Serfdom as entanglement: narratives of a social phenomenon in Baltic history writing

ABSTRACT

Serfdom narratives belong to the most prominent, emotionalized, and politicized elements of Baltic history writing. We are claiming in this article that serfdom narratives, although used mainly in national narratives, are regionally and globally entangled topics shared not only by historians from very different contexts but also created outside the historical canon in fiction and the arts. To analyze Baltic history writing as a form of entangled literature we are comparing serfdom narratives in Estonian and Baltic German history writing throughout the long nineteenth century.

KEYWORDS:

• Serfdom
• entanglement
• history writing
• transnationalism
• Estonia
• Baltic Germans

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We look forward to Andre Kruusmaa’s PhD thesis at Tallinn University and several upcoming articles of his on this topic.

2. A recent debate concerning the conditions and conceptualizations of serfdom during the Swedish era gives a good overview of different arguments, as well as of relevant historiography (Küng et al. 2013).

3. This is based on the Baltic German scholarship and the interwar period studies from the first trained Estonian historians (Kruus 1930). Due to the focus on the history of economy, class struggle, and the exploitation of the Estonians by the Germans, the history of serfdom became one of the main topics of Soviet Estonian historians (for a synthesis, see Kahk and Tarvel 1992; Kahk 1999).

4. For the Estonian historiography of the period, we have considered Undusk (1997, 2000); Rosenberg (2001); Viires (2001); Raun (2003); Tamm (2008). There is an article-based treatment on the history of Baltic German historiography (Rauch 1986), but Estonian history writing so far lacks book-length treatments, with the exception of the comparative study by Kristi Kukk (2013).

5. Andrew James Blumbergs (2008) has stressed the importance of Baltic Enlightenment for Latvian nation building.

6. Save for a few notable exceptions, such Carl Schirren (Rosenberg 2013; Undusk 2000).

7. As cultural memory studies also tend to focus more and more namely on the significance of transfers between different media (Rigney 2012, 49–77).

8. A good example of this is the study about the emergence of the night of serfdom metaphor in Estonian cultural memory by Eneken Laanes (2009, 199–215).

9. According to the thirteenth-century founding narrative of Christian Livonia as presented in The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, XIV:9 (Henricus Lettus 2003, 102).

10. It features frequently in the writings of such key figures as Lydia Koidula, Carl Robert Jakobson, and Johann Voldemar Jannsen.

11. For example, only one of Lydia Koidula’s slavery-themed short stories is based on material related to the Russian Empire: Koidula’s Olesya (1869) is based on the story The Kozak Girl (1857) by the Ukrainian writer Marko Vovchok via its German translation published in 1869 in the Riga-based journal, Die Libelle: Zeitschrift zur Unterhaltung für alle Stände.

12. Yet, the importance of Faehlmann’s (pseudo)mythological heroes for the national movement is widely acknowledged (Jansen 2004). They were popularized by nationalist poetry and fiction, as well as school text books (especially Jakobson 1867).

13. As Ants Viires (2001, 27–31) has shown, the association of paganism with darkness spread in first Estonian language histories that were authored by Baltic Germans and published in calendars and newspapers; it was still present in the writings of the first and more moderate national activist, Johann Voldemar Jannsen.

14. Held in Tartu in 1868, the speech was published by the author in 1870. We have used the scholarly edition from 1991, which is based on Jakobson’s manuscript and thus also includes parts that were censored.

15. Faehlmann had also used the metaphors of awakening and dawn, but he tended to view Estonian culture and language as something that was on the verge of extinction and belonged to the past (Jansen 2004, 271).

16. In the 1880s, the work disappeared under mysterious circumstances, but it is known through heliogravure reproductions.

17. The development of Marianne into a national symbol in post-revolutionary France is well known (Agulhon 1979), but around that time numerous other female figures spread widely (Bhreathnach-Lynch and Cusack 2003). Katrin Kivimaa (2009, 14–68) has demonstrated the importance of female embodiments for Estonian nationalism, also pointing to transfers from the Baltic German representations of Estonian women.

18. The male invariant of this story, telling of a sleeping hero or king asleep in the mountain, was also very influential, and associated with the legend of the medieval emperor Frederick Barbarossa (Flacke 2001, 108–111).

19. For example, the motif is used in Karl Russ’ engraving Hermann Frees Germania (1813) and in Christian Köhler’s painting Awakening Germania (1849). Chains can be seen also in Johann Köler’s Waking from Charmed Sleep.

20. A recent study finely points to Koidula’s role in introducing the French Revolution to the Estonian audience (Monticelli, Peiker, and Mits 2018).

21. According to Malle Salupere (2017, 128), the poem shows the influence of Faehlmann’s approach to Estonian history, discussed above.

22. The text book was reprinted numerous times. Its selection of Koidula’s poetry however did not include My Fatherland, They had buried, as censorship forbade its inclusion (Salupere 2017, 318).

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by institutional research funding [IUT (18-8), IUT (28-1)]; and personal research funding [PRG908] from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research.

Notes on contributors

Linda Kaljundi

Linda Kaljundi is a Professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of History, Archaelogy, and Art History at Tallinn University. She holds a PhD from the University of Helsinki. One part of her research is concerned with medieval studies, focusing on the role of culture and writing in medieval processes of conquest, conversion, and colonization. She has also analyzed the entanglements and disentanglements between medieval and early modern concepts of otherness. The second major part of her research concerns cultural memory studies. She has written about Estonian and Baltic historical fiction and historiography, and performative and visual culture. In her current research, she has expanded this perspective and explores the remediation of cultural memory with a particular focus on the interaction of arts, science, and environmentalism in late Soviet Estonia and eastern Europe.

Ulrike Plath

Ulrike Plath is a professor of Baltic German Studies and Environmental History at the Institute of History, Archaeology, and Art History at Tallinn University. She is also a Senior Researcher at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. She studied in Germany and Estonia and gained her PhD at the University of Mainz. Her main focus is Baltic German transnational and entangled history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has published on many different aspects of cultural and environmental history including plant, food, animal, book history, and stereotypes. Between 2011 and 2018, she led the Estonian Centre for Environmental History.