Popular literature often appropriates the structural patterns of folklore. V. P. Adrianova-Peretts has observed that in Russian narrative literature prior to the 1760s it is difficult to draw a distinct line between folklore and formal literature. Discussions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russian adventure tales, the first body of original prose fiction to enjoy widespread success in Russia, have traditionally noted use of folkloric motifs, usually citing isolated moments rather than basic, underlying plot structures as examples. In fact, however, the fairytale plot, as outlined by Vladimir Propp in The Morphology of the Fairy Tale, forms the skeleton of most Russian prose tales of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The process of imposing socialist realism on Lithuanian literature, which became a part of the Soviet multinational project after the Soviet occupation in 1940, does not directly follow the general pattern of transferring the Russian model. The agents of the Soviet national literary field not only transposed standard socialist plots to local realia, but also had to transform them in order to legitimate occupation, to reject the legacy of the independent Lithuanian republic, and to reinterpret anti-Soviet resistance. In the process of inventing the national sources of socialist realism and forging “the most advanced artistic method,” overcoming the constraints of the Lithuanian literary tradition proved impossible. This article discusses the encounter of inherited literary structures with the external model and its effects on the development of Lithuanian socialist realism.

On January 21, 1920, a man named Ernst Barth stood up in Germany's Supreme Court at Leipzig to hear sentence passed upon him. The charge was “Attempted Treason”; the verdict, guilty; his punishment to be three years’ detention in a fortress. A tragic and now all but forgotten episode, the effort made to secure national rights for the Lusatian Sorbs at the Paris Peace Conference, had ended, in a German courtroom.

Tragic this episode surely was. In postwar years a small Slavic community in Germany found itself the object of bitter suspicion which had not existed before. “Die wendische Gefahr“—“The Wendish Danger“—found a place among the less felicitous journalistic cliches employed in the Weimar Republic. For more than a few Germans after 1918 the word “Wend” summoned up an image of treacherous men conspiring to tear yet another province from the prostrate Reich.

In his Pan-Slav treatise of 1837, On Literary Reciprocity Between the Different Branches and Dialects of the Slav Nation, Jan Kollár recommended that all educated Slavs ought to know the four principal Slavic “dialects”: Illyrian (Serbo-Croatian), Russian, Polish, and Czecho-Slovak. He thought that the scholar, however, should be able to use all the Slavic dialects, as well as the languages of the Slavs’ neighbors. But in a less frequently cited passage, in which he explained why his work was appearing in German, Kollar bemoaned the still limited knowledge of the various Slavic idioms, even among so-called learned Slavs: “When one wishes to make himself understood on any important matter to brother Slavs, he must use a foreign, non-Slavic tongue.”

Throughout European history the aristocracy has been involved in reform movements which undermined either ecclesiastical or monarchical power structures. Thus the nobles of southern France in the twelfth century granted protection to the Cathars, and in fourteenth-century England lords and knights offered aid to the Lollards. The support of German princes and knights for Lutheranism is well known, as is the instrumental role played by the French aristocracy in initiating the constitutional reforms which gave birth to that nation's eighteenth-century revolution. The fifteenth-century Hussite reform movement in Bohemia similarly received aid from the noble class. Here, when the Hussites were under attack in 1417 from the authorities, especially the archbishop, sympathetic lords protected Hussite priests on their domains.