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“Mis on möödas ega see ei kordu…” Kurt Eiskopi kirjad Edith Eiskopile aastaist 1940–1941 kui ajalootunnistaja tunnistus
Get PDFThis article examines the letters of a young Estonian man, Kurt Eiskop (1919–1944), to his beloved and future wife, Edith Eiskop (1919–1991). Kurt Eiskop’s 55 letters were handed over to the Estonian Cultural History Archives in 2022, as a result of the collection campaign “Letters in my life”, a competition organised cooperatively by the Estonian Life Stories Association and the archives. Most of the letters were written between 16 April 1940 and 29 June 1941, while Eiskop was doing his military service in the army of the Estonian Republic. In this article I consider his letters as a testimony of a historical witness, based on what he saw and experienced during the arrival of the Red Army forces in the Estonian Republic in June 1940 and its subsequent annexation. What interests me in Eiskop’s letters as testimony is, first and foremost, the author’s subjective experience, which can be seen in the way emotions are expressed in his letters. As is characteristic of love letters, the main topic of Eiskop’s letters is emotions – longing for the beloved and nostalgia for life before the army. In retrospect, the latter seems like a paradisaical idyll to him, while the present reality seems like being in prison. In addition to the expression of emotions, the subjective experience of the writer emerges in the letters through descriptions of everyday life in the army, which also contain the author’s thoughts, moods, and attitudes toward the new regime.
It emerges from Eiskop’s letters that service in the army of the Estonian Republic was disagreeable to him, as it separated him from his beloved and impeded their beginning a life together. The arrival of reinforcements of the Red Army in the Estonian Republic in June 1940 put the Estonian Army and those performing their military service there in a complicated situation: they had to get used to alienating new circumstances and rules; likewise there were fears that the war would spread to the Estonian territory and that soldiers would be sent to fight the war for the Soviet Union. In a politically complicated time, which also entailed complications for personal life, writing letters provided support and a way of sustaining relationship despite being apart. The letters Eiskop wrote to his beloved during his military service became a kind of refuge for him, a safe world, the creation of which was enabled by nostalgic memories. These are poeticised and idealised images of the past which provide comfort and strength, while intensifying his closeness to the addressee. It is interesting that in Eiskop’s letters nostalgia is not always unidirectionally aimed at the past, but some memories are bound to the author’s hopes and plans for the future. However, nostalgia is not the only emotion that Eiskop expresses in his moments of solitude. Eiskop’s letters are also filled with longing for the beloved, expressed by the author in bursts of emotion, sometimes more controlled, sometimes more expressive, in some letters also as desperation
Mälukultuur ja moraalne tunnistus: Teise maailmasõja mäletamine Bernard Kangro Tartu-romaanides / Memory Culture and Moral Witness. Remembering the Second World War in Bernard Kangro's Tartu novels
No full textThis article deals with how remembering the Second World War is conveyed in Bernard Kangro’s last three Tartu novels, The Stone Bridge (1963), The Black Book (1965) and Whirlfire (1969). The Second World War is a memory topos that has, more than anything else, divided the memory politics of European countries. If memory politics in Western Europe is focused predominantly on condemning Nazi crimes, primarily the Holocaust, then Eastern Europe, in addition to the legacy of Nazism, has to deal with the additional criminal legacy of Communism. To bridge the gap between Eastern and Western European nations’ collective memories, discussions started in 1990 about the European memory that should help form the basis for a unified European identity. In the opinion of Jan-Werner Müller, European memory assumes one of two processes. The first is linked to unifying the stances toward memory politics of various European nations; the second with unifying the contents of various collective memories. Although Kangro’s last three Tartu novels are among the peripheral works of Estonian cultural memory, they nevertheless deal with themes that have become relevant in the twenty-first century, on the one hand linking collective memory and national memory politics, and on the other hand, addressing the concept of European memory. Using Kangro’s Tartu novels, I first analyse the problematic aspects of national memory politics as they relate to remembering the Second World War in Estonia. Secondly, I point out the implicit criticism in the Tartu novels of the more inflexible and homogenizing form of European memory. For this I focus more closely on the formative stories of three characters – Benno Maran, Naatan Üirike and Juku Leebram. Benno Maran is one of the narrating voices in these novels, together with an anonymous narrator, an italicized narrator from a different time, and another character, named August September. Quotes from Benno’s diary dating from the days of the Russian and