Study of Aigars Lielbārdis on A. Kurcijs and folkloristics in "Journal of Baltic Studies"
"Journal of Baltic Studies" (JBS) has published a study by Aigars Lielbārdis, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia, on Andrejs Kurcijs and Latvian folkloristics during the early years of the Soviet occupation.
The article “Latvian folkloristics in the early years of the Soviet occupation and the case of Andrejs Kurcijs” focuses on Latvian folklore studies and on revealing the activities of the Archives of Latvian Folklore (during the Soviet period – the Folklore Institute, later the Folklore Section) in the first post-war years. With the Soviet occupation and the change of political regime, Soviet scholarly principles were also introduced into Latvian folkloristics. Class struggle and dialectical materialism became the sole and officially recognized approach to the study of Latvian folklore for many years.
In 1946, the Folklore Institute hired the Latvian poet Andrejs Kurcijs, who was also a professional physician, having obtained his medical degree at the University of Jena in 1911. His responsibilities included research on folk medicine and the preparation of a monographic study for publication. However, the work remained unfinished, as his career at the institute ended with his arrest in 1949, followed by deportation to Siberia, to a GULAG camp in the Komi region. Although the arrest was not directly related to his research, but rather to his political activities during the interwar period, Kurcijs’s arrest also marked the end of research on folk medicine and charms in Latvian folkloristics—work that would be resumed only thirty years later during the Third Awakening.
The study was carried out within the FLPP project “New Approaches to the History of Latvian Folkloristics” (lzp-2020/2-0315).
