Baltic Belles E-Book

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Europe 2019
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 320

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This anthology presents readers with a broad selection of fiction written between the late 19th century and today. The collection opens with the early realist Elisabeth Aspe, who described both village life and urban fear during the final decades of the 19th century. Early 20th-century works by female writers often discussed the young creative individual's encounters in the transformed urbanised world, some of the most outstanding examples of which are by the great Betti Alver. After World War II, Estonian writing bore the unmistakable signs of Soviet censorship. Nevertheless, Viivi Luik's momentous novel The Seventh Spring of Peace managed to avoid suppression, and the wonderfully unique Asta Põldmäe seized her opportunity to write. Very strong authors such as Eeva Park, Maarja Kangro and Maimu Berg flourished with the return of freedom of expression in the late 20th century, and continue to do so today. They represent the best of Estonian short-story writing, handling social topics very sharply and suggestively, and scrutinising the country's soul in a highly personal manner.

Leseprobe

The Editor

Elle-Mari Talivee was born in Tallinn in 1974.

Elle-Mari Talivee, PhD, is a scholar, critic and writer. She divides her time between her posts as a project manager at the Estonian Literature Centre and as a researcher at the Museum Department of the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre.

The Authors

Betti (Elisabet) Alver (1906–1989), one of the greatest Estonian masters of poetic style, made her debut in 1927 writing short stories, and she published a short novel Tuulearmuke (The Wind’s Paramour) shortly after. Her first poetry collection appeared in 1936 and made her a renowned poetess. A freelance writer, she became the member of the Estonian Writers’ Union in 1934. Her marriage to the poet Heiti Talvik can be described as one of smouldering inspiration. Talvik died in a Soviet prison camp in Siberia, after which Alver’s literary voice fell silent for a long time as she translated works by Pushkin, Gorky, Goethe and Heine into Estonian instead of writing original works. Her short stories and poems that began to appear again after 1965 are both brilliant and intense.

Elisabeth Aspe (Elisabeth Nieländer, 1860–1927) was one of Estonia’s first realist writers. The daughter of a small-town miller, she graduated from a high school for girls. Aspe lived briefly in St. Petersburg but wrote her main works at her childhood home in the 1880s. Influenced by the female German authors of the time, Aspe wrote works that are marked by a longing for the wider world and the conflicts between rural and urban life. Her female characters are usually women who expect fate to make their choices for them, but feel at the same time a need to manage life on their own. Aspe’s novel Ennosaare Ain (Ain of Ennosaare, 1888) was one of the first depictions of a university-educated Estonian.

Aimée Beekman (b 1933) is a professional camerawoman, the author of fifteen novels, and a prolific travel and children’s writer. She became a freelance author in 1960 after working in the Tallinn film studio. Beekman’s novels published in the 1970s contain feminist qualities that were frowned upon in Soviet society. One of the more interesting themes that surface in her works is the mundane tragedy of a passive individual whose problems and difficulties often turn grotesque. Beekman’s novel Valikuvõimalus (Option to Choose, 1978) has been made into a film.

Maimu Berg (b 1945) has worked as an editor, critic and columnist, and has also been a politician. She has translated several works into Estonian, primarily from Finnish. Her novel Ma armastasin venelast (I Loved a Russian, 1994), which smashed through taboos and has been called the Estonian Lolita, has been translated into several languages. Berg’s novel Moemaja (Fashion House, 2012) was inspired by her long career as a fashion magazine editor. The author’s vibrant and liberal works, which consider the possibility and impossibility of love, offer a fascinating take on history. She often writes about the Soviet era. Her 2017 collection of short stories Hitler Mustjalas (Hitler in Mustjala) includes a host of brilliant alternative histories; in one of them Angela Merkel visits Estonia in search of her roots.

Maarja Kangro (b 1973) is a translator, poet, librettist and short-story writer, with a master’s degree in English philology. Kangro published her first novel in 2016, the jarring semi-documentary work Klaaslaps (The Glass Child), which has already been translated into German and Latvian. She has translated philosophy and poetry from English, German, French and Italian. Kangro’s powerful writing is one of the most compelling examples of contemporary Estonian prose. Her short story Fireworks was published in Best European Fiction 2018, the annual anthology of contemporary European literature.

