Mati Unt was born in Estonia and lived there all his life. He spent his early years in the village of Linnamäe near the university town of Tartu. His life, like that of so many Estonians, was rooted in the countryside and nature, something evident in all of his works. Unt doubled as one of the most influential modernist, and latterly postmodernist, authors in Estonia, as well as being a playwright, director, and producer, staging plays at several theaters in the Estonian capital, Tallinn.

* * *

Unt made his breakthrough as an author early in life, publishing his first prose in the early 1960s while still at school, and later while studying literature and journalism at Tartu University, near the village where he was born. He belonged to the Sixties Generation, which denotes a number of Estonian writers born in the 1940s and who emerged as writers and intellectuals some twenty years later. During the years leading up to the Prague Spring of 1968, Estonian intellectuals had high hopes of a Dubãek-style “socialism with a human face.” Their hopes were soon dashed. Nevertheless, Estonia had always managed to evade the full brunt of Soviet repression and censorship.

In the 1960s and ’70s, when Stalinism had waned, key works of international literature were made available in translation to the citizens of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic by such authors as Whitman, Faulkner, Salinger, Scott Fitzgerald, Wilder, Malamud, Baldwin, Capote, Updike, Oates, Bellow, Golding, Bergman (film scripts), Kafka, Borges, Butor, and Camus. This was thanks to an unusual initiative, a weekly addition to one of the cultural monthlies where many shorter works of international literature managed to appear. In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir made a brief visit to Estonia, and even works that were frowned upon by the central Soviet authorities—such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—were published in the Estonian language. Presumably the Soviet authorities thought that the translation of controversial works into a language used by no more than one million people could do little or no harm to the predominantly Russian-speaking USSR.

* * *

For much of his working life, Mati Unt was involved with the theater, staging plays regularly from 1981, when he became the director and scriptwriter for the Youth Theater in Tallinn. It is often thought that the Soviet Union was entirely cut off from Western theatrical trends, but this is not entirely true. During the 1960s thaw, new ideas in the theater seeped in through the Iron Curtain and from the more liberal satellite states to the Soviet Union itself. In time, names such as Artaud, Grotowski, and Peter Brook became familiar to Estonians.

Over the past decades, Unt staged many plays of international renown by dramatists such as Sophocles, Corneille, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Genet, Weiss, Havel, and Beckett, plus adaptations of Euripides and Bulgakov, many of these at the Vanemuine Theater in Tartu. One of the last plays he staged was Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, in the provincial town of Rakvere, and before his death Unt was working on a stage adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Mati Unt also wrote several plays of his own. As early as 1967, Unt was experimenting with the introduction of Brechtiantechniques to Ancient Greek material in his play Phaethon, Son of the Sun. Perhaps Unt’s most complex stage play was Dress Rehearsal (1977) where in Pirandellian fashion he examined the life of a Soviet revolutionary through actors on a film set performing in and discussing what is in fact a rather hackneyed adaptation. The real revolutionary, now an old man, stands around the set giving monosyllabic advice, and seems rather indifferent to the myth his life is being turned into.

* * *

Still, it is as a renewer of Estonian prose that Unt will be best remembered, at home and especially abroad. The leitmotifs and style of Mati Unt’s fiction changed little from when he first began publishing in the 1960s and was regarded as something of a Wunderkind. Unt’s prose is rooted in the mythology of everyday life, personal relationships, sexuality, and especially that of modern urban living—although the national trauma of the Soviet occupation always lurks under the surface. To this he added the deadpan humor of the eternal observer, someone who never quite succeeds in getting fully involved with other people, and yet is always present amongst them.

Unt was always interested in popular science; the most unexpected associations and references appear in his works. He was also keen on examining paranormal, esoteric, and pathological phenomena, like vampires, werewolves, cannibals, sex criminals, and those driven by obsessions and idées fixes. One critic says: “Unt’s interest in everything . . . was phenomenal. He read rapidly and much, his memory was first class and concrete, and he synthesized what he read. You could always ask him about things in many fields.”

Unt’s early novels clearly show the direction he was moving in. His first novel, Farewell, Yellow Cat!, appeared in his school annual in 1963. Here the protagonist is in an ideological battle with his aunt, a homeowner—something that was rather politically incorrect in the Soviet days. Anything harking back to bourgeois times (i.e. the 1930s of independence and the authoritarian rule of President Päts) had to be painted in a negative light. But by mentioning them at all, Unt was taking a stand.

Then came the novella The Debt (1964), which caused a literary storm. Under the edicts of Socialist Realism, Soviet literature was in those days supposed to provide models for how people should conduct their lives. Instead, Unt chose a protagonist who was having sex while still at school, and who gets a girl pregnant, something which was shocking to the hypocritically puritan Soviet society. Critic Tiit Hennoste regards this novella as Unt’s key work: “It was the first work of Estonian literature in Soviet times that caused a real scandal, and endless disputes about the behavior of the young.”

In 1970, Unt produced a Kafkaesque murder-mystery parody called Murder at the Hotel, and two years later wrote a love-triangle novella called An Empty Beach, where a young married writer has to contend with the advances made to his wife by a violinist—and which, he claimed, contains elements of self-mockery. A film version of this novella was scheduled to start shooting in late August 2005, and will continue despite the author’s death.

Under the same cover was Mattias and Kristiina, which is again about a young couple struggling against society, and who endup in a kind of Tristan-and-Isolde tragedy.

This was followed in 1975 by the novella And If We Are Not Dead, Then We Are Alive Right Now. This deals with werewolves and contains numerous references to literature on the same subject, a stylistic trait that remained constant in the rest of Unt’s oeuvre.

Unt’s most famous novel, Autumn Ball (1979), was translated into English—as well as Russian, Finnish, Swedish, and other languages—back in the Soviet era, and tells the story of six people living in apartments in the Tallinn high-rise suburb of Mustamäe, and who are destined to meet at the end of the novel: a poet, an architect who is a technocrat and futurist, a misanthropic barber, and a TV-addicted woman and her young son. Here, Unt’s coolly objective yet tongue-in-cheek style and interest in popular science came into their own. Apart from Things in the Night, this is the only novel by Unt made available in English. [Ed Note: At the time of writing, these were the only Unt titles in English. See below for a complete, current list.]

Unt’s novels and stories, as well as a few plays, were collected in two volumes in 1985, totaling some 650 pages. But Unt was not finished as an author. Some of his most significant work was still to come.

