Reflections on Latvia's Ninetieth Birthday Andrejs Plakans

Celebrating Origins: Reflections on Latvia’s Ninetieth Birthday Andrejs Plakans Though Latvian folk beliefs engage a large array of natural and human phenomena, an explanation – mythic or historical – of how and when Latvians came into the world seems not to have been a major preoccupa- tion in the distant past. Basic intellectual constructs such as “nation” (tauta) and “society” (sabiedrība) appeared only in the second half of the nineteenth century, and such folklorised heroes as Lāčplesis (the Bearslayer) were more symbolic of Latvians’ eternal and cyclical struggle against hostile outsiders than of a founder of the collectivity.1 When speculative accounts of Latvian origins began to appear, they dealt much more with the Baltic languages and with archeological evidence of ancient Baltic settlement and burial sites than with theorising about explicitly Latvian origins; and when historians eventually turned to the question, they came to rest with the consensus that the Latvian language as such and presumably its speakers were produced by the merger of the identifiable tribal societies of Couronians, Letgallians, Selonians, Semigallians, and Livonians during the years of the Livonian Confederation (13th to 16th centuries).2 Since it was impossible to celebrate a merger stretching over centuries, Latvians have had to forego the ritualised reenactments of founding myths and the celebration of founding monarchs (such as Min- daugas in the Lithuanian case). But they did celebrate other kinds of events,3 and for such festivities the historical evidence is extensive even if underused and researched very unsystematically, as seems to be the case everywhere with the entire sociological and social-historical subject of holidays, celebrations, and national birthdays.4 Even before there was a Latvian state, celebratory traditions of various kinds had become deeply ingrained in Latvian popular culture. Over the centuries, Latvians, a rural people at the bottom of the eastern Baltic littoral’s social hierarchy, participated as congregants in marking the holidays of the Roman Catholic Church and, after the sixteenth century, of the Lutheran Church as well. There also existed a pagan substra- tum of festivities marking turning points in the agricultural year: the arri- val of spring, the end of the harvest season, the solstices.5 Cultural historians describe the merging of these holidays over time, producing substan- tial discomfort in the clergy who remained vary of pagan admixtures. There were also the personal celebrations, such as the extended week-long 14 Andrejs Plakans ___________________________________________________________ wedding feast, that to the Baltic Germans were evidence of the fundamen- tal slothfulness of the peasantry. Peasants frequently participated in the birthdays and other family celebrations of their immediate overlords as well, and, after the eastern Baltic littoral became part of the Russian Em- pire, a new set of holidays entered the list, headed by observances, espe- cially among urban Latvians, of such occasions as the Tsar’s birthday and the anniversaries of the Romanov dynasty. In the 1860s, with the appear- ance of such Latvian organisations as the Riga Latvian Association, nu- merous opportunities arose for activists to plan and carry out culturally specific and consciousness-raising Latvian celebrations that were meant to involve more than local participants. The most notable of these were the general song festivals, which after 1873 became the single most telling expression of an emerging Latvian national consciousness.6 The song festivals became occasions for the use of symbols that gradually came to stand for national unity: the song “Dievs, svētī Latviju” and the crimson- white-crimson flag. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, therefore, the practice of organising for and coming together to celebrate important events was well entrenched in the Latvian population. But because large gatherings of any kind required prior ap- proval of government authorities, such endeavours remained largely non- political. They had an indirect political effect nonetheless, because all large and inclusive Latvian gatherings for whatever purpose contributed to the diffusion of the notion that the Latvian-speakers of the Baltic Prov- inces were a people, a nation, a tauta. Embedded in this longer chain of celebrations, Latvia’s state birthdays, when they began after the founding of the state in 1918, were by definition unique. We still do not know much about them, however, because only recently have Latvian scholars turned their attention to investi- gating Latvian holidays systematically, in the past and in the present, producing a handful of pioneering studies.7 The subject turns out to be very complicated, not so much because of the dearth but because of a plenitude of evidence. The sources (archival and printed) include anniversary speeches by prominent and nearly prominent persons, newspaper accounts of gatherings large and small, the manner in which flags and other appro- priate symbols are displayed, even the menus and seating arrangements of anniversary dinners; and, at one or two removes from the official celebrations themselves, thoughtful and polemical essays by commentators on the theme of “whither Latvia?” Current historical and sociological research has succeeded in corroborating at least one general feature of such national celebrations, namely, a continuing fissure between official celebrations and attitudes in the larger celebrant population. The fissure is, of .

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