Tour of the Exhibition “The Full Stop: The Decline of a Personality”

On Saturday, 18 October, at 2 p.m., the Andrejs Upīts Memorial Museum invites visitors to the exhibition “The Full Stop: The Decline of a Personality” for a special, in-depth talk about the final years of Andrejs Upīts’s life, the nuances of the creation of the book “A Sunless Decline”, and many other related topics. The tour will be led by the museum’s senior specialist and the exhibition’s author, Arnis Koroševskis.

The author of the exhibition “The Full Stop: The Decline of a Personality” is literary scholar and museum senior specialist Arnis Koroševskis, while the artist is Kristians Brekte.

Arnis Koroševskis describes the exhibition: “Andrejs Upīts did not die just once. The first time, he was ‘buried’ in 1919—in the midst of chaos, when, amid changes of power in Riga, his obituary was mistakenly circulated. The second time, Andrejs Upīts nearly passed away in Riga Central Prison in the spring or summer of 1920, when he was imprisoned there for collaborating with the communist authorities and had been sentenced to death. The third time, Andrejs Upīts died as a talented writer in the 1940s, when, while still able to draw on the remnants of his artistic inspiration, he created several important and enduring literary works, but had already partly subordinated his talent as a writer to the programme and methods of the nomenklatura of the time. The writer nearly died for the fifth time after suffering a stroke at the end of Stalin’s rule, in 1952. The sixth time, in the mid-1960s, Andrejs Upīts himself put a full stop to his career as a talented writer while preparing the tendentious literary-critical essay “A Sunless Decline”. On 17 November 1970, Andrejs Upīts died at the age of nearly 93. During the last 25–30 years of his life, he did everything possible to permanently tarnish the name and biography of this distinguished Latvian man of letters.

Was it worth it? How did the writer feel, live, and work during the final years of his life? There is no unequivocal answer.”

Admission: €5.