7 - Antanas Venclova

Summary

HINSEY: Let's begin by discussing your father's responsibilities from 1945 to 1954—

VENCLOVA: My father had no formal duties except being a member of the Supreme Soviet: this meant he made frequent trips to Moscow, where the MPs unanimously voted for all laws proposed by the Kremlin. However, he was a freelance writer of official stature. His friends Salomėja Nėris and Petras Cvirka had died immediately after the war. Cvirka's death in 1947 was a particular blow to our family—he had been very close to us for many years, and he succumbed to a heart attack at the young age of thirty-eight. (There were attempts to link his death to the notorious “Doctor's Plot,” but these were unsuccessful. Today, some say he was murdered by Stalinist Bolsheviks, but I consider this an unfounded rumor.) Cvirka was adored by a large part of the general public, and therefore his death and funeral were memorable events in postwar Lithuania. After Nėris and Cvirka passed away, my father became perhaps the most visible author in Lithuania, although he was never as popular as his friends, and also of lesser talent (a fact of which he was well aware). There were famous living writers from the older generation—Sruoga, Mykolaitis- Putinas, Vienuolis—but they had to be “reeducated,” whereas he was a loyal party member.

HINSEY: What was your father's literary production during this period?

VENCLOVA: As I mentioned, a book of his poetry had appeared in the immediate postwar period, written in Russia during the war. The poems were by and large nostalgic, and often did not contain any Soviet ideology. He edited the collected works of Cvirka and Nėris and certain Lithuanian classics; in addition, there was his translation of Eugene Onegin. However, in 1947 or 1948, he was publicly accused of following the “single stream theory” (which had qualified all classics as uniformly progressive—whereas, according to the authorities, many were now seen as reactionary and had to be forgotten). In addition, there had been a secret denunciation accusing him of Lithuanian nationalism. He only learned about this much later, but he had undoubtedly begun to feel an impending threat. His next several books of poetry were by and large propagandistic.