White Water Lily. The Lyrical Notes of Kitners the Accountant, one of Lāms’s significant early works, is a novel which can be used to pinpoint the beginning of modern Latvian prose, after the clichéd uniformity of Socialist realism. It tells the somewhat romantic – while also tragic, and even a
 bit ironic – story of Kitners, an accountant, during a summer spent at 
a collective farm near the Gauja River. The novel appears to describe everyday life under the Soviet regime, but it is important to note that it 
is almost the only novel from the 1950s which can be read as a literary
 text and not as a product of Socialist realism. Seemingly unremarkable everyday occurrences shed light on dramatic events from the past, and reveal the author’s deep respect for the individual’s subjective inner world of emotion and thought. The publication of Baltā ūdensroze in 1958 was received with a whirlwind of outrage, due primarily to one comical character – Baltbiksis – who is constantly explaining his views and sounds like he is quoting from a book of Socialist realist theory. Furthermore, Lāms clearly shows how Baltbiksis’s dogma falls to pieces when it encounters prose containing realistic psychological portrayals. This is where Baltā ūdensroze transforms from an outwardly inoffensive novel to a clear attack on the Socialist realist canon. Baltbiksis could be understood as a prototype 
for the writers in this canon, and so many of these authors felt that they were being ridiculed in Lāms’s portrayal of Baltbiksis. A censored version of the book was published as part of the 1973 collection Raudze, but an uncensored version, newly edited by the author, was only published in 1992.

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