Introduction: An Outline of the Political and Cultural Development of Latvia

In Part 2, we trace the main trends occurring in Latvian literary histories. The first books in the Latvian language were printed in the sixteenth century, following the Protestant Reformation. (The first book, the Latvian Lutheran Mass or description of liturgical services, was printed in 1525, but it has not survived down to the present. The first surviving book is Catholic Catechism from 1585.) The first overview of publications up to the early nineteenth century was published in 1812. During these three centuries, almost all published texts in Latvian were created by the Baltic German upper class, as the entire territory of today’s Latvia was conquered during the time of the Crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The rise of Latvian literature in the nineteenth century was closely linked to the intellectual, social, and political aspirations of the local population, which consisted primarily of the socially lower class of freehold peasants. The ruling community of Baltic Germans looked at these efforts with considerable reservations. Latvian literature became a politically and culturally contested field, and ideological tensions persisted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To make this complexity more accessible, we begin with a brief overview of the history of the territory of the present-day Latvia, followed by the story of the emergence of Latvian literature. We then proceed to look at how these processes are reflected in histories of Latvian literature.