"Dark shadows of the past will forever remain with US", or fathers and sons: boundaries and frontiers, walls and bridges in soviet and postsoviet literature

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«Dark shadows of the past will forever remain with US», or fathers and sons: boundaries and frontiers, walls and bridges in soviet and postsoviet literature

Maksim Valerievich Kyrchanoff, Voronezh State University

Abstract

My goal is to provide an analysis of problems created by social, cultural and intellectual boundaries found revealed within differing literary historical periods. Writers, poets and intellectuals such as David Shrayer-Petrov and Maxim Shrayer (1936-1967); Antanas Venclova (1906-1971); Tomas Venclova and Konstantine Gamsakhurdia (1891-1975); and Zviad Gamsakhurdia (1939-1993) are all examples of Soviet, post-Soviet and antiSoviet literatures. This article focuses upon problems documented in the development and expression of social and ethnic identities found within the texts of intellectuals who belonged to different generations by elucidating the contradictions between fathers and children; and by exploring how different generations in literary history described either their attitudes supporting nationalism or revealed themselves as members of the myriad forced or voluntary adherents to Soviet Communist ideology.

In this context, Soviet and post-Soviet literature can be approached as an historical record that describes geographical, experiential, social and intellectual boundaries between people, cultures, and governments - meaning that they are not only poems, essays, or works of fiction, but evidence of the changes in our socio-political structure and therefore a touchstone to changes in our modern history. Representatives of the first and second generations from this literary history either use different languages or write in two languages simultaneously, a in part due to the fact that emigration became an important factor that forced some intellectuals to abandon Russian language in favour of writing in English. Emigration may also have become a stimulus for the emergence and development of transculturalism within the community of intellectuals.

Keywords: Soviet literature, post-Soviet literature, Soviet literary history, Russian literary history, intellectuals, writers, prose, poetry, nationalism, identity, Sovietization, communism, anti-communism

Аннотация

«Темные тени прошлого навсегда останутся с нами»: отцы и сыновья, фронтиры и лакуны, континуитет и дискретность в советской и постсоветской литературе

Кирчанов Максим Валерьевич, Воронежский государственный университет

Автор анализирует проблемы социальных, культурных и интеллектуальных фронтиров в истории литературных династий. Писатели, поэты и интеллектуалы Давид Шраер-Петров) и Максим Шраер, Антанас Венцлова (1906-1971) и Томас Венцлова, Константине Гамсахурдиа (1891-1975) и Звиад Гамсахурдиа (1939-1993) - примеры советских, постсоветских и антисоветских литературных династий. В статье анализируются проблемы развития и проявления социальных и этнических идентичностей в текстах интеллектуалов, которые принадлежали к разным поколениям. Автор анализирует противоречия между отцами и детьми, полагая, что представители различных поколений литературных династий могли развивать ценности национализма или, наоборот, быть вынужденными или добровольными сторонниками и приверженцами коммунистической идеологии. Предполагается, что представители различных социальных и культурных поколений литературных династий могли иметь разные политические и этнические идентичности.

Автор полагает, что история литературных династий является реальным, примером географического, пространственного, социального и интеллектуального фронтира. Представители первого и второго поколений литературных династий могли использовать различные языки или писать одновременно на двух языках. Показано, что эмиграция стала важным стимулом, который вынуждал интеллектуалов отказываться от русского языка и начинать писать по-английски. Эмиграция, как полагает автор, стала стимулом появления и развития феномена транскультурности в идентичности интеллектуалов.

Ключевые слова: Династии, интеллектуалы, писатели, проза, поэзия, национализм, идентичность, советизация, коммунизм, антикоммунизм

1. Assessment of literature as a socio-political signpost of boundaries

Modern cultural and intellectual situations can be determined or imagined as evidence of social, political or ideological frontiers. They can be considered to be signposts of cultural boundaries because no modern identity can be defined as an exceptionally pure, belonging to only one national discourse that refuses consideration of any other. Modern national discourses, despite their formally national character, are heterogeneous in the extreme. As a result, it is practically impossible to map boundaries between nations or nation-states, much less to divide identities of intellectuals who belong to nations as ideological communities. It's known that intellectuals create ideologies as proposed traditions for their fellow citizens. The boundaries dividing modern cultural and social situations create an intellectual tradition and construct that, as an invention, may reveal a frontier along boundaries that could be crossed or even changed.

