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Vizma Belševica (1931-2005) | |
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Latvian poet, essayist, translator, and novelist, called in her own country "the conscience of her time and her nation." Vizma Belševica was frequently mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize for literature. During her long career, she often censored andcriticized as anti-Communist. Don't scream at the linden. Vizma Belševica was born in Riga of working-class parents. The
family lived in a poor section of the capital city. She
grew up in Riga and in rural environment in Ugāle,
northern Courland (Kurzeme), where she became intrested in writing. In
her memoirs Belševica told that her father was an alcoholic and her
mother emotionally cold. During her adolescent years, Belševica was an active member of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League), but she was scolded by her comrades for penning verses which did not deal with the building of a communist society. Latvia was incorporated as a constituent republic of the USSR in 1940. Germany occupied the country from 1941 but the USSR regained control 1944. Her literary debut as a poet Belševica made in 1947 with the poem 'Zemes atmoda,' which appeared in the daily newspaper Padomju Jaunatne (Soviet Youth). After vocational school and technicum, Belševica entered in 1955 the Gorky Institute in Moscow, finishing her literary studies in 1961. The institute did not only bring together young writers from across the Soviet empire and beyond as "one big Soviet-family", but it was also, unintentionally, a fertile breeding ground for dissents. During this period Belševica came to know Bella Akhmadulina, Yuri Kazakov, and Andrei Voznesenski, who said decades later: "Vizma was the most talented of us all." ('Om Vizma Belševica' by Juris Kronbergs, Dikter 1955–95 by Vizma Belševica, translated by Juris Kronbergs, Stockholm: Ersatz Samizdat, 2008, p. 6) In some of her early poems, she praised the Soviet Union, willingly, believing in its ideals. Belševica's world view was shattered in 1956 by Khrushchev's famous speech, in which he denounced Stalinism and "the cult of personality". She took luminal pills and wanted to die. Belševica's first collection, Visu ziemu šogad pavasaris
(The Whole Year Nothing But Spring), was published in 1955, but it was
not until Jura deg (1966),
when she started to find her own inner form of expression after inner
struggles and reflections. In the Soviet Latvia, Belševica was among
those writers who did not glorify the Soviet regime and follow the
rules of the socialist realism. There is a lot of black humor in her
writings. With such poets as Ojárs Vácietis, Imants Ziedonis, Máris Caklais, and Mára Zalite, she constantly tested the limits of censorship. The literary journal Karogs (Flag), which publisher many of their early poems, was known for its struggle with the authorities, who allowed some formal experimentation after Stalin's death. However, all signs of national thought were suppressed. Although Belševica's criticism was veiled, she was often
prohibited from publishing her work. "I am a woman. / I am silence,"
she wrote in 'Silence' (Klusums). Gadu Gredzeni, a collection
of poems written between 1957 and 1968, sold
in 1969 within hours 16,000 copies. The book came out at time when
there was a shortlived political thaw in Latvia. In the
long poem 'Indrika Latvieša piezimes uz Livonijas hronikas malam' (The
Notations of Henricus de Lettis in the Margins of the Livonian
Chronicle)
Belševica suggested similarities between the imperialism of Rome and
the Soviet policies. "Rome like a jealous wife demands / That love be
sworn to her in public / At every step... With spying eyes she reads /
Between my lines, that she owns not / This heart, once so naive and
yielding." (translated by Baiba Kaugara, Lituanus, Volume 16, No. 1, 1970;
https://www.lituanus.org/document-library/. Accessed 1 July 2025) Accused
of pseudomodernist tendencies and false
interpretation of historical facts, Belševica was silenced for
almost
ten years. Her name was not mentioned in public. It has been said that
the only official institution reading Belševica's work was the
KGB. Books were confiscated from her home and her diaries were stolen; she never got them back. Banned from publication, Belševica earned her living as a translator. Her politically outspoken son Klavs Elsbergs, also a poet and translator, died in 1987 under suspicious circumstances by falling out of a Soviet Writers' Union building. Belševica stopped writing poetry after his death. Klavs's younger brother Janis, born in 1969, gained fame as a poet under the pen-name Janis Ramba. During the 1960s and 1970s many of Belševica's poems, which managed to pass the censorship, were widely translated in the Soviet Union. Some degree of cultural freedom was allowed, if the legitimacy of the Communist rule was not questioned. In 1983 a special concert was arranged in her honor in the Small Guild House, in the center of Old Riga. Belševica served as Head of the Latvian PEN Club Riga branch in 1988-1990. "Birds die, and poets. But not even the axe's edge / can
hack out the word that is said before death. / The words, once poured
out, can not ne bailed by anyone. / Like swallows in the skies no one
can pen them. / Words, my words, do not pity me!"
