A Folklorist in the Soviet Spotlight

The article seeks to illuminate the ideologically motivated circumstances of Latvian folklore studies during the period of unconditional Soviet totalitarianism. With the strengthening of the Soviet occupation regime in Latvia in the late 1940s, many interwar folklorists became victims of ideological...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of ethnology and folkloristics Vol. XIII; no. 2; pp. 16 - 32
Main Author Treija, Rita
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Tartu Ülikool, Eesti Rahva Muuseum, Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum 2019
University of Tartu, Estonian National Museum, Estonian Literary Museum
Subjects
Customs / Folklore
Ethnohistory
Political history
sovietisation
Anna Bērzkalne
Latvia
history of folkloristics
historical–geographical method
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Summary:The article seeks to illuminate the ideologically motivated circumstances of Latvian folklore studies during the period of unconditional Soviet totalitarianism. With the strengthening of the Soviet occupation regime in Latvia in the late 1940s, many interwar folklorists became victims of ideologically motivated disdain and subsequent career limitation. ‘Bourgeois’ scholarship and the methods applied in folklore studies during the interwar period were denounced and recognised as harmful to the new Soviet order. The central part of the article presents a case study of one individual folklorist of the time, Anna Bērzkalne (1891–1956). Both increasing criticism of Bērzkalne’s folklore research approach (the historical–geographical method) and her efforts to accommodate the requirements of the Soviet regime have been analysed.
ISSN:1736-6518