Henrieta Verhoustinska: While reading this book, the biggest question I had – the first two parts are in the first person of Ezerins, it is the story of Jānis Ezeriņš, but in the last part that takes place in Riga, this message is divided and there are many “I” who tell about Lake. This form is not passed from the first to the last page, but still changes during the book. This is to reflect Ezerins’ contradictory personality?
Andris Akmentins: You mix a little, but nothing, it happens. The second part is also no longer “I”. The second part is “he” – the manager. The manager goes and does.
Since he is one of the heroes, I continued to read him in the first person.
If in the first he searches for himself: “I am one or the other, I have done it or that” – he wanders, wanders, seeks, doubts, almost dies, but in the end he gladly concludes that only the decadent is dead, then in the second part he is very focused. tries to be a good schoolmaster and plays this role as a chess party. I didn’t want to lose it, because it seems that there is a poet, not just a novelist. Because in yourself, if you have started through poetry, you continue to think about yourself. This unpublished collection of poetry hurts all my life. It is like a scar that also feeds further literature.
At the moment, it seems that you are talking about yourself, because you started as a poet and switched to prose.
Yes, we have many parallels that are very similar, including the beginning of the first short stories with short stories. Then you realize that you can grab a bigger piece, write a novel. It seemed to me that he first creates himself, then tries to play something, then gradually moves away from us. The following are reflections that are very different because there is a conversation on one topic. For example, the novel “Red and Black”, Ezerins has translated, is met by an enthusiastic colleague and says: “It is a very good book,” and Ezerins: “Yes, it is the best novel in the world.” Another colleague comes and says, “There are a lot of translation errors, though.” Ezerins says: “Yes, terribly, I had to hurry terribly, I experienced that my name was on top.” He played with somewhere often. There are very different human reflections. It was like an intrigue to me with the idea that I was still making a portrait of a man who had translated Oscar Wilde’s “Dorian Gray’s Family” in his own unique way. This relationship is when you paint yourself, but others paint you, and at some point you don’t come to yourself at all. The crowd that you don’t know where you are. That’s about it, and then he gets confused and pushes everyone aside and says, “Pag, will I meet the word again someday?” I also didn’t want to end with Ezerins, I wanted to end with the idea of the whole “Book of the Day” series, with the great happiness of getting to know the literature.
In the process, I read dozens of books I would never have read in my life, not even a very good one, but an interesting one.
For example, Austria’s “Long Mile”, which was a really long mile, is very chaotic.
Antons Austriņš is Ezeriņš’s best friend in this book.
It could be said. He had a very good friend in Goliath during the Saikava stage, but he died early. In 1921. At that stage in Saikava, they became friends, met and sang. One of the great stories in the book is about the roles of people we take, do not hold, flow, swim, and they are seven years apart. They start as a teacher and a student, then become brothers – eldest and youngest, and then they exchange places at one point. At least the attitude towards literature is somewhat more serious for Ezeriņš. I try to play that ironically.
Photo: Publicity image
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In an interview, you used a wonderful phrase “Ezerina goosebumps”. Maybe tell me what is “Ezeriņa goosebumps”? Is that what we feel when we read his short stories with which he has entered the history of literature?
Yes, there the “goosebumps” appeared as a parallel between the little breeze of the lake, which is the small waves of the lake, and the girls’ goosebumps… It’s not inside the book, but I realized that it is “Lake goosebumps”. A bit of the gothic, romantic era fear literature tremor, but in the case of Ezerins it is one face from which he has fled. “Ezerina goosebumps” is magic when working with a sentence. The novel begins with a phrase that happens in a sentence – the part of Ezeriņš that he kneads that sentence, and there is a tension, also a tension in the language – to say as accurately as possible. That is why I largely draw parallels with Klāvs Elsbergs. A maple quote is included in the preface. The resemblance to the Klava is not only in that short stage of life, but also in the intensification of what the sense of brevity of life gives. Mostly serious about the text. There they are brothers – this grinding, self-blame, even clearer, closer, more sincere. Raise each of these things to the “goosebumps” of the language. It seems to me that it is very “lake-like” for a clave to make rows and words until “the family glows green and gray”.
As the author of the story, do you agree that to study Lake is a sea, not a lake?
Ezerins is a good author, because he is one of the great classics in the sense that he is inexhaustible in terms of research, being interesting enough, and there is enough material there…
Although he died young.
Yes, his work capacity was enormous. And that’s the story of the pubs, although I doubt it in the novel …
But he also sits in pubs in your novel.
Succeeded, yes. I don’t know if it’s inside the novel, but many more people boasted that they drank with him than how Ezerins drank at all.
Respectively, the amount of work with ordinary bohemia would not be elevated.
He wrote in his “opening” moment while he could.
While finished everything…
In the novel, I tried to say that a person lives with a certain punishment, as we all do. He buys offenses for which he could be punished. Inexhaustibility is… The total volume is large.
