Anna Brigadere: Timeless Lessons

“Only he who feels responsibility can be both servant and ruler.”

~Anna Brigadere (1861-1933)

Originally published in Her Circle Ezine (April 2008)
by Zinta Aistars

Raised by Latvian parents who were World War II immigrants from Soviet-occupied Latvia, I was born in the United States, but thought of myself first and foremost as Latvian. Latvian, after all, was my first language, the only language spoken in my childhood home. But how to learn an entire culture, the essence of what it means to be Latvian, living in what my parents termed as exile?

Books. By age three, I read Latvian with ease. A phonetic language, learning the sound associated with any letter in the Latvian alphabet was a one-time lesson. Learn the rules of the language and it is your tool of communication, your lens on the Latvian culture. As I grew older, books were my key to understanding life and finding my own reflection and identity in it.

I don’t recall how the works of Anna Brigadere first came into my hands. Did someone give them to me? I think probably not. I remember creeping around the bookshelves in our home—the rooms were lined with them. Books were a part of the family and deserved a room of their own, although there were too many to contain in one room. The living room had bookshelves; the family room downstairs was filled with books, too. I would spend hours poking through the shelves, and if I pulled books loose and took them down, I often found more books tucked in back, like secret treasure. And, apparently, I found Annele among the books. Another little Latvian girl, much like me …

Annele is a diminutive form of Anna, and what I found was one of Anna Brigadere’s best known works, Trilogija, or the trilogy of three autobiographical novels about the growing up years of Annele. And I was mesmerized. Here was my key to the Latvian culture, indeed, the entire life sense of this tiny Baltic nation was compacted neatly right into the title of the first of three novels: Dievs, daba, darbs, or, God, Nature, Work. The second novel was titled, Skarbos vejos, or, In the Biting Wind, and the third, Akmenu sprosta, or, Trapped in Stone. The three novels took me on a journey through Annele’s life, beginning as a small girl on up into adulthood. Although the books were published in 1927, I nonetheless found them relevant.

Never mind that little Annele lived in the Latvian countryside, half a planet away from me. Never mind that she lived in a world half a century before mine. I found in this little girl an echo of myself, and through her, I discovered what it meant to be Latvian.

Anna Brigadere, through her alter ego child self, provided me my value system. A young girl—and later a woman—must live with integrity and honor, with respect toward a higher power, greater than self; with a deep respect for nature; and with an understanding that one’s chosen work is not just a means toward a paycheck, but one’s expression of honoring both self and others by being a productive member of society. Work should be a labor of love.

Brigadere’s books taught lessons without being didactic. These were timeless lessons, as I found out yet again when asked to teach a Latvian literature seminar just one summer ago. It was time to rediscover my childhood friend. In rereading her books, I found them as vital as ever, untouched by the passage of time, or changing of fashion, or shifting of world politics. In fact, I found her message even more relevant today. When asked at the seminar why one should read such “old books” in a contemporary world, I could only point out—here were the lessons we were calling “new age.” Truth does not change with time; it only solidifies. We live in a society where honor has too often been forgotten, while chasing shallow and temporary pleasures; where too many consider the self more important than community; and where work has become a means to compete with the Joneses, a daily grind that one does with utmost reluctance. Brigadere wrote about self-realization, however, and for her, work was the more contemporary Joseph Campbell’s “following one’s bliss.” She was an environmentalist long before most understood that nature is a living thing that sustains us, and when treated with disregard, She will rebel and spit us out. Brigadere wrote with an instinctive understanding of human psychology, one that modern day child-rearing manuals are now rediscovering, a kind of Super Nanny of her day (Brigadere worked many years as a governess). A child wants to be acknowledged, to feel useful, with a hunger for knowledge that must be fed, and a need for structure.

Brigadere was known for many other works besides her trilogy, although the value system she held dear found its way into all, in whatever genre. She became well known for her plays, many written for children, with the play, Spriditis, first performed in 1903 and later translated into English, German, Russian, Finnish and Estonian, her best known. It is a story about a little boy who longs to go off into the big, wide world and find a better life … only to grow up and realize all he ever needed and wanted was right at home. Brigadere was also a prolific poet, publishing several books of poetry. Her collections of short stories often addressed women’s issues.

