Nuotykiai, kančia ir propaganda: Antrasis pasaulinis karas sovietmečio lietuvių prozoje vaikams
Adventure, Suffering, and Propaganda: World War II in Soviet Lithuanian Children’s Prose

Summary/Abstract: The subject of war in children’s literature is problematic because of its impact on the addressee’smentality and of adults’ ideological manipulations. The article examines the representation ofWorld War II in Soviet Lithuanian children’s prose, i.e. in the texts about the years under Germanoccupation written during the Soviet occupation. Most of the literary works about the waraddressed to the young adult reader were dominated by male protagonists. The analysis of shortstories and long-short stories by Liūnė Janušytė, Mykolas Sluckis, Jonas Dovydaitis, VytautasPetkevičius, Vytautas Bubnys, Vladas Dautartas and Emilija Liegutė from the late 1940s to 1990sreveals a strongly ideologized interpretation of World War II as a battlefield between major powerswith Lithuanians stuck in-between. The positive characters support the Soviet troops, alwaysdepicted as kind, friendly, and understanding, while the Germans are caricatured or shown asextremely brutal. The post-war narrative contained elements of adventure and playfulness; laterliterature more and more focused on children’s sufferings (disabled families, orphans, death, andetc.) and criticized the very phenomenon of war. However, propagandistic heroism remainedthe 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) thatpresented the main character (a Jewish boy) not as a hero but as a victim of war

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