Alfonsas Aldonis: Writing a Soviet Poem

Abstract

The article studies the genesis of poems by one of the most famous Lithuanian poets of the Soviet era Alfonsas Maldonis (1929–2007). It follows the methodology of genetic criticism and compares versions of manuscripts and texts of poems that have already been published. The main attention is given to poems “Awakening from Sleep”, “White Mountains”, “Morning Wind”. The poet’s first manuscripts are usually more ordinary, containing everyday realities and even open critique of Soviet life. While editing the manuscripts, the author sometimes only deletes or replaces some words with neutral ones (names of religious holidays, realities reminiscent of Soviet repression), but more often, the image is fundamentally redesigned, the particulars are replaced with abstract images, creating a multifaceted reading. The original ideas do not disappear but seem to be taken into the poem’s underground layer. The manuscripts’ analysis reveals how Maldonis created his distinctive poem and how an internal censor is involved in the process, suggesting which words would never be printed in a book published by an official publisher. Rarely, but there are also opposite cases where Soviet symbols are inserted into an ideologically neutral text. Maldonis’s poetry, however, contains signs similar to what Czesław Miłosz called the “captive mind”. It is difficult to say whether those few sovietisms stem from internal conviction or external ideological pressure to write bright, optimistic texts.