Viivi Luik (b 1946) is an author of poetry, short stories and essays. Her novel Seitsmes rahukevad (The Seventh Spring of Peace, 1985) is one of the most influential Estonian works of literature, in both its style and its subject matter. As the wife of the diplomat and writer Jaak Jõerüüt, Luik has lived in Helsinki, Rome, New York, Riga, and Stockholm. Her novel Ajaloo ilu (The Beauty of History, 1991), which deals with events surrounding the Prague Spring, has been translated into fourteen languages, including English (2007). Luik’s novel Varjuteater (Shadow Theatre, 2010) is a memoir-like travelogue of a lifelong journey to Rome.

Helga Nõu (b 1934) fled with her family to Sweden in September 1944. A writer with a long career in teaching, she has been active in the Estonian PEN Club and was in the now-defunct Foreign Estonian Writers’ Union. She lives in both Uppsala and Tallinn. Nõu’s novels convey various important issues for refugees, especially inter-generational conflicts and the difficulties of trying to integrate into a new society. She has written extensively for youth, exploring society’s tender spots without ever lecturing on morality.

Eeva Park (b 1950) made her debut as a poet, but has since published four collections of short stories. Her parents were both writers. Her needle-sharp, portrait-like novellas often weave together Soviet-era memories and tribulations with those of today. Her novel Lõks lõpmatuses (A Trap in Infinity, 2003), which delves into the topic of human trafficking, has been translated into several languages. Park’s 2016 novel Lemmikloomade paradiis (Pets’ Paradise) suggestively tells about a writer’s “imprisonment” in an Irish castle and her liberation through writing. Her poetry collection The Rules of Bird Hunting was published in English in 2018.

Lilli Promet (1922–2007) was a prose author with a fascinating visual style. Promet’s novel Meesteta küla (The Village with No Men, 1962) dissects that experience. Promet made her writing debut in Leningrad in 1944, where she was sent during the siege of the city to work for Estonian-language radio. Promet was a professional writer. Scripts adapted from her short stories gave rise to four Estonian films in the 1960s. The perimeters of Soviet literature couldn’t quite manage to confine her entirely either, and the German-language translation of her novel Primavera (1971) was later removed from bookshelves in East Germany.

Asta Põldmäe (b 1944) is an author and translator who has written for both adults and children. She has had a long career in journalism and has worked as an editor of Estonia’s most prestigious literary journal Looming since 1986. Põldmäe’s lyrical prose is an exceptional voice in Estonian literature, as she is a perfectionist of language and style, and she treads the fine line between genres. As a translator into Estonian, she has worked primarily with Spanish and Finnish texts.

Mari Saat (Mari Meel, b 1947) is a Doctor of Economics and a Docent of Business Ethics at Tallinn University of Technology. Saat writes both novels and short stories in a quite unique, psychological prose with a keen sense of society. Her novel Lasnamäe lunastaja (The Saviour of Lasnamäe, 2008) was published in English translation in 2015. Saat has also written for children and has published a business ethics textbook. She often focuses on the variety, complexity, and conflicts of everyday life. Saat’s writing is characterised by sensitive insights into the human psyche, symbolism, and the weaving of fantasy and reality.

Elin Toona (Elin-Kai Toona Gottschalk, b 1937) fled with her family from Estonia in 1944 and has since lived in England and America. Toona has written literature in Estonian about the problems faced by second-generation refugees abroad; in English, she has written radio plays, novellas, monologues, articles, and short stories. Her autobiographical novel Lotukata (1969) was published in English as In Search of Coffee Mountains (1977; 1979). Her memoirs titled Into Exile: A Life Story of War and Peace (2013) was selected as one of The Economist’s books of the year, and was awarded a prize by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia in 2018.

