И время и место полностью

The rising prominence of Kreutzwald’s work in the 1850s can have encouraged Eisenschmidt to refer to Kreutzwald in his own memoir of 1860 – whether or not the two were really on friendly terms. Moreover, his reference to his two budding poets Fet and Sivers may also have taken on special importance in this context of Estonian, and Baltic, national awakening. Sivers had included a German translation of Fet’s poetry in a volume he edited, devoted to the work of German poets in Russia [Sivers 1858] – a category to which Fet emphatically did not wish to belong. Eisenschmidt’s association of Fet with Sivers will hardly have made any more palatable his fond memory of Fet’s excellent artisanal skills (which Fet also preferred to forget about and, when he did refer to them, claimed he acquired as a Russian army officer), and the matter will have been made worse by another of Sivers’s special interests: he was a great fan of Estonian folk literature, and even published a bit of pseudo-Estonian mythology himself, for example, “Vanemuine’s First Song” and “Vanemuine’s Last Song (according to oral transmission)” [Sivers 1847:39–56],

Vanemuine being a pseudo-Estonian pseudo-god imported by real Estonian Romantics and given prominence by their successors – notably in the beginning (“Soovituseks”) of Kalevipoeg. Sivers recalled that his interest in researching Estonian folklore and mythology was inspired by his hours spent among the peasants on the family estate [Spehr: 81 f.] – but he never heard about Vanemuine from old peasants. He can, however, have run into him at the doctors.

In 1862 Kalevipoeg came out in book form in Kuopio (Finland), and response to the new publication of the work offered more recognition but also sober evaluation of Kreutzwald’s achievement and of its problematic status as a reconstruction of a folk epic.¹⁵ By 1901 we find what is labeled a fourth, corrected, edition, published in Jurjev (Tartu) and apparently used as a school-book by a reader who marked off little passages and drew a cartoon on the back flyleaf (Kreutzwald).¹⁶ Although the more learned responses to Kreutzwald’s work were sometimes buried in scholarly bulletins, anyone reasonably well read in Russian or German and living in the Russian Empire in the latter nineteenth century, if he was interested in poetry or literary culture and had any connection to the Baltic provinces, is unlikely to have been totally unaware of Kreutzwald’s literary work or of his status in Estonian cultural life. If a person was, in addition, a hypersensitive Russian patriot who had seen himself portrayed in a specifically Baltic German context where he risked association with localist German and Estonian nationalism, it is quite likely he would wish to distance himself from that portrayal. It is of course possible that Fet never heard the word ‘doctor’ in Werro. When Eisenschmidt got sick and all the boys gathered round, maybe, toward the end of the long night, just maybe, young Sivers piped up: “You know, I think old Schmiddy here is looking pretty green… Think I should go fetch Kreutzwald?” Maybe he never said “doctor.” Maybe he had his own interest in fetching the doctor. Maybe he wanted to ask him about Vanemuine.

¹ The same set of variant names can also refer to the administrative district of which the town ofVôru (Werro) is the center, but this discussion will refer only to the town.

² A copy of her decree and a contemporary town plan appear in [Pullat] (plates following page 96).

³ On Catherine’s 1764 tour of the region and her subsequent initiatives, see [Voeikov etc.: 114].

⁴ A secret instruction from Catherine to Prince Vyazemsky stresses the peculiar status of the Baltic and some other non-Russian parts of her empire [Nechaev: 12].

⁵ Unless otherwise noted, the statistics and chronology here and below are from [Pullat: 28–31] and [Vrangel’].

⁶ By 1881 there were fewer Germans than Estonians in the town, which then numbered 2697 inhabitants: 976 people, or about 36 %, vs. 1339, or about half. By 1897, Estonians comprised nearly two thirds of the population, and Germans – a fifth. In the latter nineteenth century the town also had a sizeable lewish community (over 6 % of the population in 1897) and an increasing but never large number of Russians and members of other ethnic groups, notably Latvians. The surrounding countryside was “сплошь эстонское” [Vrangel’: 49].

⁷ He arrived with a post as a private tutor, but his intention from the start was to establish a school.

⁸ For a recent overview of the role of German Pietism, in particular of Moravian missionaries from Herrnhut, among different social classes in the Russian Baltic region, see [Wilpert: 105–112].

⁹ H. Eisenschmidt recalls a rapid decline in the early 1840s [Eisenschmidt: 74–78],but M. Telk’s statistics suggest a more differentiated pattern [Telk].

¹⁰ The arithmetic book was a significant enough achievement to appear in Laul’s index entry on Krümmer [Laul: 563].