Memoirs of lithuanian exile writers of the second half of XX century: genre development ; XX amžiaus antrosios pusės lietuvių išeivijos memuarai: žanro raida

Abstract

The aim of the research is to ground the statement that exile memoirs changed from documentary and political works to subjective ones, analyzing personal problems. The object of the work is the memoirs by exile writers. Analytical, descriptive and hermeneutical methods are used. The theory of autobiography by French theoretician Philippe Lejeune (1989) and the theoretical insights while analyzing autobiographical texts by Vytautas Kavolis (1998) were chosen as the theoretical background. In the research, the memoir books were divided into memoirs and genre transformations. Memoirs are subdivided into documentary and literary. The documentary memoirs start dominating around 1940, when Lithuanian was occupied by soviets. This fact is commented by the writers-politicians V. Krėvė, L. Dovydėnas and I. Šeinius, who closely observed the situation. Their memoirs are distinct because of relevant topics for the time, i.e. the abundance of facts, historical events and political details. Around 1950-1965, politics in the memoirs is changed by the problem of the relationship between the person and time or history. A distinctive feature of these texts is the abundance of tropes, figurative details, fictional elements and they are quite subjective (M. Vaitkus, J. Aistis, St. Yla, etc). The research emphasizes that at the end of the XX century (1965-2000) subjectivity becomes the main feature in order to describe memoirs. In the memory books, the focus is on the person and other people; the peculiarities of personal life get the most attention and change history and politics (J. Narūnė, M. Aukštaitė, E. Juodvalkė ir kt.). The transformations of the memoir genre (Pulgis Andriušis, J. Savickis, P. Orintaitė, B. Raila) are more common in the 6-7 decades of the XX century. This means the development of the usual genre, when the term memoirs is not sufficient to define the genre of the books. Fictionality and a double expression of the events, memoir and autobiography, essay or diary, are common for the texts.