Adventure, Suffering, and Propaganda: World War II in Soviet Lithuanian Children’s Prose

Abstract

The subject of war in children’s literature is problematic because of its impact on the addressee’s mentality and of adults’ ideological manipulations. The article examines the representation of World War II in Soviet Lithuanian children’s prose, i.e. in the texts about the years under German occupation written during the Soviet occupation. Most of the literary works about the war addressed to the young adult reader were dominated by male protagonists. The analysis of short stories and long-short stories by Liūnė Janusytė, Mykolas Sluckis, Jonas Dovydaitis, Vytautas Petkevicius, Vytautas Bubnys, Vladas Dautartas and Emilija Liegutė from the late 1940s to 1990s reveals a strongly ideologized interpretation of World War II as a battlefield between major powers with Lithuanians stuck in-between. The positive characters support the Soviet troops, always depicted as kind, friendly, and understanding, while the Germans are caricatured or shown as extremely brutal. The post-war narrative contained elements of adventure and playfulness; later literature more and more focused on children’s sufferings (disabled families, orphans, death, and etc.) and criticized the very phenomenon of war. However, propagandistic heroism remained the principal attribute; literature praised children’s courage and active involvement in the war. The exception was a collection of short stories by Icchokas Meras The Yellow Patch (1960) that presented the main character (a Jewish boy) not as a hero but as a victim of war. Keywords: Lithuanian children’s literature, Lithuanian Soviet literature, World War II, heroism, propaganda. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15823/zz.2015.21