The Translators

Adam Cullen is a freelance translator of Estonian prose, poetry and drama into English. His published translations include works by Tõnu Õnnepalu, Mihkel Mutt, Rein Raud, Jürgen Rooste, Veronika Kivisilla, Asko Künnap and Indrek Hargla. He is a member of the Estonian Writers’ Union and on the board of its Translators’ Section.

Eva Finch studied English language and literature at Tallinn University. She has over twenty years’ experience as a translator from English to Estonian, her native language. Eva translated the classic novel Toomas Nipernaadi for Dedalus with her husband Jason Finch. She also organises cultural exchanges between Finland and Estonia at the Estonian Centre in Turku, Finland.

Jason Finch is a native speaker of English, an academic researching and teaching English literature of the modernist era in Britain at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. He has also published on modern Estonian literature. In the past he has worked together with Eva Finch to translate miscellaneous texts from Estonian to English. They translated Toomas Nipernaadi for Dedalus.

Christopher Moseley was born in Australia in 1950 and is a freelance translator into English from Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, and the Scandinavian languages. He has translated numerous Estonian short stories and three novels, one of which is At the Manor, or Jump into the Fire by Maarja Kangro. He currently lives in the UK and teaches Estonian and Latvian at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London.

Contents

Title

The Editor

The Authors

The Translators

Foreword

Ain of Ennosaare by Elisabeth Aspe

The Wind’s Paramour by Betti Alver

Family Tree by Aimee Beekman

The Seventh Spring of Peace by Viivi Luik

Ella by Elin Toona

Lying Tiger by Lilli Promet

In the Eye of the Wolf by Helga Nõu

Tango by Eeva Park

In the Winds of Blue Heights by Mari Saat

The Bolide Shard by Asta Põldmäe

Awakenings by Maimu Berg

At the Manor, or Jump into the Fire by Maarja Kangro

Copyright

Foreword

Women in Estonia could enrol in any school of higher education in the Russian Empire from 1915 onwards and achieved suffrage in 1917. The February Revolution toppled the Russian Empire’s Romanov dynasty, which controlled the territory of Estonia at the time, and set the stage for the proclamation of Estonian independence in 1918. The University of Tartu, which was founded in 1632 and was Estonia’s sole university at the time, had by then already admitted over 500 women as students.

However, the desire of women to gain the right to education dates back much earlier. In 1887, Lilli Suburg (1841–1923), a female writer and schoolteacher, founded Linda as the first feminist magazine in Estonia. Lydia Koidula (1843–1886), Estonia’s first great patriotic poetess and a symbol of its national awakening, received the highest possible education a woman was allowed at the time in a high school for girls. She passed an exam in 1862 at the University of Tartu and was granted a certificate allowing her to work as a governess. The University of Helsinki began accepting female students in 1870, and some courageous young women travelled much farther. In 1902 a young teacher Minni Kurs began her studies as an external student of political sciences at the University of London, where she became a close acquaintance of Emmeline Pankhurst. Back in Estonia, she published articles on women’s rights.

Estonian literary history meanwhile shows that female Estonian authors had already asserted their presence by that time. Lydia Koidula worked alongside her father as the editor of a large newspaper, and was also the founder of Estonian theatre. Koidula (a pen name that alludes to the dawn in Estonian) published fiction as well as poetry inspired by the folk-music traditions of Estonia. Her writing was heavily influenced by German and Russian literature. As one of the first women authors in Estonia she undoubtedly became a role model for the other female Estonian writers that followed.

The epigraph before a chapter by Elisabeth Aspe (1860–1927), the first author in this anthology, directly alludes to Koidula’s influence. As the eldest daughter of a family living on the edge of Pärnu, a summer resort in southwest Estonia and at the time an important port for the flax trade, Aspe was raised to take over her father’s mill and business. As a young author, she had a “room of her own”. After she married a businessman, her creative activity unfortunately dwindled, and following his death, she took over his business and his debts, and the task of managing the whole family. The excerpt in this selection from her short novel Ennosaare Ain (Ain of Ennosaare, 1888) reveals the musings of an old farmwoman on Martinmas, or Saint Martin’s day, also known as Old Halloween. The story is set during the Estonian national awakening in the mid-19th century, and the hardy Estonian woman weighs the chances of finding her stepson a strong and industrious wife. After a day of hard work, Aspe’s character Peet also visits the schoolmaster’s house, hungry for knowledge. The short novel debates the unusual dual Estonian-German identity of the protagonist, and how romance brings him to return to his national roots. The slightly romantic, early realist literature reflected the influence of German literature, such as the novels by E. Marlitt published in the newspaper Die Gartenlaube, which was widely read across the German speaking world, and the conservative Baltic German view of gender roles. But Aspe managed to blend her own life experience with ideas from the national movement into her stories.

