Monta Kroma

Monta Kroma (February 27, 1919 – July 25, 1994) was a Latvian writer, best known for her pioneering modernist poetry. She is considered one of the most influential 20th-century Latvian poets, and one of the most unusual and radical of the Soviet era.

Having enlisted in the Red Army during World War II, Kroma initially wrote patriotic socialist realist verse, but she eventually transitioned into avant-garde free verse poetry, most notably in her 1970 collection Lūpas. Tu. Lūpas. Es.

Early life Monta Kroma was born Monta Apse in Jelgava in 1919. Shortly after her birth, the family moved to live in Riga, where her father worked as a tailor. Both of her parents died when she was still young: her father in 1920 and her mother in 1936. She then spent 1944–1945 in Moscow, studying journalism at a Communist Party school. She would later study at a party school in Riga, followed by Pēteris Stučka Latvian State University in the early 1960s. Her first book of poems, Svinīgais solījums, was published in 1947, a tribute to the Young Pioneers aimed at children. This was followed three years later by Tev, gvard!, a similarly patriotic collection of autobiographical verse.

In 1956, she collaborated with the Russian writer Boris Burlak on a book of impressions of Kazakhstan's untouched landscapes titled Neskarto zemju plašumos, one of the first Soviet-era Latvian travelogues.

Kroma's 1959 poetry collection Tālo apvāršņu zemē marked the end of her socialist realist period. The urban setting of her work set it apart from the nature-oriented poetry of many of her contemporaries in Latvia. Kroma is considered to be among the most influential Latvian poets of the 20th century.

Her first collection after her turn away from the Soviet-mandated poetry style was 1966's Tuvplānā, The following year, she was given the Rainis Award, with the judges lauding her depiction of urban life.

Throughout her literary career, she also translated writing from Russian, Romanian, and Hungarian, including work by Magda Isanos, Samuil Marshak, Natalia Zabila, Mikhail Svetlov, and Fyodor Tyutchev. She was also a fiction editor at the publishing house from 1968 to 1974.

Kroma died in Riga in 1994. Her final collection, Jānis, was published posthumously in 2001, followed by Trotuārs, a collection of her poetry from 1959 to 1993, in 2019.

Selected works

(1947) (1950) (1956) (1959) (1966) (1970) (1975) (1979) (1982) (1985) (1988) (1989) (posthumous, 2001) (posthumous, 2019)