World history provides numerous examples of cultural, political, and intellectual conventions reframed by writers and other artists who, while belonging to the same family or social group nonetheless portrayed different realities in their texts, giving birth to myriad political projects of imagined communities and their traditions. One result was the proposal that any boundary separating one group or tradition from another is actually a permeable frontier worth exploring. Analyzing boundaries between cultures and identities is consequently one of the most promising topics in contemporary interdisciplinary Humanities. The number of possible themes in Frontier Studies is vast precisely because any perceived boundary is actually a frontier; it's a realm of study that ranges from the analysis of the frontier cases of identities of imagined communities to the examination of marginalization. Such a study reveals philosophical biases behind the strategies of nations and how they define their identities and traditions

2. Literary history and frontier studies

The analysis of individual trajectories of intellectuals who belonged to different generations of literary history and had different identities is a promising topic within contemporary Frontier Studies because it reveals the interdisciplinary potential and possibilities of humanitarian discourse. The study of literary history with regard to frontier identities allows the historian to transcend merely working as a literary historian, national historian or political historian. Instead, he or she will be researching individual and cultural identity as a heterogeneous and multi -level project.

The history of literature in these interdisciplinary studies ceases to be just a history of literature. Instead, it opens the page to transforming our understanding of social or cultural histories, the history of gender, the history of generations, as well as an intellectual history. Furthermore, such study reveals possibilities and potentials within modernist and constructivist language as found in literary history. This theoretical approach will push the historian into the Procrustean bed of constructivism, forcing him to sit between the Scylla of the imagination of literature as a construct and Charybdis of understanding of texts as attempts to promote and/or popularize identity.

3. Literary history as indicators of social and cultural frontiers

The history of 20th century literature provides many examples of works that reveal when relatives, including fathers and sons who are well - known writers, produce different kinds of literature which describe different political traditions and national identities due to their writing in different languages. These literary works are a vivid example of how borders reveal frontiers that can be crossed and result in transcultural knowledge. Writers from different generations had different identities, as well as ideological and political preferences. Their texts are narratives that cultivate diametrically opposed identities or different versions of one national identity. David Shrayer-Petrov (Давид Шраер-Петров, 1936) and Maxim D. Shrayer (Максим Шраер, 1967), Antanas Venclova (19061971) and Tomas Venclova (1937), Konstantine Gamsakhurdia (зтББфбБфобд зьЭЬбЬ'зб^об, 1891-1975) and Zviad Gamsakhurdia, 1939-1993) are just a few examples of writers whose literature reveals historical paradigms.

4. Purpose of this article

My goal is to elucidate the transformation of national identities within the contexts of described frontiers between historical eras, social and cultural generations, changes and mutations of national literatures in exile and emigration or authoritarian political regimes found in the texts of representatives of Russian-American Jewish (David Shrayer-Petrov and Maxim Shrayer), Georgian (Konstantine Gamsakhurdia and Zviad Gamsakhurdia) and Lithuanian (Antanas Venclova and Tomas Venclova) writers, rendering their works significant in the study of history. Theoretical questions pertains to the presence of impermeable borders that can become frontiers to cross.

5. Social and cultural frontiers of national and cultural identities: Konstantine and Zviad Gamsakhurdia

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia and Zviad Gamsakhurdia, significant in the literary history of Georgia, became significant and important figures in 20th century Georgian history, entering it as writers, poets, critics and intellectuals simultaneously. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, unlike his father, was a political activist, an anti-Soviet Georgian nationalist and dissident who became the first president of Georgia after the critical historical moment when it regained political independence and state sovereignty. The literary heritage of father and son demonstrates the transformations of Georgian identity experienced in the period from 1920 to 1990.

