И время и место: Историко-филологический сборник к шестидесятилетию Александра Львовича Осповата - Сборник статей

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

As for Eisenschmidt, the pathetically ill teacher whose room was smoked up by his pupils, Fet has nothing else to say about him. In reality, Heinrich Eisenschmidt (1810-64) was Fet’s teacher of German literature, a fact one might have thought the poet would consider worth mentioning, especially since Fet made his 1840 debut with a book that gave prominent place to Fet’s translations of poetry by Schiller and Goethe: these were the great classics especially emphasized in Eisenschmidt’s classes, and the teacher considered himself something of an authority on them. Eisenschmidt arrived at the school the same year as Fet and stayed until 1844. He went on to become director of a prestigious school for girls in Pàrnu (1844-53) and then (1853-57) of the Tartu Seminar for Elementary School Teachers [Laul: 555]. In 1860 Eisenschmidt published a memoir about his years at the Werro school, and in the memoir he recalls Fet as a schoolboy [Eisenschmidt: 47–48]. The recollection is friendly but it probably annoyed Fet, who avoided revelations about his past, and presented his background idiosyncratically. Eisenschmidt also discusses his own illnesses, since he blames them for his suddenly resigning his teaching post in Werro. He even provides such details as the medical advice he got from his “worthy friend, Dr. Kreutzwald” [Eisenschmidt: 78]. Eisenschmidt does not refer to Kreutzwald’s literary activities, which he would probably have been aware of by the time he was writing the memoir, but which he would almost surely not have known or at least thought much about during his decade in Werro, when he was personally acquainted with Kreutzwald. In fact, if there is a hidden theme to Eisenschmidt’s memoir it is his own unawareness of what was going on around him: he states that he had no idea that Fet, for example, was already writing poetry, even though he felt he knew the boy rather well, and the same is true for his recollection of another pupil, J. von Sivers (1823-79),14 who later published poetry in German. He also claims to have known surprisingly little about Krümmer and some of the other teachers and dissociates himself from their Moravian connections, which another witness says everyone there was fully cognizant of [Maydell: 2]. The source of Eisenschmidt’s naïveté may have been his youth and inexperience: he was only 25 when he arrived at Werro, and it was his first job and experience of life in the region. Yet since Eisenschmidt, who by the time he left the school was one of its most experienced senior teachers, did depart suddenly during a period of crisis, his emphasis on his illness has a self-justificatory ring, especially since he went immediately to a better job with far better prospects for advancement through official channels. Eisenschmidt and Fet not only talk about each other in their memoirs of the Krümmer school, but also naturally refer, from different perspectives, to a number of the same realia: sketches of personalities and routines that both encountered at the school, as well as such specific details as celebration of the headmaster’s birthday and long walks to Munamàgi and other destinations in the area. The coincidence of subject matter is natural, but it is also quite possible that Fet’s recollections about the school respond directly to Eisenschmidt’s. Such a direct connection might help explain the reference to Fet not having encountered any sign of a doctor at the school, even when someone fell ill – specifically, Eisenschmidt, who clearly could have benefited from medical assistance. Just as Eisenschmidt uses the reference to evoke the by-then respected Dr. Kreutzwald, Fet implicitly disparages the reference, while making Eisenschmidt himself a figure of fun.

But is it likely that Fet really never did hear the word ‘doctor’? There seems to exist no documentation of Kreutzwald’s activities at Krümmer’s school at exactly the time Fet was there, but there is ample evidence that Kreutzwald was then the doctor for both the town and the school, that teachers called on his services in that capacity, and that Eisenschmidt, who arrived at the school the same year Fet did, afterward claimed a close enough relationship with Kreutzwald to trust his medical advice and refer to him as a friend. Fet also recalls Eisenschmidt’s being ill, and he himself even as a relatively young man was often ill and often complains of his illnesses. In his three years at school, did he really never hear of Kreutzwald’s existence? And if he did not, why bother to mention that he never heard the word ‘doctor,’ when, by the time he wrote his memoirs, he really could not have avoided knowing who the doctor was, and could perfectly well have said, if the subject of doctors interested him, that he never encountered Kreutzwald, although he might have? Fet may have had his reasons for making Eisenschmidt an object of fun. But Kreutzwald he erases.

Fet retained some ties with the Baltic region and Baltic Germans in later years. For example, when serving as an army officer in the 1840s and 50s, he enjoyed the company of other officers who, like him, were German by background, and among these was a former classmate, Peter von Maydell, with whom he afterwards remained in touch and speaks of warmly. During the Crimean War Fet was posted near Reval (Tallinn), and he speaks with enthusiasm of the efficiency and attractiveness of the way of life he found there [Fet 1890:50–51]. He also has warm reminiscences of his renewed acquaintance with Dorpat in those years. Fet’s connections with the Baltic Germans were cultural and also linguistic: besides having lived in the region and gone to school with Baltic Germans, he was completely bilingual between Russian and German, his pre-university schooling was German in language and cultural orientation, and he aspired to the aristocratic class to which his Baltic German associates for the most part belonged. At the same time, in his memoirs, Fet always insists on his own Russianness, clearly differentiating “their” way of life in the Baltic provinces from, for example, “our Black Sea population” – even though the comparison works, in Fet’s own opinion, to the great advantage of the Baltic way of life. The result is to cast Fet as superior to “our” degraded “Black Sea population” in “Rus” (as he calls it), while at the same time distancing him from the attractive, but alien, Baltic culture, in relation to which he stands as an equal.

There is considerable evidence that Fet’s insistence on his Russianness was perceived as an oddity by Russians and non-Russians alike. When Fet was at school, Eisenschmidt (who came from Jena) found Fet’s attitude about Russianness extreme and even aggressive. Fet himself recalls having to earn acceptance among the German boys because of his Russianness, and he was proud both of being accepted and of being different. Crossing from Livland into the nearby Pskov region, he reports himself falling with relief onto his native Russian soil. The decade from 1848 through the mid-185os, the years of Fet’s military career, were in this regard pivotal. Fet’s early poetry was perceived as flawed by Germanisms, unsurprising in light of his educational background, and after Fet managed to have himself transferred to the vicinity of St. Petersburg he gratefully accepted the advice of successful literary colleagues, who undertook to russify his verse, revising poems previously published for a new collection and also advising him on his new poems. Fet also began to publish short stories and essays in St. Petersburg. Clearly he was hoping to settle into a career as a man of letters in the Russian capital. Even Fet’s Russian colleagues, however, and even considering that Fet was, after all, a Russian officer in wartime, were somewhat unpleasantly struck by Fet’s ardent expressions of Russian patriotism. His stolid Russianness dogged him also abroad, when he traveled to Western Europe in 1856: although he spoke French, he evidently did not speak it well enough, and he was patently ill at ease in France, where he was able to communicate only with Russians or such Russophilic Westerners as were happy to speak Russian with him.

It was at this time, in the mid – to latter 1850s, that Kreutzwald’s most important work began to become generally known. In 1854 the Mythische und magische Lieder derEhsten (with AH. Neus) was published in St. Petersburg, by the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and in 1857 the first 3 of the 20 parts of Kreutzwald’s quasi-mythological verse epic Kalevipoeg were published in Dorpat, in German and Estonian, with the other parts following in successive years, ending in 1861 [FRKB: 7-12]. By 1860, even before publication was complete, the work had won a prize [Laidvee: 356].

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.

Notes

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.