This time, living books will be people who expanded the boundaries of freedom of the written word in the conditions of censorship in the late 80s.
Inese Zander will tell you what a children’s newspaper meant in the Renaissance years pioneer, who finally justified his name and was the first to publish an article on the history of the Latvian flag – its author was academician Jānis Stradiņš. Pioneerswhich then turned into The BA – Latvian children’s newspaperat the Interfront congress, a fascist publication was called from the rostrum, and a historic court case was held in which it was decided whether the board game published in the newspaper on the history of Latvia teaches children the truth.
Magazine Source was published from 1987 to 1992 and was a literary, journalistic, film and art magazine, whose editor was Aivars Kļavis. A year ago, a collection of his memories was published Origin time. The head of the literature department at that time was the poet and translator Guntars Godiņš.
Of the banned literature, that of George Orwell had the greatest resonance with the magazine’s readers Animal farms print, next to it Source presented writers such as Kafka, Cocteau, Nietzsche, Beckett, Salinger, Brodsky, Tarkovsky, Nabokov and others, published the works of Latvian authors in exile, including unpublished poetry by Ojārs Vācieš, once banned The resurrection of a leader and many other sensational materials at the time.
• How difficult was the process of creating a magazine under the conditions of the current Soviet censorship?
• How could there be a magazine where one of the artworks shows Lenin in a mousetrap with a confused brain?
• In late Soviet times, how could a magazine with a circulation of at least 100,000 copies question Gagarin’s space flight and write about Chekist crimes?
The legendary magazine Source once the desire to be free was created in Latvians, the philosopher Ilmārs Šlāpins, whose magazine source, one page at a time, in the letters my mother sent to the gas station in Afghanistan. The editor Aivars Kliavis writes it Source the main value was not individual articles, but the magazine as a whole, which offered the people of Soviet Latvia a completely different point of view and philosophy.
A living library the museum contains stories of courage for our common future, memories of times when people had the courage to do something new and of their own!
Different memories – a common future is a project of the Goethe Institute, which is being implemented as part of a comprehensive set of measures with targeted funding from the FRG Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the 2022 budget supplement to mitigate the consequences of Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine.
