Andrejs Papārde’s real name is Miķelis Valters (1874–1968), he was born and raised in Liepāja in a family of dock workers. Valters is a versatile personality – a Doctor of Juridical Science, a social worker, a politician and a diplomat with outstanding accomplishments in Latvian history. Valters was also an art theorist and poet. He signed his literary works with a pseudonym Andrejs Papārde.
In literature, Papārde announces himself in the 1890s with works of short prose and reflections, later also with poetry. In book shape, his poetry is published after the 1905 Russian Revolution. He has three collections of poems published.
The first collection of poems “Tantris” was published in 1908 in Helsingfors. The collection consists of little poems in short verses, without titles, but listed with roman numerals from one to eighty-nine. The poems are written in free verse, without rhymes, and they are characterized by allegoric expression and symbolic characters. The poetry is allegorically symbolic, with no specific place and time. The inflecting sound of verses is dominated by a pessimistic and depressive feel. The common gloomy atmosphere of the poems in the collections is formed by the imagery of pessimistic expressions, the dominance of the black colour and a severely dramatic sense of the world of the main character. The scenes with depressive characters capture the horror of a global apocalypse as well as the fear of an individual threat.
The atmosphere of misery and hopelessness is created by grim stylistics and negative semantic characters. The very few characters of positive expression cannot dispel the overall dreary and sorrowful mood.
Andrejs Papārde’s second poem collection “Ēnas uz akmeņiem” comes out in 1910 in Riga. The collection consists of seventy poems numbered with Arabic numerals. Interestingly, the pages are not numbered, thus only the number of a poem can be indicated in the references. All of the poems are of small scale, ranging from five to twelve lines, most of them are poems of six to eight short lines. All of the poems from the collection are without titles, written in free verse and without rhymes. The form of the poems is almost compressed to a maximum. The free verse and the intelligent dimension of the poems allow perceiving Papārde’s poetry similarly to Japanese haiku or tanka.
Verses filled with depressive feelings in a way persist in his second collection of poems, however this time in not so unvaryingly dull manner and not so fatally obedient. More often, but not entirely levelled, optimistic tunes are played. The night continues to reign, there is still a lot of black colour, but more often there are mentionings of mornings. Notably, for expressing optimistic feelings, verbs are used in the future tense. Papārde’s second poem collection “Ēnas zem akmeņiem” ends on an optimistic tune, but that is certainly not a naive optimism of non-existing problems.
Papārde’s third poem collection “Mūžība” subtitled “Mana dziesma” was published in 1914 in Helsingfors. Unlike in the previous collections, in this one, all of the poems have titles, and they are no longer numbered. The author consistently keeps writing in a rhymeless free verse. Almost like with inertia, there is still skepticism and disappointment. But there is much more confidence than before, the willingness to withstand difficulties, hard times, and there is hope for the tomorrow, for the “Easter morning”, for a new day. In this poem collection, Papārde and the main character slowly turn into an ambassador of light and an admirer of the sun, thus joining the many sun worshipers and the light announcers in Latvian literature.
The character system close to romanticism, individual sovereign subjectivity, intimate sounding verses, dynamic use of abstractions and symbols are all associated with the 20th-century romanticism, or in other words, the neo-romanticism. The dominance of the pessimistic atmosphere differentiates this poetry as a depressive neo-romanticism or so-called catastrophic romanticism poetry.
Die werking van die musiekmotief in De koperen tuin van Simon Vestdijk
