Prancūziškosios Kauno inteligentijos orientacijos sovietmečiu: žurnalas „Katakombos“
French orientations of the Kaunas intelligentsia in soviet times: The magazine “Katakombos”

Summary/Abstract: Under the Soviet occupation the natural development of Lithuanian culture was interrupted, national literature suffered from the ideological terror, and the knowledge of the Western literature was outside the law: the works by many foreign authors, not meeting the standards of the Soviet ideology, were eliminated from literary studies, scholarly research, and libraries. Despite that, a lively interest in the Western (especially French) culture and literature persisted. This interest marks the self-protection of a free spiritual space and cultural autonomy, and a demonstrated belonging to the context of Western civilization. Eventually, propagation of the French literature and culture (which especially increased in Kaunas) became an axis of the long term and wide-branched underground cultural activity of intelligentsia. This article presents an overview of the manifestations of such Western oriented consciousness in Soviet Kaunas. The activity of the group of people – the core which was formed by Juozas Keliuotis, Petras Klimas, Vaclovas Šiugždinis, Petras Matkevičius, Pranas Mikalauskas-Antalkis, and others – ranged from secret gatherings in private apartments, sharing memories and experiences from their past in France, discussions of the news about French culture and literature, poetry readings, and lectures, to the translations of Oscar Milosz’s and other French authors’ works, the organization of their underground publishing and distribution, and the birth of illegal periodical “Katakombos” (“Catacombs”) in 1975. The desire of intellectuals to spread unfettered cultural and literary thought among Kaunas society materialized in forty six issues of the cultural magazine edited by Mikalauskas-Antalkis and published till 1978. During the Soviet period the focus on French culture and literature in Kaunas meant a strategy of a particular cultural stance opposed to the Soviet ideology. This focus also woke an attention to Oscar Milosz’s (who lived in France and wrote in French) personality and literary works. The underground activities fostered the knowledge of literature produced in Western democratic countries, which in its turn influenced the activation of Lithuanian national consciousness in Kaunas.

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