Rainis (né Jānis Pliekšāns, 1865 – 1929) is a prominent Latvian poet, playwright, translator, and politician.  Rainis studied law at the University of St. Petersburg. Together with Pēteris Stučka he edited a collection of epigrams and satire, Mazie dunduri/The Small Gadflies and published Apdziedāšanas dziesmas/Mocking Songs devoted to the 3^rd Latvian Song Festival. After completing his studies, he worked at regional courtrooms in Lithuania and Latvia. From 1891 to 1895 Rainis was editor in chief of Dienas Lapa/The Daily Page where he worked side by side with young Latvian liberal and socialist intellectuals who came to be known as the New Current. Because of their social criticism and promotion of reforms and class consciousness, the New Current was a dissident movement subject to Tsarist crackdown. In 1897 Rainis was arrested and deported. It was during this period of internal exile that Rainis translated Goethe's Faust, works by William Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Aleksandr Pushkin, et al. These translations greatly revitalized Latvian language by introducing neologisms and coining expressions, and are still among the most important works shaping the modern Latvian literary language. While in exile, he also wrote his first book of poems, Tālas noskaņas zilā vakarā/Far-Off Reflections on a Blue Evening, published in 1903. Gals un sākums/End and Beginning is imbued with G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectics. In his plays Rainis used motifs from folklore as symbols for his political ideals. Due to the failure of the Revolution in 1905, he had to emigrate to Switzerland with his wife Aspazija, settling in Castagnola, Lugano, where he wrote plays and poetry. He returned home in1920, to a now independent Latvia, where he was elected to the Saeima (Parliament), worked as minister of education and director of the National Theatre.