Short stories
Dieviņa ļaudis
Not translated into English
Kārlis Štrāls · 1920
Synopsis
The first major prose book by Kārlis Štrāls, populated by solitary figures whom the criticism of 1921 called God's folk: beings who are more a psychopathological fragment than a character or a type, and who are marked by a quiet sadness, as if fated. This title later came to designate the writer's whole world, and the figures in the following collection were read as a new procession of these same people.
Context
The book appeared in 1920, the year its author returned from the Kuban, where he had taken refuge in 1918. From the war, which he had fought in Galicia, he would draw Karš, published in a journal in 1921, then in two parts in 1922 and reissued in 1939 with illustrations by his brother, the painter Aleksandrs Štrāls. The stories of Dzintara vārtos followed in 1921. Rūdolfs Blaumanis had encouraged him to take writing seriously and remained his adviser and friend to the end; literature, LSM reports, always mattered more to him than the successive regimes.
Who it is for
A prose of characters more than of plot. Better to know that one enters it for a world, not for a story.
Prizes and reception
His first important prose book, whose title came to name the whole family of his characters.