Apart from his work in the field of literature, Rainis was also socially active and politically prominent, being one of the spiritual leaders of the Revolution Of 1905 in Latvia and central to the New Current movement that led to it. After the failure of the revolution Rainis and Aspazija had to leave Latvia for Castagnola, a suburb of Lugano , Switzerland, where they lived in exile until their triumphant return to newly independent Latvia on 4 April 1920. His dramatic ballad ''Daugava'' ( The Daugava ) (1916) contained the first explicit demand for Latvian sovereignty -- "Land, land, what is that land demanded in our song? / Land, that is a ''state''." Those lines were stricken by the censor when the work was first published in Moscow . After the defeat of Bermondt-Avalov's forces at Rīga in November 1919, the ballad was given a performance at the National Theater to mark the first anniversary of Latvia's proclamation of independence; many soldiers carried this work into battle. Rainis was a member of the Central Committee of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers' Party , served in the Constituent Assembly and the Saeima , and was the Minister of Education from December 1926 to January 1928. Rainis had the ambition of becoming Latvia's president and became less prominent in politics when this ambition was not fulfilled. He founded the innovative Dailes Theater and served as its first director, and from 1921 to 1925 he was the director of the National Theater.
Rainis' statue at the Esplanāde in Rīga is a gathering-place that highlights the contradictions in how his multi-faceted career and works are interpreted; it is the focal point for the national poetry festival, always held on his birthday, as well as a focus for the Left Wing , from the Social Democrats to the radical opposition to Latvia's education reform (in part because of Rainis' support for minority schools; he was instrumental to the founding of Belarusian schools in Latvia). Similarly, criticism of his work has often been strongly affected by politics; while the Soviets emphasized his Socialism (his image even appeared on a commemorative Soviet Ruble coin), ''Daugava'' and other Patriotic works were omitted from editions of Rainis' texts prior to the Third Awakening .
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