German occupations Russian and German occupations of Estonia are used extensively in the novels’ texts. These quotations overlap considerably with the inscriptions in Kangro's own diary from the period. This circumstance and the italicized narrator’s role as a witness to pivotal events in history enable Kangro’s Tartu novels to deal with moral witness, as explained by Aleida Assmann. According to Assmann, moral witness is the grievance of a forgotten historical injustice as well as an elegy which has no political objectives. What emerges from the italicized narrator’s text is that Kangro’s objective is to deliver a moral witnessing, as well as demonstrate the difficulty in bearing such witness: having participated in the events, he is responsible for the reality he remembers and portrays, and the impression he conveys of the people whose suffering he recounts. The process of bearing witness becomes the theme of these novels through the thoughts, comments and confessions of the italicized narrator; at the same time he distances himself from the narrated tale and characters, thus emphasizing the relative nature of the portrayal. The second characteristic keyword of the Tartu novels is pluralism, demonstrated by both their structure and subject matter. Namely, by using multiple characters, Kangro portrays very different Second World War experiences that are inconsistent with nationalistic memory politics as well as too conflicting for transnational memory politics. One example is theology student Juku Leebram’s life story. Juku collaborates with those in power during the Soviet occupation and takes part in the deportations, then turns traitor by fleeing to the German side, but is captured by the Germans and dies in jail. However, after the war, rumours circulate that Juku escaped and has become a Forest Brother. Thus, in the communicative memory of the Estonians in the homeland, Juku first becomes a martyr and then a resistance fighter and national hero.
Kirjažanrist Euroopa kultuuriloos ning kirjavahetuste avaldamisest ja uurimisest Eestis
Get PDFThe article deals with the emergence, development and blooming of the letter genre in European cultural history until the middle of the 20th century. The oldest letters that have survived to our time date from the 3rd-2nd centuries BC and are written in cuneiform. The first major heyday of the literary genre was in the time of ancient Rome, when both politicians and philosophers exchanged letters, but also several writers used the letter form in their works. The so-called canon of letter writing was formed in the Middle Ages, when the art of letter writing began to be taught at the universities. In the 17th century, letter writing manuals and private letters began to be published in books, and in the 18th century it was already very common. The growing popularity of communication by letters is also shown by the fact that in the middle of the 18th century, when English writer Samuel Richardson published three novels in the form of letters, the epistolary novel was born. In the epistolary novels, for the first time the world of feelings and thoughts of the characters was under observation. At the end of the 19th century, communication by letters increased drastically due to the wider spread of literacy throughout Europe. The writing of letters intensified during the First and Second World Wars, which is considered the last major blooming of the letter genre. This fact is also confirmed by studies on the development of the written communication tradition in Estonia.
The article also provides a brief overview about the research and publication of private correspondences in Estonia. In the middle of the 20th century, the Estonian Literary Museum began to systematically deal with the autobiographical heritage (incl. letters) of those persons who had a prominent position in cultural history. In 1984, the serial publication Litteraria: eesti kirjandusloo allikmaterjale (Litteraria: Estonian Literary History Source Materials; since 2005 Litteraria: Estonian Cultural History Source Materials) was founded with the aim of making correspondences, but also various biographical notes, photographs, etc., available to the public. Litteraria has never been published regularly; nevertheless, by 2023 the series had published already twenty-eight issues, which are now also available online (https://www.kirmus.ee/et/teadus/e-litteraria). In 1998, Tuna: Ajalookultuuri ajakiri (The Past: Journal of Historical Culture) came out on the landscape of social science and humanities journals. The new journal included the rubric “Estonian Cultural History Archives”, which allowed the researchers to regularly publish archival sources with commentary four times a year. Over the years, several voluminous text-critical publications of correspondences have been published in parallel with the issues of Litteraria and Tuna, for example, “Akadeemia kirjades” (“Academy in letters”, Olesk 1997), “Minu lamp põleb” (“My lamp is on”, Annuk & Metste 2015), and “Kallid krantsid: Kirjad vangilaagritest ja asumiselt Siberis 1946–1954” (“Dear friends: Letters from prison camps and deportation sites in Siberia 1946–1954”, Kross 2021). The published correspondences have a different historical background, but the common feature of all the authors of the letters is their close connection with Estonian literature.
