The forms of silence in Stasys Yla’ works

Abstract

This article analyses the work of Stasys Yla (1908−1983), a priest who was a prisoner at Stutthof. Some of his texts were published immediately after the Second World War; others remained in manuscript until Lithuania’s independence and were published posthumously. The focus is on the Stutthof memoirs Men and Beasts in the Forest of the Gods, the first edition of which appeared in the United States in 1951. Unlike Balys Sruoga’s memoirs Forest of the Gods, which were published in Soviet Lithuania in 1957, a decade after the author’s death, this text was neither censored nor otherwise edited and is therefore distinguished by its authenticity. This research aims to examine how Stasys Yla’s texts convey moments of silence and what determines memory or forgetting. This study employs the typology of silence proposed by two scholars, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Chana Teeger, which deals with overt and covert forms of silence. The research describes these forms based on Stasys Yla’s texts. The paper concludes that silence is not unambiguous but fluid, changing forms, becoming silence for memory or for forgetting. The most important aspect determining these changes is the reading and interpretation of the texts and their involvement in the processes of cultural memory. The new editions of the memoirs testify to a living relationship with the published texts.