In 1900 the Estonian folklorist Oskar Kallas married the Finnish writer Aino Krohn (1878–1956) and took her to live with him in his homeland. Estonia thus became Aino Kallas’ “country of fate”. Although she wrote in Finnish, she was utterly fascinated by her new home and its history, and also by the fate of the women of the country. Oskar Kallas was appointed Estonia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1922 and as a result, many of Aino Kallas’ short stories were published in English, her 1924 first edition had a foreword by John Galsworthy. Her novellas, which significantly affected and broadened the Estonian literary tradition, are also counted among Finland’s literary treasures.

At the beginning of the 20th century the issue of feminism was raised by Kallas and by Estonian women authors who were directly involved in the 1905 Russian Revolution. That revolution laid the foundations for the creation of the Estonian Republic in 1918 but it was put down by the authorities and its leaders were convicted or managed to escape into exile. The question of women’s rights arose together with the idea of the modern woman from the young revolutionaries, and the revolution itself has left a trace in several epic Estonian novels set in the beginning of the 20th century. Perhaps though, one of the most romantic results of that process is the short novel by Betti Alver (1906–1989), one of the most outstanding Estonian poets of the 20th century, who began by writing prose. Alver’s short novel Tuulearmuke (The Wind’s Paramour), which she wrote as a schoolgirl, won second place in a 1927 Estonian novel-writing competition and remains unsurpassed in its depiction of the spirited melancholy of youth. The work is like a piano piece, with the protagonist Lea, a young pianist studying at the conservatory, playing variations on that piece of music. The young generation then lived and studied in the city, but their roots were in the countryside; Lea’s are in her home village, which is situated between the bogs and the sea. She catches the eye of a doctor whose late wife looked exactly like her but was selfless and mild-mannered, unlike the lively young Lea. A conflict arises in which she must make a choice and decide whether to lose herself or to turn down the love she is offered. Similar independent and self-reliant personalities often feature as ideals in Alver’s poetry too. When the Republic of Estonia was established, Estonian women got equal civil and political rights to those of men, but socially and economically a married woman was still under her husband’s custody.

Lea, Alver’s protagonist, comes from a fishing village on the coast of the Baltic Sea. As this collection moves chronologically through Estonian literature, hints of what Estonian village society might have been like before the Second World War can be gathered from the excerpt taken from Aimée Beekmann’s (b 1933) novel Sugupuu (Family Tree, 1977), the second in her Coppertown trilogy. The novel’s rich assemblage of characters is connected by the slightly mythical and ancient Estonian village of Coppertown (Vaseküla) in the first decade after the First World War. There, the elderly woman Jaava has been the heart and soul of an age-old farmstead, and after her death, her eleven children from two marriages come together to grieve. The loss of their mother and grandmother, the main pillar of their world, causes them to peer deep into their own souls; Grandma Jaava had been known as “Satan’s daughter” around the village. Aimée Beekmann herself was among the writers who started to publish in the 1960s, and some of her novels are female Bildungsroman focusing on the psychological growth of a woman. Her female protagonist often challenges the traditional family ideal. Feminist topics began to appear in Soviet Estonian literature in the 1960s and 1970s, and the private sphere, marriage and extramarital relationships were then often the centre of novels. Though popular, these novels were not considered to have any literary value. It was ideologically mandatory for the Soviet woman to be equal to the man, working as a tractor driver or labourer, and her self-realisation was directed into the public sphere, not towards the family or any private life. This meant she had a double burden, as women also took on all the domestic duties, which were not considered appropriate for men to do. It is interesting that Soviet Estonian women authors have often brought forward the feminine qualities of their heroines as they try to find a way to play the role of a woman; this in itself almost constituted dissident behaviour.