The following year, Unt published a volume of novellas and other short texts entitled They Speak and Keep Silent. Critics talkhere of polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense, claiming that while there was the germ of this already in Autumn Ball, by now Unthad abandoned the traditional role of a narrator. These texts include the semi-theatrical dialogue of a woman and a taxi-driver; a short play about the nineteenth-century poet Lydia Koidula (see below) and the twentieth-century author of folk tales Aino Kallas; diary entries by a woman whose husband disappears without trace; and a postmodern text that comments on the translation of a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

, Unt’s second-longest novel, and second to be translated into English, appeared as Öös on asju in 1990, and deals with electricity in all its forms: a source of urban heating and lighting, but also a dangerous and untamed force. Unt also incorporates other devices from his stock of trivia: pigs, cacti, holography, urban cannibalism, and the ever-present blocks of high-rise apartments found throughout the former Soviet Union. Things in the Night continues in the postmodern vein of They Speak and Keep Silent, being full of game playing, anarchic behavior, absence, schizophrenia, and irony. Nevertheless, there is, as in similar works from the former Soviet Bloc, a touch of light moralism in the novel. The Estonian critic Kalev Kesküla sums the work up as follows:

The novel consists of the author’s confessions, novel fragments, snatches of plays, comments on how to write a novel, poems, minutes of interrogations, letters, and quite a few quotes from popular classics. There are amusing adventures and pointless ratiocinations. From time to time, the writer-protagonist personifies the compulsive scribbler who is unable to curb his urge to write when attempting to describe electricity, who tells yarns about accidents and shops. The characters in the novel have strayed into a world where other people’s words, clichéd behavior, and serious scientific literature are jumbled up together. In its artistic radicalism, the novel is very modernist, while very postmodern in its zest for irony. The ideas that bear the novel along appear to be a fear of people and an underlying misanthropy, themes familiar from Unt’s earlier works. Here again we have the criminals, farmers who set their dogs on those wandering through the night, arctic hysteria, and cannibalism.

In 1990, the same year as Things in the Night, Unt published a second novel, . This is the usual Untian mixture of fact and fiction, and takes one of the most sacred names in Estonian literature in vain. Lydia Koidula (1843-1886) is regarded as the first Estonian woman poet of significance, and also the first poet to express an Estonian longing for independence and freedom. But Unt rather blasphemously weaves this national icon and her Latvian doctor and husband into a postmodern tale of vampires and a mysterious trip to Leningrad. While the leitmotif of Things in the Night is electricity, that of Diary of a Blood Donor is, predictably, blood.

After 1990, Unt published only one major work of fiction, but one with special international resonance. This was a documentary novel about Bertolt Brecht’s meeting with the Estonian-born Hella Wuolijoki, who later became a Communist and broadcaster in neighboring Finland, and is entitled . (The night was clearly something with which Unt had affinities.) In true Untian style, the author mixes episodes from the history of Estonia and Finland in a tale centered around World War II, including historical documents and a rather playful description of the very bourgeois and somewhat fastidiousBrecht, who would like to feel at home with the workers, but is too busy with his “alienation effect” and mistresses.

* * *

In one of a series of articles written to mark Unt’s sixtieth birthday—January 1, 2004—Ms. Marju Lauristin, who remembered him from his early days as a writer, wrote an appreciation entitled “Mati Unt’s Blogosphere.” In it she examines Unt’s last literary guise—that of a columnist in the cultural press, where he wrote short pieces that almost resembled “blog” entries, recording his comments on life on a weekly basis. Lauristin, now a professor of media studies, remembers Unt as someone   the world was “very text-centered, sound-centered, centered on the life of the mind.”

* * *

Mati Unt lies buried in the writer’s corner of the Metsakalmistu cemetery in Tallinn, where he rubs shoulders in death with many of the key figures of nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century Estonian literature, their graves all grouped together rather like those in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey—but in a more modest, truly Estonian manner. The vaults of the abbey are here replaced by the branches of trees.

Come back on Wednesday to read an excerpt from Diary of a Blood Donor.

Selected Works by Mati Unt in Translation:

Autumn Ball. Trans. Mart Aru. Out of Print.

. Trans. Eric Dickens. Dalkey Archive Press, $13.95.

. Trans. Ants Eert. Dalkey ArchivePress, $12.95.

. Trans. Eric Dickens.

Selected Untranslated Works:

Hüvasti, kollane kass! [Farewell, Yellow Cat!]. Keskkooli almanahh.

Mõrv hotellis [Murder at the Hotel]. Periodika.

by Mati Unt. Translated from the Estonian by Eric Dickens. (Estonia, Dalkey Archive)

Below is a guest post from Bill Marx — the man behind — about another BTBA 2010 title. Almost there . . . Almost time to announce the finalists . . .

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
There will also be singing
Ģ����ý the dark times.
Bertolt Brecht, Svendborg Poems

But can an artist who has absorbed some of the dark times sing of them? Questions of political opportunism, as well as the twisted prerogatives of creative egotism, drive the late Estonian writer Mati Unt’s postmodern historical novel Brecht at Night. Unt isn’t concerned about how playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht sang about the rise of Hitler and Stalin or the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Instead, Unt examines, via an arch vaudevillesque irony, the narcissistic machinations of Brecht in the year 1940, when, fleeing Nazi Germany, he and his entourage of wife, mistresses and children end up in Finland, the guests of playwright Hella Wuolijoki, a rich Communist sympathizer with Estonian roots. It is the portrait of the artist as a determinedly abstracted man, aside from his paranoid fear that Hitler has sent out assassins to kill him.

Unt’s Brecht is primarily concerned with making it to America, not attempting to make sense of the gathering forces of the night, which would touch on his uneasy relationship with the Soviet Union, Stalin, and Communism. The general impression left by the book is that it isn’t fear of censorship so much as a pervasive inner decay that holds Brecht back from dealing with reality: The worse thing for a writer is not, Brecht thinks, having to keep your mouth shut. Its a lot worse when you have nothing to say via that mouth.

Sadistically, Unt, a narrative kibitzer in the book, surrounds Brecht with realities that should have given the writer plenty to talk about. He provides excerpts from non-fiction accounts (newspaper articles, academic studies) of the horrendous happening in Europe, with a grim emphasis on the Soviet Unions thuggish hijacking of Estonia. He also provides potted biographies of Brecht’s friends and lovers, showing how they were used and abused by Brecht and by history, camp followers betrayed or left on their own to survive.

All of this could have been heavy-handed Brecht the selfish artist slapped around, over and over, in a circumscribed barrel. At his best, however, Unt brings sardonic humor to the dark proceedings, perhaps tapping on his own feelings about being an artist (playwright, novelist, director) bottled up by the Soviet Union. Unt’s Brecht chooses to see the world through Marxian rules, Hegelian hocus-pocus: The covert theme of the book is, of course, dialectics, Brechts greatest love. That streamlined notion of Brecht’s vision isn’t entirely fair, as least to his poetry, which at the time made use of ambiguity and skepticism, a satire that made full use of mockery. Still, the characters intellectual triangulation amusingly seems to free him from looking too deeply at the demands of the here-and-now, aside from the sexual and secretarial demands he makes on the women in his life. (Unt draws on John Fuegi’s biography The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, which details the authors swinish treatment of women.) Occasionally the author tries to wake Brecht up via an impish surrealism, such as having a very un-dialectical frog pop up in his room to give him a scare.

