Charleso Dickenso kūrybos recepcija lietuvi literatūros kritikoje (III dalis) | The Reception of Charles Dickens in Lithuanian Literary Criticism (Part III)

Although traditionally Dickens has always been regarded by Lithuanian critics and literary scholars as an emblematic English writer, one of the great-est representatives of the Victorian realist novel in England, his writing, however, has been given only cursory treatment in Lithuania, almost never until recently crossing the boundaries of biographical ar-ticles, reviews and notices with a biographical slant scattered in the press, particularly, but not only, dur-ing the early stages of reception. There is no book specifically dedicated to Dickens’s art by Lithuanian literary scholars, no comprehensive, fundamental and completely scholarly investigation of his writing. The critical assessment of Dickens’s writing has generally been coming in the form of reviews and articles dedicated to Dickens, in the form of prefaces and afterwords accompanying the translations of his books. In the inter-war years, Dickens was perceived as the great humanist, romanticist, and critic of the social evils of the Victorian England; he was glori-fied for his Christian ethics and his ‘Christmas phi-losophy’ with the focus on goodness and ‘religion of the heart’, with his cult of fireside tranquility. In the Soviet period, it is important to stress the tremen-dous influence of Marxist and communist ideology on the reception of Dickens who was favoured by the Marxist critics. In his writing they found the suit-able object to dissect using the tools, whatever blunt, of the Marxist approach, which was the only possi-ble method of literary analysis in Soviet times.Thus, during the period of Soviet occupation, Dickens was perceived as a typical representative of the social novel and of critical realism in English literature. His novels were popular because of political and social implications; he was the most translated and celebrated of English authors as providing a critique of capitalist society. This communist and Marxist bias was a crucial factor affecting the further recep-tion of Dickens and putting many readers at large off his writing. Since the Soviet regime was abhorent to most people, they hated or at least looked with sus-picion at everything that was praised and promoted in Soviet times.The epic character of Dickens’s novels, the so-cial problems unfolded in them, realistic characteri-sation might have been a model for Lithuanian prose in the inter-war and in the Soviet periods; however, one would be hard pressed to trace direct influence of Dickens’s aesthetics on Lithuanian writers.Traditionally, Dickens is still highly regarded in the academic circles and his writ