In the first part of the 20th century many Estonian artists, writers and musicians, men and women, went to Paris to study and work in the capital of the arts. Lilli Promet’s short story Lamav tiiger (Lying Tiger, 1964) describes the yearning for home felt by the Estonian artist Eduard Wiiralt while he was living in Paris (one of Wiiralt’s pictures is featured on the cover of this collection). The tiger being sketched is perplexed by the Nordic flora that surrounds him, and the trees that grow in the homeland that the artist dreams of. Promet was herself the daughter of a painter and studied ceramics, and as a result, she often depicted scenes involving artists using collage techniques. This miniature is typical of her way of telling a story in general, showing her love for detail, the depth of feeling, and a softness that is not so common in the Soviet literary discourse. Lilli Promet (1922–2007) knew the meaning of homesickness well. She experienced the difficulties of war behind the Soviet lines during the Second World War, at Tatarstan and at the siege of Leningrad.

***

This anthology also touches upon the deportations and forced exile of tens of thousands of Estonians in the middle of the 20th century. The Republic of Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, and this was followed by Nazi occupation during the war and then the return of Soviet occupation in 1944.

Viivi Luik’s (b 1946) novel Seitsmes rahukevad (The Seventh Spring of Peace, 1985), which the Soviet censors probably allowed to be published by accident, received resounding praise at the time. The protagonist in the novel, a little girl living in a rural Estonian village that was devastated by the war and by the Stalinist Soviet regime, is a character upon whom all the torment and fear of her surroundings is projected. The bleak picture spans the autumn of 1950 through to the spring of 1951 and conveys a world of farms emptied by deportations, abandoned fields, men lost in the war, and Forest Brother partisans hiding out in the forests. This novel reflects through the eyes of three generations the experience of the post-war world where men do not dominate, as the little girl is mainly cared for by her mother and grandmother. Although this world is sometimes conveyed with childish brutality, it is a fragile place full of fleeting shadows. Viivi Luik, who is also a poet, uses highly poeticised language, and the contrast between the horror of the time and the way it is conveyed creates one of the most outstanding Estonian novels.

The excerpt included here of the writing by exiled writer Elin Toona (b 1937) is the opening of her book Ella (2008), which she dedicated to her grandmother. As a young child, Toona fled from the horrors of the war together with her mother and grandmother. The grandmother, Ella Enno, had already been helping to raise young Elin in Estonia, and she continued giving her lessons about both her former home and her new one, firstly in the displaced persons’ camp in Germany and later in England. Ella’s grandmother, who had a passion for art and literature, was married to the Estonian poet Ernst Enno (1875–1934), whose biography Toona has also written.

In the Estonian-language cultural journal Tulimuld, which was published by Estonian refugees in Sweden, Toona once compared the protagonist of her novel Lotukata (In Search of Coffee Mountains, 1969) to the girl in Luik’s The Seventh Spring of Peace: “Two children from opposite shores. One in occupied Estonia, the other in occupied Germany. Both are free souls held in captivity. We see the worlds of these two seven-year-olds through their own eyes like a securely-framed landscape. The war separated them politically, ideologically, and geographically, but their landscapes are almost identical. The frames are made from the same materials: fear and unfeeling, insurmountable regimes.”

Toona balances mesmerisingly on the line between autobiography and novel. The narrator of Ella is the prototype for her character in Lotukata, which translates as “little Kate with the funny hat”. The author has remarked that she only became a true refugee when her grandmother died. Toona, as a female writer, often mediates very directly the experiences of a girl or a woman. As with Luik and The Seventh Spring of Peace, the storylines in both Ella and Lotukata are about three generations of women having to cope in the tough conditions of a post-war world without men.