Unt includes a memorably funny chapter about a real-life Estonian government who served as a stooge for the Soviets named M Unt (no relation to the author). The guy counts down his acts of repression before his bosses murder him: Lithuania has been accepted as part of the Soviet Union (3rd August). There’s still time to go before my death.

Still, it is difficult to keep the inventive black humor coming, and by mid-point Brecht at Night increasingly shoves the title artist aside to chronicle the lethal facts of Soviet domination. The books imagination gives way to presentation; it suggests that Unt lost interest in drawing (and re-drawing) ironic attention to Brecht’s disinterest in reality, his obsession with bourgeois comfort during a time of chaos. If Unt had included more of the un-dialectical consciousness that informs the (anti)lyrics in Svendborg Poems the books exploration of the amoral writer-in-exile would have been richer and more compelling. Unt has a considerable reputation as a stage artist but there is surprisingly little dramatic conflict in the book. His Brecht devolves into a didactic puppet.

Unt’s other novels available in English, Things in the Night and Diary of a Blood Donor, tap on rich veins of fantasy (apocalyptic meltdown, vampirism) to evoke the brutal truths about the somnambulism of life under (or after) the domination of the Soviet Union. In Brecht at Night the author speaks openly and powerfully about the crimes of authoritarian barbarity, the degradation of creativity and morality, the slippery slope of self-involvement. But one misses his customary wildness, his imaginative gusto, as he goes about it.

One post that caught my eye was an (According to Warburton, he’s translated more than 30,000 pages from Finnish and English into Swedish.) Warburton uses his translations of novelist Mika Waltari as a launching point to get into a greater translation/editing issue and a description of a certain type of editorial assistant:

Waltari used to claim that he had a tendency to write too much and be unable to excise things from the text. He said that he was therefore grateful for any suggestions for abridgements from his translators and editors, and would nearly always accept them completely. All his later voluminous novels have thus been abridged by about five, six or an even higher percent each.

This kind of editing is, no doubt, more common than you would believe, and there are many foreign authors who are not even aware that something has happened to their books in translation. Similar, if not worse, things have happened with our books when published abroad, when we have managed to check up.

Obviously, such a practice is completely unacceptable and comes quite close to an arrogation of the rights of the author. But the law is vague on that score and tends to allow changes that do not alter the artistic merit or aim of a work. [. . .]

One of these [types of editorial assistants] is – or was, as the variant has surely vanished by now – what you could term the normaliser. He was a proponent of the theory that all books should sound as if they had been written in the target language, Swedish in this case, and why not make it the Swedish of Stockholm, just for good measure. That’s his problem. But such an editor will then go on to think that it becomes pretty unpleasant for the reader to come across rare or difficult words and expressions, however Swedish they may be. These words have to be simplified and aligned. Here, the fact that the original author may have wanted to express himself in an unusual way, even in a convoluted or stilted manner, is no excuse. You have to explain what he really means. – This problem area is adjacent to another: have you the right to improve the text, however tempting this may be, without consulting the author? No, you haven’t.

Not sure that I agree that “the normaliser” really has vanished from the publishing scene, but I agree that translations should contains some “strange” phrasings . . .

In literary terms, Yiddish is often regarded as the language of folk tales from small country towns—shtetls—with a good deal of input involving religious ritual and custom. Authors such as Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer have done little to dispel this idea, although he did write powerful realist novels such as Shadows on the Hudson. The Jewish dimension has therefore been very visible in Yiddish literature, sometimes giving gentile readers the idea that this was not quite for outsiders, unless they wanted to steep themselves in the finer points of specifically Jewish life and religiosity.

Dovid (or David) Bergelson wanted to break the mould. But his ultimate fate is as tragic as that of the Yiddish language itself: emerging as one of the few key Modernist writers in Yiddish, he was ultimately forced to conform to the edicts of Socialist Realism, but displeased the monstrous Stalinist régime, which was to prove fatal.

Dovid Bergelson was born in Uman in central Ukraine, then a Czarist province, in 1884. His father was a rich grain merchant, and his youngest son (one of nine siblings!) was given an eclectic education. But both of his parents died young and Dovid lived with various of his older siblings in Warsaw, Odessa and Kiev.

The major upheavals of 1905 passed him by. Bergelson was apparently more interested in literature than what was going on around him, and started writing in Hebrew, then Russian, but could not place his stories. He did not find it easy to start writing in Yiddish; the styles to be emulated seemed old-fashioned. He wanted to write tersely; his models were all verbose. He also wanted to write in a kind of Yiddish literary language, at one remove from the earthy colloquialisms of the majority of Yiddish writers at the time.

By 1910, Bergelson was enjoying some success with his short works. Although living in the city of Kiev, he tended to set his stories in small towns, where Yiddish was spoken. Yiddish was on the rise. Russian intellectuals wanted to show solidarity with Jews and a certain amount of liberalization was occurring in the Russian Empire. Just before WWI, the Kiev Group was established—a group of young Yiddish authors.

He married in 1917 in Odessa, but the family moved to Kiev for protection, as the pogroms raged. One of Bergelson’s manuscripts for a novel was destroyed in one such pogrom.

In 1920, the Russian Revolution had made Moscow the capital of the new Bolshevized Russia. Yiddish flourished and the mood was liberal. The Yiddish activists dreamed of a synthesis of Yiddish and universal culture. But Moscow was starving. By 1921, Dovid Bergelson was on his way to Berlin, attracted, as many other writers and intellectuals were, by improved living conditions.

He was to stay in Berlin until 1934. Many Russian intellectuals had fled Russia and ended up in Berlin, such as Andrey Bely, Ilya Ehrenburg, Vladimir Nabokov and Marina Tsvetaeva. The multilingual Bergelson appears to have felt at home there. The Weimar Republic had also attracted a whole host of Jewish writers, writing in Yiddish or, as in the case of Chaim Bialik, Hebrew. Bergelson mixed with such German writers as Alfred Döblin and Arnold Zweig. Bergelson and Albert Einstein once played violin solos at the same concert.

Gradually, however, with Hitler’s power on the rise, Dovid Bergelson began once again to look eastwards. He spent some time in Moscow in 1926. Maybe he was beginning to feel a yearning for Russia. At any rate he attacked Zionism and somewhat glorified the Soviet Union. During that fatal turning-point year in Bergelson’s fortunes, he was forced to renounce his previous writings, which had been more entertainment than agit-prop, according to the Soviet standards of the day. But maybe he did not conform enough. He was slowly slipping towards Socialist Realism, in an anxious attempt to prove how loyal he was to Russian-style Communism. And by 1929, Stalin had consolidated his power, and the literary scene became increasingly less liberal.

