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The article studies the genesis of poems by one of the most famous Lithuanian poets of the Soviet era Alfonsas Maldonis (1929–2007). It follows the methodology of genetic criticism and compares versions of manuscripts and texts of poems that have already been published. The main attention is given to poems “Awakening from Sleep”, “White Mountains”, “Morning Wind”. The poet’s first manuscripts are usually more ordinary, containing everyday realities and even open critique of Soviet life. While editing the manuscripts, the author sometimes only deletes or replaces some words with neutral ones (names of religious holidays, realities reminiscent of Soviet repression), but more often, the image is fundamentally redesigned, the particulars are replaced with abstract images, creating a multifaceted reading. The original ideas do not disappear but seem to be taken into the poem’s underground layer. The manuscripts’ analysis reveals how Maldonis created his distinctive poem and how an internal censor is involved in the process, suggesting which words would never be printed in a book published by an official publisher. Rarely, but there are also opposite cases where Soviet symbols are inserted into an ideologically neutral text. Maldonis’s poetry, however, contains signs similar to what Czesław Miłosz called the “captive mind”. It is difficult to say whether those few sovietisms stem from internal conviction or external ideological pressure to write bright, optimistic texts.

The article analyzes a diptych “Two Poems about Love” written by Tomas Venclova in 1973 and its contexts. The article refers to the archived manuscript and the translation of Mandelstam’s poem “Za to, chto ia ruki tvoi ne sumel uderzhat‘…” (“For I failed to keep your hands…”) that Venclova first released in 1967. In this case, Mandelstam’s poem is important to Venclova both as a text about a city doomed for collapse, and as a work about love. It is noted that in the diptych this is not the only important poem by Mandelstam (although it was noted in the comments); images from the other poems (“Swallow,” “Leningrad”) were also quoted and reinterpreted by Venclova. Just like Mandelstam, Venclova was also opposed to totalitarianism. For Mandelstam, the post-revolutionary St. Petersburg, and for Venclova the Soviet Vilnius, represent a dying city – in the first poem of the diptych it is moved to the ocean, in such a way highlighting the threatening situation. In the first poem, the source of life is love disguised with a musical theme; the second one already talks about passing lovers – their bodies now “like stones lay next to each other.” Some poetic images are modified in Venclova’s later works. Mandelstam is still as important and will appear next to Ovid, who is only mentioned in the manuscript, in the poem “Tristia” from 1997.

Critics ranked poem “Pabudimas is miego” (Waking Up from Sleep) as one of the best Alfonsas Maldonis’s poems in his collection Rytas vakaras (Morning Evening) (1978). The first manuscript of the poem written in 1970 can be found in poet’s archive. Poem’s text and the exact date of the document indicate that the poem was inspired by the death of a famous Lithuanian linguist Jonas Kazlauskas. It is believed that the Soviet KGB which persecuted Kazlauskas is to blame for the linguist’s death. By comparing the manuscript and the printed version of the poem, we can see how the poet eliminates the details of a particular event from the text. However, the foreboding of danger and violence that is very strongly felt from the very beginning remains in the final version. The inner turmoil of the lyric subject also stays. The subject is trying but is unable to understand what kind of behavior would be suitable in that specific situation. It can be assumed that Maldonis had two goals when editing the manuscript. First, he wanted the poem to be published. The poet knew that censors would have removed the poem from the book because of the references to Kazlauskas’s death. Second, Maldonis’s aim was to write a poem which would have carried a universal meaning. From the poet’s manuscripts one can conclude that it is precisely the move from the mundanely concrete to the more general image is characteristic to the genesis of Maldonis’s poems. Keywords: Alfonsas Maldonis, archive, manuscript, versions of the poem, genesis of the poem. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15823/zz.2018.5