Nordic poetry as night music. A monograph on Jānis Ziemeļnieks / Article has been published

In the Latvian prose and literary science interaction project “I am…”, the publishing house “Dienas grāmata” will publish 13 novels and monographs on the personalities of Latvian literature. The ambitious research of the literary critic Jānis Zālītis has just been published – a monograph on the poet and writer Jānis Ziemeļnieks “Kam puķe zied…”.

Jānis Zālītis says that there is an idea – Ziemeļnieks is “an unhappy love poet with four thin books of poems”, but calls to remember the words of a forgotten Ziemeļnieks friend – “this pessimistic gloomy line dominates in his poetry, but it is Ziemeļnieks’ night music”. In contact with colleagues and friends, the North has been very witty, very cheerful, very fond of telling anecdotes, but less talked about, he has also been a very visible, skilled, sensitive literary critic – he has written both reviews and especially annual reports on literature, anniversary articles, notes Zālītis.

Literary historian and journalist Āronu Matīss became the godfather of the pseudonym Jānis Ziemeļnieks (real name Jānis Krauklis) when the new author had sent the first poems to Dzimtenes Vēstnesis.

In the monograph, the literary historian Jānis Zālītis, Ph.D.

“I had one such starting point, because I know that for many, my generation and the previous generation, the first lasting impression of the Northman is Jānis Plauža’s novel” Ziemeļnieks “, which was published in 1936, so soon, less than six years after Jānis Ziemeļnieks ‘death, and it really incorporates in good faith all the factual material that was available to the author, especially during the Riga period, still using Ziemeļnieks’ contemporaries, because at that time almost everyone was still alive, his friends and colleagues. , because it is a certain pressure of time and stakeholders, therefore, this novel, especially the second part of the novel, moved in such a, one might say, subjectivized way, “says Zālītis.

Speaking about their rapprochement, the author explains: “Many people have now seen the new series, the film about Emilija Benjamin, there in the first two series Ziemeļnieks appears, of course, the series is a series, without imagination and creative imagination it can not be, but at least moments and circumstances of death, they are not connected at all with reality, because Jānis Ziemeļnieks … We will not answer that either – was it a deliberate overdose of drugs or just a concession in front of an invincible opponent, in front of drugs. 55. Here it is, and when the hostess discovered in the morning that the door of the poet’s room was closed, the first was a call to the editorial office of “Latest News”, and then his colleagues and doctors were the first to arrive at the Northman’s residence. “

This year, the novel of the series “I am” about Jānis Ziemeļnieks, written by writer Andris Zeibots, was also published.