Several historians, literary scholars, cultural historians, folklorists, and philosophers have used private correspondences as source material for their in-depth studies. The analysis of scientific articles of the last decades shows that letters are useful primarily as a source of information that helps to open the hidden aspects of some cultural-historical phenomenon or historical event, for example, the world wars. In addition, different aspects of epistolary practices are also analysed, such as the peculiarities of means of expression, communicativeness or intersubjectivity of letters, etc. Until the turn of the century, prominent creative figures in Estonian cultural history dominated among the authors of the letters used in the studies. In recent decades, a new trend has emerged which shows that researchers have begun to pay more attention to, for example, the love letters and war letters of ordinary people, as well as letters in which the writer shares with the addressee various information about joys and worries of everyday life
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Meie saarelt Mnemosyne juurde. Saar kui omaelulooline kujund Bernard Kangro loomingus. From Our Island to Mnemosyne. The Island as an Autobiographical Figure in Bernard Kangro’s work
No full textThe aim of this article is to explore how a sense of place informs the autobiographical in the work of Bernard Kangro. In order to establish a wider context for the relationship between the writer in exile, writing, and a sense of place there is a reference to the work and literary views of the German-speaking Jewish poet Paul Celan. The common basis for the comparison of the work of the two writers is their exile status, but they also share an understanding of the interrelationship between language and reality, a distinctive relationship with places and a sense of place as well as religiousness in their work. The current article focuses on the depiction of places and a sense of place, and its associations with exile as a state of mind that heightens the sensitivity to the real places experienced in the past as well as the imaginary places experienced in the present. In the description of places and a sense of place the autobiographical element occurs on two levels. Firstly, an autobiographical reading is made possible by the proper names in the text that signify real geographical places, which allow for a positivist interpretation with regard to the author’s biography. Secondly, the autobiographical may be revealed through certain figures in Kangro’s work, which are repeated from work to work but whose meaning might be diametrically opposite. Such recurrent figures are, for example, those of the island, the sea, the land, the tree, fog, snow, the wind, the bog, the sky, and the star. The present article addresses the figure of the island and the shifting scale of meanings it creates in Kangro’s work. An approach to the autobiographical via textual tropes is based on Paul de Man’s consideration of autobiography, who was against defining autobiography as a genre or a mode but viewed it instead as “a figure of reading or of understanding that can occur in all texts”. In Kangro’s texts three kinds of islands are found: islands identified by their proper names, such as Ivösjö and Patmos, and islands having fictitious proper names, such as Midday Island, the Island of Dreams, the Island of Freedom, the Island of Miracles or the Island of Winds, and islands without name. The textual analysis of Kangro’s poems, poem cycles, the drama The Sunken Island (Merre vajunud saar) and the novels The Tree on the Island Still Stands (Puu saarel on alles) and Six Days (Kuus päeva) written in exile shows that these islands and the “I” of these texts form a kind of imaginary whole: the former exist in the textual space only through an “I” who goes into exile, is in exile or returns from exile, whereas the existence of this “I” depends on the possibility of the existence of the islands. On the basis of the analysis of the above-mentioned texts we can conclude that the symbol and the allegory are not opposites in Kangro’s texts. Several poems, for example “On the Midday Island” (“Keskpäevasaarel”), “Oh, Patmos!” (“Oo, Patmos!”), “Evil Visions” (“Kurinägemused”), a longer poem “Kihvakaania”, and the essay “At the Black Mnemosyne’s” (“Musta Mnemosyne juures”) can be read as allegories where the island is part of the allegorical image. The island figure also allows for yet another