While Konstantine Gamsakhurdia sought to synthesize traditional nationalist discourse in its ethnic version with modernism and socialist realism in order to actualize national ideas within historical prose, Zviad Gamsakhurdia became known because he described Georgian history through literature as a romantic poet - yet his political message was more pronounced in his essays that synthesized ethnic nationalism, Georgian ethnical myths and anti-communist sentiments (Urusadze, 1996; Urusadze, 2004; Ghlont'i, 2007). By contrast, Konstantine Gamsakhurdia's historical prose and novels (P'ap'askiri, 2010), which were historical from a formal viewpoint, of note being “Davit Aghmasenebeli” (Gamsakhurdia K'., 2011) and “Didost'at'is K'onst'ant'ines marzvena” (Gamsakhurdia K'., 1939) can be defined as frontier despite the fact that critics of the Soviet period preferred to imagine them as realistic and ideologically politically correct, thus reinforcing a particular socio-political boundary.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia's historical prose is frontier because his works are political: he used history as an external background of contemporary political situations and circumstances within Soviet totalitarian society, where the hero - intellectual - was doomed to a marginal existence on the frontier of politics, culture, and individual creativity, relegating the hero to live within an undemocratic ideology. Gamsakhurdia's frontier-exposing texts can only be construed as socialist realism from a formal viewpoint. In fact, they synthesized modernist poetics with Georgian ethnic nationalism. Konstantine Gamsakhurdia can, consequently, be viewed as a writer depicting cultural and social frontiers: he was forced to play the role of a recognized Soviet classic writer, yet he remained a Georgian nationalist.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia's “Dionisos Ghimili” (Gamsakhurdia K'., 1934) can also be defined as a frontier text. Konstantin Savarsamidze, the novel's main protagonist is a Georgian aristocrat and emigrant - representative of a man of frontier - who lives a marginal existence on the border between the West and East, which is a frontier defining different cultures and identities, and the border between ancient paganism and Georgian Christianity (Gamsakhurdia Z., 1991a; 1991b; Tevzadze, 1996). Savarsamidze, the novel's hero, chooses between traditional Georgian vineyards and Parisian cafes painfully, between the archaic aristocratic culture of Georgia and the modern mass culture of the West (lungeri, 1981; lungeri, 1982; K'ank'ava, 1983; Lomidze, 1998). Savarsamidze is a frontier figure because his identity displays the transterritorial character of an expellee (Bregadze, 2015; Gats'erelia, 2009; Sigua, 2014; Jaliasvili, 2011).

Konstantine Gamsakhurlia's early prose is a hypertext that relies upon the fin de siecle era, to reveal a cultural frontier. His work aims at a deconstruction of the previous romantic discourse by dismantling the myth and the romantic hero it created. The result is the removal of the story from the realm of the personal to the universal, creating prose that takes the national to the level of the transnational. This transformation - or transcendence, if you will - can be mapped on the frontier between national identities, and cultural and historical eras as well. Frontierness, as Gamsakhurdia believed, resulted from the uniqueness of Georgian ethnicity and language. The absence of ethnic relatives in Europe also marginalized Georgia's status and transformed it into a European frontier within the context of several Roman and German states of the West. Therefore, commenting on Georgian-European cultural contacts, Gamsakhurdia was forced to admit pessimistically that “our loneliness was a tragedy of our history” (Gamsakhurdia K'., 2011) despite the fact that Georgia and Europe were historically and genetically close in their Christianity and shared a common struggle against the Islamic threat.

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia believed that Georgian identity represents a frontier because Georgian intellectuals cannot find their historical ancestors and predecessors, despite Georgians being among the great historical nations. He demonstrates through his writings that the frontier character of Georgia as a country and Georgian cultural identity both became visible due to the influence of several factors, including the fact that the new Georgian intelligentsia was extremely weak resulting in its supporters of new cultural and political ideas being insignificant.

Gamsakhurdia's grandson, speaking at the solemn ceremony dedicated to the 111th anniversary of the writer's birth, declared that his grandfather's Georgian literary classic sought to introduce Georgia into Europe in order to overcome the cultural and intellectual frontier between the two regions and cultures, as well as to synthesize Georgian nationalism, Christian values and principles of modernism (Gamsakhurdia K'., 2004).

Konstantine Gamsakhurdia emphasized that “we have no fighters for new ideas, and we did not reform our mission in history” (Gamsakhurdia K'., 2014). Konstantine Gamsakhurdia on occasion voiced the frontier espoused by Georgian intellectuals in Sovietized Georgia by making politically dangerous statements. At the Congress of Georgian architects Gamsakhurdia said: “utsnauri khalkhi vart kartvelebi! davit aghmaseneblis dzegli ar dgas tbilissi. dzegli k'i ara, kucats k'i ar gavimet'et” or “we, Georgians, are strange people! The monument to David Agmasenebeli was nor erected in Tbilisi. There is no a monument, there is no street” (Sigua, 2014), actualizing the contradictory positions and mixed character of Georgian identity in the Georgian SSR, which in fact is revealed through literature as being a frontier space - a moving border between Sovietized discourse and the national canon.

