Latviešu modernisms PSRS: Roberta Eidemaņa piemērs

Abstract

Soviet Latvian military officer and writer Roberts Eidemanis (1895–1937) lived and worked in the USSR after the October Revolution of 1917. He debuted as a writer before the First World War, working in poetry, drama and prose. In the 1920s, he became part of the diverse literary environment of the USSR, where various modernist currents worked alongside attempts to politicise and unify literature. The article aims to explore what Eidemanis’s Soviet-era prose was like – did it fit into a modernist literary paradigm, and what were these modernist features? The paper is structured in three sections. The first examines Eidemanis’s evolution as a writer, looking at his literary contribution before the First World War. The second section attempts to compare the novel “The Naked Year” (Golyj god, 1922) and its ornamental aesthetic by Eidemanis’s contemporary and friend Boris Pilnyak (real name Boriss Vogau) with Eidemani’s works, especially his long story “Surrounded” (Ielenktie, 1925). The third section examines the most prominent female characters in Eidemanis’s prose texts from the perspective of the new woman type. The methodological framework of the article is literary comparativism and close reading of texts; a feminist reading is used in the analysis of female characters. The article concludes that in the early 1920s, Eidemanis was influenced by the aesthetics of ornamental prose, elements of which he integrated into his work, especially in the long story “Surrounded”. It is also evident that Eidemanis presents a type of new woman in certain texts, giving his heroines the freedom to choose, open sexuality, highlighting the role of women in society and writing about taboo subjects. These aspects bring certain principles of Eidemanis’s text and character creation towards the modernist literary paradigm.