И время и место полностью

Krümmer’s work in Werro took place, in fact, at the very dawn of the Estonian national awakening, in which Werro played an important role as home to one of its earliest and most deeply respected exponents: Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-82). The role of the town as a cradle of Estonian nationalism was anomalous in several ways. First of all, its history as a Russian foundation with an originally German population seems unpromising in this connection. Second, Krümmer’s dislike of Werro was at least matched by Kreutzwald’s; he hated the place so much that he even considered moving to the Russian heartland, which he also had no great love for, just to escape [Puhvel: 61]. He decided to stay put, however, and it was in hidebound (albeit increasingly Estonian) little Werro that fame eventually caught up with him.

When Fet was a schoolboy in Werro, Kreutzwald’s fame was still decades away, so if Fet had said he never heard of Kreutzwald’s Estonian literary production, he would only have been referring to an obvious reality. Even Kreutzwald’s early literary production in German scarcely overlapped with Fet’s presence in the town, nor is there any reason to assume that Fet would have read the provincial German-language weekly in which Kreutzwald’s early work appeared.¹¹ No, when Fet was a schoolboy, Kreutzwald was known in Werro not as a man of letters or intellectual, but rather as the town doctor, the man whose profession Fet never heard mentioned even when Eisenschmidt took ill.¹²

Kreutzwald was in Werro only because he was a doctor. He had been born in serfdom not locally but in the north, in Estland, near Rakvere. When he showed ability at his first school he got the extraordinary chance to go on to higher education (it was at a German-language school that he acquired his German name). He qualified as an elementary-level teacher, worked as a private tutor in St. Petersburg in 1824-25 and then returned, no longer to Estland but to Dorpat, where he went through the university course to qualify as a doctor – but only with a third-class degree, which did not qualify him for an urban practice [Puhvel: 60]. He could qualify only for a place like Werro, to work among small-town artisans and peasants in outlying areas, in effect, that is, as a doctor to Estonians of origins similar to his own. Doctors educated at the state’s expense, moreover, basically went where the state found positions for them. After brief prior acquaintance with the town, Kreutzwald in 1833 became the first town doctor appointed in Werro, and he lived there for the next forty-four years. Like Krümmer, he was an outsider, distanced from his birthplace by happenstance and his own ambitions. Like Krümmer, Kreutzwald would rather have been in Dorpat, and, like Krümmer, he instead settled in Werro because that is where the government permitted him to earn his living.

The two men knew each other and worked together. Kreutzwald’s biographer states that he fulfilled the role of school doctor at Krümmer’s school [Nirk: 41], and in 1838 pupils at Krümmer’s school put on a German-language performance of a play to which Kreutzwald had written a prologue – the first known theatrical production put on by residents of Werro [Pullat: 49]. In later years, Kreutzwald looks back on the years when Krümmer was active as the best era in the life of the town.¹³