Browse

In the modern literary science, the issues connected with Soviet regime (censorship, interaction between ideology and literature, translation policy etc.) and its impact on public awareness and national culture are of great scientific importance. The present study examines and in the comparative perspective evaluates peculiarities of literary translation in oppressive socio-political circumstances experienced by Latvia during the Soviet occupation (1940-1941; 1944/45-1990/91). The focus is on John SteinbeckВ’s nov...

The present study considers the interrelations between the personality of a socially and politically active writer and literary and cultural processes in the country. To analyse literary processes in a wider historical and cultural context the cultural-historical view on literature was applied; in its turn, to examine the writerВ’s place within the overall cultural milieu and to determine the interaction of the authorВ’s writings and his era the elements of the biographical method were used. In Latvia, the Russian...

Mister Sherlock Holmes has appeared in the cultural space of Latvia at the very end of the 19th century. Arthur Conan DoyleВ’s detective stories were published both in the Latvian periodicals and in the books by different publishers. Unfortunately, the attitude towards the fictional character Sherlock Holmes was not serious; during the first half of the 20th century DoyleВ’s detective stories were regarded only as the phenomenon of the pulp fiction. It can be observed by the analysis of the translations carried ou...

The given article addresses the issue of Jewish text in the literary production of a contemporary Canadian writer of Latvian origin - David Bezmozgis – focusing on representation of Latvian segment in the collection of his short stories Natasha and Other Stories (2004). Publication of the said collection alongside with his other works (The Free World (2011), The Betrayers (2014)) has aroused great interest among common readers and literary scholars, who in their critical notes consider his works mainly through t...

The paper investigates memory narratives in contemporary Latvian and North American life-writing with the focus on Latvian writer Anita Liepa's autobiographical fiction and Canadian writer Alice Munro's short stories. The theoretical framework of the paper is related to the fast developing memory culture after the end of the Cold War in Europe and Latvia as well as globally, and sketches out the theoretical framework of memory writing referring to the studies of Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Paul Ricoeur, Aleida...

The genre of travelogue is regarded as one of the most readable in the contemporary North American literature. Its popularity has grown in the latest decades due to the processes of globalization and new technological developments in the world. People travel a lot; new, exotic places become of utmost interest; new typologically various travelogues appear. The question of belonging of travel narrative to fiction or non-fiction remains disputable; the frames of each are very controversial. Thus, the aim of the prese...

Cultural trauma appears when a group of people feels they were made some horrible event experience leading to indelible traces in their collective consciousness, leaving an imprint in their memories forever and changing their identity irreversibly. During the 20th century, first in the Western societies but soon also worldwide, people constantly were stating that they had been traumatized by some experience, event, act of violence or frightening, or just by sharp and sudden and sometimes even not very hostile expe...

The Revolution of 1905 and its successive events had an essential impact on the development of literature – both themes and form. In Latvia, the Revolution started with demonstration on 13 January 1905 protesting against „Bloody Sunday” in Saint Petersburg (January 9, 1905). In both events a significant role was played by intellectuals. In Russia, the attitude of intellectuals towards the events of 1905 mostly caused the dissidence that would lead to the tragic events of the October 1917 and the Civil War. Th...