Dovid Bergelson did, however, see the other side of Jewish life, that of the USA. In 1929, he spent six months in New York, writing for the Yiddish press. But he found American Yiddish poetry élitist; he was already beginning to abandon Modernism in search of a more committed form of writing. By 1931, his visits to the Soviet Union were becoming ever longer.

In 1933, Bergelson spent a short while in exile in Denmark with his family. But his fate was sealed when, early the following year, he decided, as other key Yiddish writers had before him, to return to the Soviet Union. Maybe it is unfair to say that this was the beginning of the end for Dovid Bergelson, but from 1934 onwards, for the remaining 18 years of his life, he appears to have become bogged down in the intellectual and social swamp that Soviet Union had become. He visited Birobidzhan, the showcase republic set up for the Jews by Stalin, not far from Vladivostok.

After the assassination by Stalin of the prominent Jewish actor and cousin to Stalin’s personal physician, Solomon Mikhoels, in 1949, it was all over for Bergelson and a number of his Jewish writer colleagues as well. In his characteristically paranoid manner, Stalin began rounding up the Jewish intelligentsia in Russia, imagining all manner of plots. Stalin decided to eradicate Soviet Jewish culture, and one by one, Jewish intellectuals were arrested and put on trial. Dovid Bergelson spent the last couple years of his life in prison and was executed by firing squad on his 68th birthday in 1952.

This sad event for Yiddish literature occurred between 12th and 13th August 1952 and is termed the Night of the Murdered Poets. Executed along with Dovid Bergelson were Yiddish authors Peretz Markish, Itzik Fefer, Leib Kwitko, David Hofstein, Benjamin Zuskin, Solomon Lozovsky and Boris Shimeliovich.

The above is but a thumbnail sketch of the life of a complex man in complex times. The nuances and paradoxes only fully emerge in the chapters of David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, edited by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh. This book strikes a happy balance between text and context, and the essays there cover everything from a close reading of his works to an examination of the literary, historical and cultural context in which those works were produced. This book is, in effect, more than the examination of the works of one author. The symbolic value of Bergelson’s fateful move from emerging as a Modernist author and ending up following the tenets of Socialist Realism forms the central leitmotif.

At the risk of over-simplification, it can be stated that when Bergelson described the decline and decay of the Jewish world in Eastern and Central Europe, and in a stylistically experimental fashion, he was at the top of his game. Once he started describing utopian change he was less convincing. One of the most stimulating essays in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism is one entitled “Language and Style” in Nokh Alemen by Daniela Mantovan of the University of Heidelberg. This novel, translated twice into English as When All is Said and Done, is regarded as Bergelson’s Modernist masterpiece, and first appeared in Yiddish in 1913.

The story bears some resemblance to Madame Bovary although the main female protagonist disappears rather than dies. None the less, as Mantovan claims, Bergelson was influenced by Flaubert’s use of style indirect libre, where the distinction is blurred between direct and reported speech, which in turn affects the perceptions and limitations of the narrator.

The story is mostly centred around the life of one woman and her suitor, rejected by the “Bovary-type” of woman. As Joseph Sherman puts it:

“..the novel was among the crowning achievements of modern Yiddish fiction, the first not only to take a woman as its central character, but also to depict radical alienation. Bergelson’s prose sunders speaker from speech: monosyllabic language is punctuated by silence as though to conceal, rather than reveal thoughts.”

Mirele Hurvits, the woman protagonist, longs to escape the boredom of small-town life as the only and privileged daughter of a man with some status in the town. One step in this process is rejecting her lover. Mantovan:

“With her fiancé finally rejected, Mirele’s psychological make-up is established by means of indirect allusions: her reluctance to speak is manifested in the action of returning the engagement contract via an intermediary; her indolent decision through the inordinate lapse of time (four years!) Through which her relationship has dragged on; her aimlessness by pointless ‘promenading’; her need of suitors by immediately replacing her former fiancé with ‘the lame student’ and her self-centred use of [him] both before and after her betrothal.”

The whole novels exemplifies an interplay between various sets of values and attitudes to class. The subtlety is in the narration, not the plot.

Bergelson’s second novel Descent was published in 1921 and tells of the mysterious suicide of a young pharmacist Meylekh in the small town of Rakitne (the very name of which has the ring of rachitis or rickets about it). The title – “Opgang” in Yiddish – can be interpreted as decline, descent, sunset, and one or two other downward allusions. The book begins with the funeral of Meylekh (the name, ironically, mean “king”) and the arrival of his friend Khayim-Moyshe to sort out the financial affairs of the dead man. The local townspeople are very unhelpful, fall silent at the first opportunity. It is not clear whether any of the womenfolk that Meylekh associated with pushed him over the edge. One critic, Dara Horn, is puzzled by the fact that Meylekh’s unexpected death could be owing to one of three women, his former fiancé Ethel, a recluse, Khave, a rather smart woman about town and Henke, who is the earthiest, most straightforward of the three. But this puzzle is never resolved. The novel shows how the glue of small-town society has come unstuck. There is no redemption. Not an particularly life-enhancing way of approaching life. But it has been suggested that Bergelson already identified the decline of Jewish society after the shake-up of World War One; so this negatively-charged novel comes as no surprise.

What is much more surprising is why, by the early 1930s, Dovid Bergelson had sold his artistic birthright to Socialist Realism, a credo that should have been utterly alien to the sensitive describer of the decline of the Jewish stetl. What had occurred during the 1920s to turn the author from a gloomy Modernist into an adept of modern [Stalinist] man, a eulogistic supporter of the new project for Jews in the Soviet Union, the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Republic in Birobidzhan? How had Bergelson, then living in Berlin and even visiting Jewish communities in the United States, managed to convince himself that Soviet Jewry would fare any better than Jews had for hundreds of years under rulers of a more or less anti-Semitic variety? Was Bergelson the victim of his own bouts of wish-fulfillment?

In 1929, Bergelson published a novel entitled Mides-hadin which translates as “with the full force of the law”, a Hebrew concept. Critic Michael Krutikov says that this novel marks the watershed between Bergelson’s Modernist and Socialist Realist periods. While he was already trying to adjust to the Socialist Realist mind set, he was still experimenting, using a mystical concept in the title of what was to become a novel of revolutionary struggle. Bergelson appears to still have had the mental space, living in Berlin as he still was, to have it both ways: literary experiment and political commitment did not yet exclude one another. But by 1932, in his novel Baym Dnyepr (On the Dniepr; Part Two 1940), Bergelson had crossed the river. Harriet Murav of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests that the author may have by now been “rewriting” both himself and history. You are almost reminded of the gin-soaked tears of Winston in 1984 as they run down the cheek of the new “convert” to Big Brotherism. The brainwashers had won the day.