The lake folder on my computer is about five gigabytes.
The brass library has the most manuscripts, a few thousand pages, and it is not the easiest handwriting to read. Somehow gradually get used to. While searching for Ezerins, I met not only him, but a lot of people who are currently living. Representatives of the Ezerins family branch, researchers in Madona and Valmiera. I basically had four museums – the Writing Museum, the Brass Library, the Valmiera Museum and the Madona Museum.
In your book, without a story about Jānis Ezeriņš, there are three of your original short stories. At first, closer to the middle and separating the third part. All three short stories are gorgeous. Why was it important for you to write these three short stories?
Short stories came about as my reaction to the materials as I studied them. To do what he did, I would feel better. And at some point I started to think I could leave them inside. Now, for example, student participation is important in curriculum development. I laughed, I quote in the book that students need to participate in the development of the curriculum – I found it in the magazine “Education” in 1911. The reform continues.
Education is a topic close to you in general, because your first prose work is the novel “Teachers” about the Khrushchev school.
Yes, it is a coincidence. I wanted to write even less…
But two of the three parts of “Ezerina” take place directly at school.
Yes, it also meets time. I didn’t jump terribly, I went quite chronologically. Chapters are with arrows, if it leads linearly forward, but if it is a bounce back to the past, then there is an arrow back at the beginning of the chapter. Basically, I tried to describe the basics because they weren’t really told, and then I experimented a bit with forms of expression and included short stories.
The problem is that the authors who are in this “Diary Book” series, everyone is in their own situation, because there is too much written about someone, too little about, so the books will be very different in this series. That is interesting. It is a competition with the author.
In the end, I also meet Ezerins and admit that he is teasing me, that he still gets better short stories, I fully understand and admit it.
My only consolation is that I finished a novel that he did not complete.
I think you have to write seven more short stories to make a collection!
I would not want to do it alone. This year, on April 9, Ezeriņš will celebrate his 130th anniversary. When other authors celebrate it, I usually don’t feel it and think – what are they bothering with some numbers, but now I feel this anniversary. For some 150, 140, even 137 years, a project could be made for prose writers to organize a Ezeriņš short story competition. He studies a writer, reads and writes his short stories. These, too, have become so. Introduction and it’s all like actually trying to go to the pub and sit down, imagine that you are Ezerins.
As a result of scarce food and a pandemic, I have no imagination, so I can only write what I see.
In the second short story, I realized that there really is a short story. It is a very private situation when talking to a man who has been like a tongue-in-cheek all my life, and I suddenly come and he starts talking about the funeral, the red army, the white army. Air gardens have begun. And I understand that I don’t have that dictionary, and that’s the story.
And the third comes from Kārzdaba’s stories. Like Sigita Kushner, who takes on the science part of this project that comes from there. We went there, visited Lake Beirus, which was also a tragic gap in his soul that they were lost. He forbade himself to look to that side. We got a lot of folklore material. There is a distinct, interesting layer. Imagine stealing a roller with a wall and pulling it away with a horse, but that roller ignites in some way, and a horse with a burning wall roller roars through the village. Or that the three brothers are buried at the expense of the parish. The first one is given money for a funeral, it is drunk, the second one is given a coffin, he also manages to drink it and the third one is kept, then the company arrives, it drains everything. It could be put there over and over again, but I was determined that this book should not be thicker than “Teachers”, I wanted to be thinner. The goal has been achieved, thank you.
CONTEXT:
In 2018, the publishing house “Dienas grāmata” started work on a new major project of Latvian literature “I am …”. From 2020 to 2024, it will publish 26 new works: 13 novels and 13 monographs on the classics of Latvian literature.
The new project “I am” provides for the series “We. Latvia, XX Century ”, constantly activating social memory, awareness of history, its research and understanding, focusing on the essence of personality, individual choices, intellectual responsibility.
The series includes works by Aspazija, Anna Brigadere, Anšlavs Eglītis, Jānis Ezeriņš, Gunars Janovskis, Ivande Kaija, Vilis Lācis, Jānis Poruks, Kārlis Skalbe, Ilze Šķipsna, Andrejs Upīts, Eduards Veidenbaums and Jānis Ziemeļnieks.
The authors of novels and monographs are writers Inga Ābele, Andris Akmentiņš, Guntis Berelis, Māris Bērziņš, Inga Gaile, Ilze Jansone, Arno Jundze, Laima Kota, Svens Kuzmins, Gundega Repše, Osvalds Zebris, Andris Zeibots, Inga Žolja and literary scholars Mai Daukste-Silasproģe, Gundega Grīnuma, Māra Grudule, Ieva Kalniņa, Arnis Koroševskis, Sigita Kušnere, Anita Rožkalne, Olga Senkāne, Lita Silova, Ieva Struka, Viesturs Vecgrāvis, Jānis Zālītis. The author and initiator of the idea of the project “I am…” is the writer and art historian Gundega Repše.
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