Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

This entry focuses on the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Baltic countries are at the intersection of Western and Eastern elements that combine to make them distinctively hybrid societies. From the linguistic point of view, Latvian and Lithuanian are among the oldest languages, as they belong to the Sanskrit family of Indo-European culture. There is thus a blending of major European faiths in Baltic culture (Western Catholicism, Protestantism, and Slavic Orthodoxy), and linguistic amalgamation (Germanic and Slavic) which feed and inform the narrative structures and literary output as a whole. Baltic cultures also benefit from other influences, e.g., Scandinavian, Russian, and Jewish. And at a strictly political level, in any analysis of modern Baltic societies it is fundamental to consider their annexation by the Soviet Union for almost eighty years, a historical experience that has had deep consequences for cultural life. The narrative output of the Baltic countries is fairly limited, for two reasons. The first has to do with the prevalence of oral rather than written literature. The other follows as a consequence of the prevalence of oral literature in the three Baltic countries, i.e., a relatively later emergence of specifically national literature. In this respect, it is significant that one of the major semioticians of our time, the Lithuanian Algirdas ... log in or subscribe to read full text