Abstract
"The Buddhists might say that the soul of a secretive and unique poet had transferred itself to a no less peculiar and secretive bird of the night?" This is how a contemporary remember the burial of Alexandrs ?aks, in February 1950. He was born in 1901 under the name of Alexandra ?adarainis . Raised in an environment, which protected him from the external world, he studied medicine first in Moscow, and later in Riga, and then worked as a teacher, a journalist and even as a bank employee. Well-educated and very self-confident, even superior, in his behavior, he directed a poetry newspaper, "Jauno Lira", by which he sought to oppose what he called the "frozen and apathetic nature" of Latvian literature. Indeed, he entered the field of literature at the time of independence of Latvia, when cultural life seemed conventional and stagnant.
