Writing gender and ethnicity from a North–East European borderland in the 1930s: Leida Kibuvits and An Evening Ride

ABSTRACT

This is a short introduction to Estonian writer Leida Kibuvits’s work, particularly to her novel Rahusõit (1933, An Evening Ride). Kibuvits is an unjustly forgotten writer from the first half of the twentieth century, both in academic circles and among those who Virginia Woolf called “the common readers.” This introduction contextualizes the reasons why Kibuvits is forgotten and explains why she should be known and studied in the framework of transnational feminist modernist studies. The introduction outlines her slow-burn aesthetics, ecological awareness, and strong critique of patriotism and patriarchy. The introductory text is followed by a translated extract from the novel An Evening Ride, so that the readers can have a taste of her style and themes.

KEYWORDS:

• Patriotism
• transnationalism
• ecofeminism
• Leida Kibuvits
• modernism
• violence

Acknowledgment

I’d like to acknowledge the Estonian Research Council for the SJD3 grant “Women, Nations, and Affect: The Importance of Leida Kibuvits’s Writing in the Context of Transnational Modernisms” that made the writing of this paper possible. I’d also like to thank the University of Limerick for welcoming me among their staff as a visiting researcher for three months; the time spent at the UL contributed to the writing of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I have previously translated an extract from Kibuvits’s short story “Ladybirdred” for The Fortnightly Review. My complete translation of “Ladybirdred” will appear in The Space Between journal in early 2025. For a comparative reading of Woolf and Kibuvits, see my “Thoughts on Peace during a Train Ride” in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.

2 See Vaino, “Rist ja rõõm,” for an overview of Kibuvits’s life in Estonian. For a brief overview of her life in English, see an introduction to her artwork by the Kondas Centre, “Works by Leida Kibuvits.”

3 Leadership positions, including editorial positions in journals and newspapers, were only granted to people who were members of the communist party. There were also hierarchies within the party, so belonging to the party did not automatically grant power, but it did open the door to leadership roles and better opportunities in (professional) life, which were accordingly heavily monitored by the leadership in Moscow.

4 Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” 440.

5 Kibuvits, Rahusõit, 120.

6 I have omitted “she” from the beginning of this sentence to stay close to the original translation and to keep a certain oddity of her style intact. In the text that follows, all ellipses and other strange punctuations and omissions are also original.

7 The reference to the flower roots conjures an earlier scene, not translated, in the novel. In the scene, Eege’s husband’s, Sammul’s, boss threatens to fire Sammul, which means they would lose the housing alongside the job. (The boss threatens to fire Sammul because Eege did not sleep with the boss.) In panic, the mother-in-law starts to uproot all the flowers they planted to demonstrate her pained preparation for leaving her home. See “Thoughts on Peace during a Train Ride” for a longer discussion about the firing.

8 Jaakup committed suicide by flinging himself under the train because of unrecruited love for a younger woman. He was the husband of the woman who teaches her son the alphabet, and who has many lovers herself.

9 In the original, the mother teaches phonetics to her son, and I decided to translate it like this, because the long “iii” sound is important in the original, but in English, we need “eee” to get that sound, so I chose these specific words.

10 Eege’s mother-in-law thinks that the cow died because she swallowed one of the many pins that the disabled seamstress Ella accidentally dropped in the grass. Eege, the mother-in-law, and Ella all picked up the pins, so that the cow would not eat them. But it is indicated in the text that Eege left one pin in the grass on purpose, so that the cow would it eat. Eege did this to get rid of the cow (who looked starved) because she wanted to get a small, easier-to-manage goat instead.

11 When an overseer came to tell Eege and her family that they need to move out, the usually silent Eege screamed at him and sent him away.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Eesti Teadusagentuur: [Grant Number SJD3].

Notes on contributors

Eret Talviste

Eret Talviste is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tartu, Estonia. She has a background in English modernism, and her current project looks at Estonian modernism in a transnational context. Although being a hopeless Woolfian, she's also interested in marginalised women's writing and dialogues between canonical and lesser-known authors. She works at the intersections of feminist, affect, and posthuman theories. Right now, she's finalizing her monograph Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys: Exploring Strange Intimacies (expected 2025 with EUP), and is translating Leida Kibuvits into English to introduce her to anglophone readers.