If Konstantine Gamsakhurdia belonged almost exclu sively to Georgian literature, becoming one of its recognized classic authors, then Zviad Gamsakhurdia - unlike his father - became a more marginalized figure because his status and cultural affiliation expressed the spirit of the frontier. Zviad Gamsakhurdia was not just a poet or university intellectual - he combined academic studies in the field of Georgian literature and his work as a Georgian translator of works originally published in European languages with his political activities (Gamsakhurdia Z., 1972;

Gamsakhurdia Z., 1990; Gamsakhurdia Z., 1996; Gamsakhurdia Z., 1993). Konstantine Gamsakhurdia asserted that Georgian history was a factor in solidifying the psychological trauma experienced by the Georgian nation, thus creating an historical lacunae. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, by contrast, sought to exalt and redeem Georgian history (Gamsakhurdia Z., 1990), by portraying the past as evidence of a symbolic frontier separating the modern Georgian nation from its past and catapulting it toward a more expansive future. The translations can be interpreted as uniting the two Gamsakhurdia generations' heritage as recorded in their respective literatures because they both were active translators of European literature into the Georgian language. Konstantine Gamsakhurdia and Zviad Gamsakhurdia participated in defining the frontier between Georgian and European cultures, promoting the integration of Georgian intellectual, cultural and literary discourses into the Western canon.

6. Father and son, communist and nationalist: lithuanian identity between lacunae and continuities of generations

Antanas Venclova and Tomas Venclova - Lithuanian intellectuals, writers, and poets - provide another example of literary periods. The political dynamics of 20th century Lithuanian history marginalized Antanas and Tomas Venclova, but their writings did not directly describe their marginality, or even their alienation from their Lithuanian culture and identity, because their marginal status took other forms. Antanas and Thomas Venclova were marginalized because their ideas, actions, and administrative positions were too radical for the era in which they lived, despite the fact that Antanas Venclova still was able to succeed in his career in the Soviet Lithuania.

The majority of Lithuanian intellectuals and writers accepted Soviet power formally while remaining passive in private, thus avoiding active collaboration with the regime, yet Antanas Venclova, by contrast, sought to make a career in Soviet Lithuania as a Soviet Lithuanian writer. He accepted his election to be a member of Liaudies Seimas in 1940, and subsequently took part in the session of the USSR Supreme Soviet which finalized the Sovietization of Lithuania, resulting in its annexation to the Soviet Union as the Lithuanian SSR. Antanas Venclova's signature is evidence to this act as it is found in the original text of the “Declaration on Lithuania's accession to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, which marks his role in the definition of boundaries described by the political and intellectual climate of 1940.

Antanas Venclova was among those Lithuanian intellectuals who agreed to collaborate with the Soviet regime and so became an agent of Sovietization of Lithuania. He held several different Soviet official positions, including People's Commissar of Education of the Lithuanian SSR (1940-1943), Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR (1949), member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Lithuanian SSR, deputy of the Supreme Council of the Lithuanian SSR and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1941 -1962), and Chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers of the Lithuanian SSR (1954- 1959). The fact that Antanas Venclova in 1950 wrote the anthem of the Lithuanian SSR (Venclova A., 1950), where Iosif Stalin and Vladimir Lenin were mentioned simultaneously, turned the writer into a boundary - defining figure in Lithuanian history; as a result, his status in the modern Lithuanian historical milieu is marginal because it has been transcended.

The anthem of the Lithuanian SSR, written by Antanas Venclova, cemented the boundary that defined Lithuanian Sovietized identity. Some of his texts defined boundaries because they fit within several discourses: political and ideological canons simultaneously, including Lithuanian nationalism, communism, and Soviet loyalty. His poem “Teviske” (Venclova A., 1942), idealized Lithuania and actualized the values found in Lithuanian nationalism. Almost thirty years later, after Lithuania was Sovietized and integrated into the Soviet ideological realm, Antanas Venclova delineated the republic's cultural boundary again by idealizing the Lithuanian language (Venclova A., 1970), imagining Lithuania as a boundary separating the Baltic world and other cultural Slavic and Germanic cultures from his own.

