by Will Mawhood
Travel much in the small towns and countryside of Latvia’s lake-splashed eastern borderlands, and you’ll almost definitely hear a Baltic-sounding language that isn’t quite Latvian – at least, certainly not the kind spoken in the capital. To someone comfortable with Riga Latvian, the majority of the words will have clearly familiar outlines, but most of the vowels have shifted under pressure, palatalised tails have clipped themselves to unexpected sounds and certain words seem oddly truncated. Now and then an unknown word, often ringing faintly Russian or Polish or Lithuanian, seems to have seeped in.
This is Latgalian – which is, depending on your point of view, “a historical variant of the Latvian language” (the legal status of its standardised written form), or the third living Baltic tongue. Safest to say, whether dialect or language, it certainly is extremely unlucky.
It has a written tradition dating back to the 18th century and has long formed part of the highly distinct identity of Latgale, a broad swathe of territory that is the most ethnically diverse of Latvia’s four historic regions. Despite or perhaps because of this, it has been subject to no less than three separate formal or de facto bans on printing and official use in the last 150 years, the last of which ended only in 1990.
The last Latgalian publication prior to that, a kolkhoz calendar, had appeared in 1960, with the language falling victim to an undeclared but clearly effective prohibition, seemingly the consequence of a policy against “dialecticism” pursued in Soviet Latvia. The restoration of Latvian independence meant cultural production restarted, but considerable uncertainty prevailed regarding the role, if any, of a “second” Latvian language in education and administration. Besides, many young and creative people were doubtful about defining themselves by a language often associated with the old and rural, even if they spoke it natively.
That’s why it’s been fascinating to see music, films, literature and even memes in the Latgalian language gaining a higher profile over recent years, bringing Latgale’s very specific qualities to an audience across Latvia and beyond, while wrestling with its troubled past and challenging present.
Latgalīšu Reps (Latgalian Rap), a hip-hop duo from the small town of Ludza, had one of the summer hits of 2018 in Latvia with “Žārei Gaļi”. It’s a slick and radio-friendly earworm of a track that in its chorus shouts out for “čyuli, čangali” to come together for a barbecue, repurposing terms for (non-Latgalian) Latvians and Latgalians respectively that edge on being slurs. Their success has drawn attention to the small but thriving Latgalian scene, ranging from veterans like metallers Sovvaļnīks and the anthemic rock-edging-on-folk group Bez PVN to younger voices like the rapper Ūga.
The novel Bruoli (“The Brothers”) by Aldis Bukšs was released in 2020, becoming the first ever Latgalian-language thriller. The same year, the historical drama Piļsāta pi upis (“The Town on the River”) appeared, the first major film in three decades to be narrated primarily in Latgalian. Filmed largely in the pretty and largely wooden old town of Krāslava by the modern-day Belarusian border, and punctuated by whooping bursts of polka, it covers the turbulent period from the 1934 Riga coup that brought Latvian nationalist Kārlis Ulmanis to power to the subsequent wartime occupations by the Soviets and Nazis. It’s also been made available to English-speaking audiences, under the title The Sign Painter, as has a slim volume of selected works from three Latgalian poets of the younger generation, The Last Model/Pādejais Modeļs.
When we meet at the GORS concert hall in the central Latgalian city of Rēzekne, Vineta Vilcāne, until earlier this year the editor of lakuga.lv, perhaps the best-known Latgalian-language cultural website, agrees that interest nationally in Latgalian has grown considerably in the last decade, but evidently feels there is still some way to go before the region is adequately represented in Latvia’s story. Born in Preiļi, a small and predominantly Latgalian-speaking town not far away, Vilcāne says she found during her school years and later studies that overviews of the nation’s past tend to minimise or even entirely ignore the region, and speculates:
“As a historian, you need sources, and that means you have to go to the archives. And the problem with this region is that documents are not in Riga; they are in Russia, in Belarus, maybe in Ukraine, in Poland. And that always makes costs… In Riga, you can just jump on a tram, pay 1.50 euros and you are at the archives.”
