9 The growth of the town meant that demand for land and services rose, and with them – prices. Locals blamed Krümmer for bringing in “outsiders,” while Krümmer himself, in an effort to cope financially, tried various undertakings to bring in more money, but they all took time and energy, and they all failed [Eisenschmidt: 74–78]. He found himself at odds with the local powers and even with some of his own senior teaching staff, and by 1847 Krümmer, in unpublished correspondence (Herrnhut Archive R19 G aa 24 a 15), talks about Werro as a kind of hell populated by a narrow-minded and short-sighted citizenry.
In spite of these petty and ultimately exhausting conflicts, Krümmer’s legacy shows him to have been at least somewhat adaptable to his situation as a German pedagogue in the Russian Baltic provinces: in 1830,before he succeeded in founding his school, he published a German-language arithmetic textbook, afterwards revised and often reprinted, providing exemplification suited to the needs of local pupils, including Estonian ones who happened to be attending German-language schools.10 Moreover, one part of his own school in Werro – a part unmentioned by Fet – was, although German in language of instruction, an elementary school that taught Estonian pupils. By means of both the textbook and his education of Estonian children, Krümmer was participating in the enterprise that had drawn him to the region in the first place: the work of German Moravian missionary-educators in the Russian Baltic provinces, where they had been influential since the eighteenth century but where they were unwelcome after the death of Alexander I. Krümmer seems to have separated his program from any explicit missionary goal (there was at least one other local Moravian school, more pious and academically less successful), but to have retained his sense of himself as an educator bringing enlightenment to both a ruling class in need of moral discipline and a population only recently freed from serfdom. Krümmer thus was a late representative of the tradition of Estophilic Germans, notably pastors, active in the region for generations. When the school began to lose its ability to attract wealthy German families, this was of course not only a problem for the school itself but also an intellectual loss for the town and a grave disappointment to Krümmer; nonetheless, the change can be viewed not only as deterioration (which it was) but also as a kind of assimilation to local needs and part of a shift away from German cultural dependency to a new situation that engendered a more dynamic, if not invariably more pleasing, set of social relationships.
Krümmer’s work in Werro took place, in fact, at the very dawn of the Estonian national awakening, in which Werro played an important role as home to one of its earliest and most deeply respected exponents: Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-82). The role of the town as a cradle of Estonian nationalism was anomalous in several ways. First of all, its history as a Russian foundation with an originally German population seems unpromising in this connection. Second, Krümmer’s dislike of Werro was at least matched by Kreutzwald’s; he hated the place so much that he even considered moving to the Russian heartland, which he also had no great love for, just to escape [Puhvel: 61]. He decided to stay put, however, and it was in hidebound (albeit increasingly Estonian) little Werro that fame eventually caught up with him.
When Fet was a schoolboy in Werro, Kreutzwald’s fame was still decades away, so if Fet had said he never heard of Kreutzwald’s Estonian literary production, he would only have been referring to an obvious reality. Even Kreutzwald’s early literary production in German scarcely overlapped with Fet’s presence in the town, nor is there any reason to assume that Fet would have read the provincial German-language weekly in which Kreutzwald’s early work appeared.11 No, when Fet was a schoolboy, Kreutzwald was known in Werro not as a man of letters or intellectual, but rather as the town doctor, the man whose profession Fet never heard mentioned even when Eisenschmidt took ill.12
Kreutzwald was in Werro only because he was a doctor. He had been born in serfdom not locally but in the north, in Estland, near Rakvere. When he showed ability at his first school he got the extraordinary chance to go on to higher education (it was at a German-language school that he acquired his German name). He qualified as an elementary-level teacher, worked as a private tutor in St. Petersburg in 1824-25 and then returned, no longer to Estland but to Dorpat, where he went through the university course to qualify as a doctor – but only with a third-class degree, which did not qualify him for an urban practice [Puhvel: 60]. He could qualify only for a place like Werro, to work among small-town artisans and peasants in outlying areas, in effect, that is, as a doctor to Estonians of origins similar to his own. Doctors educated at the state’s expense, moreover, basically went where the state found positions for them. After brief prior acquaintance with the town, Kreutzwald in 1833 became the first town doctor appointed in Werro, and he lived there for the next forty-four years. Like Krümmer, he was an outsider, distanced from his birthplace by happenstance and his own ambitions. Like Krümmer, Kreutzwald would rather have been in Dorpat, and, like Krümmer, he instead settled in Werro because that is where the government permitted him to earn his living.
