Monta Kroma

Kroma's first published work was the poem "Paēnā puķes un bērziņi dzīvo..." in the newspaper Jaunākās Ziņas. She went on to publish poetry in newspapers including Literatūra un Māksla, Padomju Jaunatne, and Cīņa, as well as such magazines as Bērnība, Karogs, and Zvaigzne. During her early writing career, she also worked at the publications Cīņa and Padomju Latvijas Sieviete.[2]

Her early literary work can be characterized as socialist realism, featuring effusive praise of the Red Army and life in the Soviet Union.[1][4][7] 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.[6][8][9]

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.[2][9][10]

Kroma's 1959 poetry collection Tālo apvāršņu zemē marked the end of her socialist realist period.[2]

Beginning in the 1960s, as Kroma traveled to Moscow to study at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, her work took a radical turn, and she is best known for her modernist poetry of this period up into the 1980s.[1][2][4] She is known for writing about the emotional lives of women in modern cities, employing an avant-garde, free verse style.[1][8][11] The urban setting of her work set it apart from the nature-oriented poetry of many of her contemporaries in Latvia.[12] Kroma is considered to be among the most influential Latvian poets of the 20th century.[1][3][13]

Her first collection after her turn away from the Soviet-mandated poetry style was 1966's Tuvplānā,[12] followed by the influential—and controversial—Lūpas. Tu. Lūpas. Es. in 1970. Considered by some critics to be her best book, Lūpas. Tu. Lūpas. Es. used free verse to express sexuality, drawing both praise and criticism.[2][7][8][11]

Kroma's 1979 collection Refrēni ("Refrains") won the Poetry Days Festival Award in 1980. She then won the Ojārs Vācietis Award for her poetry in 1984.[14] The following year, she was given the Rainis Award, with the judges lauding her depiction of urban life.[11][14]

Her work in the 1980s was marked by a turn away from polyphonic poetry, toward shorter works.[2] A lifelong communist, she appeared to reassess her political views during the third Latvian National Awakening, and she worked to document Latvian society during the Singing Revolution.[2][15][16]

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.[2][5] She was also a fiction editor at the publishing house Liesma from 1968 to 1974.[2]

Kroma died in Riga in 1994.[1][2] Her final collection, Jānis, was published posthumously in 2001, followed by Trotuārs, a collection of her poetry from 1959 to 1993, in 2019.[9][15]