Understanding the conflict between the boundary and frontier status of Lithuania through the gap in its historical and cultural records, as well as realizing that “niuriosios praeities seseliais liks mums visada” or “dark shadows of the past will forever remain with us” (Venclova A., 1941c) Antanas Venclova attempted to integrate Lithuanian nationalists into the Soviet ideological canon. He recognized f isolation evidenced by the historical roots of the breaking with traditions, as well as gaps in national and historical conventions. He described his homeland as a wild, abandoned park: “miestas toks tolimas, svetimas, parkas apleistas ir senas” or “a city so distant, strange. The park is abandoned and old” (Venclova A., 1941b). Lithuania, in Venclova's poetic imagination, mutated into an unbounded realm where an abandoned and wild territory faces death (Venclova A., 1941d), and teeters on the precipice separating civilization from barbarism. The poet imagined Lithuania as a state bal ancing on the line separating two eras, a country growing outside of closed boundaries and seeking to create cultural frontiers. He compared it to a tree without roots (Venclova A., 1941a).

The texts of Tomas Venclova (Greimas, 1972; Valiukenaite, 1975; Valiukenaite, 1978; Kelertiene, 1981; Silbajoris, 1982a; Silbajoris, 1982b; Silbajoris, 1991; Kavolis, 1984; Nastopka, 1997), Antanas Venclova's son, also reveal the difference between boundaries and frontiers. Tomas Venclova recognized special social and cultural connections between himself and his father, without denying their political and ideological differences, stressing that “my father, Antanas Venclova, was a self - confident Communist. I respect him, I respect him as a person, he taught me the principles of loyalty.” (Mitaite, 2002). Beginning his career as a poet in the Lithuanian SSR (Venclova T., 1962, 1965, 1972), Tomas Venclova can be counted among the intellectuals describing social, cultural and political frontiers because he was forced to emigrate in the 1970s. His emigration transformed him into an intellectual bridging two different political and ideological paradigms. He experienced the tragedy of emigration (Venclova T., 2005), breaking old ties, separation from the Motherland and forced integration into another culture and language.

Despite the fact that Tomas Venclova (Venclova T., 1981, 1985, 1990, 1991, 2003) was able to integrate into the Western academic community successfully, becoming one of the outstanding and leading Slavicists in the United States, after the critical historical moment when Lithuania restored its independence he was nonetheless able to regain his Lithuanian citizenship and the opportunity to visit the Motherland regularly. His texts did not lose their frontier character during this time because he regularly described and documented the problems of cultural and religious Lithuanian identity and depicted Vilnius (Venclova T., 2001a, 2006) as a multicultural city on the frontiers of Baltic, Polish, Russian and Jewish cultures.

Thomas Venclova (Venclova T., 2001b) produced an opus of works filled with frontier images and motifs because he perceived Lithuanian culture and identity as a fragile territory with blurred boundaries, and this point of view brings his texts closer to his father's poetic heritage. While the image of Lithuania as a contact zone, cultural and social borderland, the space between the West and the East became inevitable in the Tomas Venclova's texts, they nonetheless also portrayed European Romance (Venclova T., 1956) motifs that reinforced the frontier character of his own personal Lithuanian poetical style. As an intellectual, Tomas Venclova was hemmed in by the strict and rigid borders of Soviet identity which he sought to expand through manoeuvres that transformed formal and informal boundaries into permeable frontiers.

7. Father and son: soviet Jews and American intellectuals (David Shrayer-Petrov and Maxim Shrayer)

The literary familial tradition of David Shrayer-Petrov (Смола, 2017; Вайс, 2011) and Maxim Shrayer (Цылина, 2017; Schwartz, 2018) is a striking example of literary documentation of the conflict between rigid boundaries and permeable frontiers in culture. Frontier narratives are evident in David Shrayer-Petrov's novel “Герберт и Нэлли” (Шраер- Петров, 1992), dedicated to the struggles faced by refuseniks and Soviet political dissidents. Herbert Levitin, the main novel's protagonist, was imprisoned within the rigid cultural boundaries of the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities denied him the right to emigrate from the USSR to Israel; as a consequence, he lost his family, his wife died, his son was killed in Afghanistan, his social ties and networks were destroyed, and governmental authorities forced him to abandon his medical profession, marginalizing him intentionally and deliberately because he opposed the government and the political ideas that the state imposed upon its citizens. “Herbert and Nellie” is a novel that depicts the social and cultural boundaries between different states, and how attempts at transcending them - to attempt to redefine them as frontiers - results in the protagonists' forced marginalization. Their response: deliberate resistance.