The novel Hundi silmas (In the Eye of the Wolf, 1999) by exiled writer Helga Nõu (b 1934) tells the story of Tiina, an Estonian woman who fled wartime Estonia with her family and grew up in exile in Sweden. She endeavours to find herself and define her own identity, spurning the diasporal Estonian society one moment and the opportunities her new homeland presents the next. Tiina ends up dating a Swede, but has a backroom abortion to escape becoming a single mother in a society of exiles where that is sternly frowned upon. The wolf in the novel’s title is not just a wolf, but a werewolf.

The werewolf itself is highly symbolic in Estonian literature. In the tragic play Libahunt (The Werewolf, 1911) by the writer August Kitzberg, one of the founders of Estonian drama, a freethinking young woman named Tiina, who is a social outcast regarded by the community as an aberration flees the maliciousness of others to live in the forest, where she is slain by a bullet from her beloved. The writer Aino Kallas mentioned earlier also created a character named Aalo, who transforms into a werewolf at night on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa. Nõu’s novel cites Clarissa Pinkola Éstes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves.

The intergenerational conflict of In the Eye of the Wolf provides space for the strains of womanhood to erupt in physical form, no matter whether the individual in question is genuinely a werewolf or merely “the madwoman in the attic”.

***

Eeva Park (b 1950) regularly features female characters and views the world from a strongly female perspective. Park’s characters tend to be fearless and unyielding, unlikely ever to lose their sense of dignity, and they rarely leave revenge untaken. A semi-ironic observation of Soviet-era Tallinn unfolds in Park’s novella Tango (2006), which is set during a time when the most prevalent word was undoubtedly “deficit”. Park’s main character in Tango has come to Estonia from another republic of the Soviet Union, and her depiction of the city of Tallinn is spatially fascinating, observed from the lofty heights of its upper Old Town as if it sits in the palm of a hand and through the critical eye of an artist and an outsider. The French pop star Mireille Mathieu, whom the protagonist meets in the story, was one of the very few Westerners whose music was permitted in the Soviet Union, and who furthermore actually performed in Estonia.

Estonia regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Soon afterwards the country was rocked by a major catastrophe at sea. The excerpt from Mari Saat’s (b 1947) novel Sinikõrguste tuultes (In the Winds of the Blue Heights, 2000) deals with the sinking of the Estonia, a cruise ferry on its way from Tallinn to Stockholm in September 1994. The greatest tragedy ever to happen at sea in peacetime, the incident has been recorded in the literature of different countries around the Baltic Sea. In Saat’s work, the novel’s protagonist is a young Estonian leatherworker from a suburb of Tallinn who bids bon voyage to her Swedish husband on that fateful September night. Her worldview is an exceptionally poetic reflection of the fragility of life, as she is so sensitive to her environment that she seems to have no protecting skin at all. She is in her origin an embodiment of the Estonian nation’s jumbled historical background, as her father is Russian, while her husband and the father of her child is Swedish. A small country beside the sea, Estonia is inevitably a crossroads of nations, or even “a windswept land; a geographical prostitute,” as Aino Kallas once wrote. Here lies also the argument with those who narrowed the question of the nation to the growth of the population and the role of a woman in reproducing the nation.

When women ask questions, they often have a very different perspective to that of male authors. Asta Põldmäe (b 1944) is an especially sensitive author. In her short story Boliidi kild (The Bolide Shard, 2010) a university lecturer, who is a solitary man, develops a relationship with a rather moody chip of a bolide, a piece of a meteor. The author mentions Tõravere Observatory, which is also known as Estonia’s southern space centre, though it does not keep count of bolides. Estonian literature possesses other traces of majestic shooting stars though, and in a sense the shadow of a comet has hovered over it since 1976. In that year Lennart Meri, the future president of Estonia, wrote his tremendous work Hõbevalge (Silverwhite), which is a sweeping reconstruction of Estonian and Baltic Sea history that focuses on the Kaali meteorite, which struck the island of Saaremaa about 4,000 years ago. Põldmäe paints wondrous pictures and conjures fairytale-like situations in her poetic short prose, something about which she has theorised from the perspective of a translator and literary critic. Põldmäe has remarked that a short story must have a fast-paced beginning, writing “[It must] begin with the strike of a gong,” and “A short story must function like a heart: without skips in the beat.”

