Trilogy "Aija", 1911, 1914 and 1925, and Childhood Memoirs "The White Book", 1914–1921, by Writer Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš (1877–1962)

Jaunsudrabiņš is remembered chiefly for the trilogy novel “Aija” (finished 1925) and the memoirs of his shepherd days, “The White Book” (Baltā grāmata, 1914–1921). He wrote in sonorous Latvian retaining a broad farming-related vocabulary as well as the absolute harmonies of folk songs. “The White Book” concerns the life and mores of people in the countryside. It gives a panoramic look of what life was like in a series of heartfelt vignettes about peasant life, portraying a Latvia that has changed beyond recognition.

“Aija”, Jaunsudrabiņš’ tour de force, was written over the course of more than a decade and coincidentally traces the way the author’s style would develop. Its first part was published in 1911 and took up a subject akin to that of the “The White Book”, namely childhood memories. Jānis, a poor shepherd, falls in love with a fellow servant girl, the ever-practical Aija who wants to make a future for herself as soon as possible. After some ado, Aija becomes the wife of someone else, older but much richer than Jānis.

The second part, “Echo” (Atbalss, 1914), however, is wildly different in style and introduces new themes. Suddenly we see characters tackling class and economic matters in the manner of Hamsun (whose Pan the author had earlier translated into Latvian) alongside things amorous and fatalistic. As such, the book stands as a curious mélange of romanticism, proto-modernist ideas (city v. countryside), and Tolstoyan/Flaubertian realism. The difference between Jaunsudrabiņš and the best-known works of the latter pair is that the protagonist is male.

In “Echo”, Jānis’ beloved Aija remains all but invisible; what makes him, now a 30-something factory worker, fall for her again are memories of a love that even his young shepherd self had recognized to be misguided. Without exchanging a word with her, Jānis feels that Aija has “become his destiny”, and there are subtler forebodings of Jaunsudrabiņš’ shifting focus too. In the first book, Aija is wearing a red kerchief on the occasion of their first meaningful meeting (an image of blood marks the first meaningful encounter, à la Anna Karenina), whereas in “Echo” he would encounter her wearing a black one. The symbolism is obvious enough, but the narrative retains an impressive intensity due to the friction created by Jānis’ relationship to Ieva, a young fellow servant who eventually kills herself in the third part, “Winter” (Ziema, 1924).

To give a social and psychological reading, in Jānis we find someone rooted out from the countryside in addition to having an indifferent mother who only cared to swindle her son out of what little he earned cow herding. Thus, Jānis’ fall for an uncaring, materialistic woman (there are other parallels: the given name Aija evokes “aijāt” – to cradle) can be argued to be caused by a lack created by his mother’s lovelessness and, similarly, by the “lovelessness” of his circumstances that offered little chance of meaningful social advancement. For lack of knowing anything better, and maybe due to a peculiarly Latvian fatalism, Jānis allows an idolatric passion to consume his life.

Jaunsudrabiņš’ choices might be seen as questionable as concerns the depiction women (it could be argued, however, that Jaunsudrabiņš also lays bare the structural reasons for the wretchedness of lower-class women and men), but his prose still blew a fresh breath into Latvian literature a time when the way writers treat love had become all but fossilised. As critic Guntis Berelis notes, “In “Winter”, Jaunsudrabiņš transforms love from a bittersweet cliché into an existentialist notion, and the guiding principle is something like this: love presides over existence.”

Furthermore, for a book that is considered a downer even by Latvian standards, “Aija” does have a fair share of strikingly beautiful sentences. It is opportune to note that Jaunsudrabiņš was also a reasonably successful artist. His naive art illustrations for “The White Book” look fresh to this day. To consider but one: “I looked into the brightness that surrounded the head of my shadow like a sparkling nimbus.” Or, again, “From the white chimney, smoke blew right into the air like a blue jet of water.”

Both “Aija” and “The White Book” remain classics that are taught at school. Both have been adapted to the silver screen, the latter in Aivars Freimanis’ (1936–2018) popular film “The Boy” (Puika, 1977) and Varis Brasla’s classic “Aija” (1988).

Twenty print runs of “The White Book” have been published until 2017, and it has been translated into Lithuanian, Russian, and Estonian. Parts of “Aija” were translated into German during the inter-war period. Jaunsudrabiņš’ works are continuously staged in Latvian theatres.

Lauris Veips