Despite significant evidence to the contrary in the Latvian language, especially the memoirs of General Peteris Radzins, Latvians, historians included, and others, have persisted in mythologizing the military events of 8 October to 11 November 1919 in Riga as some sort of national miracle. Since this Latvian army victory, first celebrated as Lacplesis Day on 11 November 1920, accounts of this battle have been unrepresented, poorly represented or misrepresented. For example, the 2007 historical film Rigas Sargi (The Defenders of Riga) uses the 1888 poem Lacplesis by Andrejs Pumpurs as a template to portray the Latvians successfully defeating the German-Russian force on their own without Allied military aid. Pumpurs' dream and revolutionary legacy has provided a well used script for Latvian nation building. However, the reality documented by Radzins in 1922 clearly gives most of the credit to the Allied Fleet which provided two significant series of well planned and well coordinated naval artillery barrages in support of Latvian infantry offensives which succeeded in driving their dual enemy out of Riga thereby ending Russian-German hegemony in the Latvian territory and making Latvian independence possible. How the poem, military event, and film are related in a problematic way with respect to Latvian/Russian relations is the subject of this thesis. / Graduate / mackie9@telusplanet.net

ABSTRACTS This thesis is concerned with the psychological prose by Regīna Ezera. The first chapter gives an insight into the writer's personality. The chapter also outlines the situation in Latvian literature in the period from the restoration of Soviet occupation at the end of World War II throughout the 1990s. The following two chapters are devoted to the analysis of specific Ezera's works, namely three works that were translated into the Czech language (The Well, Aka, 1972, Summer Lasted for Just One Day, Vasara bija tikai vienu dienu, 1974, A Man Needs a Dog, Cilvēkam vajag suni, 1975) and some works that have not yet been translated (Smouldering Fires, Zemdegas, 1977, A Dragon's Egg, Pūķa ola, 1995 and some short proses included in the book The Princess Phenomenon, Princeses Fenomens, 1985 especially so-called zoological novellas and so-called crazy stories). The fourth chapter contains a translation of the short story called August, Month of Apples, Augusts, ābolu mēness included in the book The Princess Phenomenon. The translation is the original work by the author of the thesis. In the final chapter the main features of analysed works are summarised.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the entwined roles of schooling, family support and investment, and community contact in Heritage Language Learning (HLL), Heritage Language Maintenance (HLM) and identity formation among two groups of North American Latvians. One is made up of 49 teenagers at Gaŗezers language camp in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The other comprises 25 parents, other adult Latvian speakers and camp staff members. I explore differences and similarities among them by age, gender and self-stated national identity and language proficiency. Primary data consist of some 70 questionnaires completed by youths and adults and six 30- to 90-minute interviews conducted and transcribed by me. Six more were conducted via e-mail. Based on aggregate analysis of multiple-choice and short-answer questions, supplemented by participants’ individual responses to longer-form survey questions and to my questions during interviews, findings demonstrate a connection between self-stated national identity (Latvian, Latvian-American or Latvian-Canadian, or American or Latvian) and self-assessment of Latvian language proficiency among the youths. Among the adults, men were more likely to identify simply as Latvian than were women, and adults of both genders who identified as Latvian averaged slightly lower in self-assessment of proficiency, even though most of them grew up speaking Latvian at home. Additionally, my research shows a community proud of its HLM accomplishments alongside those of displaced peoples from other nations—a community now at home in North America, although 60 years ago members were determined to return to Latvia. Keywords: L2, Latvian heritage language revitalization, third space, lingua franca, language immersion, heritage language maintenance.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att analysera Grebzdes novellsamling Bergen enligt Michail Bachtins kronotopteori. Jag baserar min kronotopmodell, som uppstår i Bergen, enligt de modeller som utvecklats av litteraturvetaren Juris Rozītis. Romanerna, vilka undersöks av Rozītis behandlar tiden efter andra världskriget i flyktingläger och hur flyktingarna upplever de första åren utanför sitt gamla hemland Lettland samt hur de bosätter sig i det nya landet. I denna uppsats tänker jag gå ett steg längre än Rozītis, eftersom jag ska analysera hur flyktingarna, dvs. novellernas karaktärer, lever i det nya landet. / I have analyzed the collection of Irma Grebzde's short stories "Where the Mountains Meet the Sky", published (in the Latvian language) in 1962 in New York, USA, and found that the times and venues in Grebzde's narratives correspond to the chronotope models developed by literary historian Juris Rozītis for novels written in the immediate post-Second World War years. I have expanded upon the Rozītis' models, and created a new model called "Alone in the New Country". This new model describes and positions Irma Grebzde's short stories in Canada - the new country. It also places the parallel space of Latvia, now occupied by the Soviets - outside the immediate circle of the abstract external chronotope, since in Grebzde's short stories, the old homeland no longer has such a dominating function.

This study investigates the impact that Latvian exile literature has had on research in Latvia between 1992 and 2006. Latvian exile literature refers to the publications that were authored and published by Latvians who emigrated to Western countries after World War II and were issued between 1945 and 1991. Mixed methods research was conducted, incorporating citation analysis, questionnaires and interviews. Nine subject fields from the social sciences, arts and humanities were examined: philosophy and psychology, religion and theology, political science, education, folklore and ethnography, the arts, linguistics, literature, history. For the citation analysis, 33,866 citations from 1241 publications were collected. In the survey, 79 questionnaires were received from Latvian researchers and 31 questionnaires from the librarians working in Latvian academic, special and the main regional libraries. After the data analyses of citations and questionnaires were conducted, the results were presented to 15 researchers in Latvia (experts in their subject fields) for their assessment and comments. The overall results show that Latvian exile literature has had the greatest impact on research in folklore, history and literature. Exile impact was observed through both exile publications and communication with exile people. It appears that in other disciplines exile literature has had little or no impact. The reasons for this are thought to be: the lack of exile publications that could make an impact, and the irrelevance of existing publications to research in Latvia. In general, exile academic publications have been the most influential on research. The citation results also demonstrate the impact that restrictions of the soviet period (1945-1991) had on the research in Latvia, particularly through the double obsolescence of citations in all subject fields.

