“ ‘Who knows, will I ever see you again,’ said the one-eyed duck.” Reflections on a Soviet Childhood in Leelo Tungal's Life Writing

Abstract

The article focuses on the representation of childhood trauma in Seltsimees laps (Comrade Child 2008) and Samet ja saepuru (Velvet and Sawdust 2009), a childhood autobiography of a well-known Estonian children's author Leelo Tungal. These works offer a multilayered insight into sociopolitical and historical climate of the Soviet 1950s in Estonia from a young child's perspective who, as a result of the Stalinist repressions, has to spend the prime years of her childhood without her mother. Tungal creates an idyllic childhood scene that is interlaced with the traumatic story of a young child having to face a confusing world wrought with tension and insecurity. This article provides an analysis of Tungal's intricate textual strategies for tackling the traumatic impact of her childhood experience. This experience is mediated in her life writings through a portrayal of emblematic aspects of the era and the creation, in Lauren Berlant's terms, of an intimate public centered on a horizon of expectations about happy childhood.

Keywords:

• childhood autobiography
• trauma
• intimate public
• Stalinist era
• Estonia
• Leelo Tungal

Notes

1. All translations from Estonian are by the author. The article was written with the support of Estonian Science Foundation grants ETF 9035 and ETF 8875 and Target Financing project SF0030065s08.

2. In an interview Leelo Tungal has noted that though her story may seem atypical, when she was doing research for her autobiography, she learned that during the years 1950–1952 more than 600 school teachers were fired by the Soviet authorities all over Estonia and more than 150 of them were sent to prison camps like her mother (Lotman 9).

3. In addition to Leelo Tungal's own life writings, her family history can also be accessed through her mother Helmes's life story, submitted to the Estonian Literary Museum. Helmes also produced (and submitted to the Museum) an acccount of the life story of her own mother Silima Mann. The life story of Helmes Tungal provides an account of what it means for a mother to be violently separated from her daughter: “Leelo was a lovely three-year-old girl when I was torn from her. This was the hardest and most painful event of my life. If one wishes to punish someone with utmost strictness, and in particular to cause a lot of pain to a mother, she should be separated from her child. […] I felt that I was the victim of huge injustice” (32). Leelo Tungal did not know that her mother had sent her own life story and that of her grandmother to the Estonian Literary Museum, but by the time she submitted her own life story, and later wrote her autobiography, she must have been familiar with her mother's story. It is, however, difficult to estimate to what extent it influenced the focus of her life writings. Her life story published in Eesti Rahva Elulood (Life Stories of the Estonian People, 2003) stands out among others included in the volume for its primary focus on her childhood, in particular the years spent without her mother. In it, she mentions the weary years of longing for her mother's return and the pain her constant question “When will memme [Mommy] come back?” must have caused to her father who took care of her (334).

4. NKVD is the abbreviation of The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs that was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that executed the rule of power of the All Union Communist Party, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin.