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.

“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

• PrefaceIntroductionDalia Satkauskytė Soviet Literature as Theoretical and Historical ProblemSoviet Multinational Literature: Approaches, Problems, and Perspectives of StudyEvgeny Dobrenko The Role of Aesopian Language in the Literary Field: Autonomy in QuestionDalia Satkauskytė Between Universalism and Localism: The Strategies of Soviet Lithuanian Writers and “Sandwiched” Lithuanian Ethnic ParticularismVilius Ivanauskas Contradictions in Lithuanian Literary FieldAtheist Autobiography: Politics, the Literary Canon, and Restructured ExperienceNerija Putinaitė Sartre and de Beauvoir Encounter the Pensive ChristSolveiga Daugirdaitė The Production of Eimuntas Nekrošius’s Kvadratas as a Palimpsest of Soviet-Era MemoryLoreta Mačianskaitė The Experiences of One Generation of Soviet Poets, Their Illusions and ChoicesDonata Mitaitė The Art of Compromise in Literary Criticism that Legitimated Soviet-era ModernismAušra Jurgutienė Hermeneutics of Truth and Compromise in Literatures of Other Soviet RepublicsUkrainian Literature of the Late Soviet Period: The History of Three Generations of PoetsValentyna 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 KarogsEva Eglāja-Kristsone Hamlet and Folklore as Elements of the Resistance Movement in Estonian LiteratureAnneli Mihkelev IndexBiographical Notes