‘Teachers’ (2018)

The novel by Andis Akmentiņš takes place in the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called ‘Khrushchev’s Era’, the era of simple people and simple teachers, who lived and worked.

When working on the novel ‘Teachers’, Akmentiņš used hundreds of Latvian teachers’ notes, letters and memoirs. Almost a documentary story that addresses the Latvian SSR in the 1950s and 1960s. The novel is divided into four books. In each of them the main character is a teacher from a rural area – people with a different life experience and a vision of what’s going on.

The author himself says the following about the novel: ‘The novel begins with the funeral of Stalin, claiming that now the great teacher of our nation is dead. Time and life are also depicted as teachers. Essentially, in the book, and also in history, there is an ongoing competition or even a fight over who will teach who, and how will they do that.’

The book was published in the series ‘We. Latvia. XX Century.’ within the framework of the SCCF’s target programme ‘National Identity’.