Estonian literature

Estonian literature is the national literary tradition of Estonia and the body of written work originally composed in the Estonian language. Due to its strategic coastal position in the northern reaches of Europe’s Baltic region, Estonia has long been the object of foreign occupations and imperialist campaigns of larger and more powerful neighboring and regional countries, including Germany, Sweden, and Russia. As a consequence of centuries of subjugation under foreign rule, literature specific to the Estonian language did not begin to develop a continuous tradition until the nineteenth century.

During the twentieth century, Estonia and the other Baltic countries were occupied by the Soviet Union and absorbed into the Soviet sphere of influence. Numerous noteworthy Estonian authors of the country’s era under Soviet rule wrote while in exile, contributing a significant body of work to the nation’s literary canon. Since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, Estonian literature has drawn increased attention from the international literary community, and the country has produced a growing number of commercially and critically successful authors.

Background

Estonia has hosted human civilization since prehistoric times, with archaeological evidence suggesting that its first settlers may have arrived as early as 9000 BCE. Prior to the High Middle Ages (ca. 1000–ca. 1300 CE), Estonia was dominated by competing tribal groups that did not unify into a single state. This made the territory now comprising Estonia vulnerable to external attack, with Viking invaders from Scandinavian states, including Sweden and Denmark, competing for its control against the regional power of Kievan Rus’, the precursor of modern Russia.

Merchants and traders from Central Europe and Scandinavia introduced Christianity to Estonia around the twelfth century, with the Estonian tribes subsequently becoming the targets of religion-motivated military campaigns. Denmark, under the kingship of Valdemar II (1170–1241), succeeded in conquering Estonia in the early thirteenth century. At the time, Estonia was divided into northern and southern regions, with ethnic Estonians occupying the northern, Danish-controlled part of the country and a related ethnic group, the Livonians, occupying the country’s southern region, then known as Livonia. As Denmark took Estonia, crusading armies from neighboring Latvia conquered Livonia. Over time, the Livonian population was absorbed into Estonian and Latvian groups. The resultant ethnic homogeneity led to Estonia becoming a culturally unified state.

German replaced the ancestral languages of the ethnic Estonian and Livonian populations in Estonia in the mid-thirteenth century. The change occurred as the country’s ecclesiastical and ruling classes were dominated by Germanophone imperialists, relegating the Estonian language to the status of a rural peasant tongue. Subsequent shifts in the regional power balance brought Estonia under the control of a succession of foreign states, including Sweden, Poland, Prussia, and Russia.

Constant changes in administrative authority inhibited Estonia’s urban and industrial development for centuries, a situation that was only permanently resolved in the nineteenth century. Public education was liberated from the exclusive control of Christian authorities, with Estonian being instituted as the primary language of instruction when mandatory education policies were introduced in 1816. However, Russian and German remained the main languages of government administration in Estonia, with the country’s complex political situation leading to the development of a pluralistic nationalist movement over the nineteenth century.

German retained official language status in parts of Estonia until 1880, after which the Russian czar Alexander III (1845–1894) embarked upon an imperialist campaign of Russianization (Russification) in Estonia. By the end of the 1880s, Russian had been imposed as the official language of Estonia, with Estonian receiving only marginal institutional support. Estonian nationalists opposed the Russification reforms, but were unsuccessful in their efforts to stop the process. From a cultural perspective, one key consequence of the Estonian resistance movement was the 1893 closure of Estonia’s national literary association by Russian authorities.

Further turbulence followed after the turn of the twentieth century, when World War I (1914–1918) and the Russian Revolution (1917–1923) dramatically reshaped the European political order. In 1939, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to Estonia, which had established a tenuous independence during the tumult of the preceding decades, demanding that Estonia open its territory to Soviet military installations. The Soviet Union later occupied Estonia, forcibly integrating it into the Soviet sphere of influence, where Estonia remained until achieving independence in 1991 in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

Overview

The Estonian language was repressed to a profound degree by the succession of foreign administrators controlling Estonia, and Estonian persisted for centuries as a vernacular tongue primarily used by non-literate peasant classes. As such, most Estonian literary productions predating the mid-eighteenth century were religious and written in non-Estonian languages. Notable exceptions include an Estonian translation of the first principles of the Lutheran denomination of Christianity, which dates to about 1535, and biblical translations produced in the late 1600s and early 1700s.

