Kārļa Krūzas piezīmes par Eduardu Mēkleru
K. Krūza’s reflections on Eduards Mēklers - Kārlis Krūza. Dreaming one’s dream

Summary/Abstract: The Latvian poet Kārlis Krūza (1884-1960) has left in manuscript a series of notes on approximately two hundred distinguished intellectuals in Latvia of the 1920s and 1930s. As a sequel to earlier publications of K. Krūza’s notes, for this volume M. Vecvagars has chosen to introduce the poet’s reflections on the writer and teacher Eduards Mēklers. E. Mēklers worked in various schools in Riga and elsewhere as well as taught a course on the history of Russian literature at the University of Latvia. He authored a monograph on Alexander Pushkin as well as a number of essays and poems. M. Vecvagars focuses on previously unexamined aspects of E. Mēklers’ thought. First, Mēklers attempted to develop a “universally national” mode of thought, novel in Latvia at his time. Secondly, he advocated ‘pancriticism’, i.e., a view that absolutely everything could be subject to criticism from a vantage point of a certain truth (Kant’s influence on Mēklers in that can be doubted). Thirdly, Mēklers questioned if the Republic of Latvia could be regarded a democratic and socially just society, a question that has recently acquired topicality in Latvia as well as in other post-communist states. According to K. Krūza, E. Mēklers’ ideas on the possibility to unite various modes of thinking and believing as well as to establish social justice were anchored in dreams.

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