Brigadere was much loved among her readers, but she remained a somewhat solitary figure throughout her life. She had a longstanding close friendship with her publisher, but never married. A nature museum has been established in the village of Tervete in southern Latvia, where she was born and spent the last decade of her life, writing. Carved wooden figures of her best known characters line paths through woods and fields that inspired her work. To wander there is to go back in time, yet find oneself solidly rooted in a sustainable future.

The Tervete Recreation and Nature Park

Approaching THE END: 2012?

by Zinta Aistars



"The 400-year paradigm of modern civilization, as currently conceived, has reached the end of its line. Without a radical reorganization and rapid transformation of global practices, there is a high probability that the human species will soon crash and burn, as so many species have before us."
~ Daniel Pinchbeck from The Mystery of 2012




The Sunday morning is so bright with sun, the cool August air so sweet, the breeze so soft on my skin, the silence enveloping me so peaceful, that to consider THE END seems not only improbable, but nearly impossible.

And yet.

And yet, not. When I page through the new catalog of book choices offered by my favorite online book club, my eye catches on the big bold teaser at the top of page 29: DO WE REALLY ONLY HAVE FOUR YEARS LEFT? The book advertised is called The Mystery of 2012: Predictions, Prophecies and Possibilities, by Gregg Braden et al. The teaser continues, "The ancient Mayan calendar predicted that 2012 would be the end of the world. But what exactly does that mean? Will we go out with a bang or a whimper? Will we witness the apocalypse or the birth of a new age of enlightenment? Twenty-five experts on the 2012 debate present their answers …"

A light shiver goes through me. Four years. One moment I am tempted to order the book, curiosity tugging insistently at me. The next, all too quickly, I turn the page. I am uncomfortable. The thought of not only my life, but the lives of my children, my family and friends, of life as we know it, coming to an end in such a short time—four years!—is almost beyond bearable. Never mind the bleak days when this and that goes awry in my life that I toss out the careless comment, oh, I wish I could just die! When recently facing the scare of a possible diagnosis of cancer, I knew better. I do not want to die. And even less, I cannot, cannot bear the thought of my loved ones passing away. Even at the very threshold of such a thought, my mind clenches like a closed fist and turns away. NO.

It was only last week, however, that I sat with my aging parents, both in their 80s, at their kitchen table, the same one at which I'd sat as a child, that I heard my mother whisper her fears of impending death. Even while her physical self ages and withers, her spirit is still vibrant and young. Young and hungry for more living. My father still dreams of all the masterpieces he will paint. The future still holds promise for them. They have attended the funerals of countless friends. Dropping like flies, my mother says, shaking her head and breathing a long, heavy sigh. I'm not ready.

Are we ever? Perhaps some of us are. Those with clean consciences, who have righted wrongs, made amends, subsequently lived good and loving lives, and made peace with their God. Who knows what fears lurk in even a good man's heart? The unknown, after all, is unknowable. We have only our fears and our faith to face it.

I'm not sure my answer to my mother was of any comfort to her. But I told her that there was a part of me that envied her and my father. Their lives have been long and rich. Even the experience of being refugees in the brutalities of war, when the Soviet army invaded their homeland, Latvia, and drove them forever away from the place where they had their deepest roots, and do still. They have managed to live good lives, nonetheless, with two daughters nearby, a wide circle of grandchildren, and a tightly knit social circle of their Latvian friends. They have had each other, for better or for worse, near 60 years as companions. Every night, they fall asleep spooning for warmth.

