Ojars Vacietis

Ojārs Vācietis, a towering figure in the 20th century Latvian poetry, rised high above the limitations and restrictions of the time and inventing striking and inimitable modes of expression.

The poet Ojārs Vācietis was born in 1933 to a family of servants in the Trapene parish.

He studied Latvian philology at the State University of Latvia from 1952 to 1957.

Later, he was employed at various newspapers and magazines, including the magazine Draugs (Friend), a magazine for teenagers, where he worked from 1968 to 1983.

Between 1956 and 1985 he published 14 poetry books for adults.

Vācietis was also a translator, and is best known for his rendering of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

During his lifetime, Vācietis received numerous awards and honorary titles, including a Latvian SSR State Award, a USSR State Award and the title of People’s Writer.

One of the annual literary awards in Latvia is named after Ojārs Vācietis.

His book of poems Si minors (B Minor), first published in 1982, has been included in the canon of Latvian culture.

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For almost a quarter-century, the poems of Ojārs Vācietis (1933 - 1983) created the “arterial plotline” of Latvian poetry; at the same time, his works are a mirror that reflects the poetry of the time. In the late 1950s, Vācietis’s first collections – Tālu ceļu vējš (“The Wind of Long Roads”), Ugunīs (1956) (“In the Fires”) (1958), and Krāces apiet nav laika (“No Time to Circumvent the Rapids”) (1960) – loosened social realism’s canonical lyrical system and standardized metaphors and renewed poetry’s historical memory, particularly its links with the poetry of the 1920s and 1930s.

Poetry transformed from a series of ideologically and conceptually correct slogans into an aesthetic and social phenomenon. These early collections introduced a feature characteristic of all of Vācietis’s poetry: a poetic experience of maximum intensity, and dramatic and emotional accents piqued to the ultimate degree. In the first books, when looked at from a contemporary viewpoint, this feature was melted together with the metaphors of social realism (“Moscow-mother,” “the port of communism,” and so on) as well as flat-out rhetoric, mixed with newspaperly phrases and occasional propaganda. (Vācietis was a convinced communist, or more precisely, a utopian, who thought it was possible to reform the Soviet Union’s actual socialism into “real” socialism).

Vācietis’s book Elpa (“Breath”) (1966), which shook up both the poetic process and society, marked a turn in the author’s writing. The poet’s laconic, precise style – tuned directly at the reader in the form of conversations, speeches, or impersonal declarations – crystallized in this new collection. In other words, Vācietis liberated poetry from anonymity. On the one hand, he expressed his personal conviction, testimony, or doubts. On the other, he avoided writing anonymous, impersonal clichés to an infantile yet politically conscious “reader of Soviet poetry”; rather, he wrote to his contemporaries, to a specific person whose thoughts moved alongside the author’s.

We find a manifesto of expressive writing in the following lines: “Bet tas nekur neder, / Ja nav zem papīra šahtas, / Ja nav zem papīra magmas, / Ja nav zem papīra krātera” (“But it doesn’t belong anywhere / If it isn’t under the paper shaft / If it isn’t under the paper magma / If it isn’t under the paper crater”). The most essential aspect of Elpa was the expansion of poetic time and space. Though Vācietis often poeticized specific events and specific places (for instance, many of his texts were dedicated to Riga), he once wrote that “everything is global.” There is no difference between a grain of sand and the Universe; point of view is everything. The object of the text is no longer “here,” “alongside,” “around,” or even the classic romantic “beyond the horizon.” Now, poetic time and space encompass continents, the planet, the Universe. The poet is entitled to be present everywhere; similarly, even the most prosaic matters are worthy of poetry. In addition, Vācietis world is divided into distinct poliarities, and is caught up in eternal disharmony and turbulent movement.

Elpa includes the little poem “Einšteiniāna” (“Einsteiniana”), first published in periodicals in 1962, which was one of the most significant poetic works of the 1960s; the poem provoked aggressive critical attacks and became one of the reasons why Vācietis was prohibited from publishing for several years. “Einšteiniāna” is an apologia for and criticism of civilization and progress. In the poem, Vācietis, in his characteristic manner, addresses no more and no less than all of humanity (or every reader), asking, “Cilvēces saprāt, / Ko jūs tik svarīgu darāt, / Ka jūsu ugunsdzēsēji atbrauc / Stundu pēc ugunsgrēka?” (“Human reason, / What are you doing that’s so important, / That your firefighters arrive / An hour after the fire?”).

Vācietis interprets Einstein as a metaphor for humanity’s creative power, which is opposed to humanity’s cult of torpidity. The result of the confrontation between both powers is dismal: “Kad sastopas lielais ar sīko, / Kad sastopas atrasts un neatrasts, / Tad vienmēr vispirmā vaina: / - Tev ir divas rokas. / Mums ir divas rokas. / Tad kāpēc tu drīksti / Atrast vairāk par mums? // Pie sienas!” (“When the big meets the tiny, / When the found meets the lost, / The first fault is always: / You have two hands. / We have two hands. / So why are you allowed / To find more than us? / Against the wall!”).

