Reception and Translations of Western Modernist Literature in Latvia in the Brezhnev Era
Reception and Translations of Western Modernist Literature in Latvia in the Brezhnev Era

Summary/Abstract: This study was motivated by the aspiration to understand the entry process of Western modernist literature and its results during the period of Stagnation in Soviet Latvia. The article aims to disclose what works of Western modernism were known and translated and to identify the official ways of their reception. Since this familiarization process was influenced by the specificity of the Soviet colonization model, this study uses the approach of postcolonialism and cultural studies and a collection of data that reveals the appearance of the first modernist translations in this period. The main focus is on the situation in Latvia. However, it is viewed in the context of the literature translated into Russian, with a brief outline of the situation in the other Baltic republics which, together with Latvia, from the positions of the center of the USSR were treated as the so-called Soviet West. In order to reveal how the public perception of modernism was formed, this study analyzes the contribution of Latvian Soviet literary scholars and the influence of the central literary periodicals of the USSR on their works. In conclusion, the landscape of translation and reception of Western modernism in Soviet Latvia during the Stagnation shows the hybrid nature of culture and the parallel existence of colonial and decolonial discourses. It confirms that the focus on Western modernism, which intensified in the USSR during the period of political Thaw and Stagnation, paradoxically returned Western modernism to the literary space of Soviet Latvia and changed its cultural orientation from the East to the West.

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