Awards

• Winner of Culture Fond Prize for Mirabo 1927
• Winner of Culture Fund Prize for Joan of Arc 1931
• Winner of Latvian SSR Prize for Socialism Realism Issues in Literature 1957
• Winner of USSR Prize for The Green Land 1946

Overview

Andrejs Upīts’s classic novel Gold, set in Latvia still under Tsarist rule and on the brink of the First World War, is perhaps more topical in recent decades than it has been for a long time. In fact it was dusted off in the 1990s precisely because of its description of how society behaves in untrammelled free markets. The poor and hardworking Sveilis family suddenly inherit great wealth, and this leads them on a journey in which desire and disappointment are always in control, and the author avoids many of the readers’ expectations and all stock narratives. Upīts is forensic in his naturalistic analysis of a society contending with extremes of both wealth and poverty, and how this is undermining what was left of a moral society. High on a bull market and a flood of quality alcohol, the nouveau riche are in expansive mood but what they experience is not happiness but jaded insatiability they are unable to control. These hellraisers and presumed winners in the struggle for wealth are the subject of this highly original novel, and the losers are barely mentioned except in its brief first section. The pace and the detailed observation of psychological developments carries readers along through a narrative whose power resides in its lack of moralism. They are left to make their own judgements.

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9781913212377

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Andrejs Upīts was born in 1877 in Skrīveri, a small rural town in Latvia, where he completed his studies but still pursued his self-education which included studies into German and Russian, both culturally significant in his country at the time, and also English, French and Italian. He worked as a teacher, translator, civil servant and journalist as well as a prolific career as a novelist and poet. He was arrested in the early twenties because of his writing, and on one occasion sentenced to death, but other writers and artists managed to secure a reprieve. In the postwar period, Upīts won literary prizes and had a more secure career, but he still had problems with the Soviet censors who banned the performance of one of his plays, and prevented the distribution of his History of Literature. He died in 1970 at the age of ninety-three, and a museum was opened in his name.

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