Heroes found in David Shrayer-Petrov's poetic texts (Шраер-Петров, 2012) are frontier characters because they have much in common with what cultures would define as `the other'. Some territories, such as Georgia, in his poetic imagination are described as frontier territories where different cultures intersect and cultural identity shifts as a result. The works by Maxim Shrayer (Вольтская, 2018; Зельцерман, 2014), David Shrayer-Petrov's son, “Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration” (Shrayer, 2007) or “В ожидании Америки: Документальный роман” (Шраер, 2016) in the Russian translation can be seen as literary attempts to remedy the boundary/frontier dilemma through the described aspirations for freedom and liberation from Soviet Jews' cultural burden of intellectual authoritarianism and cultural slavery, due to their having been refuseniks. Nonetheless, they were able to emigrate. Austria and Italy also became new frontiers for them because former Soviet Jews perceived these territories as places where they could enjoy individual, collective, and communal freedom.

David Shrayer-Petrov's memoirs “Охота на рыжего дьявола” also reflect the contradictions arising from existence on the border between different identities and cultures within the context of his personal experience. His texts (Шраер-Петров, 1989; Шраер-Петров, 2007), focus on his contemporaries, colleagues and writers and are filled with frontier motifs because their characters are marginalized, forced to remain at the juncture between different cultures, requiring adaptation to the norms of native and inherited identities, as well as those of official political and ideological conventions.

The heroes in David Shrayer-Petrov's works echo his own experience of being marginalized because they were seen as `other' in the eyes of the Soviet dominant political discourse and ideological canon. They did not abide by it, and were active in their attempts to defy it in order to actualize principles and values of inner freedom, which expanded the boundaries and limits of Soviet cultural space. The result was that some USSR intellectuals also became frontier dwellers who were officially declared traitors; they preferred to choose freedom, to abandon the borders created by the Iron Curtain because the frontier concept provided larger possibilities. Protagonists described in Maxim Shrayer's novels (Shrayer, 2009; Шраер, 2017a) exist between Russian and American cultures and consequently serve as frontier heroes because they are forced to inhabit a world where transnational and transcultural identities collide. Shrayer's characters are forced to make painful choices that illustrate the conflict between their own identities and ancestral identities, between Judaism and Christianity, and between Zionism and the American dream.

Maxim Shrayer, who admits that “writing in English or in Russian is destiny and choice” (Шраер, 2011), defines himself as an “American product of Russian culture and Jewish history” (Шраер, 2017b). His stance positions him as a frontier character with respect to his being recognized as an American writer. The frontier concepts revealed in Maxim Shrayer's prose differs from similar concepts found within David Shrayer-Petrov's texts: if the characters of the elder Shrayer are heroes of the marginal or almost marginal frontier consequently making them victims of the political system they endure, the characters of the younger Shrayer are heroes of from another frontier - the frontier of free choice, yet this freedom required that they choose to become trans-cultural hostages who are nonetheless free to create their own trans-cultural identities.

Preliminary conclusions

The main observations and proposals presented in this article are worth approaching with the intent to consider logically the range of factors that contributed to the personal trajectories of transformations and developments of intellectuals who represent these literary legacies, because their personal experiences embody the evolutionary changes between social and cultural conventions held by fathers and sons who belong to different generations.

I have done my best to describe and analyse from a socio-political and cultural perspective the intellectual and philosophical views of these fathers and sons who have left for our consideration a literary legacy, showing how these generations had different cultural and political prefer ences which emerged as the result of transformations of external ideological discourse. While these fathers and sons, together creating a literary legacy that recorded how they were either forced to accept or chose to willingly adopt and support a dominant political ideology, their works also record that there are historical cases when representatives of the first and second generations did not accept the official ideological canon but rather rejected it outright, thus criticizing the ideological preferences of the ruling political elites.

