Language, Individual & Society, Volume 16, 2022

Abstract: In the history of Latvia, alongside with other nations, Baltic German people also left their imprints. Over the centuries, Baltic Germans influenced local socio-economic life and cultural processes, cultural practices and values until the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Baltic Germans are an ethnic group of people that was formed from peoples who immigrated to Livonia and Latvians who became Germans, thus creating a peculiar phenomenon of local history with its own mentality and culture. The imprints they left are reflected in Latvian literature, which is an essential resource to find out more about the social and national history. One of such texts is the novel Rīga (‘Riga’) by the novelist Augusts Deglavs (1862–1922). It depicts the events of the second half of the 19th century, when Latvians, forced by economic needs, began to flow from the countryside to Riga, hoping for a better life. The overall picture of the novel is made up of Riga’s multicultural society, general socio-economic and urban processes, Latvians’ struggle for the Latvian language, equal to the German language, practice and strengthening the Latvian culture, therefore the novel can be called a chronicle of cultural history and cultural confrontation of the second half of the 19th century. One of the central lines in the novel is the development and formation of the Latvian nation in the conditions of double colonialism (Baltic German and Russian Imperial Rule). In the article the manifestations of the Baltic German hegemony and the relations related to Latvians, depicted in the novel, have been analysed. The research uses a context-oriented approach, applying interdisciplinary findings from sciences related to the humanities. The theoretical findings of New Historicism support the connection of literary work with the correlations of history and cultural social life.