Since the times of the so-called Neo-Latvians we've been looking for our identity. Starting 1879, when Mērnieku laiki ("Surveyor Times"), a novel by brothers Reinis and Matīss Kaudzīte, was published, we embarked on a transition from the national-romanticist glorification of the past to depiction of life as it was. Our prose had awakened the national self-awareness.

Celebration of the positive ideal has dominated our literature.  Latvian diligence, honesty, sympathy, open hearts have all been extolled, but this ideal  tends to assume the dimensions of a literary canon, a template for mass production of Latvian virtue as it shines forth in almost every one of the classic novels by Andrievs Niedra, Andrejs Upītis and even that author of bestsellers Vilis Lācis. The works of prose-writers who have kept to the golden mean and written non-didactically, like Rūdolfs Blaumanis, Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš, Jānis Ezeriņš have we can now recommend as undiscovered gems among the world literary masterpieces.

Our prose has been subjected to canons lifted from the theses of Marxist, Leninist and Stalinist political economy. We have had astounding sagas describing wars and revolutions, where the world is mostly seen as black-and-white. We have gone through periods when Latvian literature was "national in form and socialist in content". However, even in the absolute heyday of the Soviet regime novels were created of which we have no reason to be ashamed today:works by Regīna Ezera, Alberts Bels, and Zigmunds Skujiņš. This was literature born outside the generally approved frameworks, and reading it for the first time now you would never suspect it was created behind the Iron Curtain.

Since the arrival on our literary scene of the "angry young girls" Gundega Repše and Andra Neiburga, literature has finally been living by its own set of natural laws. Unfortunately, --or perhaps fortunately -- the situation here is similar to the one in Europe at large and elsewhere:  the natural dialogism of literature has been replaced by the steely logic of economics. The post-modern self-satisfaction and self-sufficiency is no threat to Latvian prose, however, for, as a champion/critic has said of Latvian literature, "there are enough existential issues around us to think and write about. That is a great privilege."