These geographical reference points reveal a little about what sets Latgale apart within Latvia. For the hundred-odd years Riga was under Swedish rule and Courland (western Latvia) a largely autonomous German-dominated duchy, Latgale was a distant fringe of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Later, under the Russian Empire, Latgale was also governed separately, from the now-Belarusian city of Vitebsk, undergoing a fifty-year ban on printing using Latin characters, meaning Latgalian-language books had to be covertly copied out by hand by volunteers.
It was in Rēzekne that, in March 1917, the Latgalian Congress voted to join a bid for autonomy together with the majority-Latvian regions of Vidzeme and Kurzeme, laying the foundation for the Republic of Latvia, declared the following year. But the time apart had left deep cultural imprints, not least the fervent Catholicism of most Latvian-speakers in the region, an anomaly within mostly Lutheran Latvia.
A recent Latgalian-language documentary, Laiki. Cylvāki. Volūda. (Times, People, Language), perhaps does something to correct this apparent neglect.
Sitting by a cold-looking, pine-fringed lake, the two presenters, Arnis Slobožaņins and Māris Susejs, share thoughts on the region’s past, now earnestly, now with bitter humour, interspersed with archive footage and talking-head commentary.
Reverses are, understandably, taken personally. Reacting to a 1941 declaration by Riga Communists that Latgale’s idiosyncrasy was simply a result of the influence of Catholic priests (and thus of course undesirable and to be combatted), Susejs growls indignantly: “They tried to convince us, Latgalians, that we were one big mistake of history!”
One of the most memorable moments concerns another lake: Adamova, just outside Rēzekne. It’s an arrestingly placid sight the day I visit, an unruffled blue surface with a miniature island set halfway across; save for a couple of Soviet apartment blocks that overlook it from the village on one shore, it’s hard to imagine it could have changed much in centuries. Taken there shortly after the start of his tenure, an enraptured Kārlis Ulmanis declared it the most beautiful place in all of Latgale. But he had an unpleasant surprise when informed of its Slavic-sounding name, and declared it would be renamed Kalnezers (a more “Latvian” name which literally means “hill-lake”).
This reveals an uncomfortable fact: the second of the three periods of suppression Latgalian experienced happened under Latvian rule. While Latgalian wasn’t outlawed, the documentary nonetheless assembles considerable evidence of interference with the region’s hitherto considerable cultural autonomy after Ulmanis’s arrival in power, from covert discouragement of publishing and education in Latgalian to the “Latvianisation” of place names.
This stretch of history leaves ripples in the contemporary-set Bruoli. Bukšs mentions how under Ulmanis his protagonist Edgars’ fictional home village, Ryučupe, was renamed Rūčupe (the letter “y” appears in Latgalian words, but not in Latvian), a small change phonetically but one that completely alters its meaning to Latgalian-speakers. “The name of Edgars’ home village had changed from a river with streams to a river that roared.”
The theme shows up in The Town on the River too. The ingenious device of following a professional sign painter, Ansis, an amateur artist with a complicated love life, allows the film to unobtrusively trace the domestic impact of the head-spinning series of changes of authority (and governing language) the region underwent before, during and after World War II. But it all begins with the coup in 1934, after which Ansis is instructed that everything “must be just like in Riga”. Ansis’s brush ensures Breiveibas īla becomes Brīvības iela (Freedom Street in Latgalian and Latvian respectively), and then, significantly, Vienības iela (Unity Street).
The boyish presenter of Laiki. Cylvāki. Volūda. Slobožaņins is a singer too, and his group Dabasu Durovys played a set at GORS the night before. They are in a sense the old guard: what is possibly Dabasu Durovys’s biggest hit: “Piparmētru čajs ar madu” (Peppermint Tea with Honey), a chirpy, brass-assisted ode to soothing a ferocious hangover, came in 2008, and their gentle, tuneful pop-rock, mostly sung in Latgalian, is often heard on Latvian radio stations. He’s joined onstage by a range of luminaries from the region’s music scene, from rappers to choirs to a participant in the Latvian version of The X Factor.