Or had they? Murav suggests that while the surface of Baym Dnyepr conforms to the grand tenets of Socialist Realism, a number of stylistic devices used subtly by Bergelson undermine this surface reading. The very fact that the novel was enthusiastically planned as a five-volume suite, but in the end appeared as two volumes with almost a decade between them, points to a different reality than the hysteria of the Stalinist doctrine of “back to the future” with positive heroes following Lenin and their conscience.

Before his arrest and ultimate execution, Dovid Bergelson was to produce one more work of note: the play Prints Ruveni. This play was being rehearsed by the Director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre Shloyme Mikhoels, when Mikhoels was arrested and murdered on Stalin’s explicit orders on 12th January 1949. Mikhoels had hoped to turn Bergelson’s play into one of his theatre’s great achievements. But it was not to be. Within three years, Bergelson would also have fallen victim to Stalin’s irrational purge mentality. The play is based on the life of Prince David Reubeni (1490-1540), one of Judaism’s several false messiahs who ended up a victim of the Inquisition. Where was Bergelson going with this play, written in the Stalinist Soviet Union after the Holocaust? Was he in some complex way trying to square the circle of the Jewish state in Palestine and the life of Soviet Jewry? Was he implying that the Soviet Union might be swept away as Hitler’s Germany had been? Whatever the overt or covert message, Stalin must have interpreted the play, with a song sung in Hebrew, as a bridge too far as regards Jewish identity, because the message about a secular paradise seems to been overlooked by the dictator, and suspicions were aroused about other dreams.

The paradoxical nature of Dovid Bergelson’s life and the movement of his work from experimentation to conformity (with experiment and non-conformity still lurking beneath the surface) make the man and his writings a fascinating case in twentieth century literature written in one of Europe’s many literary languages.

*

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

When All Is Said and Done, (novel), translated by Bernard Martin, Ohio University Press, Athens 1977

The Stories of David Bergelson – Yiddish Short Fiction From Russia, translated by Golda Werman, Syracuse University Press, 1996

Descent, (novel) translated by Joseph Sherman, Modern Language Association of America, New York, 2000

Shadows of Berlin, (stories) translated by Joachim Neugroschel, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2005

When All is Said and Done (novel), translated by Joseph Sherman, Yale University Press, [forthcoming 2008]

*

DISCUSSION OF HIS WORK

edited by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh
Legenda
363 pages, $89.50
978-1-905981-12-0

Jaan Kross, the novelist and grand old man of Estonian literature died in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, on Thursday 27th December 2007. He was 87.

What follows is both an obituary, a history and a bibliography. As will be seen, life and letters are inextricably intertwined and as only three of Kross’ novels and one collection of stories are readily available in English, light will also be shed on those that are not yet available in that language. I will translate the titles of all the works mentioned for the convenience of readers.

*

Jaan Kross was born on February 19th, 1920, in Tallinn, as the son of a metal craftsman and engineer. The Estonian Republic, independent for the first time in history, had been proclaimed shortly before Kross was born, and he spent a reasonably idyllic life at school in Tallinn, and university in Tartu, studying to become a lawyer. But history was instead to ultimately make him the author of more than a dozen historical and semi-autobiographical novels, all intimately connected with the fate of Estonia.

At a national level, the twenty years of Estonian independence which marked Kross’ boyhood and youth were marred by a failed Communist coup in 1924, the knock-on effect of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, and the resulting authoritarian governments of the 1930s. But worse was to come. Kross’ dreams of peace and prosperity, and those of most Estonians, were shattered as a result of the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, where Hitler and Stalin in effect divided up Europe into two spheres of influence. Estonia, like Latvia and Lithuania, all three fledgling independent republics, fell under the Soviet, i.e. Russian, sphere of influence. From then onwards, until Estonia regained its independence in 1991, the country suffered occupation, war, destruction, deportations and a ruined and centrally planned economy, tailored to suit the exigencies of Moscow.

In 1940, the Soviet Union bullied its way into Estonia, stationing large numbers of troops in several parts of the country. A Communist takeover was then rigged so that it looked democratic. Yet the number of Estonian Communists was minuscule; Russian Communists were shipped in to pad out demonstrations. During this one year Soviet occupation, all the members of what had been the government of an independent state, including the President and Prime-Minister, were deported to Siberia, as were many members of parliament. Many were shot in 1942.

Kross was too young to be greatly affected, but observed, experienced. When the German Nazis invaded and occupied the country in the summer of 1941 and stayed for three years, Kross was imprisoned for a few months, on suspicion of being an Estonian nationalist. This was not the last time that Kross suffered at the hands of an occupying power.

In 1944, as the Germans retreated and the Soviets returned causing a power vacuum, a large number of middle-class people took the opportunity to flee to Sweden. Kross was not among them. He decided to stay put and take his chances with whatever history brought Estonia. All went reasonably well until 1946 when Kross was arrested, this time by the Soviet authorities, and sent to the Gulag – suspected, as by the Germans, of nationalist activity. He spent most of his eight years of labour camp and internal exile in the area around Krasnoyarsk in the Komi Republic, not returning to his home town Tallinn until 1954. Kross depicts these two periods of incarceration and forced labour in a series of stories, available in English translation under the title The Conspiracy and Other Stories.

*

For some 15 years after his release, Kross wrote poetry, but by 1970 he started publishing novels. From then onwards, Kross’ literary output was divided in two: he wrote both semi-autobiographical works and purely historical ones, all of them in prose.

A number of shorter novels were then published alongside what is regarded as his masterpiece, the historical tetralogy Between Three Plagues (1970, 1972, 1977, 1980) set in 16th century Tallinn, depicting the national aspirations of the Estonians, then under the rule of the Baltic-German barons, seen through the eyes of the clergyman Balthasar Russow, a real historical figure. Kross examines the psychology of his characters. This book has been translated into Russian, Finnish and German, but is not available in English.

In 1975, Kross published the novel The Third Range of Hills about the Estonian painter Johann Köler, and in the same year the novel The Moonstone which consists of a dialogue between two leading 19th century Estonian intellectuals and writers, the very young Kristjan Jaak Peterson, a poet, and the much older Otto Wilhelm Masing.

His most translated historical novel is The Czar’s Madman (1978), a work that tells the story of a 19th century Baltic-German nobleman who tries to persuade the Russian czar to abolish serfdom and is imprisoned in a casemate as a traitor for his pains. As with most of his protagonists, Kross based the character of Timotheus von Bock on a real-life figure. This novel has been translated into English by Anselm Hollo.

Next came a novel set in the 18th century, A Rakvere Romance (1982), where the burghers of Rakvere (German name: Wesenberg) revolted against the oppression of the nobility. It also involves a love story.

From then onwards, Kross shifted his focus to a more modern period. The novels and stories are mostly semi-autobiographical, and even where this is not the case, they are set in the twentieth century.

