Rīgas atkalredzēšana. Ieskats Ainas Zemdegas romānā “Līdz vārtiem – un tālāk?”

The Latvian exile literature features various topics – from the depiction of the past, experiences of the transitional period, the impressions of the new places of residence, from Latvia’s countryside and Riga to the displaced persons camps in war-torn Germany and the depiction of far-away lands. Around the end of the 1950s, this range of topics was supplemented by descriptions of Soviet Latvia (among the authors providing them were Anšlavs Eglītis, Aīda Niedra, Pāvils Klāns, Alfreds Dziļums), but at that time this was more of a construction of the soviet environment; an authentic experience was missing from it. The present article concentrates on the time and experience when the Latvian writers in exile found an opportunity to return to Soviet Latvia or visit it. They arrived there as guests or tourists. This experience was transformed into impulses for the creation of new texts. They feature a multitude of personal observations and impressions, displaying apparent discord between the past (recollections) and present, and also acute issues of belonging or identity are strongly present. The aim of the article is, on the basis of the novel “To the Gate – and Beyond?” (Līdz vārtiem – un tālāk?, 1988) by writer Aina Zemdega and using close reading, a biographical approach and archival studies, to look at how the text reveals Soviet reality and what shapes it. Although the novel cannot be perceived as autobiographical, the literary work was built on experiences from several visits to Latvia by the author Zemdega. On one hand, the novel is shaped as a personalised message; on the other, it reaches beyond the limits of a single personal story and attains the shape of a generalised view and impressions by a Latvian, a tourist from Canada, arriving in Soviet Latvia. The chosen text is emphasised by the attachment to a location – Riga, where the narrator Maija arrives, crossing several foreign, even hostile borders. The text marks the trip to Soviet Latvia, emotions, observations in Latvia, mostly Riga, and the departure. When arriving in Soviet Latvia, a broad emotional spectrum is opened, with clear-cut dissonance – between one’s own (place, environment, and landscape recorded in one’s memory) and the alien or alienated, transformed place, the linguistic environment, and dullness of the surroundings seen in reality. As a literary text, the novel by Zemdega includes a strong context of the age, a sketch of the environment, it possesses some documentality of sorts, and signs of the historical time, with points of the writer’s biography interwoven into it, thus making the literary text approach quite an authentic depiction of the Soviet reality. A study of a single novel in the crossing points of the age and a writer’s biography proves that also such literary texts may include substantial issues of the XX century Latvia, helping to form an understanding of the dramatic character of human fate in the period, even if it is an outsider’s view of Soviet reality.