Indriķis Laube latviešu rakstniecībā

Abstract

The article analyses the literary works of the writer and publicist Indriķis Laube (1841–1889) in Latvian literary culture in the 1870s and 1880s. The aim of this article is to analyse the significance of Laube’s literary activity and describe his contribution to Latvian prose fiction, humorous satirical literature and journalism. Methodologically, the article employs the approach of the social history of literature by highlighting the interaction between social change and literary innovations. Summarising the information about Laube’s work scattered in publications so far, the article identifies the main research questions for further studies of his work, formulates those aspects of Laube’s work that are connected with the political and national transformations in the period after the Young Latvian movement in the 1860s, and also offers to locate Laube’s place among his contemporaries. The story “Smiltnieku Andrejs” is interpreted as Laube’s main work in the article, which depicts a Latvian peasant’s intellectual and professional growth in the interaction between German and Russian cultural impulses. In addition, attention is paid to issues of women’s emancipation in Laube’s works, as well as to his humorous prose, in which the social and political problems of his time are addressed. Laube is described as a typical representative of his era, who has combined the autodidact’s ambition to popularise scientific and cultural affairs with the work of a literary critic. At the same time, Laube occupies a special place in the landscape of the Latvian national culture of his time due to the fact that, being born in a German-Latvian family and raised in a German environment, he made a conscious decision to become a Latvian and get involved in the national revival movement.