Born: 21 September 1888, Latvia
Died: 8 August 1931
Country most active: Latvia
Also known as: Biruta Skujeniece Dambekaene
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
Biruta Skujeniece Dambekaene was bom on September 21st 1888, at Katoļu. Her father was the poet Vensku Edvarts and her mother a well-known art-critic of her time.
Having finished the high school in Riga, Biruta Skujeniece attended, in the years 1907-1909, the Musical-Dramatic School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society. During the years 1912-14 she studied at Reicher’s Dramatic School at Berlin.
Biruta Skujeniece often appeared on the stage of the Latvian theatre, but she made a name for herself chiefly as an elocutionist. The poetess was revealed in 1924, by the volume of poetry, Wings of Rays Over a Steaming Bowl of Sacrifice. This poetry is bizarre and over-refined. Biruta Skujeniece is praised as the singer of colors. The colors are the ground on which she forms the sometimes fantastic experiences of her soul and her feelings. She is a singer of melancholy. Her song is enshrouded by pain and heavy dreams. Strange and incomprehensible is the soul of this poetess. She wished to find the entire content of life in her own manifold aspirations. In the last years of her life she enthusiastically devoted herself to sculpture. In the autumn of 1931, in a railway accident, Biruta Skujeniece’s life came to a sudden end. Her tragic death deeply moved Latvian society, who remembered the time when Biruta Skujeniece’s scenic art had enraptured the public. The great sympathy evoked by her untimely death was clear evidence of the love and recognition which Biruta Skujeniece had won in the hearts of her people.