Shortly before the return of the Sigulda Opera Music Festival (29-31 July) to live concerts, its organizer Dainis Kalns published his first book “Neparvaramāma”.
Photo: Dainis Bushmanis
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“I was surprised by how much romance there is in the book, I didn’t expect it,” said entrepreneur Ilze Auzere (formerly Jurkāne) at the opening of the first book “Invincible” by the surgeon Daiņas Kalnas, organizer of the Sigulda Opera Music Festival. The book belongs to the range of fiction, and after reading it, you can agree with what is said.
Can I say this is your first book?
D. Kalns: Printed. One was already written in advance. In the context of the opera music festival, I was told not the best about some people, but Visockis (at that time the owner of the “Jumava” publishing house Juris Visockis. – VK) wanted everything to be in syrup. I wanted it to be a bit of a lie, sweetly embellished. But I wasn’t born that way.
And who has published this book?
Published by myself at my own expense. I would like to thank the artist Sarmīte Māliņa for the cover design.
The name “Irresistible”, taking into account the current situation, at the first moment is associated with the concept of “insurmountable power”. What does that mean in your book that is “insurmountable”?
Love. It can be both beautiful and at the same time humanly cruel condition. It is not for nothing that people hang themselves because of unrequited love, there are even murders, and in one of my stories, love is connected with emotional and psychological violence. This is what I call “dirty” love. But love in the most beautiful sense of the word weaves through the entire book and all its four stories.
You yourself have been lucky in love in your life… Wife, National Theater actress Lolita Cauka, has always been present at the Opera Music Festival as well…
It is both! However, there have been women in life who have turned their backs. You have to put up with it, well, maybe some good people regret it… (Smiles.) But everything happens with God’s message since the birth of a person, without it not even a hair falls from the head. I really believe that. That’s why one story is also called “Doomed”, a beautiful and sad story about a woman, with all her mistakes and an unfortunate fate, but it was she who was destined for the hero of my story, so that through all the pain and suffering caused by this woman, a man would achieve something in life .
But what was the emotional moment that made you start writing fiction?
The stories I now print have been in my head for a long time. Actually, I am a dreamer by nature. I pick up a book, I get excited and I can look at the sky. It’s like the notes for a musician that resonate in the head, thus creating music. That’s how I get a topic that I should write about, and I put this thought into specific characters.
All stories are written in the first person. In the first story, your literary heroine is a woman, a milkmaid, who has experienced both beautiful and harsh moments in her life, the rest you have assumed the skin of a man – both selfish and humiliated. How many stories contain reality, documentary facts?
All stories correspond to the truth, reality of life. However, except for one story, the other three do not have specific prototypes. I don’t rewrite life in a book, but draw from it. Several topics have been bothering me for a long time.
The first is about what the world powers have done to us, how they have broken people’s destinies, but in spite of that, our people have been so resilient. I couldn’t help but write about the cruel fate of the many women in the post-war years, who raised their children alone without fathers, despite poverty, physical and moral humiliation, overcoming suffering, not a single tragedy, slaving in collective farms, made their offspring work-loving, smart, hardworking patriots who protected Latvia and became one of the main restorers of independence.
The second story – times change, virtues also change, the story is written as an antithesis to the bright, good, pure, beware of sin!
Two short stories – my eternal question: how can you be happy, unjustifiably hurting your loved ones and making your own children unhappy? I have always wondered if betrayal can be forgiven. How can you be happy at the expense of others’ unhappiness, especially if they are your children? A man tangles at women’s brunches, divorces and abandons his children.
It seems to me a very tragic and unforgivable act. You have to be able to make sacrifices for the sake of your children, because if you can’t, they grow up mentally crippled. In addition, it is precisely such children who are most affected by mobbing at school, this modern misfortune, they are ridiculed and humiliated. But passion, lust, infatuation with another woman, it lasts about four years. It is scientifically proven.
The man then looks for another object of love. There are mistakes in life that are very difficult, in fact impossible, to correct. That’s what the last story “Night on the Street” is about.
But the first story of the book, “Just like then” is about the cruel fate of women in the post-war period. The heroine of my story gets married in 1939, very beautifully in love with her real man, but then the Russian occupation comes and soon she is drafted into the German army. Then the Russians come again, they have to survive the 1949 evacuation and later, after serving in the Soviet army, their son dies.
One woman has to go through all this. My cousin’s husband went to Lestene, but nobody knows where he is until this white day. My heroine in the story has a similar fate. There is no news about her husband, who was taken in the war, but she hopes that maybe one day her beloved will return.
