The New Latvians: Strategies for the Creation of a National Identity

The aim of this chapter is to identify the key waypoints in the development of Latvian literature in the 1850s-70s, when the Latvian national movement, also known as the jaunlatvieši – the New Latvians, emerged and advanced at a rapid rate. Its aims were associated with Latvian social and economic emancipation, for which the movement’s activists regarded the construction of national consciousness to be a pre- requisite. Thus Latvian literature became an instrument for carrying out the objectives of cultural nationalism; by means of this instrument (similarly as with the gathering of folklore materials and the Song Festival movement) the national movement intended to provide justification for the equality of Latvian culture as it was understood in the nineteenth century, and at the same time to lay the foundations for the development of the Latvian nation in the future without setting forth any political demands, but remaining within the framework of the paradigm of cultural nationalism.