from Journal of Folklore Research Volume 41, Number 1

Excerpt from

The Latvian Epic Lacplesis: Passe-Partout Ideology, Traumatic Imagination of Community

Sergei Kruks

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In school, when I first read passages from Lacplesis, I was convinced it was included in books in order to chastise children. A dull and bulky text was somehow to be appreciated as a sublime story, a source of heroic inspiration. Twenty years later, because my academic interests encompass national narrative, I had to coerce myself to approach Lacplesis again. How was I to do this analysis? What could one expect from this nineteenth-century romantic imitation of the epic genre? I found myself setting Lacplesis aside for a while to direct my attention to the Estonian epic Kalevipoeg. Immediately I was struck by the joy and optimism emanating from the Estonian text, in contrast to the depression and anguish permeating the Latvian. I was astonished by the completely different images of the social world created in the two neighboring nations!

These first impressions resonate with contemporary observations about Latvia and Estonia. Despite their similar cultural, religious, and historical background, it is common to hear public and private reiterations of the differences between the two, especially in terms of their responses to Soviet domination and to the ways social change has been accomplished. In this article I argue that the differences are already coded in the ways distinct communities are imagined and social realities constructed in each country's rendering of its literary epic. Both epics are particular signs of conscious attempts in the nineteenth-century to invent identities for emerging "nations" (as part of so-called cultural awakenings) as well as attempts to create a blueprint for social bonding. The premise of this essay is that these epics have become reservoirs of symbolic material--mythomoteurs--that have exerted influence on each nation's sociocultural development and that continue to shape contemporary discourses. Thus, if the value of literary work is defined by contemporary society (Fokkema and Ibsch 1995), then the analysis of epics might reveal what Fredric Jameson (1981) refers to as the "political unconscious" and provide a frame for interpreting certain contemporary questions.

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