Young Latvians - Directions and Divisions

Directions and Divisions

Defining the movement in retrospect in 1889, Pumpurs wrote: "Those in the grouping that for twenty-five years fought for freedom were called the Young Latvians. Their fate was almost always the same. Without a homeland, their people devoid of rights, without goods or sustenance, often without lodging and without bread, they were doomed to wandering. All doors were locked before them, and they were prevented from finding residences or jobs. With a heavy heart they left their beloved homeland and went abroad, into the interior of Russia, searching for sustenance and at the same time gathering knowledge."

In fact, close to half of the ethnic Latvians who received a higher education were forced to seek work in Russia. As Švābe saw it: "With their selfish and shortsighted politics, the German aristocracy and bourgeoisie pressured the Young Latvians into Russophilia." Even Baltic German intellectuals devoted to the study of the Latvian culture and language, like August Johann Gottfried Bielenstein (the editor of Latviešu Avīzes), opposed the Young Latvians -- whilst the editor of Die Zeitung für Stadt und Land declared that "to be educated and Latvian is impossible -- an educated Latvian is a nothing" ("sei ein Unding"). Pastor Brasche, writing that there is no Latvian nation and that the Latvian people have no past, suggested replacing "Young Latvians" with the term "Young Peasants" ("Jung-Bauernstand"). The foremost Lutheran publication declared that Latvians had been a nation in the 13th century but had since been reduced to a peasant class; did every class require its own language? "The Latvian must die." Ethnic Latvian supporters of the Baltic Germans came to be known as "Old Latvians"; partly because many of the Young Latvians' opponents were associated with the Lutheran church, the movement also had a pronounced anti-clerical character.

Though one stream of the National Awakening was at first centered in Tartu, moved to St. Petersburg, and later shifted to Moscow, in the late 1860s Lettophiles finally succeeded in establishing themselves in Latvia, by founding a relief fund for victims of the famine in Estonia and Finland in 1867 and receiving permission to establish the Riga Latvian Association a year later. Similar associations followed in other towns, the Rīga original receiving the hypocorisma "mommy" ("māmuļa"). The Rīga Latvian Association staged the first Latvian play, held the first conference of Latvian teachers, and organized the first Latvian song festival in 1873.

Valdemārs engaged in polemics with Keuchel (the author of "sei ein Unding"), penning Nationale Bestrebungen in German as a response to his critics. A pragmatist and materialist, Valdemārs -- in exile and under police supervision in Moscow -- came further under the influence of the Slavophiles, working for the publisher Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov. To Valdemārs, "the kulak could never be as dangerous as the German's nails of flint." In reality, the liberalism some of the Young Latvians looked to in the East was soon in full retreat under Alexander III of Russia, and the Latvian language was to be more severely threatened by Russification than by Germanisation.