Vincentas i Andrius. Literacki dwugłos o Holokauście na Litwie

Abstract

Vincentas and Andrius. Two Voices on Holocaust in Lithuania The main goal of this article is to analyse literary representation of Lithuanian responsibility for Holocaust in Lithuania in the novel of Sigitas Parulkis Darkness and Company (Polish edition 2020) in the context of modern Lithuanian history politics – especially the reception style of prose on the Jewish-Lithuanian relations and the politics of memory. Vital context is also provided by the novel Izaokas (written between 1960 and 1961) by the emigrant writer Antanas Škėma, which hasn’t been translated into Polish, yet which can be treated – as the author attempts to prove – as one of the crucial hipotexts of Darkness and Company. The comparative reading of both texts leads to the conclusion that – despite society’s expectations – Darkness and Company isn’t a “revisionist” work and it isn’t supposed to be mainly read from the ethical perspective, but rather from the epistemological and psychological one instead. This stands in contrast to Izaokas, where the reader’s attention is directed towards the sphere of ethics and metaphysics; while the main theme of Izaokas – which seems to be an interesting example of an experimental modernist novel – is memory, the postmodernist Darkness and Company focuses on post-memory.