The Secret Understanding of Souls in Lithuanian Literature
The Secret Understanding of Souls in Lithuanian Literature

Summary/Abstract: The phrase the secret understanding of souls was coined by a Lithuanian poet Sigitas Geda in 1983, the years of Soviet stagnation, when he developed the idea of a universal language of art; it stated that artists knew each other through the network of special symbolic relationships, as if in a special spiritual substance (Geda 1983: 143). The secret understanding of souls implied an idea that the language of art, in particular that of poetry, comprised experiences of sainthood and a feeling of eternity. At the same time in the 1980s and 1990s, Geda’s phrase, the secret understanding of souls, circulated in discussions between poets and literary critics, as well as in articles and reviews, gaining a double meaning: (1) that of a universal language of art (secondary modelling systems, according to Lotman), which liberated for creation those who understood it; (2) that of a concrete Soviet epoch where art existed in captivity. Under such restrictions, artists had to invent a special means of communication, an Aesopian language.

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