Socialist realism and the psychological novels of Alf. Bieliauskas

Alfonsas Bieliauskas, an established Soviet Lithuanian writer (b. 1923), has published five major novels over the past two decades. His first three novelsDarbo Gatve (Work Street, 1956), 1 Roies iydi raudonai (Roses Bloom Red; 1959), and Mes dar susitiksim , Vilma (We Shall Meet Again, Vilma; 1962) are traditional narratives with branching plots, stereotyped characters, and conflicts based primarily on class struggle. His fourth novel, Kauno romanas (Kaunas Romance; 1966), broke with the tradition of epic narration, introducing into Soviet Lithuanian literature various stream of consciousness techniques in which a character's sense perceptions mingle with his conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, feelings, and random associations, with no direct intervention by the author. This work contributed substantially to a revitalization of Soviet Lithuanian literature after the paralysis of the post-war period. Ten years after Kauno romanas appeared Bieliauskas' fifth and latest novel, Tada kai lijo (When It Rained; serialized in the journal Pergale, November 1976-March 1977), that continued to experiment with a stream of consciousness mode of narration. These five novels present a line of development from the political epic of class struggle to the psychological novel of introspection, a development typical of Lithuanian prose in the post-Stalinist period.2 This shift of focus from historical processes to the spiritual life of the individual evolved in the face of conflicting demands faced by the Soviet Lithuanian writer. The central principle of Socialist Realism, party-mindedness, assumes that ideologically defined reality in fiction is a more important criterion of literary value than aesthetic quality.3 Thus every serious Soviet writer is faced with the problem of how to reconcile individual creative vision with a rigid definition of truth. The introduction of modernist narrative techniques makes this dilemma even more acute. For stream of consciousness presupposes an autonomous human psyche through whose subjective prism the

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• The myth of the ‘New Cain’ in the works of S. T. Kondrotas

  Audrone B Willeke•Journal of Baltic Studies•1987

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