Narrative strategies in Maxim Goretsky’s novel Vilnius Communards

Abstract

In the Soviet times, when the official authorities and censorship demanded that writers follow the official ideology, authors who could not and did not want to accept it were forced to develop new narrative strategies. That helped them to express their ideas, but still did not protect them from torture and premature death. Maxim Goretsky managed to say more than was allowed in those times in his novel Vilnius Communards through narrative figures and a complex system of presenting different points of view. Nominally, the narrator is one and the same person throughout the book, but there are two subjects of consciousness that can be observed in him, and they stick to different points of view: Matey Myshka’s point of view, which is on the surface, and the one of the author's himself.