A nationalistic cultural movement began to take root in Estonia in the mid-eighteenth century, before which most popular Estonian literature consisted of folktales preserved through oral traditions. These literary forms, which thrived during a period spanning from about 1300 to 1600, mainly consisted of lyrical epics. Its structural and formal characteristics strongly resemble the Finnish tradition of folk poetry, owing primarily to cultural and linguistic points of contact between Estonia and Finland.

The early phases of the uniquely Estonian literary tradition date to the latter half of the eighteenth century, when traditional forms of didactic literature from the German literary tradition were adapted for Estonian audiences. Kristian Jaak Peterson (1801–1822) is commonly cited as the first native poet in the modern Estonian literary tradition, and is widely considered the founding figure of Estonian poetry. The emergence of modern prosaic forms, including novels, date to the mid-nineteenth century, with authors including Eduard Bornhöhe (1862–1923) and Jakob Pärn (1843–1916) meriting mention as trailblazers of the historical novel and realistic novel forms, respectively.

Poet and novelist Juhan Liiv (1864–1913), recognized as one of the most iconic figures of Estonian literature, worked in a starkly realistic style that came to dominate domestic literary production in Estonia from the late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. During the early decades of the twentieth century, competing poetic movements defined the emerging bodies of Estonian verse, with one branch of poets embracing the creative and subjective qualities of European Romanticism and another emphasizing the rigid structural characteristics of traditional poetic forms.

Following World War II and Estonia’s addition into the Soviet sphere of influence, many of Estonia’s leading cultural and literary figures fled the country and continued to work in exile. This created a unique genre of Estonian literature, marked by romanticized poetic and prosaic narratives of lost Estonian independence, and by cynical interpretations of current events and their potential future impacts.

Under Soviet rule, Estonian literary production was tightly controlled and remained subject to oppression and censorship. Following Estonia’s 1991 independence, a new generation of Estonian authors enthusiastically embraced their newfound expressive freedom and began attracting the notice of the international literary establishment. Notable authors from this period include the International Nonino Prize-winning author Jaan Kross (1920–2007), short-story author and novelist Arvo Valton (1935-2024), poet Jaan Kaplinski (1941– 2021), and novelist Tõnu Õnnepalu (b. 1962), also known by the pen name Emile Tode. Õnnepalu produced two noteworthy novels in the 1990s, including Piiririik (Border State) (1993) and Hind (The Price) (1995), which critics have placed in the postmodern literary category that ascended to a position of dominance in the Western canon during the second half of the twentieth century. Like many great works of Estonian literature, Jaan Kross's The Ropewalker: Between Three Plagues (2016) is a work of historical fiction dramatizing the life of Latvian Balthasar Russow. Before Kaplinski's death in 2021, he published Evening Brings Everything Back (2004) and contributed to A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue between East and West (2019).

Estonia’s blossoming literary scene has been aided by the establishment of multiple literary journals and cultural publications, including Looming (Creation), Keel ja Kirjandus (Language and Literature), Noorus (Youth), and Kultuur ja Elu (Culture and Life). These periodicals, all based in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, have generally served to strengthen Tallinn’s claim as the epicenter of Estonian literary culture. Post-Soviet developments in Estonian literature, combined with the increasing number of translations of other Western canonical works into Estonian, have generally resulted in the erosion of linguistic and cultural barriers that previously functioned to effectively isolate the Baltic States from the broader European milieu.

Bibliography

“Database of Estonian Writers.” Estonian Literature Center, 2024, www.estlit.ee/writers. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Kaus, Jan. The Dedalus Book of Estonian Literature. Dedalus Books, 2011.

Oras, Ants. Estonian Literary Reader. Routledge, 2017.

Soosaar, Edith. “Estonian Novels Translated into English in 2018.” Estonian World, 3 Jan. 2019, estonianworld.com/culture/estonian-novels-translated-into-english-in-2018. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Talvet, Jüri. “The State of Estonian Literature Following the Reestablishment of Independence.” Literature Today, vol. 72, no. 2, 1998, pp. 307–12, doi.org/10.2307/40153766. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Taylor, Neil. Estonia: A Modern History. Oxford UP, 2020.

“Top 5 Estonian Books You Have to Read.” Traveller Tours, 17 Oct. 2023, www.traveller.ee/blog/tallinn/top-5-estonian-books-you-have-to-read. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Väljataga, Märt. “Literary Perspectives: Estonia.” Eurozine, 30 Jun. 2007, www.eurozine.com/literary-perspectives-estonia. Accessed 30 Nov. 2022.