The aim of the research – to define the content, functions, manifestations, forms of the concept of legal culture and to investigate the specific character of the legal culture of Latvian senior-grade elementary school pupils, developing proposals for improvement of acquisition of the legal culture by elementary school pupils. Thus, no research studies of legal culture are actually being made in Latvia, and also attention is insufficiently paid to it in the studies of law, and in political and sociological studies. The scientific novelty of the Doctoral Dissertation is characterised by the fact that the Doctoral Dissertation is dedicated to the legal culture, its updating and consolidating in the scientific and research environment in Latvia. Moreover, such an original research study of the legal culture of Latvian elementary school pupils has been made for the first time in Latvia. / Daktaro disertacijos tikslas – santykio tarp įstatymo ir kultūros apibrėžimas, išryškinant reguliavimo sistemų tarpusavio santykį, kaip socialinių santykių, kurie taip pat yra apibrėžiami teisine kultūra, pagrindą. Autorius nagrinėja terminologijos, susijusios su terminais „teisinė kultūra“, „juridinė kultūra“ ir „įstatymo kultūra“, dilemą, analizuoja teisinės kultūros interpretaciją per įvairių mokslo šakų tyrimus, išskirdamas siaurąjį (mikro lygį) ir platųjį (makro lygį) teisinės kultūros supratimą, apsvarstydamas pagrindines teisinės kultūros formas, funkcijas ir elementus, apibūdindamas virtualią teisinę kultūrą kaip naują teisinės kultūros lygį, taip pat pabrėžia specifinį teisinės kultūros pobūdį pasaulinės krizės sąlygomis. Kaip šio tyrimo dalis, buvo atlikta vidurinės mokyklos aukštesniųjų klasių mokinių teisinės kultūros studija, kuria buvo siekiama išanalizuoti jų požiūrį į pareigą mokytis ir pamokų nelankymo priežastis, ypač atkreipiant dėmesį į 9 klasės mokinių požiūrį į įstatymą ir teisinės elgsenos modelio pasirinkimą, išanalizuojant teisinės kultūros pritaikymą studijų standartams. Galiausiai, buvo padarytos išvados bei pateikti pasiūlymai dėl tolimesnių tyrimų, įstatymų ir nuostatų tobulinimo, programos įdiegiant teisinę kultūrą plėtojimo, atkreipiant ypatingą dėmesį į teisinės kultūros įsisavinimą mokslo įstaigose ir visuomenėje apskritai.

This work consists of a broad introduction followed by two parts that match the chronology of events – Part I looks at the closing stages of the Second World War and the first two years that followed (1944–1946), while Part II deals with musical life and creative work at the height of the Stalinist totalitarian regime (1947–1953).

This corpus-based diploma thesis deals with the analysis of selected Latvian somatisms containing the keywords galva, kāja and roka, using principally data from the parallel corpus InterCorp v11. The aim of the thesis is to identify corpus categories and creative alterations of Latvian somatisms, as well as determine how they can be translated to Slovak and Czech. The theoretical part comprises an introduction to the fields of phraseology, cognitive and corpus linguistics; a description of the features of idioms as well as their classification; and a demonstration of the differences between phraseological terms in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Latvia and the West. The practical part focuses on the analysis of patterns in the context of somatisms, the assessment of creative alterations in comparison with linguistics textbooks, and finding translation equivalents in Slovak and Czech.

In this essay I introduce and analyse Lärobok i lettiska (with an adaptation in English called A Course in Modern Latvian) from 1980 by Valentine Lasmane and LETTISKA för universitetsbruk I (Latvian for University Students I, my translation) from 1993 by Aija Priedīte.  My aim is to find out the author’s intention and examine how it is carried out. This involves vocabulary, grammar, possible influences by certain methods in language teaching, and exercises. As the books were written several decades ago, the question of their relevance today is also worth investigating.  In her work, Priedīte contrasts Latvian to Swedish, which also is a clear characteristic of the book. The vocabulary is translated into Swedish, and Swedish is used to explain the grammar. This is typical of the grammar-translation method. The vocabulary consists of about 770 words, plus over 400 items in thematic lists. There is emphasis on grammar in a way that is suitable for the university level. However, I conclude that this material requires teacher-led instruction and more varied exercises to be effective for the learner.  Valentine Lasmane’s Lärobok i lettiska is more focused on language skills than academic knowledge, although the description of Latvian grammar is also wide-ranging. It is intended for two years’ study. In it, Swedish is used in about the same way as in Priedīte’s book. The texts are about a Latvian family living in Uppsala and describe everyday life in the family, at work, in school, and so on. The vocabulary comprises some 1 700 words, plus about 500 thematic items. Some exercises are drills, but there are also other types of exercises. There is a grammar index and Swedish-Latvian and Latvian-Swedish word lists. I conclude that talented and diligent students should be able to study this course on their own, though it would be desirable to have oral contacts with Latvian speakers.  The two works I have studied are in many ways similar to each other, for example in their way of using Swedish. There are also differences. LETTISKA för universitetsbruk I is a more academic work, much focused on grammar, whereas Lärobok i lettiska has both grammar and a more practical view. I conclude that both books can still be used in teaching and learning Latvian thanks to their contents of everyday life situations.

General problems in common with all of Latvian musicology and specific problems peculiar to this particular theme