Brodele, Anna

Born Sept. 3 (16), 1910 in the village of Tauroga, Lithuania. Soviet Latvian writer.

Brodele was born into a forester’s family. Her first work was published in 1927. She was imprisoned from 1932 until 1936 for her participation in underground work in bourgeois Latvia. She studied in Moscow at the Gorky Institute of Literature. She is the author of a collection of verses entitled Free Homeland (1946) and a collection of short stories about the war, Strong People (1946). In the postwar period, Brodele’s plays about life on collective farms were performed in the theaters of Latvia (Spring in the Village of Rechnoe, 1948). The transformation of the attitudes of the old intelligentsia is reflected in the play Straume the Teacher (1949). Her most important prose includes the novella Marta (1950), A Quiet Town (a novel about the struggle for Soviet rule in bourgeois Latvia; 1967), and two novels about rural life, With My Heart’s Blood (1955) and Fidelity (1960). The problems of young people are the subject of two novellas, The Blue Sparrow (1965; translated into Russian in 1966) and This Is My Time (1969). Brodele has been awarded two orders as well as medals.