Balodis, Andrejs

Born Mar. 24, 1908, in Vecumnieki volost (small rural district), Bauska District. Soviet Latvian poet. Honored Cultural Worker of the Latvian SSR (1958). Member of the CPSU since 1940.

Balodis participated in the underground revolutionary movement, spending about ten years in the prisons of bourgeois Latvia (until 1939). His work was first published in 1924. The revolutionary verses of his early years are collected in the book Winds against the Window (1955). Early in the Great Patriotic War he volunteered for the front. In Kirov, in 1943, a collection of his verses was published in Russian, entitled You Love the Homeland. From 1948 to 1963, Balodis was editor of the magazine Karogs (Banner). He published the collections In the Rays of Struggle and Victory (1945), The Sowers of Life (1948), With All My Heart (1950), Let the Cannons Be Silent (1951), Winged Years (1958; State Prize of the Latvian SSR, 1959; Russian translation, 1960), Maturity (1963), and The River of Time (1968). His verses are imbued with patriotism and ideas of the struggle for peace. He was awarded two orders, as well as medals.