Jānis Sudrabkalns pirmajā padomju gadā (1940–1941): sadarbības motīvu rekonstrukcija

In the last decade, several studies have been made in Latvia (Klotiņš 2018; Konstante 2017; Ķencis 2019), the focus of which has been the art of totalitarianism, or the so-called Stalin period, as well as the folklore sector in political, ideological and institutional discourse, leaving the personality in the background. The article focuses on an individual personality because the work and life of the poet Jānis Sudrabkalns (1894–1975) offer an opportunity to study his motivation for choosing behavioural strategies when he finds himself in a totalitarian regime and where they lead him. The purpose of the article is 1) to reveal the motivation that determined the behavioural strategy chosen by Sudrabkalns during the first year of Soviet occupation (June 17, 1940 – June 29, 1941); 2) to show that becoming a collaborator/ collaborationist was a process characterised by a fluctuation between collaboration and collaborationism during this period; 3) with examples of poetry and journalism, to reveal how collaboration and collaborationism are manifested in his creative work. The sources of the research are two collections of poems from the interwar period of Sudrabkalns, articles and poems published in periodicals during the first Soviet period; additional material is also provided by the collection of Sudrabkalns and Arturs Baumanis in the Museum of Literature and Music. The biographical method, close reading of the text, and archival studies were important in the research, as well as the concepts “collaboration” and “collaborationism”, which allow a more nuanced understanding of the path to collaborationism. An evaluation of certain events in Sudrabkalns’s life and an insight into his creative work during the interwar period and the first year of Soviet rule serve as the basis for reconstructing his motivations. This allows for the hypothetical conclusion that the poet’s collaboration and collaborationism were significantly influenced by the international situation at the beginning of the Second World War and the German-USSR war, but as well as his personality traits and personal motives, it also allowed us to outline the further consequences of his personality and creative work in the totalitarian regime.