Kurtsii, Andrei Petrovich

(pseudonym of A. P. Kurshinskii). Born Sept. 19 (Oct. 1), 1884, in Asitskaia Volost (small rural district), present-day Liepāja Raion; died Feb. 23, 1959, in Riga. Soviet Latvian writer.

Kurtsii graduated from the University of Jena (Germany) in 1911 and the University of Kazan in 1913. He practiced medicine. Kurtsii participated in the political life of bourgeois Latvia as a member of the left-wing legal party of Independent Socialists. In 1928 he was arrested.

Kurtsii first published his work in 1908. He was a compiler of The Collection of Latvian Literature, published in 1916 and edited by M. Gorky and V. Briusov. His most productive period was in the 1920’s and 1930’s, when Kurtsii’s realistic prose, marked by artistic experimentation and permeated with a critical attitude toward the capitalist world, influenced the development of Latvian democratic literature. Works of this period include the collection of short stories People and Livestock (1929), the novella The Swineherd (1936), the novel The Gate of Life (1938), and the poetry collections Utopia (1925) and Silence (1930). Kurtsii published a collection of short stories, A Simple Life, in 1959. He translated the poems of A. S. Pushkin and N. A. Nek-rasov.