Beata Kalęba

The main goal of this article is to analyse literary representation of Lithuanian responsibility for Holocaust in Lithuania in the novel of Sigitas Parulkis Darkness and Company (Polish edition 2020) in the context of modern Lithuanian history politics – especially the reception style of prose on the Jewish-Lithuanian relations and the politics of memory. Vital context is also provided by the novel Izaokas (written between 1960 and 1961) by the emigrant writer Antanas Škėma, which hasn’t been translated into Polish, yet which can be treated – as the author attempts to prove – as one of the crucial hipotexts of Darkness and Company. The comparative reading of both texts leads to the conclusion that – despite society’s expectations – Darkness and Company isn’t a “revisionist” work and it isn’t supposed to be mainly read from the ethical perspective, but rather from the epistemological and psychological one instead. This stands in contrast to Izaokas, where the reader’s attention is directed towards the sphere of ethics and metaphysics; while the main theme of Izaokas – which seems to be an interesting example of an experimental modernist novel – is memory, the postmodernist Darkness and Company focuses on post-memory.

The main question discussed in the article is: why was it the Lithuanian emigration environment in USA that found Miłosz’s poetry a testimony of the era (de facto – their own experience) during the first decade after the WWII. To answer the question mainly two publications are interpreted: the first one is Miłosz’s poetry volume translated into Lithuanian, entitled Epochos sąmoningumo poezija (Poetry of the Era’s Self-Awareness) with introduction (by Miłosz) and afterword (by a poet Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas); the second one is a Lithuanian literary magazine „Literatūros lankai” („Literary sheets”) where Czesław Miłosz published, and where some interpretations of Miłosz’s works, written by Lithuanian writers and philosophers, were published as well.