conclusion. The description of the relationship between the “I” and place in Kangro’s work seems to illustrate de Man’s analysis of Coleridge’s concept of the literary symbol, according to which cognition and the symbolic imagination are continuous, interrelated processes. In Kangro’s work the imagining, dreaming or remembering “I” often turns into a perceiving “I” who moves from reality into meta-reality. This “I” is an exile, similar to the subject position described by Paul Celan in his acceptance speech for Georg Büchner prize published as “Der Meridian” – a tireless traveller, who does not travel in reality but in the infiniteness of his imaginary worlds in order to create a reality necessary for survival and creative work
Mäletamine ja nostalgia Karl Ristikivi romaanis „Kõik, mis kunagi oli” ning Bernard Kangro Joonatani -romaanides. Remembering and Nostalgia in Karl Ristikivi`s novel „All that Once Was” and Bernard Kangro’s Joonatan-novels
No full textResearch on the phenomenon of nostalgia has been notably shaped by the interest taken by sociologists, historians, and ethnologists in the ways of remembering past events and the impact of these ways of reminiscence on different communities of memory. This article considers remembering in a narrower sense, focusing on the modes of expression of individual memory, that is, on nostalgia. More specifically, nostalgia is defined as a conglomeration of feelings, images and interpretations that accompany individual remembering; the contradictions between these elements reflect the tensions inherent in remembering. The purpose of the article is first to emphasize ways in which remembering is represented in the works of two Estonian writers who went into exile during World War II; second, differences among their novels which thematize remembering, and third, how these works communicate today, in the context of recent polemics around memory. Karl Ristikivi’s novel „All that Once Was” (Kõik, mis kunagi oli”, 1946), was his first work to be published in exile, and the first volume of a dilogy set in Estonia, which the writer had already planned before fleeing Estonia. The first volume of Bernard Kangro’s Joonatan trilogy was published in 1971, and the last in 1973 – a period of creative crisis for Kangro, in which his prose writing undergoes significant change. In the works of both Ristkivi and Kangro, remembering and nostalgia are inextricably bound together. In Ristikivi’s novel, the connections emerge through the parallel representation of remembering, events in historical time, and the writing of history; in Kangro’s novels, in the force field of remembering and events in historical time. Ristikivi’s novel is set a few months before the conclusion of the Molotov- Ribbentrop pact in August, 1939. The novel’s focus, however, is not on the historical events themselves, but rather on how characters experience and interpret their own personal past and present. The novel shows how personal remembering differs from the logic of cultural memory, and seems to confirm that remembering maintains a certain autonomy from historical time. Such an understanding of memory can be taken as an effort to critique attempts to politicize memory. Ristikivi stresses qualities of individual remembering such as self-enclosure and refusal to submit to efforts at collectivization and assimilation. This kind of memory is only for the characters themselves to know; never once do they express their memories in language. As concerns nostalgia, Ristikivi’s novel emphasizes its connection with forgetting: in their retrospection and recollection, characters remember only extraordinary events in their lives, but not the texture of their everyday lives. Like Ristikivi, Kangro also speaks of the connections between nostalgia and remembering. In his Joonatan-novels, however, nostalgia has a more ambivalent meaning. The protagonist of the Joonatan novels, who has just returned to the homeland from exile, feels the tension between his wish to reconcile himself with the past and the nostalgic memories that flood him in the homeland. On the one hand, indulging in nostalgia tears him away from the wish to remember painful past events, and with this from present reality; on the other hand, his nostalgia helps him overcome a traumatic past. In both Ristikivi’s and Kangro’s novels nostalgic memories are connected with personally meaningful places, to which they return again and again
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