Aija Priedīte

The group of researchers of an ESF Project “One’s Own Teeny Tiny Piece of Land — Developmental Strategies of Latvian Rural Population and Change in the Cultural Environment” have chosen the title of a long story by Jānis Purapuķe, very popular in the context of Latvian culture, as the heading of their interdisciplinary research work. It is not only the title of the story by Purapuķe that has grown into a meaningful and widely used phrase in Latvia but the long story itself is also a rich source of information about the life of the rural population in Latvia in the 19th century. In this analysis, I have undertaken an attempt to address the long story by Purapuķe through a “question grid” that has been created for specific purposes of a wider research (concerning the life of the rural population in Latvia as reflected in the novels of Latvian authors); this grid includes the fundamental questions of my other colleagues (socio-anthropologists, political scientists, culture-anthropologists, environmentalists and sociolinguists). While analyzing the long story from the perspectives of various areas, the reader simultaneously receives due information as to the reasons why the group of scientists have decided to choose exactly this title for their research.

With the help of the method of “in-depth interviewing” that is widely practiced in other branches of science (and incorporated in the “question grid”, mentioned above) but up to now virtually unfamiliar in the theory of literature, interesting vistas open: first, it is a new analytical method to be applied in literary analysis; second, this method enables us to discover such wealth of information in the literary text that would have been lost upon the reader if the text were to be read as an aesthetic piece of fiction; third, this method enables the researcher to link various scientific subject areas within one literary work and, in such a way, attain an interdisciplinary vision.

With the help of such an approach, we rediscover the life of rural people in Latvia in the second half of the 19th century. We learn about their social and legal status, their mutual relations and cooperation, about the role of the master and the mistress of the farm and their relations with the hands of the farm, about their attitude to the work, their ethical ideas and visions of a meaningful life, about their attitude to the environment, nature and animals, their views on the “otherness” as well as the sociolinguistic aspect that may create conflicts and what conflict solutions are available. Linking this information with the reality of 2011 a question arises whether Pēteris Zelmenis, the protagonist of the long story, would develop the same strategies and stamina today as he did then or, putting it in other words, would the 2011 replica of Pēteris Zelmenis only consider the land inherited from his fathers and grandfathers by its market value?