In 1984, the author published another of his novels that is available in English translation Professor Martens’ Departure, which is set during the early years of the 20th century when Czarist Russia decided to collate and classify all its various treaties with foreign countries. This is done by an ethnic Estonian, and diplomat Friedrich Martens. Kross also plays with the idea of his namesake, who did something similar a century previously. Curiously enough, both Martenses are real historical figures. What is rather sad about this novel is that it forespells one of Kross’ personal disappointments. Professor Martens narrowly misses the Nobel Peace Prize and this disappointment must, years afterwards, been the same as that of the author, since although a candidate, Kross never actually won the Nobel Literature Prize.

Kross’ 1987 novel Into the Wind describes the life of another real-life character, Bernard Schmidt the astronomer, lens polisher and inventor of the Schmidt telescope (still used today!), who was born on the Estonian island of Naissaar (Swedish and German name: Nargö), loses a hand during a teenage fireworks accident, but goes on to become the polisher of precision lenses and mirrors for telescopes of his own invention. Estranged from his wife, he moves to Germany during the rise of Nazism in the 1930s giving Kross the opportunity to examine the paradoxical life of this scientist and hermit as the clouds gather over Germany.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kross published three collections of short-stories plus his first directly autobiographical novel The Wikman Boys (1988) describing his schooldays and the characters he met there. Its sequel Mesmer’s Circle appeared in 1995 and here the author describes the ultimate fates of a number of these contemporaries at high school: some fled to Sweden, some were deported to Siberia, some died, some survived.

In 1989, the novel Excavations was first published in Finnish in Helsinki, Finland, before the Estonian version appeared. The reason for this was that Estonia was going through a very unstable period, during the break-up of the Soviet Union, and if Gorbachev and Yeltsin had not kept things under control, anything could have happened. This novel, that nevertheless appeared in Estonia the following year, is set in the 1950s and the protagonist, once again Kross’ alter ego, is a young man who has just returned from the Gulag and has to find a job to avoid being sent back to Siberia as a “parasite”, a frequent Soviet charge to get rid of inconvenient citizens. He takes part in an archaeological dig under what is now the parliament building and finds a document which proves Estonian claims to nationalism and is controversial from a Soviet or Russian point of view.

In 1993, Kross published the novel Untouchability about Jüri Vilms, who nearly became a member of the government of the newly independent Estonian Republic in 1918, but who died under mysterious circumstances off the Finnish coast near Helsinki, presumably shot by the Germans who were helping the Finns against the Russians at the time. There is, as often with Kross, a parallel theme of the researcher on the run, who is trying to find out more about Vilms, some decades later.

In 1997, a detailed bibliography of everything by and about Jaan Kross was published, in Estonian and in translation. The book is nearly 400 pages long!

The novel Treading Air (1998) looks at the life of a young man from his time at the Wikman high school of the novel above to his rather sad decline in a mental hospital in the 1980s. Ulo Paerand is highly intelligent and is obliged to take the initiative early in life to help the family budget when his father, who proves to be a philandering swindler, flees abroad with his mistress, leaving Ulo and his mother behind, penniless. They start a laundry and this is the start of a series of odd jobs for Ulo, including being messenger for the then Estonian Prime-Minister just at the time when Estonia is forced to sign what is in effect its death warrant as an independent republic on the Soviet-Estonian border. Ulo sees it all, experiences it all, yet remains something of an observer, a bystander. The novels examines the complex psychology of this very Estonian individual. This novel appeared in English translation by Eric Dickens in 2003.

Kross was to publish one more novel, Tahtamaa Farm (2001). This is a contemporary novel, set in post-Soviet Estonia, where an exile Estonian, one of those whose parents fled to Sweden in 1944, comes to Estonia to try to buy a plot of land from a somewhat gullible Estonian. The land contains valuable medicinal mud, which can be used in sanatoria, and as the scales fall from the eyes of the owner of the land, a duel ensues between the scheming Western businessman and the now equally shrewd Estonian.

Kross’ substantial autobiography Dear Travel Companions (600 text pages, plus documents and photographs) appeared in 2003. It covers his life until about 1962, when Kross had achieved some stability in life, had settled down and put his years in the Gulag behind him. It starts out with the small city of Tallinn, the family summer cottage and his student life, and moves on to his work at a newspaper and at a bank, studies, how he avoided being conscripted into the Waffen-SS (also described in the story Lead Piping), his prison experiences during the German occupation, and so on. Over 250 pages are devoted to his involuntary sojourn in Siberia, while the last 150 pages describe Soviet life when he returned from the Gulag. The text was edited by his daughter Kristiina, so there may be a little more to come from the following 45 years of his life.

Finally, Kross published a book of observations on the creation (and translation) of literary texts, also in 2003, under the rather complex title of Jaan Kross – One’s Own Historicity and Subtext. This is a collection of a series of lectures Kross gave in 1998 at the Department of Philosophy at Tartu University where Kross was Extra-Mural Professor of the Liberal Arts. The lectures are, in effect, critical examinations of his own novels and stories. This 220-page book is divided into two sections: Autobiographism and the opportunities and inevitabilities of literature and Text, context, surface text and subtext. This, along with his autobiography, neatly rounds off Jaan Kross’ life’s work.

*

Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves recently praised Kross’ work in preserving Estonia’s will to independence, language and literature. “He was one of those who helped the nation maintain a freshness of spirit and prepared the ground for the return of national independence”, said Ilves.

Jaan Kross was married three times and is survived by his widow, Ellen Niit the children’s writer and poet, and his children Kristiina, Eerik-Niiles, Maarja and Märten. From 1962 until his death, Jaan and his family lived in an apartment at the top of a block inhabited only by writers. This was common during Soviet times. The apartment block is right in the center of Tallinn, almost opposite the small commemorative plaque to the bombing of Tallinn in March 1944, which Kross experienced, when the other side of the street was flattened by the Soviet airforce, never to be rebuilt.

At time of writing, a brief obituary has appeared in the International Herald Tribune and ones will be appearing in the British dailies The Guardian and The Independent.

*

Eric Dickens 28th December 2007

This review is written by Eric Dickens, who has done his fair share of translating from Estonian. Most recently he did Mati Unt’s for Dalkey Archive Press, and will be doing Unt’s Brecht Appears by Night for Dalkey as well.

On a sidenote, does do some interesting things—needs some serious website help. I honestly couldn’t find Luik’s book on the site, which is why there’s no link in the review.

In those days I had never heard of Estonia. I only became aware of the country while studying at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K., several years later. A few albums, brought up from Cambridge and whose photographs were projected onto the wall with an epidiascope, left me with no more of an impression of that country behind the Iron Curtain than a pretty medieval city and lots of evergreen forest. Not until 1979 did I see the real thing. But we were chaperoned round Tallinn by a tour guide who was no doubt obliged to report our every move and utterance back to the KGB. Nor were we allowed to talk with ordinary Estonians. Tourists were given red Soviet champagne and three square meals a days at the best hotel in town, but local people were banned from entering that hotel to prevent them mixing with foreigners and telling them what life was really like in Estonia.

