Lydia Koidula - Works

Works

Koidula's most important work, Emajõe Ööbik, (The Nightingale of the Emajõgi ), was published in 1867. Three years earlier, in 1864, Adam Peterson, a farmer, and Johan Köler, a fashionable Estonian Saint Petersburg portraitist, had petitioned the czar for better treatment from the German landlords who ruled Estonia, equality and for the language of education to be Estonian. Immediately afterwards they were taken to the police where they were interrogated about a petition that 'included false information and was directed against the regime'. Adam Peterson was sentenced to imprisonment for a year. Two years later, in 1866, the censorship reforms of 1855 that had given Koidula's father a window to start Postimees were reversed. Pre-publication censorship was re-imposed and literary freedom was curtailed. This was the political and literary climate when Koidula started to publish. Nevertheless, it was also the time of the National Awakening when the Estonian people, freed from serfdom in 1816, were beginning to feel a sense of pride in nationhood and to aspire to self-determination. Koidula was the most articulate voice of these aspirations.

German influence in Koidula's work was unavoidable. The Baltic Germans had retained hegemony in the region since the 13th century, throughout German, Polish, Swedish and Russian rule and thus German was the language of tuition and of the intelligentsia in 19th century Estonia. Like her father (and all other Estonian writers at the time) Koidula translated much sentimental German prose, poetry and drama and there is a particular influence of the Biedermeier movement. Biedermeier, a style which dominated 'bourgeois' art in continental Europe from 1815 to 1848, developed in the wake of the suppression of revolutionary ideas following the defeat of Napoleon. It was plain, unpretentious and characterised by pastoral romanticism; its themes were the home, the family, religion and scenes of rural life. The themes of Koidula's early Vainulilled (Meadow Flowers; 1866) were certainly proto-Biedermeier, but her delicate, melodic treatment of them was in no way rustic or unsophisticated, as demonstrated in the unrestrained patriotic outpourings of Emajõe Ööbik. Koidula reacted to the historical subjugation of the Estonian people as to a personal affront; she spoke of slavery and the yoke of subordination as if from personal experience. By the time of the National Awakening in the 1860s, Estonia had been ruled by oppressive foreign powers - Danish, German, Swedish, Polish and Russian - for over 600 years. In this context, she was conscious of her own role in the destiny of the nation. She once wrote to a Finnish correspondent: "It is a sin, a great sin, to be little in great times when a person can actually make history".

The Estonian literary tradition started by Kreutzwald continued with Koidula but whereas The Bard of Viru tried to imitate the regivärss folk traditions of ancient Estonian, Koidula wrote (mostly) in modern, Western European end-rhyming metres that had, by the mid 19th century, become the dominant form . This made Koidula's poetry much more accessible to the popular reader. But the major importance of Koidula lays not so much in her preferred form of verse but in her potent use of the Estonian language. Estonian was, still, in the 1860s, in a German dominated Baltic province of Imperial Russia, the language of the oppressed indigenous peasantry. It was still the subject of orthographical bickering, still used in the main for predominantly patronising educationalist or religious texts, practical advice to farmers or cheap and cheerful popular story telling. Koidula successfully used the vernacular language to express emotions that ranged from an affectionate poem about the family cat, in Meie kass (Our Cat) and delicate love poetry, Head ööd (Good Night) to a powerful cri de coeur and rallying call to an oppressed nation, Mu isamaa nad olid matnud (My Country, they have buried you). With Lydia Koidula, the colonial view that the Estonian language was an underdeveloped instrument for communication was, for the first time, demonstrably contradicted.