Come what may, I think, they have had a good share of the best life has to offer. My own? My heart has been broken more than it's been mended. In spite of various pretend lovers since, it has been over a decade since I have made love. I once had one of those pretend lovers say to me, at least you have known love. Indeed, I have. Although the saying, better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, never fails to make me cringe. There is no settling for anything less once one has known true lovemaking. It is the sacred. All else will forever pale in comparison, leave the heart aching in memory. The casual embrace, the unions of the many lonely, the poor, crippled cousin of true intimacy—mind, spirit, body simultaneously entwined—whimpers and slinks away, back into the dark, seedy shadows from whence it came.

I think of my own children—the generation to come. Their children, as yet unconceived. While at times I have longed to see their future faces, there are increasingly more times that I fear for their futures. I consider the generations behind me, lying down with peace on their death beds, knowing their seed will thrive in the years ahead, know lives better than their own. Can we still hold such an expectation?

Four more years.

How might we change our lives now if we knew this to be true? Oh, the apologies made, the avalanche of apologies, this time, finally, sincere. I imagine those who would finally reunite and those who would finally separate to pursue a truer intimacy. I imagine the stacks of resignations at work places. I imagine the homes abandoned and the homes finally found. I imagine the weapons of war laid down while others would be taken up, if only in denial and fear.

Yes, I can imagine the fear. The air would reek of it. The churches and mosques and meditation chapels and synagogues would fill to brimming, the whispers and chants and murmurings of desperate or resolved prayer vibrating the air like a tangible frequency of electricity.

I can imagine the joy. In those who have suffered in silent martyrdom for too long, the hope of a finality the best news they could hear.

I imagine prisons falling open like cracked eggshells. The stampedes. Fists raised to the air, bellowing lungs of freedom cries, so quickly followed by wails of impending doom.

Four more years.

I imagine artists, myself among them, contemplating the tools of their art. Paper and pencil, the keyboard and blank pages. What still needs to be said? What does one write when the moment stands solitary and without another to follow it?

The artist contemplates his paintbrush. How many years did Michelangelo need to paint the heavens, the mere hand of God? Far more than four.

Perhaps only the musician will play, fingering the weeping strings of his guitar, yet once more dancing over the keys of his piano, because music is the straightest line to the heart. I imagine the sorrowful violin as the Titanic sunk into dark and chilly depths. Music will be the final art, singing us in our passage into the unknown.

Four more years. For those of conviction and faith, it would be the time to prepare for a wonderful and final journey. The heart would tremble with ecstasy.

But tomorrow is Monday, and it is still only the summer of 2008, and so we will clamp down the alarm with a groan when it sounds in the morning and rise from our varied beds, worldwide. Some of us will immerse ourselves in work of meaning; others will complain the entire day of their meaningless and unappreciated labor, and change nothing. Humanity will know the full spectrum of emotion and experience in one day, and the days to follow. Life and death and all that comes between. As always.

The possibility of THE END is undeniable. We cannot know. Even those of us with a deep faith cannot know. We can only wait and wonder. We can only hope to do what is right in this next moment, and the moment that follows, and so be ready for whatever comes. Countless more centuries of a better life … or an end to the agony. A new age of enlightenment … or simply the closing of a door. The last door. With no more doors behind it.

It is wise to be ready for either. 2012 may be no more spectacular than 2000, when many feared the changing of the zeroed century. Yet there is wisdom in living our lives, always, under any condition, as if there are only four more left. If nothing else, it sharpens the mind. It alerts the sleeping heart. It corrects the list of priorities. It teaches us to create a blessing in this moment, now, rather than to forever be anticipating that which may or may never come.

The Courage to Speak the Truth at Any Cost: The Passing of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

by Zinta Aistars



It was 1974. I was just a kid, still with two more years ahead of me in high school.

