Karlis Skalbe

Skalbe, Kārlis 

Born Nov. 7, 1879, in the volost (small rural district) of Vecpiebalga, now Cēsis Raion; died Apr. 14, 1945, in Stockholm. Latvian writer.

Skalbe worked as a farmhand, teacher, and journalist. He began publishing in 1896. His first poetry collections, Dreams of a Prisoner (1902) and When the Apple Trees Bloom (1904), were permeated with a presentiment of revolutionary events. His later works were individualistic and passive in tone; examples are the collections Heart and Sun (1911) and Evening Lights (1927). Skalbe was the greatest master of the literary folktale in pre-Soviet Latvian literature, as seen in the collections The Meek in Spirit (1911), Winter Tales (1913), and A Mother’s Legend (1928). These tales are ideologically contradictory. Skalbe’s social attitudes were linked with bourgeois nationalist ideology. He emigrated in 1944.

WORKS

Kopoti raksti, vols. 1-10. Riga, 1938-39.
In Russian translation:
Skazki. [Foreword by J. Sudrabkalns.] Moscow, 1961.

REFERENCES

Istoriia latyshskoi literatury, vol. 1. Riga, 1971.
Latviešu literatūras vēsture, vol. 4. Riga, 1957. [23–1458–]