The Beauty of History

As a teenager, I watched on TV the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks. The year was 1968. The Soviet Union put an end to an attempt by a purportedly sovereign state to introduce a milder brand of Communism. Conscripts from the Baltic republics were also forced to take part in this blatant act of Soviet imperialism.

In those days I had never heard of Estonia. I only became aware of the country while studying at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K., several years later. A few albums, brought up from Cambridge and whose photographs were projected onto the wall with an epidiascope, left me with no more of an impression of that country behind the Iron Curtain than a pretty medieval city and lots of evergreen forest. Not until 1979 did I see the real thing. But we were chaperoned round Tallinn by a tour guide who was no doubt obliged to report our every move and utterance back to the KGB. Nor were we allowed to talk with ordinary Estonians. Tourists were given red Soviet champagne and three square meals a days at the best hotel in town, but local people were banned from entering that hotel to prevent them mixing with foreigners and telling them what life was really like in Estonia.

By the late 1980s the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, along with neighboring Latvia and Lithuania, was seminal in the initial stirrings of revolt: the Singing Revolution and the Baltic Chain. These events marked the start of what ultimately became the collapse of the whole Soviet Union under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. These three small countries had almost sunk into oblivion in Western eyes since being swallowed up by the Soviet Union in 1944. Now, suddenly, they had re-emerged into the limelight of history. At about that time, while it was still uncertain whether the peaceful Baltic revolt would succeed or be crushed like the Prague Spring, Viivi Luik, a popular Estonian poet, then in her forties, began to write her second novel.

Her first, The Seventh Springtime of Peace, written only a few years earlier, had dealt with Luik’s early years which had coincided with the period that the kolkhoz system that had been forced onto unwilling Estonian farmers by the Soviet authorities. It was received enthusiastically by an Estonian reading public that knew that woven into this delicate portrait of childhood was an implicit critique of the Soviet annexation of Estonia in 1940 and, after a few years of Nazi German occupation, again in 1944.

Luik now embarked on a second novel, this time set in August 1968, when the fate of Czechoslovakia, as it then was, hung in the balance. But, not only was the author unable, owing to Soviet censorship, to fire full Baltic salvos at Soviet injustices abroad, but she actively chose not to. This was to become one of the most poetic Estonian novels of recent years.

The Beauty of History is essentially a love story; but also the story of an emergent postcolonial awareness in Eastern Europe. The protagonist is a young Estonian woman, the alter ego of Luik, who is described over the first few pages of the novel as someone who “. . . has played unconcernedly all her life, with images and words, against a background of the history of the Baltic countries” which we know, with hindsight, to have been a history filled with of short-lived hopes and bitter disappointments. Her lover is a Latvian Jew, Lion (pronounced Lee-on), whom she goes to visit in his home town, the city of Riga, once the prosperous capital of Latvia, but which had, to all intents and purposes, become a run-down provincial town in the Soviet Empire.

One paradox in their relationship is language. “Why don’t we speak German?” asks Lion, not without impatience. This simple suggestion pans out into the whole tragedy of the Baltic countries who were occupied at times by Russian- and German-speaking overlords, sometimes for centuries at a time. Estonians and Latvians had no choice but to use one of the colonial languages to communicate with each other. The Estonian and Latvian languages are worlds apart, though the countries border on one another; the English language was only taught to a tiny number of people. The protagonist would have liked to have spoken to Lion in German, the lesser of two linguistic evils, but her knowledge of that language is limited to pat phrases learnt at school. In the end, they will have communicated in the least popular colonial language of the time: Russian.

Clothing takes on symbolic value. The Soviet system with its Five Year Plans and top–down economy led to periodic shortages. She herself wears sandals and a shirt with epaulettes, which may make her something of a Communist Youth member in Lion’s eyes. He, on the other hand, wears a soft woollen jumper with the label “Pure Wool – Reine Wolle” that reeks of bourgeois decadence. Even clothes, whether bought from second-hand shops, or discovered in a cupboard and dating back to Baltic independence in the 1920s and 1930s, allude to politics, in this instance, the twenty years of independence that Estonia and Latvia enjoyed between the First and Second World Wars.

Several folk tales are interwoven with the text. Unlikely yarns are told, tales that have been with the Estonians and Latvians for centuries, passed down by word of mouth. But some of the allusions are all too real. In the first chapter already, among lyrical descriptions of butterflies in April, spruce trees in the twilight, and the sowing of potatoes in May and their harvesting in September, comes the mention of bunkers and trenches. Bunkers especially have a resonance among Balts. In all three countries, an anti-Soviet resistance movement, the Forest Brethren, fought their hopeless fight against the Soviet takeover until well into the 1950s. These guerrilla fighters lived in appalling conditions in bunkers and underground hideouts in the forest, and were hunted incessantly and mercilessly by the KGB. When, in the very next paragraph of the novel, the author mentions Prague, Kundera, Havel, Brezhnev and Ceausescu, there is a fruitful tension between the seasonal rhythms of rural life and the magical month of August, which marked both the commencement of the First World War, and now that of the end of the Prague Spring.

