Karlis Verdins

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

Doctor of Philosophy

About

26
Publications
6,269
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Citations
Introduction
My current research project is the relationship between nationalism and queer sexuality in a small literature. I use mostly interwar Latvia and the Cold War period as my case study. I am exploring how original literary production as well as translations from other languages (mostly "big" European languages as English, French, and German) shapes the literature, including books considered to be "middlebrow" or "low" literature. My approach is informed by comparative literature/world literature studies as well as queer studies and small state studies.
Additional affiliations
January 2007 - present
Institute of Literature Folklore and Art
Position
  • Researcher
Education
August 2016 - December 2022
Washington University in St. Louis
Field of study
  • Comparative Literature

Publications

Publications (26)
Chapter
The Latvian exile community in North America was created during the Cold War when many Latvians fled the Soviet occupation after the Second World War. It actively advocated for the U.S. government to continue not recognizing the incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union and aspired to maintain its traditions in the spirit of the inte...
Article
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...
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This article focuses on the gaze of the flâneuse as portrayed in the novel Sieviete (The Woman, 1930) by Tija Banga (1882–1957), the collection of prose poems Ielu maldos (Delusion in the Streets, 1923) by Lūcija Zamaiča (1893–1965), and the collection Dzejas (Poems, 1932) by Austra Skujiņa (1909–1932). These works of Latvian feminist modernist lit...
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The research published in the current issue, which is mostly based on hitherto unused historical sources, includes a diary by the Latvian film director Gunārs Piesis (by Jānis Ozoliņš), as well as the advanced research of an already known diary by an employee of the Soviet People’s Court Kaspars Aleksandrs Irbe (1906–1996) (by Andrei Vazyanau). The...
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The article focuses on the phenomenon of queer domesticity in Latvia in the 20th century, analyzing evidence of a homosexual couple living together in a house they built in Rīga. Adapting to different political regimes, two men who met while working in the theatre could maintain their lives together for about twenty years. To do this, they had to u...
Chapter
This chapter examines alternative culture in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during the period of their annexation by the Soviet Union from 1945 onward, focusing primarily on visual art with correlations in the literary realm. Because artists and writers in the Baltic republics first encountered Socialist Realism as a fully articulated aesthetic pol...
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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...
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In the context of the history of the leftist ideas, the relations of their repre- sentatives with the non-normative sexuality have been peculiar and controversial. In the European countries, the attitude of the leftist circles towards the non-normative sexuality was controversial – it was interpreted both as a manifestation of the depravity of the...
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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...
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Free e-print: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NSNJNCPBABSEXAHBRNDE/full?target=10.1080/01629778.2020.1850486 A Woman in Amber (1995), a memory book by the Latvian-American writer Agate Nesaule, makes readers ask questions about the relationship between memoir and fiction, as well as the credibility of a text written from a child narrator’s pers...
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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...
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In his essay “Making Love in the Shadow of Blinds: Materialism in Andra Neiburga’s Stories from 1993”, Kārlis Vērdiņš emphasizes that in Neiburga’s prose, the material world is important even in imagined scenes and personal memories and fantasies. Materialism is one of the cornerstones of her richly detailed prose, thus underlining the thesis of cu...
Book
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Šajā grāmatā apkopotas dažādu humanitāro zinātņu pētnieku, literatūrkritiķu un rakstnieku – Kārļa Vērdiņa, Ingas Žoludes, Annas Auziņas, Arta Ostupa, Ritas Treijas, Zitas Kārklas, Mārtiņa Kaprāna, Valta Ernštreita, Valentīna Lukaševiča, Maijas Petrovskas-Uzulas, Daiņa Leinerta, Ilvas Skultes, Mariana Rižija u. c. apceres par jaunāko latviešu litera...
Chapter
Fin-de-siècle also features the appearance of a new distinctive category of the homosexual in medical and legal discourse. Homosexuality might be variously interpreted as a sign of degeneration and decadence, and can be highlighted as a subversion of the normative limits of bourgeois society. The chapter “The theatre of fin-de-siècle and the genesi...
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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...
Book
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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...
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In Latvia, queer culture is still practically invisible. In this paper I will analyse two types of queer nar-ratives: documentary life stories collected by R ita Ruduša in her book Forced Underground (2012) and the manuscript of a collection of 12 short stories by Klāvs Smilgzieds (2014), originally published serially during the 1990s in an under g...
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Full-text available
In the context of the history of the leftist ideas, the relations of their representatives with the non-normative sexuality have been peculiar and controversial. In the European countries, the attitude of the leftist circles towards the nonnormative sexuality was controversial – it was interpreted both as a manifestation of the depravity of the deg...
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Full-text available
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...
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Full-text available
This collection of essays aims to recapitulate the state of grotesque poetics in modern and post-modern writing. It concentrates on Central and Eastern Europe, introducing the Western reader to the variety and ingenuity of this region's literary traditions, ranging from German and Russian to Lithuanian and Romanian literatures. At the same time, it...
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Full-text available
In The Social and Political Dimensions of the Latvian Prose Poem, Kārlis Vērdiņš uses the tools of the historian alongside those of literary studies in order to contextualise the development of a particular genre, the Latvian prose poem. Authors of different artistic and political leanings used it as a special kind of poetic space for expressing th...
Chapter
Ko latviešu dzeja ir ieguvusi 21. gadsimta pirmajos gados? Ar ko tā atšķiras no agrākās dzejas? Ar ko dzejnieki spēj pārsteigt lasītāju? Šajā rakstā gribētos pievērsties dažām kopsakarībām, kas raksturo pēdējo gadu dzejas procesus, tikai nedaudz pievēršoties atsevišķu autoru daiļradei.

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