Maimu Berg (b 1945) tends to be outspoken and mercilessly forthright when exploring the female perspective. Berg’s novella Awakenings (2015), published in this collection, won the Friedebert Tuglas Award in 2016. Since the beginning of her career there is always something playfully surprising about her novellas and novels. She writes with direct frankness about fears and desires, and the attempts at self-realisation by her characters. Her female character is often beautiful, self-confident and living alone, and Awakenings is an example of an upside-down story of Pygmalion.

Thinking about Berg’s role in the process of Estonian female prose, it is easy to build a bridge from her to the bold, erudite, and often ironic female perspective of the next generation of young Estonian writers in the 21st century. These members of the first generation that grew up in a newly independent Estonia often see themselves as citizens of the world, and undoubtedly feel it necessary to create a better world in their own country. The piece by Maarja Kangro (b 1973), Mõisas ehk Hüppa tulle (At the Manor, or Jump Into the Fire, 2014), is full of social-critical humour and shines a harsh light on injustice and prejudice, but at the same time she frequently scrutinises the experience of “making it” as a woman in a society where this is not the norm. This sometimes requires a woman to demonstrate strength and prove herself, something that is not commonly expected of men. Nevertheless, the female characters in Kangro’s works are still feminine in essence, and sometimes more fragile than might be expected. Kangro’s descriptions are painted with warm sympathy and a hint of tenderness, as well as with black humour. Her characters are often childless and cynical; they suffer pitfalls that must be addressed, but which are commonly taboo or regarded as better not discussed. Maarja Kangro is a human rights activist. This has been one of the important roles played by Estonian female writers, and portraying independent women who are more and more sure in their own choices.

Since 1971 the clear point of reference for the short story in Estonia has been the Friedebert Tuglas Award, which was established by the author of the same name whose works went beyond the boundaries of genre. Several of the authors included in this selection – Betti Alver, Mari Saat, Asta Põldmäe, Eeva Park, Maimu Berg, and Maarja Kangro – have won the prize, some of them multiple times.

Cover image by Eduard Wiiralt

Ain of Ennosaare

Elisabeth Aspe

Yet strangely an ancient tale still tread softly o’er the land: your people were free before, and Estonians once stood their ground upon their northern soil.

(Lydia Koidula)