It’s a curiosity of the modern Latgalian pop canon that it includes a localised version of “An Englishman in New York”, played by Dabasu Durovys during their set. At some time in the ‘90s, Latgalian lyrics were put to Sting’s tune, and it was recorded by Apveineiba MMC under the title “Kod latgaļīts Reigā brauc” (When a Latgalian Goes to Riga). In place of the former Police singer’s refined and misunderstood Britisher on the Upper East Side, we have a Latgalian counting off the stations on the 150-mile journey from Rēzekne to the capital, resorting to the pawn shop, getting used to the city and forgetting “what shines so there in the marsh”.
In its unusual way, this highlights the economic and social difficulties the region has long faced, by flagging its principal result: (regretful, sometimes embittered) emigration. Latgale is by some distance the poorest region of Latvia, and tops the charts for a whole spectrum of undesirable indicators, from unemployment to alcoholism to, most recently and pressingly, vaccine-shyness. This is nothing new: Ulmanis and contemporary government officials often referred to Latgale as “the third star of Latvia”, which “lags behind”. In a sign of the times, Edgars Tārauds in Bruoli has experience of working not just in Riga, but also in London. And, as their bios relate, two of the three Latgalian authors represented in The Last Model live abroad: in Ireland and Estonia.
While Latgalian authors and film-makers are still dealing with the remnants, cultural and physical, of the recent, painful past, the much freer environment of today seems defined by challenges and uncertainties that border on the existential.
Aldis Bukšs is from northern Latgale, a thickly forested region bordering Russia, and his intricate and tautly wound tale exposes the criminal possibilities of this sparsely populated and liminal zone, covering international espionage, blackmail, illegal immigration, and the trans-European trade in narcotics.
A recent short story collection by Sandra Ūdre examines how destructive attitudes and violence can be passed from generation to generation, particularly affecting women. It touches on the impact of the region’s greater social conservatism and religiosity too; in one powerful story, a woman in late-Soviet Latgale thinks about her feckless and alcoholic čyuļs husband, who she married shortly after her first encounter under pressure from her mother (she remembers him looking at the altar, paintings of Christ and candles, mouth open; “he felt like he was in a museum”, she thinks).
Raibīs’s long poem “We Are the Last Models”, collected in The Last Model, is half-defiant, half-despairing, in a striking series of images presenting his generation of Latgalians as literal detritus, marked but survivors: “We are the children of the last belches of the Soviet era,/ our pockets and bags/ were sewn with forever […] We are the children of the Soviet Union’s run-off”.
In the song that is unofficially thought of as the anthem of Latgale, heard for the first time in 1991, the landscapes of Latgale, its forests, fields and creatures, are described speaking:
Tik skaidrā volūdā
Kai iudiņs olūtā
“In language as clear
As water in a spring”
The music is lilting and the words of poet Anna Rancāne are stirring, unshowily evoking a remarkably beautiful and unspoilt part of the world. And yet clearness and consistency is exactly what is hard to come by when reading and writing about the language spoken, beautifully but quite differently, throughout Latgale. In theory a constituent part of the state language; in practice, it has often seemed subordinate or even contradictory to “literary Latvian”.
It’s a decade since the Latgalian author and broadcaster Ilze Sperga wrote for a Riga-based publication: “Latgalians in Latvia are like a hot potato. They mustn’t be spat out, but neither can they be swallowed.” She was writing in response to the spectacle of two newly elected deputies in the Saeima (Latvian parliament) who attempted to give their oaths in Latgalian, but were instructed by the Speaker to switch over to the “state language”, receiving the retort from one: “for those for whom it wasn’t clear, I will read it in the Rigan variety of the language”.
Since then, things appear to have changed somewhat. In 2018, four Saeima deputies from across the political spectrum gave their oaths in Latgalian, unobstructed. Earlier this year, “the Latvian Historical Lands law” passed, intended to promote and provide funding for local identities and heritage; it will lead to road signs appearing in Latgalian throughout the region. This summer the Latvian National Language Centre appointed for the first time a consultant on the written form of the Latgalian language, the poet and linguist Armands Kociņš-Kūceņš.
