Leaders
Valdemārs is seen as the spiritual father of the Awakening. With Alunāns, he led student gatherings while at Tartu and advocated the study of folklore and the founding of marine academies to turn the Latvians and Estonians into seafaring peoples. Krišjānis Barons began collecting dainas under Valdemārs' direct influence, and in 1862 Valdemārs, Alunāns and Barons collaborated in St. Petersburg to publish Pēterburgas Avīzes. The most radical newspaper hitherto published in Latvian, it was closed by the authorities in 1865. From 1867 to 1873, Atis Kronvalds (often known as Kronvaldu Atis) renewed the "Latvian evenings" begun by Valdemārs at Tartu. His Nationale Bestrebungen (1872) can be seen as the manifesto of the Young Latvians. Two of their older colleagues included Kaspars Biezbārdis, the first ethnic Latvian philologist, who helped draft petitions to the tsar on the harsh conditions among the Latvian peasantry (for which he was exiled to Kaluga in 1863), and Andrejs Spāģis, the first writer to draw western European attention to the Baltic problem. Fricis Brīvzemnieks (Treuland) is considered the father of Latvian folkloristics; Barons later made the collection of dainas his life's work. The poet Auseklis (the nom de plume of Krogzemju Mikus), in the diplomat and scholar Arnolds Spekke's words, represented "the romantic and mystic search for the nation's soul." The Young Latvian Andrejs Pumpurs later penned the national epic Lāčplēsis, "The Bear Slayer."
Read more about this topic: Young Latvians
Famous quotes containing the word leaders:
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measures by results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)