Fet retained some ties with the Baltic region and Baltic Germans in later years. For example, when serving as an army officer in the 1840s and 50s, he enjoyed the company of other officers who, like him, were German by background, and among these was a former classmate, Peter von Maydell, with whom he afterwards remained in touch and speaks of warmly. During the Crimean War Fet was posted near Reval (Tallinn), and he speaks with enthusiasm of the efficiency and attractiveness of the way of life he found there [Fet 1890:50–51]. He also has warm reminiscences of his renewed acquaintance with Dorpat in those years. Fet’s connections with the Baltic Germans were cultural and also linguistic: besides having lived in the region and gone to school with Baltic Germans, he was completely bilingual between Russian and German, his pre-university schooling was German in language and cultural orientation, and he aspired to the aristocratic class to which his Baltic German associates for the most part belonged. At the same time, in his memoirs, Fet always insists on his own Russianness, clearly differentiating “their” way of life in the Baltic provinces from, for example, “our Black Sea population” – even though the comparison works, in Fet’s own opinion, to the great advantage of the Baltic way of life. The result is to cast Fet as superior to “our” degraded “Black Sea population” in “Rus” (as he calls it), while at the same time distancing him from the attractive, but alien, Baltic culture, in relation to which he stands as an equal.
There is considerable evidence that Fet’s insistence on his Russianness was perceived as an oddity by Russians and non-Russians alike. When Fet was at school, Eisenschmidt (who came from Jena) found Fet’s attitude about Russianness extreme and even aggressive. Fet himself recalls having to earn acceptance among the German boys because of his Russianness, and he was proud both of being accepted and of being different. Crossing from Livland into the nearby Pskov region, he reports himself falling with relief onto his native Russian soil. The decade from 1848 through the mid-185os, the years of Fet’s military career, were in this regard pivotal. Fet’s early poetry was perceived as flawed by Germanisms, unsurprising in light of his educational background, and after Fet managed to have himself transferred to the vicinity of St. Petersburg he gratefully accepted the advice of successful literary colleagues, who undertook to russify his verse, revising poems previously published for a new collection and also advising him on his new poems. Fet also began to publish short stories and essays in St. Petersburg. Clearly he was hoping to settle into a career as a man of letters in the Russian capital. Even Fet’s Russian colleagues, however, and even considering that Fet was, after all, a Russian officer in wartime, were somewhat unpleasantly struck by Fet’s ardent expressions of Russian patriotism. His stolid Russianness dogged him also abroad, when he traveled to Western Europe in 1856: although he spoke French, he evidently did not speak it well enough, and he was patently ill at ease in France, where he was able to communicate only with Russians or such Russophilic Westerners as were happy to speak Russian with him.
It was at this time, in the mid – to latter 1850s, that Kreutzwald’s most important work began to become generally known. In 1854 the Mythische und magische Lieder derEhsten (with AH. Neus) was published in St. Petersburg, by the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and in 1857 the first 3 of the 20 parts of Kreutzwald’s quasi-mythological verse epic Kalevipoeg were published in Dorpat, in German and Estonian, with the other parts following in successive years, ending in 1861 [FRKB: 7-12]. By 1860, even before publication was complete, the work had won a prize [Laidvee: 356].
The rising prominence of Kreutzwald’s work in the 1850s can have encouraged Eisenschmidt to refer to Kreutzwald in his own memoir of 1860 – whether or not the two were really on friendly terms. Moreover, his reference to his two budding poets Fet and Sivers may also have taken on special importance in this context of Estonian, and Baltic, national awakening. Sivers had included a German translation of Fet’s poetry in a volume he edited, devoted to the work of German poets in Russia [Sivers 1858] – a category to which Fet emphatically did not wish to belong. Eisenschmidt’s association of Fet with Sivers will hardly have made any more palatable his fond memory of Fet’s excellent artisanal skills (which Fet also preferred to forget about and, when he did refer to them, claimed he acquired as a Russian army officer), and the matter will have been made worse by another of Sivers’s special interests: he was a great fan of Estonian folk literature, and even published a bit of pseudo-Estonian mythology himself, for example, “Vanemuine’s First Song” and “Vanemuine’s Last Song (according to oral transmission)” [Sivers 1847:39–56],
Vanemuine being a pseudo-Estonian pseudo-god imported by real Estonian Romantics and given prominence by their successors – notably in the beginning (“Soovituseks”) of Kalevipoeg. Sivers recalled that his interest in researching Estonian folklore and mythology was inspired by his hours spent among the peasants on the family estate [Spehr: 81 f.] – but he never heard about Vanemuine from old peasants. He can, however, have run into him at the doctors.
