Sudrabu Edzhus

(in Latvian, Sudrabu Edžus; pen name of Eduards Zilbers). Born Aug. 30 (Sept. 11), 1860, in Vidzeme, in what is now Ogre Raion; died Jan. 30, 1941, in Moscow. Soviet Latvian writer.

Sudrabu Edzhus graduated from the Baltic Teachers’ Seminary in Riga in 1882 and then worked as a teacher. He was forced to leave his homeland because of his participation in the Revolution of 1905–07. He lived in Siberia and, from 1907, in the Caucasus. In 1924 he moved to Moscow.

Sudrabu Edzhus’ literary career began in 1880. His romantic poems on historical subjects were followed, in the 1890’s, by realistic short stories and novellas. In the USSR he became one of the founders of Soviet Latvian literature. In his novellas The Curse of the Past (1921), The Carrion Vultures (1923), and In the Fog of the Swamp (1925), he criticized the Latvian bourgeois nationalists. He also wrote a novel in verse, Before the Storm (1922), about the revolutionary movement in Latvia in the early 20th century. In his poetic works of the Soviet period, Sudrabu Edzhus glorified liberated labor. He translated the works of L. N. Tolstoy, N. V. Gogol, and A. P. Chekhov.