republic” by lauding communism and Stalin as the “bringer of the sun.” The scheme of socialist realism became “an instrument for communist indoctrination and Russification” (6), and the slightest deviation from it was censored. During the post-Stalinist time, Lithuanian writers introduced new issues into their fiction, combining the experience of the past with the hard post-war realities. Lithuanian prose was influenced by the stream-of-consciousness technique and was imitated by writers all over the Soviet Union. However, for reasons of censorship as part of the situation of literature, many aspects of social and political realities could not be depicted with psychological complexity and subtlety, and writers had to keep to more stereotypical portrayals of reality and to depicting the usual mix of classical realism and romanticism, all blended with socialist realism. Nevertheless, as Kelertas emphasizes, the fiction of this time helped develop new modes to express characters’ inner worlds by concentrating “on the formal level rather than on the thematic one” (6).

The prose fiction published in this anthology represents the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, when Lithuanian writers became more familiar with Western literary trends and developed their skills in an effort to communicate the most important cultural and social issues in a totalitarian state. By using such literary techniques as allegory, fable, irony, and myth, they hoped to evade both the censorship and the pressure of socialist realism. Suggesting that these heavily coded and complex texts might be difficult to understand for English readers, especially for those who have never lived under a totalitarian regime, Kelertas provides the reader with the “native” interpretations of the stories in order to explain some hidden meanings and “codes.”

The stories unify the connected themes, elements, and motifs that are relevant to Lithuania as well as to the former Soviet republics. The topics include those such as Nazi violence, Stalin’s crimes (e.g., Baltrus?aityte·’s “Under the Southwestern Sky,” Gavelis’s “Handless”), the examination of changes in the society brought by collectivization and urbanization (e.g., Granauskas’s “The Bread Eaters,” Aputis’s “The Flying Apple Trees”), and the humiliation, guilt, and sense of loss (e.g., Aputis’s “The Author Looks for a Way Out,” Kondrotas’s “The Suspended House,” Klimas’s “What I Thought about on the Bus Ride to See My Former Classmate”). Specifically Lithuanian themes are the love of nature, pride in the country’s history, closeness to the land, patriotism toward the homeland, and elements of Baltic mythology. On the other hand, however, fifty years of isolation and repression have resulted in psychological consequences for individuals which are commented on throughout the stories, such as alienation from traditional familial and social patterns, rising conformism, the tendency to see the world only in black and white, as well as other social ills, such as escapism into alcoholism (e.g., Šaltenis’s “The Ever-Green Maple”) or aggression and violence (e.g., Aputis’s “Wild Boars Run on the Horizon”).

Generally, Come into My Time succeeds in presenting the very balanced collection of Lithuanian prose fiction. The translations are precise and clear, and maintain the spirit of the original. Four of them (“The Red Forest,” “The Flying Apple Trees,” “What I Thought about on the Bus Ride to See My Former Classmate,” and “The Author Looks for a Way Out”) previously appeared in the journal Lituanus. The information about the authors at the conclusion of the book gives some aspects of their biographical contexts, literary developments, and themes.