Andrejs Pumpurs

Andrejs Pumpurs is the first most important historical figures in Latvia Toplist want to share with you! Andrejs Pumpurs (1841–1902) wrote Latvia national heroic epic "Lāčplēsis" (Bear Slayer, 1888), to which he attributed several mythical stories. Pumpurs is presented as an ethnic Latvian who battled against Vikings a millennium ago, but he has successfully become a kind of personification of Latvia, a remembrance of the last age (before the twentieth century) when Latvians enjoyed and defended their freedom. Many patriotic and pro-independence groups were afterwards named after Lāčplēsis , and "Lāčplēsis Day" is a patriotic festival celebrated every year.

Pumpurs was exposed to the Latvian oral culture, notably strong in the region of his birth, and to the legends that would be at the heart of his works while working as a raftsman and performing odd jobs with his father after completing the three-year course. Between 1867 and 1872, he wrote his first poems and early drafts for the epic at Piebalga, a rural center of Latvian education and cultural life.

After a brief stay in Riga, he moved to Moscow in 1876, where he met Slavophile Ivan Aksakov and editor Mikhail Katkov through Fricis Brvzemnieks (Treuland). Pumpurs was the third Latvian to volunteer to fight alongside the Serbs and their Russian allies against the Turks, and his experiences in Serbia influenced his already ardent nationalism. His military career took him to Sevastopol, where he got officer training. In 1882, he returned to the Governorate of Livonia as a member of the Ust-Dvinsk Regiment, where he attended secret meetings of the Narodnaya Volya movement. He worked for the quartermaster in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils) beginning in 1895, traveling extensively to feed the Russian army until he died of rheumatism after a trip to China.