Linards Petrovich Laicens

Laicens, Linards Petrovich 

Born Nov. 3 (15), 1883, in Metumy, Jaunrozes Volost (small rural district); died Dec. 14, 1938. Latvian writer. Member of the Communist Party of Latvia from 1929. Son of a tenant farmer.

Laicens’ first work was published in 1904. A participant in the Revolution of 1905–07, he suffered official repression. He was an important organizer of the legal workers’ press and of revolutionary culture in bourgeois Latvia. From 1932 he lived and worked in the USSR.

Laicens’s writings are imbued with the ideas of revolutionary struggle and hatred for capitalism. His volumes of verses include Caravan (1920), Ho-Tai (1922), The Semaphore (1924), Berlin (1924), and The Asian (1929). He wrote the collections of short stories The Acquitted (1921), Beautiful Italy (1925), and Prison Cells (1929). The novel Groaning Cellblocks (1930), one of the best works of Latvian revolutionary literature, is an exposé of the prison regime of the bourgeois state.

WORKS

Raksti, vols. 1–9. Riga, 1958–60.
In Russian translation:
Izbr. proizv., vols. 1–4. Leningrad, 1929–30.
Sobr. sock, vols. 1–5. Moscow-Leningrad, 1931–34.
Emigrant: Roman. [Introduction by Iu. Rozenblium.] Moscow, 1967.

REFERENCES

Ābola, M.”Linards Laicens.” In Latvieŝu literatūras vē sture, vol. 5. Riga, 1959.
Tabüns, B. Linards Laicens. Riga, 1972.