Narrative
Kalpa zēna vasara
Not translated into English
Jānis Akurāters · 1908
Synopsis
A summer on a Latvian farm, seen by a boy hired out as a farmhand. Half memory, half imagination, the story goes beyond the picture of hard work in the fields to express a transfigured youth: nature, nascent desire, Alma and Jānis near an apple tree whose hand reaches for the ripe fruit. Written far from the country, it presents itself as a letter to friends left behind there, a sketch of memories rather than an autobiography.
Context
The story was written in the winter of 1908 in Kristiania, present-day Oslo, where Jānis Akuraters was living as an émigré: he says, in his autobiography of 1923, that he composed it in five or six days in a small room in a working-class district, like a letter to friends. It appeared in the journal Zalktis in August 1908 and in book form in 1911. Alvis Hermanis staged it in 2018 at the New Riga Theatre with the twelve students of his course, to music by Pēteris Vasks, reading in it a sensual work closer to symbolism than to realism. A Ukrainian translation appeared in Lviv in 2023.
Who it is for
A short narrative with almost no plot. It is best to know that it was written in exile, from memory, like a letter to the homeland.
Prizes and reception
His most popular, most widely read and most often reissued work, according to the memorial museums of Riga.