It is important when analysing the intellectual developments in the works from these fathers and sons to remember that the national identities of the communities in which they lived were not the results of their own individual political impacts and cultural contributions; rather, they are records of identities created by previous generations of intellectuals. Therefore, the heroes of this article were not founding fathers of identities of their nations, but instead actively attempted to transform the identities of the communities and groups to which they belonged. The attitudes between representatives from different generations with regard to political regimes also differed. Representatives of older generations could be forced to actively support the regime, and the ruling political elites could endow them with public recognition and privileges, cultivating their loyalty and prevent ruling classes from potential protests, because this formal recognition allowed them to be closer to the ruling class.

There are cases when fathers and sons united in their opposition to the dominant regime's political ideology. Fathers sometimes criticised the regime that repressed them but later integrated themselves into the official ideological discourse, endowing and providing the necessary symbolic attributes of the classics. Fathers and sons, as individuals and writers did not exist as monoliths, but rather exemplified the human reality of needing to change, thus revising imagined and invented categories. Only those intellectuals who were not emigrants were able to maintain relatively stable bases of identity that depended on external factors: their identity supported the formal national viewpoint of their community. For example, Konstantine and Zviad Gamsakhurdia were both Georgian nationalists, while by contrast Antanas Venclova remained Lithuanian nationalist despite the fact that he had to integrate his personal Lithuanian identity into the ideologized canon of Soviet Lithuania.

The emigration of representatives from these literary traditions underwent significant transformation in their identities due to their emigration, which is shown within the context of their adopted national identities and the literature they produced as a result. The intellectual experiences of David Shrayer-Petrov and Maxim Shrayer provides a classic example of such a transformation of identity within the context of Soviet authoritarianism as compared to the experience of someone being an immigrant to America. Prior to the ban to emigrate to Israel in the late 1970s, David Shrayer-Petrov was considered a Soviet writer despite his Jewish roots which were difficult to integrate into the official Soviet ideological canon. In the first half of the 1980s, David Shrayer-Petrov remained a Soviet citizen, yet lost his official status of being a recognized Soviet writer; despite political and ideological persecution he nonetheless remained an intellectual whose texts in the USSR were marginalized, yet were nonetheless published abroad from time to time.

Emigration contributed to a metamorphosis in David Shrayer-Petrov's status as a writer: when he became a US citizen, he regained his status as a writer, but a new question arose: to which national literary tradition David Shrayer-Petrov and his son Maxim Shrayer belong? On the one hand, this father and son left us a literary legacy written in Russian, yet Maxim Shrayer also created an opus of works in English. Both writers are US citizens, so are they American writers and part of American literary tradition? Are they Russian writers? Could they be both? It may not be possible to make a single choice and be true to their literary legacy.

It is more logical to take the view that David Shrayer-Petrov and Maxim Shrayer are American writers of Jewish origin who write in both Russian and English, actualizing national problems and motives in their texts from both languages and both national experiences. The intellectual and cultural experience of their literary legacy serves as a classic example of expansion and redefinition of frontiers in personal identity as well as literary affiliation, although the experience of other literary legacies (Konstantine Gamsakhurdia and Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Antanas Venclova and Tomas Venclova) also provide scholars with examples of breaking through boundaries to transform them into open frontiers.

Analysis of the intellectual development and cultural transformations found within the works created by these multigenerational literary traditions is evidence for the legitimacy of frontier studies as an interdisciplinary approach that provides information applicable to the analysis of main vectors and trajectories of changes and mutations of national and social identities within the context of various national literatures because representatives of different literary generations revealed in their texts the trends that determined the development of national identities of the communities to which they belonged in different periods of history, documenting oscillations between authoritarianism and democracy, national and leftist authoritarianism, tradition and modernization - all evidence of how borders can become frontiers.

Further analysis of the history of these literary legacies as a marker of the frontiers crossed by generations and identities is promising because it is evidence of the interdisciplinary potential of contemporary humanitarian knowledge, which can provide historians with the new possibility of using a wider range of methods from multigenerational literary legacies to better understand subjects from microhistory to biographical history, from the history of nationalism to social history, from cultural history to intellectual history and the history of ideas all at once. The history captured within these literary legacies may be taken as an actual living example of a frontier in geographic, spatial, social, and intellectual dimensions, confirming that geographical areas of contacts and interactions of cultures and identities are not the only examples of evident and recognizable frontiers because the historical experiences recorded by the fathers and sons leaving us their literary legacies described different dimensions of social and intellectual frontierness in its textualized forms.

intellectual literary dynasties identities

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