Some Mother’s Son
“Honor your father and your mother, that you may live long in the land that the Lord gives you.” (Exodus 20:4)
It is hard to find in the history of civilization any culture or religion that does not honor parents. The Latvian understanding of God also includes this clear and comprehensible moral norm. But in the not-so-distant past, our land was ruled by a state system whose policy was built on a double morality. With regard to the family as well. For example, in secondary schools, while studying social studies, pupils were taught that the family is the foundation of society. But in primary schools every Soviet pupil knew the story of Pavel Morozov, or Pavlik. A boy of thirteen, he denounced his father, Trofim Morozov, to the state authorities; according to one version, Trofim was killed by agents of the state security committee. Glorified by propaganda, Pavlik became a Soviet martyr. This absurd story was on the list of required children’s literature. It was used in songs, plays, poetry and an opera. Through the story of Pavlik, future Soviet citizens were given the message that, in this system, the state is a higher value than the family. The well-known film director Sergei Eisenstein even made a film based on this story, titled
“Bezhin Meadow.” But it reportedly never reached audiences.
Yes, “honor your father and your mother, that you may live long in the land that the Lord gives you.”
Pavlik himself was soon killed too, in revenge for his father’s betrayal. And after several decades, the state itself also perished.
To Latvians, Soviet stories of this kind were incomprehensible and alien, because respect for the family, for father and mother, is one of the cornerstones of our culture. There are values that no one can destroy. They are values that God has placed in our mentality.
During the time of the first independent republic, Mother’s Day became an important holiday in Latvia. Just as the state was honored on 18 November and Latvia’s heroes were honored on 11 November, so on Mother’s Day the mother was honored. It was a time when the mother was an ideal to strive toward. It is a time from which we can learn, today, respect for the family, for the mother.
As an illustration of what has been said, I would like to tell of the love of a remarkable Latvian figure for his mother, a love that our literary history preserves. This man is not inscribed in the church’s canon of saints, but he is inscribed in the canon of Latvian culture. He is inscribed in the memories of his contemporaries and, through the legacy of his creative work, woven into the hearts of generations.
The literary scholar Kārlis Kārkliņš wrote in the first half of the 20th century that this man passionately loved the truth and could not at all bear lies. His words and deeds, it is said, were in harmony. Kārlis Skalbe, for his part, recalled him saying: “How can I love humanity, which I have not seen, if I do not love the person who may be suffering right here beside me? Help a person and you will serve humanity.”
Anna Brigadere wrote in her memoirs about this man that he was his mother’s son. From her soul he “raised the greatest inheritance.” “Braki’s mother” – this is how, near and far, this man’s mother was known.
The man of whom his contemporaries spoke so highly is the outstanding Latvian writer Rūdolfs Blaumanis.
If it were not for Rūdolfs Blaumanis’s reverent love for his mother, we would know very little about the Ērgļi manor housemaid Karlīne Blaumane, who knew so wonderfully how to fry pancakes and treated Rūdolfs’s guests to them at Braki. Blaumanis loved both his parents, including his father, the manor cook, Matīss Blaumanis, even though it was rumored in the area that Rūdolfs might be the illegitimate child of the Ērgļi manor baron Gustav Rudolf von Transehe, “thanks to” the baron’s droit du seigneur over the bride on her wedding night. Rūdolfs Blaumanis was a deeply intelligent man who reportedly never stooped to the level of gossip.
Kārlis Skalbe wrote of Blaumanis: “I have never happened to meet a person with as bright and kind-hearted a soul as Blaumanis had.”
Respect for parents is formed in the family. It is instilled in the little person by mother and father through their example and their way of life. In her book “Blaumanis’s Gold,” Līvija Volkova devotes a whole chapter to describing the environment in which Blaumanis’s personality was formed. And the truth is that a person who respects his mother and father also respects his homeland. Blaumanis was such a person. That is why, in the poem “The Trumpeter of Tālava,” the words that are engraved on the author’s own monument still ring out so powerfully today:
“My gold is my people, my honor is their honor”
“Blaumanis loved his mother more than all people; he read his works aloud to her while they were still being written, in order to hear what she would say about them,” Kārlis Štrāls writes in his memoirs.
And it is his works that best help us to come to know the personality of Rūdolfs Blaumanis. Kārlis Skalbe has said: “We find Blaumanis in his works.”
I will mention only a few. The short stories “In the Shadow of Death” and “Raudupiete,” the plays “In the Fire,” “Tailor Days at Silmači,” “The Indrāni Family” and “The Prodigal Son.”
In several plays he explores the relationship between children and parents. In the play “The Indrāni Family,” Blaumanis shows that cruelty toward parents leads to death. Yet in the words of old man Indrāns, which he speaks to Zelmiņa, Blaumanis has revealed the other side of the coin of respect for parents: “I will live on through the good that I have taught you.”
Blaumanis is also endowed with a good sense of humor, and in “Tailor Days at Silmači” he smiles at the relationship between children and parents in the song sung by Kārlēns and Rūdis: “How wicked are the parents who raise their children.”
In 1992, at the Rūdolfs Blaumanis Museum at “Braki” in the Cēsis district, the sculpture, or monument, “Roses for Mother,” created by Oļegs Skarainis, was installed. To this day, this sculpture has preserved a certain story. When Rūdolfs’s mother turned 70, her son had decided to surprise her in a special way. For a whole day in Riga, Blaumanis reportedly composed poems dedicated to his mother and set them to music himself. Meanwhile, the wife of Rūdolfs’s brother, Anna, who was an outstanding pretzel baker, was at the same time baking a “loaf of yellow bread” at Braki.
When his mother’s birthday came, along with all the other gifts, Rūdolfs had also brought seven roses with him. His mother asked why there were so many roses. To which Rūdolfs replied that it was not really so many – one rose for each decade of life she had lived.
The monument “Roses for Mother” is more than the embodiment of this story; it is a monument to a son’s love for his mother.
“Honor your father and your mother, that you may live long in the land that the Lord your God gives you.”
Rūdolfs Blaumanis passed into eternity at the age of 45. But his works accompany us. He lives on in his creative work. Blaumanis is still the third most popular Latvian in his country, after Krišjānis Barons and Kārlis Ulmanis. The legacy left by Rūdolfs Blaumanis, his creative work, serves even today to help us live well, harmoniously and in friendship in our land. At Blaumanis’s former home and workplace, now at 8 Blaumaņa Street, there is a plaque on the building with lines of verse from one of his own poems, once dedicated to one of Blaumanis’s companions, but now the lines of the poem are applied to him himself:
“That living water you poured out will never run dry.”
And every year, more than one child will once again recite to their mother, on Mother’s Day, a poem by Rūdolfs Blaumanis, one that our fathers and mothers have recited to their mothers over several generations:
Mommy, dear little mommy,
Come and look as well
In the garden the first little violet
Can be seen in bloom.
Right in its center, of gold,
Such a small, small heart,
And gathered from the morning dew
A lovely speckle gleams on top.
For whom shall we pluck this little violet,
To whose breast shall we pin it?
Or shall we invite the bee to visit,
So that it may sip fresh honey?
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