Third Front

The Third Frontiersmen ( lit. trečiafrontininkai ) are participants in the Lithuanian literary association of writers of left-wing political orientation, who published the Treyachas Frontas literary magazine ( lit. Trečias frontas ; Third Front) in 1930 - 1931 .

The association included Kazis Boruta (who lived at that time abroad), Antanas Wenclova , Kostas Korsakas , Jonas Šimkus , Bronis Raila , Piatras Zvirka , later joined by Salome Neris , Valis Drazdauskas and some others.

The Third Front members considered themselves to be representatives of the third generation of writers, replacing the Lithuanian Symbolists and the Four-Windmakers . They criticized official ideology, clericalism, and stagnation in Lithuanian literary life. Most third-party soldiers were characterized by dissatisfaction with the autocratic regime of Antanas Smetona established in Lithuania, anti-fascist sentiments, and sympathies for socialism. Initially, they promoted activism (in this case, understood as the artist’s active participation in public life) and the new creative method of neorealism (in this case, a synthesis of realism , expressionism and futurism ), seeking to combine ideological progressiveness with modernism in poetics. Then followed the rejection of spontaneous and sometimes ideologically indefinite rebellion, from avant-garde formal experiments. It was replaced by radical ideologization, an orientation toward Marxist ideology and proletarian literature, a transition to political agitation and a realistic style of writing.

In Soviet criticism and literary criticism, third-fronters were given the importance of the only correct and healthy trend in pre-war Lithuanian literature, a kind of sprout of socialist literature, the forerunner of Soviet Lithuanian literature; the influence of the Third Frontists on the development of Lithuanian literature was exaggerated.