By the late 1980s the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, along with neighboring Latvia and Lithuania, was seminal in the initial stirrings of revolt: the Singing Revolution and the Baltic Chain. These events marked the start of what ultimately became the collapse of the whole Soviet Union under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. These three small countries had almost sunk into oblivion in Western eyes since being swallowed up by the Soviet Union in 1944. Now, suddenly, they had re-emerged into the limelight of history. At about that time, while it was still uncertain whether the peaceful Baltic revolt would succeed or be crushed like the Prague Spring, Viivi Luik, a popular Estonian poet, then in her forties, began to write her second novel.

Her first, The Seventh Springtime of Peace, written only a few years earlier, had dealt with Luik’s early years which had coincided with the period that the kolkhoz system that had been forced onto unwilling Estonian farmers by the Soviet authorities. It was received enthusiastically by an Estonian reading public that knew that woven into this delicate portrait of childhood was an implicit critique of the Soviet annexation of Estonia in 1940 and, after a few years of Nazi German occupation, again in 1944.

Luik now embarked on a second novel, this time set in August 1968, when the fate of Czechoslovakia, as it then was, hung in the balance. But, not only was the author unable, owing to Soviet censorship, to fire full Baltic salvos at Soviet injustices abroad, but she actively chose not to. This was to become one of the most poetic Estonian novels of recent years.

The Beauty of History is essentially a love story; but also the story of an emergent postcolonial awareness in Eastern Europe. The protagonist is a young Estonian woman, the alter ego of Luik, who is described over the first few pages of the novel as someone who “. . . has played unconcernedly all her life, with images and words, against a background of the history of the Baltic countries” which we know, with hindsight, to have been a history filled with of short-lived hopes and bitter disappointments. Her lover is a Latvian Jew, Lion (pronounced Lee-on), whom she goes to visit in his home town, the city of Riga, once the prosperous capital of Latvia, but which had, to all intents and purposes, become a run-down provincial town in the Soviet Empire.

One paradox in their relationship is language. “Why don’t we speak German?” asks Lion, not without impatience. This simple suggestion pans out into the whole tragedy of the Baltic countries who were occupied at times by Russian- and German-speaking overlords, sometimes for centuries at a time. Estonians and Latvians had no choice but to use one of the colonial languages to communicate with each other. The Estonian and Latvian languages are worlds apart, though the countries border on one another; the English language was only taught to a tiny number of people. The protagonist would have liked to have spoken to Lion in German, the lesser of two linguistic evils, but her knowledge of that language is limited to pat phrases learnt at school. In the end, they will have communicated in the least popular colonial language of the time: Russian.

Clothing takes on symbolic value. The Soviet system with its Five Year Plans and top–down economy led to periodic shortages. She herself wears sandals and a shirt with epaulettes, which may make her something of a Communist Youth member in Lion’s eyes. He, on the other hand, wears a soft woollen jumper with the label “Pure Wool – Reine Wolle” that reeks of bourgeois decadence. Even clothes, whether bought from second-hand shops, or discovered in a cupboard and dating back to Baltic independence in the 1920s and 1930s, allude to politics, in this instance, the twenty years of independence that Estonia and Latvia enjoyed between the First and Second World Wars.

Several folk tales are interwoven with the text. Unlikely yarns are told, tales that have been with the Estonians and Latvians for centuries, passed down by word of mouth. But some of the allusions are all too real. In the first chapter already, among lyrical descriptions of butterflies in April, spruce trees in the twilight, and the sowing of potatoes in May and their harvesting in September, comes the mention of bunkers and trenches. Bunkers especially have a resonance among Balts. In all three countries, an anti-Soviet resistance movement, the Forest Brethren, fought their hopeless fight against the Soviet takeover until well into the 1950s. These guerrilla fighters lived in appalling conditions in bunkers and underground hideouts in the forest, and were hunted incessantly and mercilessly by the KGB. When, in the very next paragraph of the novel, the author mentions Prague, Kundera, Havel, Brezhnev and Ceausescu, there is a fruitful tension between the seasonal rhythms of rural life and the magical month of August, which marked both the commencement of the First World War, and now that of the end of the Prague Spring.

The room has grown dark. Brezhnev’s tanks have just reached Prague. The Angel of the Lord smiles mockingly and tenderly. In his hand is no fiery sword, no lance, no spear or brine-soaked whip, but only a single stinging nettle, which gives strength to resist evil and purifies the blood.

Smoke rises vertically from factory chimneys, iron rumbles, bare bulbs light corridors and stairways. Do not trust others. It is better not to speak about yourself. Fear glows in naked forty-watt bulbs like an egg, like butter and cream, like an official testimony. Clouds float like leaflets over the long lonely beaches of the Baltic, over tracks left by soldiers’ boots in Bohemia and Moravia, the wind bends the grain of Lithuania double, strikes the beans of Latvia to the ground. More faith! More hope! More love!

What have all the countries mentioned in common? The clue is in the second sentence: suppression by Brezhnev’s tanks. The nettle is a symbol of the purifying resistance of small, weak nations against superpowers.

By 1991, when the The Beauty of History first appeared, the game was almost up for the Soviet Union. That is why Luik feels free to mention political events relatively openly. But lurking at the back of everyone’s mind in the Baltic countries was the fear that the beast would somehow be given a new lease of life, and that the Soviet Union would manage a few desultory reforms, then trundle on for another half-century. This was, after all, Gorbachev’s strategy, before Boris Yeltsin exerted his power.

One beautiful piece of ironic understatement, alluding to Ján Palach, who died by self-immolation in protest against the Soviet invasion, is: “A Czech boy pouring petrol over himself and then lighting a match does not really go with the carpets in the living-room of Europe, so the television is switched off.”

The style of the novel thus comprises the alternation of the idyllic aspects of life, mostly rural, and the real, much less attractive one, often urban. The kolkhoz system had ruined the rural economy, but trees and clouds do not follow the edicts of economists and politicians. Private life, within the home, also served as an inner sanctum of normality set against the absurdities of life on the streets.

When the protagonist (whose name we never learn) steps on a broken lightbulb and cuts her foot on the beach, Lion cuts open the wound a little further to release any infected blood. This description is treated poetically, despite the banality of the actions involved. But then we are tugged straight back to the looming reality of the military threat in Central Europe, in juxtaposition to the mundanities of everyday life:

Today, TASS no longer announces anything. On the shores of both the River Daugava and the Gulf of Finland, water flows from the taps into saucepans and coffee pots, bathtubs and wash-basins. Butter is taken out of refrigerators, bread is cut.

The River Daugava is in occupied Latvia; the Gulf of Finland has, on one part of the littoral, occupied Estonia, on the other a relatively free Finland, with Leningrad (now again renamed Saint Petersburg) in between, where Peter the Great drove a wedge into the continuum of Finno-Ugrian peoples at the end of the Gulf.