The tears streaming over my face were angry ones, fierce with the sense of betrayal. No one had told me this part of my history. I had listened to all the stories my parents and grandparents had told me, I had attended Latvian school from age 3 through high school, sat through formal lectures and seminars, walked through war museums, paged through libraries. But not until I read Aleksandr Solzhenitysn’s Gulag Archipelago, a brutal account of Stalin’s concentration camps from 1918 to 1956, did I learn this part of my history—that Vladimir Lenin gained his power through the strength of an elite unit of Latvian soldiers. My God, my own countrymen? Could this be? Responsible for what would then follow, helping to plant seeds of what would become the Soviet Union, a system of bloodlust and terror? My own …

I read and reread the Gulag pages, the Russian dissident’s horrifying account of his treatment as a political prisoner under the rule of communism. The cruelest prison guards, he wrote, were the Latvians. My heart shattered inside me with shame and disappointment. When I confronted my parents with this new knowledge, their lips pinched and they nodded slowly. True. Yes. It was so. There were those among us who fought on the other side. The small elite unit that put Lenin into power was the military crème de la crème. And they were, in ethnic bloodline, my brothers.

The story of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn registered early on my radar. Born of parents who had come to the United States as WWII refugees as their native Latvia was swallowed by the oncoming Soviet army, I was accustomed to following political news from early childhood. I visited the Soviet Union the first time at age 15, with many return trips to follow. As much as someone looking in from the outside could—I understood. Which is, perhaps, not at all. But Solzhenitsyn filled in some marked gaps. And the role of my countrymen in the mad world he revealed to the rest of us, safe in our democracy, shook me to the core. For long months after reading the Gulag, I was unsure of my identity. That is, I knew who I was. Had always known. Latvian was my first language, the language we spoke at home. I hadn’t learned English until I attended public school. And still, I knew myself different. And gloried in it.

I gloried in the entirety of my Latvian identity. I had never felt that curious need to fit in as others my age seemed to; it was my status of difference that was most desirable. But now I had the sudden wish for the ground to open and swallow me up. My ethnic roots with me. I wished to be a girl without a country.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a hero. He was a political dissident who had put his dissident thoughts on paper, spoke them loud and clear, in defiance of one of the most fearsome governments that had ever existed. Instead of being silent after his imprisonment in the Russian gulag, his voice rang even louder, even more clear. His books spread like wildfire across all civilized nations, revealing the truth with courage. His first novel was A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, followed by others, including Cancer Ward about his experience of suffering through cancer under Soviet imprisonment. He wrote Warning to the West, and it was just that. He wrote, no matter how the Soviets tried to choke the voice out of him. But he was not to be silenced, and if the Soviets did not simply eliminate the problem by their most frequent, if unoriginal solution to problems—execution—it was by another powerful weapon that he remained alive. The world was watching. Solzhenitsyn, via manuscripts smuggled out to the free world, had captured the imagination of the free world, and odd as it was, it was not weaponry the communists seemed to fear as much as public humiliation. They were all about image. The best they could do was to free the dissident and exile him. Deny the man the home he loved so much that he would risk his life to save it.

For the next 20 years, Solzhenitsyn continued to write, and he devoted himself to writing the truth at any cost. He would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He would give a commencement speech at Harvard, and once again dare to speak the truth, this time speaking to the new generation of fresh faced Americans about the shallowness of American materialism. He would return to his Mother Russia decades later, greeted by the current totalitarian, Putin, who would commend him on his literary contribution to Russian literature … yet somehow leave out his most important work, Gulag Archipelago.

The man seemed nearly invincible in his armor coat of blatant honesty. Until last Sunday, August 2, 2008, when his lion’s heart finally failed.

Thinking of him, I look through my bookshelves for that battered old copy of the Gulag from my teen years. Solzhenitsyn put me into a tailspin. He made me question my identity. He made me question my personal figures of authority. He made me take a closer look at the history of my ancestors, take a microscope to my own government. He caused me to redefine the world in which I live. Today, I am proud to call myself Latvian. Because, like Solzhenitsyn, my people have survived occupation after occupation, terror after terror, slavery and oppression. We, too, have made mistakes. Not all of us are heroes. Like any family, mine too has its strong and weak characters, heroes and cowards, the good and the bad. Like most of us, I love my family nonetheless.

Solzhenitsyn, too, never stopped loving his country or his people, despite the blood on their hands. He taught me—that the most patriotic thing any of us can do, is to speak to our own about our shortcomings. At any cost. With fierce determination. Until we change.