The Annele Trilogy: A Book for Young and Old by Anna Brigadere

Anna Brigadere (1861-1933) was a writer, playwright and poet working in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. She is one of the most beloved female writers in Latvia. I had seen her name now and then in my extensive research into the writer known as Aspazija (Elza Rozenberga) but didn’t know much about her.

I was very surprised one day to find out that she is from the same small area as Aspazija! Just southwest of the town of Jelgava (the former capital of the Duchy of Courland) are the historic manor towns of Zaļenieki and Tērvete (Tērvete was known in the past as Kalnamuiža). This is where my husband’s great-great grandfather, Kristaps Rozenvalds, was born and raised. Although I haven’t been able to confirm it due to lost church records, I believe Kristaps’s mother, Anna Rudzis, was born in Kalnamuiža. (Anna Rudzis would become a step-mother to Aspazija’s father).

When I learned that Brigadere was also from this area I looked up her works. One of her most famous works is The Annele Trilogy. Luckily for me it has been translated into English. It was a long read, being three novels in one, but I enjoyed every minute of it.

The Annele Trilogy

The Annele Trilogy is a fictionalized account of Brigadere’s own youth in the countryside of Tērvete and later in the city of Jelgava. It takes place over the years 1865 to 1880. I was very excited to be able to read such a detailed, and at times whimsical, account of what life was really like for a child growing up here. I suppose one has to realize that the story is being written through the lens of a woman looking back on her youth many years later (she didn’t finish the final part until just before her death). I took notes the whole way through to help reconstruct the story of Kristaps Rozenvald’s childhood experience.

The book is divided into three separate books:

Part 1: God, Nature, Work (Dievs, daba, darbs)

Part 2: Harsh Winds (Skarbos vējos)

Part 3: In a Stone Cage (Akmens sprostā)

The main character of Annele is of course Anna Brigadere herself. Annele comes from a simple farming family, the youngest of three siblings. Annele has a vivid imagination and the author brings that to life through the early sections of the book. Part 1: God, Nature, Work takes the young girl from the age of four through the early years of her childhood. She talks to plants and mushrooms and animals and imagines what they would tell her. She is desperate to understand the world around her and is often confused about the unfairness of life:

“On Sunday afternoons, men from the surrounding farms often come to visit Spring Farm. They don’t play cards, for they are not carefree…The don’t go and make the rounds of the fields of Spring Farm, for they have no horses and fields of their own; they are hired hands on farms that belong to others, just as Annele’s father is a hired man of Spring Farm.”

Part 2: Harsh Winds finds Annele entering her teenage years. This time period in Latvian history was a real turning point and Annele is caught up in it. She wants to attend school but rules and ideas regarding gender and social class are against her. She loves the land, but it is also harsh. She sees the effects of hard labour on her parents and other family members and is curious about what else is out there for someone like her.

Part 3: In a Stone Cage follows Annele as she enters womanhood. Her life is changing in many ways, including moving from the countryside and the only life she has ever known, to live in the city of Jelgava. By the end of the three books, Annele has learned much through her experiences, her family upbringing, the new friends she meets along the way, the natural world, the education in a small parish school and the confusing yet ever-present arms of the Lutheran church.

Throughout all three sections I especially loved reading about her everyday life, for example the ritual of moving from one farm to another on St. George’s Day, the detailed descriptions of celebrating Christmas with fragrant pine boughs covering the walls, ‘mummers’ singing from door to door dressed in masks and the warmth of baking flatbreads warming the house. Or what a wedding entailed and how a funeral was conducted. It was fascinating to attend confirmation classes with Annele and see how she had to come to terms with letting go of her childhood and accepting a new role as a young woman:

“Is it possible that this happy time is over already? Something fills her with such deep sorrow. Do the others feel it, too? There is a kind of deep emotion, the chatter has a different sound to it…”

Ilze Kļaviņš-Mueller, the English translator, describes the book like this:

“Through the eyes of a keenly observant child, the three novels present the social history of the late 19^th century in Latvia: the migration of poorer Latvians from the country to the city in search of better-paid work, some to be Germanized as they join the urban middle class; at the same time, there is the rise of a young educated generation who are proud to be Latvian. The girl Annele watches a stratified society: Germans versus Latvians; prosperous Latvian farmers versus poor rural workers like Annele’s own parents; outsiders belonging to other ethnicities such as Jews and Gypsies; and stirrings of liberation from the economic dominance of German landowners.”

Here is a great interview with the translator about the process of creating the English version of this iconic Latvian book: Click Here

Comparisons With Other Authors

These three volumes have often been compared to the famous books by American author Laura Ingalls Wilder. They lived at almost the same time with very similar rural upbringings. They both wrote their fictionalized memoirs later in life. Even though they lived on other sides of the world their stories have much in common. I loved The Little House on the Prairie books and did feel like Brigadere’s works were a Latvian equivalent. Though there seemed to be a difference in Brigadere’s work, a Latvian-ness if you will. The reverence for the land and the idea that it is full of the spirits of nature is missing in the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Brigadere exposes a more complex set of emotions and challenges as her character Annele sets out to find herself.

Interestingly, both of their book series acquired beautiful and iconic black & white illustrations in the 1950s. The Annele Trilogy was illustrated by well-known female artist Džemma Skulme in 1957. They are scattered here and there throughout the book and are a perfect complement to the prose.

Anna Brigadere is also often compared to her slightly more famous counterpart, Aspazija. Both women grew up in the same area at the same time and their careers took parallel paths. They both wrote fictionalized memoirs (though unfortunately Aspazija’s has never been translated into English) and they are both remembered today above all other female writers of the time.

According to Sandra Meškova, in her 2003 paper Two mothers of Latvian literature: Aspazija and Anna Brigadere, Aspazija is seen as the subversive one, a ‘woman of protest’, while Brigadere is perceived as the virtuous one, ‘…the traditional symbol of virtue and goodness in Latvian folklore.’ Meškova claims that the currently believed rivalry between the two authors is pretty much myth however. It seems that they actually had very little to do with each other personally and wrote in completely different styles – Brigadere being a ‘Realist’ writer and Aspazija being a ‘Romantic’ writer.

I highly recommend The Annele Trilogy for anyone wanting to understand what it was like to grow up as a peasant farmer in Latvia on the cusp of modernity. It is the closest there is to travelling back in time and being there yourself.

Brigadere describes Annele’s final revelation, as she thinks about her father:

“[Annele], too, had learned to look at the expanses of that invisible world with the eyes of her soul. She not only wanted to gaze at them, but to enter there and look for paths. And wasn’t it the same with this invisible world as with the visible one? You were aware only of some small fraction of it, and if you wanted to push on further, you had to dig, to dig with the hard labor of thinking, sometimes through deep darkness and despair. What would show the way?

Fervor. Desire.”

Museum & Accommodation

Today, the building where Brigadere lived in the last years of her life is a museum to her life and work. The building itself dates from the 1840s and served as a water mill, the local school and a forest ranger’s house before being given to the author in 1922. It is named “Sprīdīši” after one of Anna Brigadere’s most well-loved characters. The property runs a guesthouse as well as several modern ‘forest cabins’. When I finally make it to Latvia one day I will definitely be staying there!

Learn about the Sprīdīši museum and accommodation here: https://www.spridisi.lv/