Viivi Luik makes good use of this contrast between the smallness of our lives with the huge vistas of history. The Angel of the Lord hovers over the whole historical scene, then, the next moment, we are back in the sensual scheme of life surrounding the protagonist, as she sits in Lion’s flat. She decides to write a poem (this is probably one of Viivi Luik’s own, written in 1968 and left unpublished) :

The moon shines brightly,
bq. the dead drive lightly.
bq. My darling, have no fear.

Then she considers for a moment what to write next, and adds:

In memoriam
bq. 21 August 1968

Soon, the reader is caught up in this rhythm of alternation, where the author can swing, quite unexpectedly from one register to another, from poetry to journalism, from the present day to memory. So we are not surprised to see words such as NKVD and Goethe on the same page, to be followed by a brief description of the weather in Riga.

Lion goes to Moscow, she is left behind in his flat in Riga with Aunt Olga, plus a thousand artefacts, items of furniture, and architecture that remind her of Lion, remind her of history. Lion is in Moscow in an attempt to obtain papers to exempt him from military service. The Balts secretly admire the Czech revolt, and Baltic conscripts would be loath to sit atop a tank and maybe have to fire bullets at those clamoring for freedom. Meanwhile, she ponders on the politics of poetry: the Russian dissident poet Joseph Brodsky, and the Estonian poet Paul-Eerik Rummo (who later, in real life, was for a while Estonian Minister for Ethnic Relations) can be “interviewed” by the secret police:

A certain Russian boy who is considered and underground genius once showed her, across the table in a café, a copy of Doctor Zhivago, wrapped in a newspaper. Rumours of secret circulars and plain-clothes men she considers exaggeration and bluff, although she has heard that Joseph Brodsky (who lives in Leningrad) and Paul-Eerik Rummo (of whom no one knows exactly where he lives) can be called in for interrogation for the dissemination of particular poems. Those words – called in for interrogation she repeats, carefree and mechanical as a parrot, and other people like her nod their heads, equally carefree and mechanical. Being called in for interrogation sounds almost as vague and grand as the Finnish Winter War, the Hungarian Uprising, the Three Baltic States.

In the Soviet Union, literature was never neutral. Any hint of revolt against the system, even in passing in a poem, could trigger off a negative response from the secret police, the Glavlit censorship apparatus or the Communist Party. One Latvian poet, Knuts Skujenieks, was sent to Siberia as recently as 1962 for possessing a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica!

The novel ends with the protagonist returning to Tallinn from Riga by train. The journey takes seven hours, in itself a critique of the inefficiency of the Soviet infrastructure. Trains formed a major part of Soviet travel, despite their slowness. Before the train has even begun to move, Riga is already unreal. The girls in the train are showing one another consumer goods they have managed to get hold of. Will she ever see Riga again, she wonders. At the Valga railway station, which marks the border between Latvia and Estonia, she sees a small boy playing with a flower as if it were a living creature. The Drunken Man is railing against the nearest that Soviet youth got to long-haired hippies.

At the very end, the Angel of the Lord, who has hovered over history throughout the novel, is replaced by the Angel of Death.

*

As mentioned briefly above, Viivi Luik herself started her literary career as a poet. Given the fact that she was born in 1946, it is quite remarkable that she already managed to publish her first chapbook of poems in 1964, in a boxed set together with a number of other Estonian authors of her generation: Jaan Kaplinski whose work has appeared in English, the patriotic poet Hando Runnel and Ly Seppel, who nowadays translates literature from Turkish into Estonian, including Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. Estonian authors often double up as poets, prose writers and translators. This last activity sets them apart from the vast majority of British and American authors; the smaller the number of native-speakers of any language, the greater the tendency to do translation.

Luik went on, by way of her low-key symbolic poems that take everyday life as their point of departure, to become a popular poet. But as has been pointed out by critic Arne Merilai, there is a certain element of melancholy in her poems. Between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, she produced nine collections of poetry of varying sizes, most chap-books; then she moved over to prose and essay-writing. Viivi Luik has also written several books for children. Her collected poems were published in 2006.

We can ask ourselves why has it taken so long for this accomplished poetic novel to appear in English. The Finnish translation appeared before the original Estonian version in 1991, because then, as now, Estonia was going through troubled times; Yeltsin had not yet stood on his tank. It was not even certain that the Estonian version would ever appear. The Dutch translation appeared in the early 1990s and the undersigned helped Viivi Luik a little when she visited Amsterdam, and the publishing house in the southern Dutch city of Breda. The Swedish translation appeared in 1993. There was even a foretaste of an English translation in the magazine Transition 1: Writing From the European Borderlands a literary magazine partly edited by the present translator herself, Hildi Hawkins. But that was back in 1995; it is now 2007.

A word about the translation. As far as I am aware, this was done from the Finnish version, with close reference to the Estonian original — the Finnish version did, after all, appear first, so this course of events is justified. Any of the minor discrepancies and unhappy turns of phrase should be forgiven by readers, given the fact that the translator has been trying for over a decade to get the book published in Britain.

The afterword is by Richard C.M. Mole, lecturer in politics of Central Europe at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. Dr Mole concentrates on the geo-political and historical background of the novel, which may not always be immediately evident to the British reader, but does not touch on the poetics or aesthetics of the novel. That dimension is self-evident from the text itself.

Estonia continues to be haunted by its Soviet past even today. Ironically, owing to the riots in the capital Tallinn during late April this year, themselves sparked off by Estonia’s Soviet legacy, the country has gained the attention of the world again. But for all the wrong reasons. It would be so much nicer if Estonia were known, not for the smashing of the plate-glass windows of boutiques and wine shops, but for its wealth of sophisticated literature. When Russian-speaking youth rioted in Tallinn recently, protesting at the removal of a the symbolic Bronze Soldier from the center of the city, and the Russian Foreign Minister described such a removal as “blasphemous” , this formed an interesting coda to a period of history with little beauty about it.

Poetry and politics form the clue to most of Viivi Luik’s writing. People growing up during an occupation lasting decades learnt how to preserve that deeply private part of their lives that remains untainted by the wearying absurdities of the political system. Luik is a child of Soviet reality. A poetic rendering of such a life can dig deeper than mere history book description. We are introduced to the feel of what it was like to live in an vassal state of the Soviet Union.

The Beauty of History was launched at a reception the Estonian Embassy in London, during the London Book Fair.

*

, Blaricum, Netherlands, April 2007

The Beauty of History
by Viivi Luik
Translator: Hildi Hawkins
Afterword: Richard C.M. Mole
Original language: Estonian
Length: 152 pages
Publisher: The Norvik Press, UEA, Norwich
Year of publication: 2007

ISBN 978-1-870041-73-7