Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš

Biography

Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš’s first poem, “Winter Night”, appeared in the newspaper Latviešu Avīze in 1896, when he was nineteen and a student at the Vecsāte Agricultural School. He would take up painting later.

He was born on 25 August 1877 (13 August, Old Style) on the Krodziņi farm near Nereta, the son of a farmhand. His father died in 1880, and the family moved to the Riekstiņi farm; that house would later become “Our Home” in “The White Book”. In 1886–1892 the boy attended the parish school in Nereta, and in 1892–1893 a school in Panemunis, where teaching was in Russian. From 1893 he assisted a teacher in Nereta and learned German, then entered the Vecsāte Agricultural School (1895–1897). He worked as a cattle hand, a clerk, a storekeeper and a manager on the Laukmuiža and Smukas estates; in 1898 he was an agronomist at Remte. Drawing won out over farming. From 1899 to 1904 Jaunsudrabiņš studied at Blum’s school of drawing and painting in Riga and at the same time in the studio of Janis Rozentāls. The sources differ on the dates of his studies: by some accounts they ended in 1903, by others in 1904. In 1905 he spent three months in Munich, and in 1908–1909 he lived with his family in Berlin and studied with Lovis Corinth. In 1906–1907 his first exhibition of paintings was shown in his Riga apartment; at the same time he translated Knut Hamsun, wrote the novella “Flowers of the Wind” and saw his first play, “Tragedy”, staged. He was literary editor of Mārtiņš Buclers’s magazine Stari.

From 1910 he lived in Mīlgrāvis, then in his own house in Pļaviņas. There he wrote most of the sketches in “The White Book” (1914) and the story “Aija”, later the first part of a trilogy: it was followed by “Echo” and “Winter”. His prose rests on psychological realism with touches of neo-romanticism; he wrote about rural Latvia and about the bond between people and nature.

The First World War sent him into refugee life. In 1915–1918 he lived in the North Caucasus, in Baku and Pyatigorsk, met Latvian writers there, and wrote the novel “The Dance of Death” and the cycle “Letters from the Caucasus”. To the refugee committee of Pyatigorsk, which held charity lotteries, he gave several paintings.

Back in Latvia he returned to both painting and writing. In 1919 he became one of the founders and the first chairman of the Association of Independent Artists, published reviews of his colleagues in newspapers and in Ilustrēts Žurnāls, was one of the first in Latvia to practise art criticism, and wrote about Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis among others. He exhibited regularly, with two solo exhibitions in Riga, in 1921 and 1927. He painted landscapes and portraits and illustrated books, his own included. In 1924 a grant from the Culture Foundation allowed him to travel to Paris, Luxembourg and Capri. In 1927 he received the Order of the Three Stars.

In the 1930s his personal life went badly: in 1935 he left his home and lived in Sabile and Ilūkste, and the novel “Don’t Look at the Sun” tells of that time. Later he settled in Ropaži, where he built a house. He began “The Green Book” in 1942.

In 1944, unwilling to cooperate with the Soviet authorities, he left for Germany. He lived in camps for displaced persons, in Bielefeld, Binde and Werfen, and wrote “Without a Homeland” and the memoir “I Tell My Wife”. From 1948 he settled in Körbecke, in a house on the shore of a lake, which he named “Moonlight”. He went on translating Hamsun, Maupassant and Charles De Coster. His autobiography, “My Life”, was published in Sweden in 1957.

Jaunsudrabiņš died on 28 August 1962 in Körbecke and was buried there. In 1967 a memorial museum opened on the Riekstiņi farm, and in 1997 his remains were moved to Nereta, to the Ķišķi cemetery.