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ABSTRACT
Rannamaa’s youth novel duology Kadri (1959) and Stepmother (1963), set from mid-1950s to 1961, has retained its appeal across generations in Estonia. This article discusses the novels as a postcolonial Bildungsroman, analyzing the tangle of divergent and often contradictory strands inflecting the socio-political, cultural, and literary phenomena and interconnections operative at the time of their writing. The example of the Kadri novels and their history of publication will show how a particular locus of entanglement need not be static, but rather one transforming in time, and, crucially, one producing propulsions to untangle combined with the dynamics of entanglement and relationality.
Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Epp Annus and to Eneken Laanes for their thorough comments and input, as well as to Andres Jaaksoo, Kirsti Jõesalu, Linda Kaljundi, Jukka-Pekka Kemiläinen, Sirje Olesk, Johanna Ross, and George Schöpflin for inspiring conversations and for sharing their knowledge. I thank the anonymous reviewer for helping me improve the article in its final phase.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Some Soviet-era reviews argue that the issues and literary qualities of the books should make them specifically relevant for adults (Krusten Citation1978, 509; Kalda Citation1963). Rannamaa herself reminiscences about the stir the books created in an interview: right after Stepmother’s publication she once went up to a huge queue in the hope of having chanced upon oranges or some other goods in short supply, only to find that it was her own novel that the people were queueing to buy (Tali Citation2005).
2. One of the few examples of first person narration at the time is Rannamaa’s own short story ‘Unlucky Day’ (‘Vasaku jala päev,’ 1958) that received a second prize at the short story competition of the Writers’ Union, but was also criticized for vagueness and lack of social bearing.
3. Kadri’s love of Czar Saltan certainly makes the book a better fit for its official context of publication, as Pushkin, often considered the Russian national author, attained near mythical status during the Soviet era. We read from Rannamaa’s (Citation1990, 22) later memoirs, however, that she herself was bewitched with this particular fairy tale of Pushkin’s in her early childhood in independent Estonia. One of the few autobiographical episodes in the novels, Rannamaa relates that she, like Kadri, learned to read compelled by The Tale of Czar Saltan.
4. I use the term ‘postcolonialism’ as customary in Postcolonial Studies to refer to the whole period after colonization, rather than only to that after decolonization. It refers to ‘the consequences of colonialism from the time of its first impact – culturally, politically, economically’ (Nagai Citation2007, 239), covering both the colonial period(s) and period(s) of independence. I will elaborate on the concept of ‘postcolonial Bildungsroman’ in the following subchapter.
5. The readers’ opinions vary, how convincing they found it to be (see Blackwood Citation2018).
6. There are no actual dates in the diary, the entries are marked by weekdays (e.g. ‘On Saturday’).
7. The fictional topos of an honest Estonian exile disenchanted with the West was not an unknown one, although in real life a naïve returnee would have been imprisoned. The manner the scenario is depicted in the novel, it more resembles the return of the deportees during the same period (after Stalin’s death). I am grateful to Andres Jaaksoo and the historian Linda Kaljundi for their comments on this matter (personal communication, April 2014).
8. The latest 2010 and 2018 editions of Kadri, produced by the TEA publishing house follow the first edition version of the novel. According to the TEA publishers Eve Leete and Olivia Saar, their rationale was to base the new publication on the original – they did not compare the editions and were not aware of the changes between different versions (personal communication, 10 October 2018). The TEA publications of Stepmother, however, also published in 2010 and 2018, are based on the 1970 edition without the Gagarin epilogue.
9. Rannamaa actually stayed at the Pukavere boarding school near the town of Rakvere, sharing the sleeping quarters with the female students, in order to do research for the book (Rannamaa Citation2012).
10. Presently the best supported and internationally accepted version of the accident is by Gagarin’s colleague Alexei Leonov. There was an unauthorized large supersonic jet (Su-15) that flew dangerously close to Gagarin’s MiG-15 and caused the latter to spin out of control (Azriel Citation2013). Of course, it would have been impossible for the authorities to admit such an error.
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Piret Peiker
Piret Peiker is a postdoctoral researcher in intellectual history at the Institute of Humanities at Tallinn University, Estonia. Her main research interests are nationhood, modernity, conceptions of time and history, postcolonialism, and genre studies.