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The creative biography of the film director Jānis Streičs includes 22 feature films, 13 of which are devoted to the present day and nine are about the past. From among historical films, one depicts Latvia at the turn of the 19th century, another focuses on the Russian Civil War, two deal with the inter-war period, three depict World War II, and two are about the 1940s. These films offer Streičs' views about the past, his own interpretation of the texts of history. At the same time, events, people, environments and life situations of the past are viewed from the present-day perspective, which includes issues and values from the present day within the space of the past. This paper examines two films made by Jānis Streičs during the Soviet era, both of them focusing on Latvian history - "The Boys of Līvsala" (1969) and "Strange Passions" (1983), and both of them are set in 1946. The films are different because of the 14 years that passed between the production of the first one and the second one, but they differ even more by the way in which the director sends messages about the past, also displaying his relationship to history and regimes. "Strange Passions" is a challenging film in terms of the history of cinema and the Soviet occupation of Latvia, bringing up the question of whether such a film could have been produced and shown in cinemas and on television. The era that is reflected in the two films is part of Jānis Streičs' own biography. He was a child in 1946, and there was a great deal of tragedy caused by the Soviet regime, its cultivated violence, and the lack of value for human lives. The paper reviews the history interpretation in these films, and the research is based on documents from the Riga Film Studios materials that are stored at the Latvian State Archives. The conclusion is that "The Boys of Līvsala" and "Strange Passions" provide brilliant evidence of the director's "magical realist" style. They demonstrate his great skill in transforming the childhood and youth period of his generation into a part of Latvia's cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine how myths, narratives and biases referring to the recent history are born and developed in nowadays Latvia, supported by the analysis of the case study of the legacy of KGB and its actualization in the public discussion landscape focusing on the relationship of KGB and artists and cultural workers. One of the main criteria for narrowing the research subject to regarding only the relationship between representatives of the fields of arts and culture and KGB is that those particular relationship cases have caused the most heated discussions in mass media and general public, mostly due to the undeniable public 'visibility' of the aforementioned professionals as well as due to personal in-depth connection of society members with art products, artists and cultural workers via artistic preferences, engagement with cultural processes, individual contribution to professional and amateur arts, emotional links, memories etc. Another important aspect to be considered is the strong connectedness of arts and culture with the state apparatus, as throughout history arts and cultural production has served as a propaganda tool, putting forward regime ideology and granting a certain kind of 'power legitimization' as supported by entertainment industry. In order to get a deeper insight into the formation of the myths, narratives and biases referring to the relationship between artists and cultural workers in nowadays Latvia, the authors of the study have combined empiric data analysis based on the research project by the Government Commission for KGB Research at the University of Latvia, the purpose of which was to prepare KGB card files for public access on the website of the National Archives of Latvia, and qualitative media and public discussion narrative analysis, focusing on how certain aspects referring to Soviet legacy in general and specifically to cooperation between artists and cultural sector workers and KGB have been framed and portrayed in actual social memory representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proverbs form part and parcel of intangible cultural heritage. They are handed down from generation to generation and retained in the collective long-term memory of a people, constituting part of their language and culture. The purpose of this paper is to revisit proverbs and examine some of their essential features in the system of language and in their creative use in discourse from a cross-language and a cross-cultural perspective. This approach calls for semantic and stylistic analyses of empirical material, which I have chosen from my own archive of English and Latvian proverbs. Linguistic examination of proverbs promotes an understanding of their functioning across the broad spectrum of languages and cultures, bringing out similarities in the figurative structure of their base form and their stylistic use in various types of discourse. Cognitive linguistic research on proverbs reveals an infinite diversity of expression of figurative thought: a manifestation of the capacity of the human mind for abstraction and generalisation. The study of figurative meaning of proverbs and its changes in discourse accounts for the uniqueness of their stylistic use in text, which lies in the creativity of the cognitive mind. Stylistic use of the same proverb and the same stylistic pattern yields a different creative form of expression. Novel stylistic instantiations emerge in discourse as a reflection of the development of figurative thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]