('Words about Words,' translated by Inara Cedrins, in Contemporary Latvian Poetry, edited
by Inara Cedrins, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1984, p. 102) Belševica uses simple images and contrast –
fire and water, trees and bird, silence and scream, but they have rich
symbolic meanings. "Winds rage. Winds howl. Riga is silent. / Silent
are the naked stone women. / Silent are marble breats. / Spires are
silent. On the tips of spires— / Silent roosters." ('A
Latvian History
Motif: Old Riga' (Latvijas motivs: Veeriga), in 'A Note about Vizma
Belševica, a Latvian Poet' by Astrid B. Stahne, Lituanus, Volume 47, No. 3. 2001;
http://www.old.lituanus.org/2001/01_3_01.htm. Accessed 1 July 2025)
In the collections Madaras (1976) and Dzeltu laiks (1987) Belševica identified womanhood with nature and the earth, and found harmony in family life and altruism. Some of these themes she had also dealt in short stories. They often center on strong women and have the form of monologue. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, writers in Latvia
were freed from political censorship. Although Belševica had felt
that she had no more to say as a writer, she eventually broke her
silence and published in 1992 in the United States the first part of
her
autobiographical work, Bille,
dealing with her childhood in the
late 1930s in Grīziņkalns, a working-class neighbourhood in Riga.
(Bille is the nickname of the protagonist, Sibilla Gūtmane.) It was
followed by Bille un karš
(1996), about the
German and Russian occupation of Latvia seen through the eyes of a
child, and Billes skaistā jaunība
(1999), about the post-war
years and the first great love of a young girl. The trilogy was published in a single volume in 2004. Ināra Kolmane's screen adaptation of Bille (2018) won the National Film Award for best feature film. Some scenes were shot in the actual apartment where Belševica had spent her childhood. Belševica also wrote film scripts and translated English
(Hemingway, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, A.A. Milne), Russian (Pushkin) and
Ukrainian literature into Latvian. In 1990 she was appointed honorary
member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. Belševica received
several awards for her work, including the Swedish Irma and Einar
Forseth Foundation Literary Prize in 1992 and Tomas Tranströmer prize
in 1998. Vizma Belševica died in Riga on August 6, 2005, after a long illness, which had kept her wheelchair-bound for the last years of her life. Her poems have been set to music by manu composers, among them Nikas Matvejevs, Imants Kalniņš, the songwriter and poet Pāvils Johansons, and the composer and piano player Raimond Pauls, who also had a prominent career in politics. For further reading: 'Simboliskais un semiotiskais Vizmas Belševicas dzejas poētikā' by Anna Auzina, Kultūras krustpunkti, Vol. 7, Issue 1 (2015); 'Belsevica, Vizma,' in 300 Baltic Writers: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania: A Reference Guide to Authors and Their Works, edited by Benediktis Kalnačs, Jūratė Sprindytė, Jaan Undusk (2009); 'Belševica, Vizma' by EJ [Eriks Jekabsons], in Biographical Dictionary of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, edited by Wojciech Roszkowski and Jan Kofman (2008); Dvīņu zīmē: Vizmas Belševicas nozīme latviešu literatūrā un vēsturē: konferences materiāli, sastādītāja Margita Gūtmane (2007); All Birds Know This: Selected Contemporary Latvian Poetry, compiled by Kristine Sadovska; edited by Astrīde Ivaska, Māra Rūmniece (2001); History of European Literature by Annick Benoit-Dusausoy and Guy Fontaine (2000); 'Some Notes on Vizma Belsevica' by Rolfs Ekmanis, World Literature Today, Volume 72, Issue 2 (1998); 'The Woman and the House: Vizma Belševica' by Inta Ezergaile, Feminism and Latvian Literature, edited by Ausma Cimdiņa (1998); Vizma Belševica: monogrāfija by Anda Kubulina (1997); 'Efterskrift' by Juris Kronbergs, in Kärlek, helt enkelt by Vizma Belševica (1992); 'Vizma Belševica,' in Porträtt: Ur tidshistorien by Birgitta Trotzig (1993); Dainojen henki: Latvian ja Liettuan kirjallisuudesta ja kulttuurista, edited by Urpo Vento (1990); Contemporary Latvian Poetry, edited by Inara Cedrins (1984) Selected works:
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