Without a doubt, Vācietis used the black-and-white polarities of social realism as well as its language and metaphors. This is particularly apparent in the poem “Partijas piederība” (“Party Affiliation”), published in Elpa, where Vācietis admits his unshakeable belief in the communist party: “Tāpēc operē, Partija (..) / Ja esmu vainīgs - / Operē mani / Ar savu ideju skaidro skalpeli” (“Operate on me, party… / If I am guilty. / Operate one me / with your clear scalpel of ideas”). But at the same time, Vācietis turned against Stalinism and any manifestations of totalitarianism: “Nost ar tiem, kuri ar Staļinu / Zaudēja tēvu / Un jūtas kā bāreņi!” (“Down with those who / lost a father with Stalin’s death / And feel like orphans!”). It’s obvious that in this poem, the concept of “party” is almost synonymous with conscience.

This anti-totalitarian inclination is even sharper in Vācietis’s poem “Vadoņa augšāmcelšanās” (“The Resurrection of the Leader”), which was written in 1967 but could only be published in 1987. In the poem, a fiery Stalinist monologue is recreated in grotesque form; the monologue invites the “father and leader” to rise up again in order to finally bring order to the world. If we view Elpa in the context of all the Latvian poetry of the time, we see that Vācietis was in fact the instigator for a great surge in the generation of poetic ideas; this was apparent in the enormous number of printed copies of poetry books (usually around 30,000 copies, but in a few cases, as high as 100,000 copies), poetry gatherings, and the unprecedented wave of popularity enjoyed by poetry during this period.

Yet Vācietis’s poetry turned in another direction, from socially engaged “idea” poetry and “loud” and provocative poetry to what was at the time called “associative poetry” – texts that were dense with metaphors and concepts, rhythmically complex, and where, if you tried to use logic, you could easily break your neck. This took place gradually in the collections Dzegužlaiks (“Time of the Cuckoos”) (1968), Aiz simtās slāpes (“Behind the Hundredth Thirst”) (1969), and Melnās ogas (“Black Berries”) (1971).

But the potency of his poetry was fully realized in the books Gamma (“Scale”) (1976), Antracīts (“Anthracite”) (1978), and Visāda garuma stundas (“Hours of All Lengths”) (1974), where the following contemplative words aptly describe Vācietis’s poetry of the period: “..caur pasauli iet mūžīgs nošu raksts / un skaņas nebeidzamību vēstī! / Es esmu laimīgs šajā neizslēgtībā, / kas pilna liela maiguma un dusmu” (…an eternal score of notes goes through the world / and heralds the interminableness of sound! / I am content in this non-exclusion, / which is full of great tenderness and anger”). Vācietis’s worldview became much more harmonious; he no longer “stands aside,” having climbed up onto the judge’s podium, but is “inside” everything. In place of the fiery apologia for and criticism of civilization we find a calm skepticism and irony, which sometimes transform into the grotesque.

Vācietis’s “engaged” poetry was mostly concentrated on texts with an ecological bent (in the Soviet Union, ecology was the dissidents’ favorite theme, and “green thinking” stood in strong opposition to ideological dogma). Nevertheless, Vācietis hadn’t lost his inclination to contemplate social problem in poetic form. The motifs that culminated in Elpa continued to weave and variegate through all of Vācietis’s works, though they backed away to the periphery of his writing. The infinitely distance and at times rhetorical expeditions into the expanses of poetic time and space were replaced by retreats into oneself and the infinity of consciousness, as well as inquiries into Latvian history. Speaking about history, Vācietis no longer submitted to the opinion propagated by official propaganda.

In Elpa, Vācietis actualized the possibilities of evocative expression; but in his subsequent volumes, he realized, with just as much maximalism, the creative potency of poetic metaphor and reflection. The paradigms of modernism began to stabilize in Latvian poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when associative poetry appeared in the works of Vācietis, Ziedonis, Čaklais, and others. But no matter how minor-keyed this poetry was at times, it turned out to be no less provocative than the “loud” poetry of Elpa. Vācietis’s poetry once again provoked critical attacks, and up until the late 1970s, he was accused of “incomprehensibility.”

Vācietis’s last collections – Zibens pareizrakstība (“Lightning Orthography”) (1980) and Si minors (“B Minor”) (1982), as well as the poems of his final years that were collected in Nolemtība (“Fatality”) (1985), the first posthumously published volume of Vācietis’s poetry (several volumes of unpublished poems appeared after the poet’s death) – supplement, comment upon, and variegate the motifs and poetics that were characteristic of all of his works; they do not, however, include an essential “correction” of his writings. Zibens pareizrakstība particularly accents the idea of temporal continuity, and features the marvelous poem “Vecā karte” (“Old Map”), in which the author sketches the historical dimension of his poetry: “Man steigas izģērētai ādai / jāatdabū jutība, / man trokšņu kontuzētai ausij / jāatdabū dzirdība, / lai simtiem gadu vecas nātras kož. / (..) Var visu aizsegt viena pati šodiena, / es tāpēc vecas kartes dievinu, / jo, tikai liekot / kontūru uz kontūras, / top laika svētbilde / un laika fotogrāfija” (“My skin, tanned by hurry, / has to regain feeling, / My ear, contused by noises, / has to regain hearing, / so that hundred-year-old stinging nettles bite. / …Only the present day can cover everything up –/ that’s why I worship old maps, / because only by placing / contour upon contour / is a holy icon of time created, / a photograph of time”).

When viewed as a whole, Vācietis poetry is reminiscent of a polyphonic piece of music. His works includes many themes that can already be felt, in varying degrees of intensity, in his first books, and are then gradually developed. Sometimes, one of the themes experiences a culmination, only to eventually grow silent, retreat to the background, and open up a space for another theme. But one way or another, the presence of each of these themes can be felt throughout his body of work.

Guntis Berelis, www.literature.lv