It was only Martinmas, but the cold had laid a strong lid over the river and had long since hidden the summer grass trimmings under a white blanket of snow. The wind whined and bleated outside, rattling the little four-cornered window of the Ennosaare farmhouse, rustling in the thatched roof, and howling at the door, as if it wanted to duck out of the cold and into the warm interior. But Ennosaare was inhabited by a young, sedulous man who would not tolerate holes in the roof and had stuffed moss tightly into the gaps between the logs well before, and by a flinty grandmother who had shuttered the doors and windows against the cold. She was alone in the house today, as the children had gone off this way and that to take part in the Martinmas traditions. At dusk, she heated the stove for a second time that day, ventilated the room from smoke, then made sure to shut all the doors tight. Presently, she was seated on a low stool in front of the fire. The stub of a stave torch burned smokily in its holder, casting a tremulous light through the large space. The horses, gathered around a trough in the adjoining threshing room, whinnied and stamped their hooves against the hard clay floor, and every now and then, a drowsy, feathery chicken or two would cluck a household lullaby in their indoor coop. The old woman sat upon her stool didn’t want to spin wool on “dear Martinmas”, but neither was she seeming to make any progress with the knitting needles she’d fetched from the back chamber. Ultimately, she let her hands settle into her lap, her thoughts semi-consciously drifting into the past. Her hair had gone quite gray since the day her daughter-in-law flung her domestic rights and duties at the old woman’s feet and left to serve at the manor house. As if that had come as any surprise! The old woman’s youth was over by the time it happened, and eight or nine years of toil and worry aplenty had rolled by since. Life had certainly been difficult with two people away from the work and chores at the same time. The household hadn’t seen much of the master’s hand, but at the same time, they had no girl to send to the manor to perform peasant duties – something that should have happened after the master’s death, and for which they would have had to hire another farm hand. And the mistress of the house! Good heavens: had the old woman or any other housewife ever pulled off such a foolish trick? Up and leaving in the middle of the most hectic harvest time, just like a hired drifter! The child might certainly benefit from it: rumour had it he was being tutored by the baroness’ brother! Well, fine: she still wouldn’t have let anyone but Peet become master of the house – a man as big as he, with a face and manners like those she’d seen in the men of Ennosaare before, and Peet was the fourth she’d seen! The old woman looked up and scanned the room with a warm gaze, as if having a vision. She’d never had children of her own, but she’d never felt regret ever since Peet came into the world. She’d held that child dear and coddled him more than anyone else in her own particular way. He was also the reason why she hadn’t lifted a finger when Mai left with their son. Good riddance! It brought peace to the household. The small amount of extra work – that, she could manage, of course. In her younger days, she’d been a bold, hard-working woman praised all around the parish; one unrivalled in the fields. Back then, her family would say: Watch out when that woman gets a hold of a scythe: you’ll have to mow at such a speed that “your eyes go white” so as not to fall behind. And how strong and strapping she’d been! The old woman smiled as she thought back to the good old days. At Villem’s wedding at Maidla farm, where she had been the young man’s principal singer and had danced in a thick coat all day, the groom’s younger brother Mart vowed that he would dance with the young woman of Ennosaare for as long as it took for water to seep from the coat. And the rascal kept his word, whirling her around the dance floor all day long and making her nearly breathless from exhaustion. But had it done any harm? Not a fingernail’s worth! Her chores hadn’t gotten any harder in the days that followed and over time, the household had prospered. But look at it now! The old woman fetched another long stave torch from above the stove, lit it in place of the smoking stub, which she extinguished, then sat back down in front of the fire. Her thoughts wandered on: nowadays, she often felt fatigued – now, she could use a daughter-in-law to shoulder the yoke of domestic chores. The idea had already crossed her mind long ago, in truth, and at quarrels all around (the folk of Sauga Parish called weddings, feasts, and every other antithesis of peaceful everyday social order a “quarrel”) where the young people gathered in one place, she had been on the lookout for a suitable partner who just might stand out – just like at the big wool-spinning gathering at Vanasalme farm lately, where nearly half of the parish women were together in one place, young and old alike. She’d savoured Rõõt of Vanasalme’s warm beer that contained plenty of honey and bits of white bread, making her head buzz a bit and even causing her to go and drop a hint or two in regard to the farm’s oldest daughter Miina. But what could you do with that Peet of theirs! He could be talkative and smart beyond any other, but at other times was as dull and bewildering as a plank. She certainly raised the topic and elbowed him when he arrived at the dance later that evening, but someone who fails to notice simply fails to notice. He went and chose some lass – one so young she hadn’t been confirmed yet – out from the back of the crowd, danced and talked to her alone the whole night long, and everyone witnessing it was already raising their eyebrows and old Leenu of Tiiduoja, whose sharp tongue was unflagging in finding something to say about others, was already whispering this and that. And if only the girl had been someone’s respectable daughter. But no: she was a relative of Riin of Papisaare, who had a farm across the river, whom the woman had taken in out of mercy when the girl’s parents were evicted to cover a debt for borrowed grain and died soon after in another man’s cramped sauna building. But such was the way of those men! If only Peet’s father himself had listened when she forbade him from going off to the manor to take a wife…

The old woman lifted her head and cocked her ear. What was that thumping noise rising around the house? Had the rest of the household arrived?

“Dear old granny of the house, dear old grampy of the house,” a Martinmas beggar called from outside, “will you let us speak to you? May Martin’s beggar enter in?”

Instead of granting permission, the old woman tiptoed over to the door, and she latched it. She wasn’t in the mood to receive Martinmas beggars while home alone, or to start handing out the best of what she had, all their bread and meat. She curtly replied: “You may not – go somewhere else!”