If I had written a documentary about the fate of my mother, who raised us, five children alone, because my father was exiled to Siberia for 25 years, it would be gloomy and depressing. But I have dressed the harsh life and the twists and turns of fate in the story in the sauce of love and romance. My heroine is a strong person who, despite the blows of fate, at the end of her life can be satisfied with her life, because she is not alone, lonely and abandoned. Yes, I could take a lot from my mother’s life for the story, because she, like my literary heroine Mirdza Leimane, was also a milkmaid.
At that time, the kolkhoz sweepers hoe beets and potatoes in the farm field, we children weeded so that the cows would not starve in the winter, because the food provided by the kolkhoz was only a tenth of what was needed.
On the other hand, in the story “Doomed”, a completely different love winds through – cruel, tormenting, even torturing.
Like I said, it’s what I call “dirty” love, with multiple partners, alcohol, hand-wringing, and venereal disease. Erotica and romance in the story to show how polished a woman can be, to wrap an inexperienced man around her finger. Smart women use the art of love to make fools of naive men. This is quite typical. That’s life too.
Knowing you as an opera lover, reading the story titled “Othello” brings to mind the well-known black hero of the opera who strangled his beloved Desdemona in a senseless jealousy.
Well, who doesn’t know the saying – jealous like Othello! It describes unreasonable jealousy, which also includes the inability to communicate with the other person.
How long did it take to write the book “Invincible”?
The story “Night on the Street” was already in my head in 1972. “Decided” – notes for it had been accumulating for a long time, but when I got down to writing, I wrote it within a month, maybe even faster. This is the last new work.
Basically, the stories have been swirling around in my head for at least forty years, taking up space in my mind, in my brain. Interestingly, the Ukrainian family that appears at the end of the short story “Just like then” can create the feeling that the work was written today, but not, it was written when the terrible misfortune of the Russian invasion of their land had not yet befallen the Ukrainians. The appearance of Ukrainians in my story is a pure coincidence!
This year, after a two-year break caused by the pandemic, the Sigulda Opera Music Festival promises to be magnificent again, with the main event J. The open-air performance of Puccini’s opera “Bohème”, in which the story is also about love, will be heard on July 30.
And the first Mimi in the world, Maija Kovalevska, will sing. The Bulgarian, 33-year-old Mikhail Mihailov, is one of the best tenors in the role of Rudolph. He has performed at the Sigulda Opera Music Festival before, and not a single person in the audience admitted that he sang or better than the famous Pavarotti.
Our own Macanovskis, Norvelis, Apeinis are also world-class singers.
Excellent violinist Dainis Medjaniks will play at the opening concert. This artist is not really known in Latvia, but he has a great career, he is the only Latvian to join the famous Elba Philharmonic Orchestra in Hamburg, where our Iveta Apkalnas is the head of the organ music program. The young, talented violinist Elsa Siliņa, the daughter of the well-known singer Ances Krauze, will also perform, the prima donna of the Latvian National Opera, Jūlija Vasiļjeva, and the Ukrainian soloist of the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theater, Olga Matushenko, will also sing.
Several Latvian musicians with an exotic touch in their origins will perform at the “New Stars” concert. For example, violinist Ankita Tripathi’s mother is Latvian, but his father is Indian. Plays as virtuoso as rarely anyone. Cellist Reinis Rudzītis will perform, as well as very good singers – Katažina Dudareva, a Latvian-speaking girl from Daugavpils, and excellent baritone Daniils Kuzmins.
Opera music has long been known to be your passion, and everyone knows that you are a doctor by profession. But writing, moreover, when it comes to fiction, also requires completely different skills, including thinking. How do you agree, how do you go together?
You can’t say it like that, but if you look at the articles, a lot of doctors have written fiction. Miervald Birze had a doctor’s diploma, as did Aria Elksne… Of course, I don’t compare myself to them, but Chekhov and Bulgakov were also doctors by profession.
Have your next book in mind?
When I woke up on Midsummer morning, I can’t even say why, I started thinking about grandparents, whose children and grandchildren are abroad and who are left alone, unhappy, in Latvia. There are young people who go abroad to study, marry foreigners, and the children in their families no longer speak Latvian.
But grandparents feel unnecessary here. So many houses are standing empty. Scary. Already half a million people are in economic emigration. I consider those who have left to be traitors to the motherland. You can also find a job in Latvia.
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