Scholarly record

“WHERE BREAD WAS SWEET AND FRAGRANT”: LATVIA AND NATIONAL CHARACTER IN ILZE KALNARE’S WRITING

I. Kacane, O. Kovzele

Abstract

Nowadays the debate on national character has become one of the central issues in the context of ever-growing globalization tendencies and the most recent expressions of nationalism. Contrary to the big nations that most often take for granted who they are, the Latvians have always dwelled upon the aspects of their identity and a range of issues associated with it. Being the “culture of a closed type”, i.e. an issue of an individual choice, Latvianness acquires also the features of the “culture of the open type” becoming supra-individual. Therefore, looking at self-portraits – often referred to as cultural stereotypes – is one of the ways of reflecting upon Latvianness and the Latvian national character. Although the strategies used for the description of national character in literary works are diverse, they often discuss the issue of national stereotyping involving the construction of binaries and characterize both an author’s individual worldview and the nation in a particular cultural-historical epoch. The paper is aimed at the description of the concept of national character and the analysis of the peculiarities of national character in little studied Latvian writer Ilze Kaln?re’s (1918–1968) creative works, especially in the prose of the 1930s, focusing on the perception of the “self” and the “other”, “one’s own” and “strange”. Creative writing by Kaln?re is a striking testimony to the processes of the Latvians’ national and cultural self-identification. It has a strong national-patriotic tenor and tries to answer the question “Who are the Latvians?”. The “self-images” (Selbst-Bild) contrasted with the “hetero-images” (Fremd-Bild / the others) reveal the peculiarities of national character and bring to the forefront the issue of Latvian national identity. The writer who felt strong patriotic attachment to her country was deported to Siberia in 1949; although she returned to Latvia in 1956, her literary works were rediscovered only after 1990. Having been born in the year the independence of the Republic of Latvia was proclaimed, Kaln?re will celebrate her centenary in 2018.

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