Jānis Ozoliņš

University of Latvia | LU · Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art

The article focuses on two lesser-known Baltic fictional narratives from the early 1990s that explore the melancholia experienced by gay men, as depicted by Latvian writers Andra Neiburga and Eva Rubene. Drawing on the concepts of melancholia as developed by Sigmund Freud and reinterpreted by Judith Butler, the study delves into the portrayal of qu...

This article comprehensively analyses Gunārs Piesis’s diary, providing a complete reconstruction of its content. Historical and literary discursive practices have been employed to examine the material. The central point of the argument is that the diary illuminates Piesis’s personality, his queer feelings, and mental health struggles, particularly...

The article analyzes the male portraits of the Latvian painter Atis Jākobsons, which were on display in 2022 in his exhibition at Padure Manor. The thematic dominants of these portraits are related both to the revelation of the inner world of his masculine objects (especially with the presence of timelessness, ecstasy, and androgyny in his paintin...

Keywords: stāstījums, vēstījums, Broņislavs Tabūns, Harijs Hiršs, narratology, Latvian literary scholarship This article is dedicated to the concept of narrative, exploring the origins of the concept, its character, and use in Latvian literary history and nowadays. The concept of narrative has telltale signs of an epistemological crisis: the meanin...

In Eastern Europe and Eurasia, LGBT+ individuals face repression by state forces and non-state actors who attempt to reinforce their vision of traditional social values. Decolonizing Queer Experience moves beyond discourses of oppression and repression to explore the resistance and resilience of LGBT+ communities who are remaking the post-socialist...

In my article “Inconstant and Sensitive Men: Depiction of Late Soviet Masculinity in Andra Neiburga’s Short Stories” I suggest that the masculinity of male characters depicted in all Andra Neiburga’s short stories is not unified; on the contrary, it is inconstant, sensitive, vulnerable, corporeal, and rather feminine. Some reviewers point out that...

In this thesis, I reflect upon the short fiction by Andra Neiburga (1957– 2019), including stories written between 1985 and 2011 and considering the structure of the narrative and the functions of the narrator, as well as the hitherto unexplored contextual levels of the narrative. I accord an important place to theoretical problems of narratology a...

The article examines the visibility of the LGBT community in Latvian public discourse of the last thirty years and the history of LGBT activism. Special attention is paid to the normalization of same-sex relationships: to the social processes through which ideas and actions of a social group begin crossing the threshold of deviance toward becoming...

In his article “The Pale Boys and the Critique of Masculine Subjectivity in Andra Neiburga’s Prose”, Jānis Ozoliņš claims that the most important Neiburga stories from the late 1980s and early 1990s put men in a complicated situation. The historical events of the time promoted a crisis in masculine subjectivity: first of all, some men could not ada...

Andra Neiburga’s literary work is closely tied to the short story form. While few in number, the thirty stories, published in three books — Izbāzti putni un putni būros (Stuffed Birds and Birds in Cages) (1988), Stāsts par Tilli un Suņu vīru (Story about Tille and the Dog Man) (1991) and Stum stum (Push Push) (2004) — a nd an even smaller number in...

The article examines the development of narratology from its inception to the latest trends, showing the crisis of discipline and the prospects for the future progress. Keywords: Narratology, Narrative, Russian Formalism, French Structuralism, corpus argument. *** Šis ir pirmais raksts no publikāciju kopas žurnālā "Letonica", kurā raksta autors...

In 2012 the Latvian poet Rihards Bargais published a book called Tenkas (‘Gossip’), a collection of small absurd narratives, inspired by the Russian writer Daniil Kharms, that describes his fellow writers, well-known Latvian personalities and himself. Many of the pieces have an explicitly sexual character; one of them even resulted in legal action...

This is the first volume on the studies of queer identities in Europe to adopt a strong focus on the history of the Baltic region among other countries in Central and East Europe. It unites work by researchers of different European countries that deals with various representations of the queer culture over a period of more than one hundred years. A...

The novel Insomnia by the young Latvian prose writer Ilze Jansone was the first contemporary Latvian novel dedicated to lesbian identity. It is productive to look at the questions raised in this novel in comparison to the well-known lesbian novel by the English author Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, which caused considerable controversy at...