The two men knew each other and worked together. Kreutzwald’s biographer states that he fulfilled the role of school doctor at Krümmer’s school [Nirk: 41], and in 1838 pupils at Krümmer’s school put on a German-language performance of a play to which Kreutzwald had written a prologue – the first known theatrical production put on by residents of Werro [Pullat: 49]. In later years, Kreutzwald looks back on the years when Krümmer was active as the best era in the life of the town.13
As for Eisenschmidt, the pathetically ill teacher whose room was smoked up by his pupils, Fet has nothing else to say about him. In reality, Heinrich Eisenschmidt (1810-64) was Fet’s teacher of German literature, a fact one might have thought the poet would consider worth mentioning, especially since Fet made his 1840 debut with a book that gave prominent place to Fet’s translations of poetry by Schiller and Goethe: these were the great classics especially emphasized in Eisenschmidt’s classes, and the teacher considered himself something of an authority on them. Eisenschmidt arrived at the school the same year as Fet and stayed until 1844. He went on to become director of a prestigious school for girls in Pàrnu (1844-53) and then (1853-57) of the Tartu Seminar for Elementary School Teachers [Laul: 555]. In 1860 Eisenschmidt published a memoir about his years at the Werro school, and in the memoir he recalls Fet as a schoolboy [Eisenschmidt: 47–48]. The recollection is friendly but it probably annoyed Fet, who avoided revelations about his past, and presented his background idiosyncratically. Eisenschmidt also discusses his own illnesses, since he blames them for his suddenly resigning his teaching post in Werro. He even provides such details as the medical advice he got from his “worthy friend, Dr. Kreutzwald” [Eisenschmidt: 78]. Eisenschmidt does not refer to Kreutzwald’s literary activities, which he would probably have been aware of by the time he was writing the memoir, but which he would almost surely not have known or at least thought much about during his decade in Werro, when he was personally acquainted with Kreutzwald. In fact, if there is a hidden theme to Eisenschmidt’s memoir it is his own unawareness of what was going on around him: he states that he had no idea that Fet, for example, was already writing poetry, even though he felt he knew the boy rather well, and the same is true for his recollection of another pupil, J. von Sivers (1823-79),14 who later published poetry in German. He also claims to have known surprisingly little about Krümmer and some of the other teachers and dissociates himself from their Moravian connections, which another witness says everyone there was fully cognizant of [Maydell: 2]. The source of Eisenschmidt’s naïveté may have been his youth and inexperience: he was only 25 when he arrived at Werro, and it was his first job and experience of life in the region. Yet since Eisenschmidt, who by the time he left the school was one of its most experienced senior teachers, did depart suddenly during a period of crisis, his emphasis on his illness has a self-justificatory ring, especially since he went immediately to a better job with far better prospects for advancement through official channels. Eisenschmidt and Fet not only talk about each other in their memoirs of the Krümmer school, but also naturally refer, from different perspectives, to a number of the same realia: sketches of personalities and routines that both encountered at the school, as well as such specific details as celebration of the headmaster’s birthday and long walks to Munamàgi and other destinations in the area. The coincidence of subject matter is natural, but it is also quite possible that Fet’s recollections about the school respond directly to Eisenschmidt’s. Such a direct connection might help explain the reference to Fet not having encountered any sign of a doctor at the school, even when someone fell ill – specifically, Eisenschmidt, who clearly could have benefited from medical assistance. Just as Eisenschmidt uses the reference to evoke the by-then respected Dr. Kreutzwald, Fet implicitly disparages the reference, while making Eisenschmidt himself a figure of fun.
But is it likely that Fet really never did hear the word ‘doctor’? There seems to exist no documentation of Kreutzwald’s activities at Krümmer’s school at exactly the time Fet was there, but there is ample evidence that Kreutzwald was then the doctor for both the town and the school, that teachers called on his services in that capacity, and that Eisenschmidt, who arrived at the school the same year Fet did, afterward claimed a close enough relationship with Kreutzwald to trust his medical advice and refer to him as a friend. Fet also recalls Eisenschmidt’s being ill, and he himself even as a relatively young man was often ill and often complains of his illnesses. In his three years at school, did he really never hear of Kreutzwald’s existence? And if he did not, why bother to mention that he never heard the word ‘doctor,’ when, by the time he wrote his memoirs, he really could not have avoided knowing who the doctor was, and could perfectly well have said, if the subject of doctors interested him, that he never encountered Kreutzwald, although he might have? Fet may have had his reasons for making Eisenschmidt an object of fun. But Kreutzwald he erases.