Andrejs Upīts

Biography

In the spring of 1920 Upīts was arrested in Estonia: he was making his way into Latvia secretly from Soviet Russia. There followed Riga Central Prison, an investigation on a charge of taking part in a society whose aim was to overthrow the social order, and house arrest in Skrīveri Parish on the guarantee of two prominent men. In August an amnesty of the Constitutional Assembly set him free.

He was born on 4 December 1877 (22 November, Old Style) in Skrīveri, in the Governorate of Livonia, into a tenant farmer’s family. He studied at the parish school and then on his own, chiefly languages: German, Russian, English, French and Italian. He worked as a village teacher and translator and took part in the work of the Riga Latvian Society. He began to publish very young: in the newspaper “Mājas viesis”, under a pseudonym, as early as 1892 according to some accounts; his first short story is usually dated to 1899. The 1905 Revolution, by his own account and in the view of his biographers, turned him towards Marxism. In the 1900s he spoke out against decadence, wrote stories about peasant life, the novel “Citizens” (1907) and the collections “Small Comedies” (1909–1910). The novel “Jauni avoti” (“New Springs”, 1909) opened the Robežnieks cycle; it was followed by “Zīda tīklā” (“In the Silk Net”, 1912) and “Ziemeļa vējš” (“Northern Wind”, 1921), part of which, it is reported, was written in prison. Later came “The Return of Jānis Robežnieks” (1932), “The Death of Jānis Robežnieks” (1933), “Mārtiņš Robežnieks”, “The New Front” and the introductory novel “Old Shadows” (1934). In all there were eight books about how a patriarchal peasant family breaks apart under the pressure of capitalism and the labour movement.

At the same time he wrote plays: “Voice and Echo” (1911), “Zuzanna the Swimmer” (1922), “Mirabeau” (1926), “Joan of Arc” (1930), “The Blooming Desert” (1930). For young readers he wrote the story “The Boys of Moss Village” (1940), which is still on school reading lists. He was an author of a four-volume history of world literature, written with Rudolfs Egle, and of a study of recent Latvian literature (1911).

After the February Revolution of 1917 he was elected to the Riga Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. In the winter of 1917–1918, under the German occupation, he was arrested. In 1919 he headed the arts department of the People’s Commissariat for Education of the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic. In the interwar years he lived in Riga and Skrīveri, and from 1924 to 1930 worked on the editorial staff of the journal “Domas”. After Kārlis Ulmanis’s coup of 1934 his works were banned.

In 1940 he became a member of the People’s Saeima and at the end of July went to Moscow with the delegation that asked for Latvia to be admitted to the USSR. From August of that year he was deputy chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Latvian SSR (until 1951 or 1952), and then a member of the Presidium. He chaired the board of the Latvian Writers’ Union and edited the journal “Karogs”. He spent the war years, from August 1941 to the spring of 1944, in the village of Kstinino near Kirov; there he wrote the tragedy “Spartacus” (1943) and the novel “Zaļā zeme” (“Verdant Land”, 1945). For the latter he received the Stalin Prize, second class, in 1946. The sequel, “Plaisa mākoņos” (“A Rift in the Clouds”, 1951), came out in 1951.

In 1946 Upīts became a member of the first body of the Academy of Sciences of the Latvian SSR and founded the Institute of Language and Literature, which he directed until 1952. He headed the department of Latvian literature at the Latvian State University. His book “Problems of Socialist Realism in Literature” brought him the State Prize of the Latvian SSR (1957). He translated into Latvian Griboyedov, Gogol, Gorky, Aleksey Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Heine, Bernard Shaw, Flaubert and Heinrich Mann. The staging of “The Blooming Desert” at the Dailes Theatre was banned in the Soviet years, and the censors did not pass his “History of Literature”.

He received the title Hero of Socialist Labour, the Soviet Union’s highest civilian distinction, in February 1967. Upīts died in Riga on 17 November 1970 and is buried in the Forest Cemetery. The monument to him in Riga, unveiled in 1982, was in 2024 the subject of a decision by the city council to relocate it: it was proposed that the figure be sawn in half.