Film Evening “All My Best Sayings Are Recorded in My Books”

To celebrate the 120th anniversary of Anšlavs Eglītis’s birth, on October 21 at 6:00 p.m. the National Library of Latvia Museum of Literature and Music invites visitors to meet writer Anšlavs Eglītis through the eye of a video camera in filmed material preserved in the museum collection, “All My Best Sayings Are Recorded in My Books,” which will take place in the permanent exhibition “Procrastination and Creation” at 6 Mārstaļu Street, Riga.

During the evening, it will be possible to watch several filmed materials by Veronika Janelsiņa and take a look inside his home in Pacific Palisades, on the American West Coast, where the writer lived from 1952 onward. Anšlavs Eglītis’s home on Monumenta Street was full of paintings and books; here he sat by the glassed-in window and typed continuations of his novels or a review of some Hollywood film on his typewriter. In the yard, tropical trees, shrubs, and flowers burst into bright bloom. Anšlavs Eglītis’s house burned down in the great California wildfire at the beginning of 2025. Until then, the great annual fires had spared the writer’s home; his long-time pen friend, writer Gunars Janovskis, knew this too when he wrote in 1978: “Yes! The big fire on your side! I read it - no, I listened - on the radio and heard Pacific Palisades mentioned. I thought: surely it cannot be that bad. But look: it was close. Good that it turned out that way!”

The event is held in cooperation with the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia within the framework of the State Research Program “Latvian Literature as Belonging: Personalities, Poetics, and Public Space” (LITBEL) (No. VPP-IZM-Letonika-2025/1-0006).