However, not taught regularly at school and with limited media presence since the 1930s, Latgalian is splintered, differing markedly from one end of the region to the other. This is no different from most languages, of course, but in Latgalian the written standard (first worked out in 1929, just a few years before it disappeared from institutions) has never fully taken hold. Vineta Vilcāne has said that one of the biggest difficulties in recruiting for lakuga.lv was that so few Latgalians can write accurately in the language – as she tells me, her own sister, a fellow native Latgalian-speaker, texts her in Latvian. A source of regular complaint is the increasing prevalence of the so-called “third dialect” (trešā izloksne), which is essentially Latvian in grammar and vocabulary, albeit with the necessary phonological changes made to fit with Latgalian pronunciation.
There are grammatical differences distinctive to most of the dialects of Latgalian and many words are completely different too; Dabasu Durovys chose one for the title of their first album (the word for butterfly, ļepetņīks, which would be “taurenis” in Latvian). However, these can be disregarded: Armands Kociņš-Kūceņš himself commented in a recent radio interview that “the prestige of the written Latgalian language is pretty low”, giving the example of an encounter with a Latgalian-speaker who preferred to use the Latvian word for garlic, ķiploks, to the equivalent Latgalian term casnāgs.
Of course the best way to counter a lack of prestige is finding a way to associate it with things that people do esteem.
Latgalīšu Reps tend to take a celebratory view of the region, playing up its reputation for hospitality and carousing, and the video to their track “Trešuo zvaigzne” (Third Star) sees one of the frontmen on a bus returning to his hometown, to the words “I know that I will stay here”.
Several thriving and partially Latgalian-language Facebook pages give a contemporary, light-hearted view of the region, making memes and jokes about Latgale in which cultural differences, stereotypes and linguistic misunderstandings are sources of, mostly affectionate, humour. One, based on a very well-known meme, sees a man called Klāvs come to grief in a Latgalian environment (Klāvs is a common man’s name in Latvia, but in some Latgalian dialects it means a cow shed).
It’s increasingly common to find Latgalian businesses blazoning their difference too: KUUP, a coffee roastery whose products are available nationwide, give their coffees mysterious Latgalian names, explicated on the label by cheeky stories in the same language. Oskars Maculevičs, founder of the roastery, tells me that “the Latgalian language definitely has a future; it will develop and grow only if we, Latgalians, use it and keep it up-to-date”. He says that when running coffee masterclasses he often delivers them only in Latgalian, at the request of the attendees.
At an unexpected intersection of art and commerce is Ausmeņa Records, a Rēzekne hip-hop and street art collective, which shares its name with Ausmeņa Kebabs, a popular local kebab shop and venue which prides itself on using only Latgalian throughout its premises. That‘s because the founder, Valters Murāns (stage name Kvāps) is a rapper and collective member; and in a rare case of Latgalian cultural expansion beyond its home territory, Murāns has opened an invariably packed and equally Latgalian kebab joint on a central street in the capital, described by the national weekly Ir magazine as “something like an embassy of Latgale in Riga.”
You get used to firsts and onlys when researching Latgalian: Bruoli is the first Latgalian-language thriller, the hip-hop artist Ūga has been described as the only female Latgalian rapper in the world representing old-school hip-hop (the title track of her recent album insists “there’s hip-hop in Latgale too”), one radio programme I’m listening to refers to “the first postmodernist Latgalian text” (Oskars Seiksts and Valentīns Lukaševičs’ Valerjana dzeive i redzīni, published in the mid-‘90s), adding a little later “I have my suspicions it’s also the last Latgalian postmodernist text”.
The music scene is a small one where collaboration is the norm (Latgalīšu Reps have joined together with Bez PVN for a track, and Slobožaņins has teamed up with Ūga, who is herself a member of the Ausmeņa Records collective, who have worked with multiple other Latgalian rappers).
Still, traditions start from firsts and onlys and from smallness, and Latgalian has faced enough obstacles in its centuries of existence that one can be pretty confident it’s unlikely to end here.
2021
Will Mawhood is the editor of Deep Baltic
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