Fiction
January 1921
Gold
by Andrejs Upīts
Augusts Sveilis Jr., the oldest son of a poor small-town tailor, is at the centre of the story in Gold. He and his family are tested suddenly and unexpectedly when Augusts, working as a servant, receives an inheritance from his mistress. The inheritance leads him (and his family) into a completely unfamiliar environment, one they had previously only seen from a distance. In this world, commercialism, intrigue, and the excesses of Rīga’s Latvian bourgeois inhabitants are everywhere. Here the slogan “Gold is life, gold is freedom, gold is everything” rules. Symbols of the era – shops or many types of goods, a car, and the bourgeois social circles of big-city Latvia – reveal the magical power of money, against which their country / small-town morals turn out to be powerless.
