Paegle, Leons

Paegle, Leons 

(in Russian, Leon Martynovich Paegle). Born May 29 (June 10), 1890, in Vidriži Volost (small rural district); died Jan. 28, 1926, in Riga. Latvian writer. Member of the Communist Party of Latvia from 1917.

After graduating from the Valmiera Teachers’ Seminary in 1910, Paegle worked as a schoolteacher. From 1914 to 1917 he studied at the faculty of history and philosophy of the A. Shaniavskii People’s University. Paegle’s first book was Gods and Men (1914). His collections of poems The Call of the Young Falcons (1921), Banners (1922), and Prisons Will Not Help (1923; confiscated in 1925) served the cause of the struggle for liberation waged by the Latvian working class. Paegle’s prose works depicted the life of the Latvian village; his dramas attacked bourgeois life.

WORKS

Kopoti raksti, vols. 1–5. Riga, 1956–58.
In Russian translation:
Izbrannoe. Riga, 1955.
Rasskazy. Moscow, 1965.
Zhdu solnyshka. Riga, 1967.

REFERENCES

Istoriia latyshskoi literatury, vol. 2. Riga, 1971.
Latviešu literatūras darbinieki. Riga, 1965.