In 1862 Kalevipoeg came out in book form in Kuopio (Finland), and response to the new publication of the work offered more recognition but also sober evaluation of Kreutzwald’s achievement and of its problematic status as a reconstruction of a folk epic.15 By 1901 we find what is labeled a fourth, corrected, edition, published in Jurjev (Tartu) and apparently used as a school-book by a reader who marked off little passages and drew a cartoon on the back flyleaf (Kreutzwald).16 Although the more learned responses to Kreutzwald’s work were sometimes buried in scholarly bulletins, anyone reasonably well read in Russian or German and living in the Russian Empire in the latter nineteenth century, if he was interested in poetry or literary culture and had any connection to the Baltic provinces, is unlikely to have been totally unaware of Kreutzwald’s literary work or of his status in Estonian cultural life. If a person was, in addition, a hypersensitive Russian patriot who had seen himself portrayed in a specifically Baltic German context where he risked association with localist German and Estonian nationalism, it is quite likely he would wish to distance himself from that portrayal. It is of course possible that Fet never heard the word ‘doctor’ in Werro. When Eisenschmidt got sick and all the boys gathered round, maybe, toward the end of the long night, just maybe, young Sivers piped up: “You know, I think old Schmiddy here is looking pretty green… Think I should go fetch Kreutzwald?” Maybe he never said “doctor.” Maybe he had his own interest in fetching the doctor. Maybe he wanted to ask him about Vanemuine.
Notes
1 The same set of variant names can also refer to the administrative district of which the town ofVôru (Werro) is the center, but this discussion will refer only to the town.
2 A copy of her decree and a contemporary town plan appear in [Pullat] (plates following page 96).
3 On Catherine’s 1764 tour of the region and her subsequent initiatives, see [Voeikov etc.: 114].
4 A secret instruction from Catherine to Prince Vyazemsky stresses the peculiar status of the Baltic and some other non-Russian parts of her empire [Nechaev: 12].
5 Unless otherwise noted, the statistics and chronology here and below are from [Pullat: 28–31] and [Vrangel’].
6 By 1881 there were fewer Germans than Estonians in the town, which then numbered 2697 inhabitants: 976 people, or about 36 %, vs. 1339, or about half. By 1897, Estonians comprised nearly two thirds of the population, and Germans – a fifth. In the latter nineteenth century the town also had a sizeable lewish community (over 6 % of the population in 1897) and an increasing but never large number of Russians and members of other ethnic groups, notably Latvians. The surrounding countryside was “сплошь эстонское” [Vrangel’: 49].
7 He arrived with a post as a private tutor, but his intention from the start was to establish a school.
8 For a recent overview of the role of German Pietism, in particular of Moravian missionaries from Herrnhut, among different social classes in the Russian Baltic region, see [Wilpert: 105–112].
9 H. Eisenschmidt recalls a rapid decline in the early 1840s [Eisenschmidt: 74–78],but M. Telk’s statistics suggest a more differentiated pattern [Telk].
10 The arithmetic book was a significant enough achievement to appear in Laul’s index entry on Krümmer [Laul: 563].
11 For details of Kreutzwald’s publication history, see the first part of H. Laidvee “Fr.R. Kreutzwaldi Tôôd” [Laidvee: 15-170].
A more straightforward and updated chronology is at the beginning of “Fr.R. Kreutzwaldi bibliograafia” [FRKB:7-19].
12 Fet’s statement about never hearing about a doctor has not escaped the notice of researchers in Vôru. V. Ots [Ots: 17] notes Fet’s observation and states that of course we know that there was a doctor, Kreutzwald. Since, however, Ots is writing for an Estonian audience, specifically one in Vôru, she situates the problem in the world of what was and presumably still is known to everyone in Vôru, not the much stranger world of Fet’s prose poetics, or the less well-informed one of a twenty-first century non-Estonian readership.
13 Kreutzwald’s correspondence on this point is quoted in [Ots: 19–20].