Lietuvių ir latvių egzodo romanas: skaitytojo lūkesčių vaidmuo

The article, basing on the theory of reception, discusses the Lithuanian and Latvian expatriates’ novels and examines the mutual correlation of the horizons of meanings of the novel and the reader. In the opinion of the author of the article, as literature found itself in a new historical situation, i. e. in exile, a certain shock was experienced not only by the writers – the receivers, who actively participated in creation of meanings and modified the ways of writing also underwent a new formation. The article characterizes the prerequisites for popularity of the genre of novel, the area of its functioning, the relation between the supply and demand and the preference of the expatriate readers, oriented to specific reading codes. The author of the article states that the readers’ preferences mostly determined the “applied” character of the texts, created in expatriation and distinguishes the following main functions of expatriates’ novels: entertainment (historical and pop literature), therapy (prose on the experience of exile, balancing between a document and fiction) and texts of compensational and reminiscent character about the lost home and motherland). In the opinion of the author of the article, the great epics of expatriation are mostly revealed as a type of biographical plot, which is the narrative of expatriation as a unified cultural unit, also representing the common global expatriates’ perception. The said phenomenon, according to the author of the article, is reminiscent of the great epic narratives of the old times, in which the community expressed its collective experience