Career
Working in the land before volunteering to fight in Serbia against the Ottoman Empire in 1876, he became a loyal officer in the Russian army and also a staunch promoter of the Latvian culture. Growing up on both banks of the Daugava river, he was one of three children from the civil parish chosen by the Lutheran minister for the German class of the church school in Lielvārde. His first poems and early sketches for the epic were written in Piebalga, a rural center of Latvian education and cultural life, between 1867 and 1872.
After a brief period in Riga, he left for Moscow in 1876 and was introduced to the Slavophile Ivan Aksakov and the editor Mikhail Katkov by Fricis Brīvzemnieks (Treuland).
His military career took him to Sevastopol and he received an officer"s education in Odessa. In 1882 he returned to the Governorate of Livonia in what became the Ust-Dvinsk Regiment, participating in secret meetings of the Narodnaya Volya movement.
From 1895 he worked for the quartermaster in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils), traveling widely to supply the Russian army, until he died of rheumatism after a trip to China.