Laikinoji sostinė lietuvių literatūroje

The object of the research is the development of the temporary capital image in the literature. This study aims to analyze the tendencies of the literary mythopoetics of the interwar Kaunas caused by specific historical circumstances, and to track the shifts in reflection on the temporary capital in the Lithuanian literature brought about by changes in the historical, political, social and cultural situation of the 20th century and the beginning of 21st century.The method of mythopoetic analysis of a city applied for this research is directed to the recognition of characteristic symbolic images of temporary capital which have been crystallised in the collective consciousness and appear as literary texts. The historical-political circumstances had a decisive influence on the trends mythologizing the temporary capital in the 20 and 21st centuries in Lithuanian literature. The social and cultural issues facing temporary capital and interwar Lithuania in general took the form of framework for mythologised narrative about a pernicious City – one that stands in the path of the individual’s life as a fateful challenge to be overcome in the search of identity. The mythopoetics of interwar Kaunas completely changed its direction in the postwar émigré literature: with the net of historical circumstances receding to the background and the tendency of mythologisation gaining strength, the social-cultural contradictions of independence period retreated to the background and the narrative of temporary capital fatefully converged with the reflection on the fate of the state it represented. Contrary to the narrative of the temporary capital which was idealised, reducing political and social contradictions in the diaspora literature, in the Soviet Lithuania the memory of the interwar Kaunas, as well as the whole of period of the independent Lithuanian, was ideologically demonised, bringing the vices of the bourgeois and authoritarian regimes to the first place. The contemporary myth of the temporary capital is generated by the antagonism between the independence and the Soviet occupation: the progressive, Western-oriented culture of the interwar Kaunas and the creative breakthrough of the artists and intellectuals of the temporary capital are contrasted with the cultural, intellectual and spiritual stagnation of the totalitarian system