The room has grown dark. Brezhnev’s tanks have just reached Prague. The Angel of the Lord smiles mockingly and tenderly. In his hand is no fiery sword, no lance, no spear or brine-soaked whip, but only a single stinging nettle, which gives strength to resist evil and purifies the blood.

Smoke rises vertically from factory chimneys, iron rumbles, bare bulbs light corridors and stairways. Do not trust others. It is better not to speak about yourself. Fear glows in naked forty-watt bulbs like an egg, like butter and cream, like an official testimony. Clouds float like leaflets over the long lonely beaches of the Baltic, over tracks left by soldiers’ boots in Bohemia and Moravia, the wind bends the grain of Lithuania double, strikes the beans of Latvia to the ground. More faith! More hope! More love!

What have all the countries mentioned in common? The clue is in the second sentence: suppression by Brezhnev’s tanks. The nettle is a symbol of the purifying resistance of small, weak nations against superpowers.

By 1991, when the The Beauty of History first appeared, the game was almost up for the Soviet Union. That is why Luik feels free to mention political events relatively openly. But lurking at the back of everyone’s mind in the Baltic countries was the fear that the beast would somehow be given a new lease of life, and that the Soviet Union would manage a few desultory reforms, then trundle on for another half-century. This was, after all, Gorbachev’s strategy, before Boris Yeltsin exerted his power.

One beautiful piece of ironic understatement, alluding to Ján Palach, who died by self-immolation in protest against the Soviet invasion, is: “A Czech boy pouring petrol over himself and then lighting a match does not really go with the carpets in the living-room of Europe, so the television is switched off.”

The style of the novel thus comprises the alternation of the idyllic aspects of life, mostly rural, and the real, much less attractive one, often urban. The kolkhoz system had ruined the rural economy, but trees and clouds do not follow the edicts of economists and politicians. Private life, within the home, also served as an inner sanctum of normality set against the absurdities of life on the streets.

When the protagonist (whose name we never learn) steps on a broken lightbulb and cuts her foot on the beach, Lion cuts open the wound a little further to release any infected blood. This description is treated poetically, despite the banality of the actions involved. But then we are tugged straight back to the looming reality of the military threat in Central Europe, in juxtaposition to the mundanities of everyday life:

Today, TASS no longer announces anything. On the shores of both the River Daugava and the Gulf of Finland, water flows from the taps into saucepans and coffee pots, bathtubs and wash-basins. Butter is taken out of refrigerators, bread is cut.

The River Daugava is in occupied Latvia; the Gulf of Finland has, on one part of the littoral, occupied Estonia, on the other a relatively free Finland, with Leningrad (now again renamed Saint Petersburg) in between, where Peter the Great drove a wedge into the continuum of Finno-Ugrian peoples at the end of the Gulf.

Viivi Luik makes good use of this contrast between the smallness of our lives with the huge vistas of history. The Angel of the Lord hovers over the whole historical scene, then, the next moment, we are back in the sensual scheme of life surrounding the protagonist, as she sits in Lion’s flat. She decides to write a poem (this is probably one of Viivi Luik’s own, written in 1968 and left unpublished) :

The moon shines brightly,
bq. the dead drive lightly.
bq. My darling, have no fear.

Then she considers for a moment what to write next, and adds:

In memoriam
bq. 21 August 1968

Soon, the reader is caught up in this rhythm of alternation, where the author can swing, quite unexpectedly from one register to another, from poetry to journalism, from the present day to memory. So we are not surprised to see words such as NKVD and Goethe on the same page, to be followed by a brief description of the weather in Riga.

Lion goes to Moscow, she is left behind in his flat in Riga with Aunt Olga, plus a thousand artefacts, items of furniture, and architecture that remind her of Lion, remind her of history. Lion is in Moscow in an attempt to obtain papers to exempt him from military service. The Balts secretly admire the Czech revolt, and Baltic conscripts would be loath to sit atop a tank and maybe have to fire bullets at those clamoring for freedom. Meanwhile, she ponders on the politics of poetry: the Russian dissident poet Joseph Brodsky, and the Estonian poet Paul-Eerik Rummo (who later, in real life, was for a while Estonian Minister for Ethnic Relations) can be “interviewed” by the secret police:

A certain Russian boy who is considered and underground genius once showed her, across the table in a café, a copy of Doctor Zhivago, wrapped in a newspaper. Rumours of secret circulars and plain-clothes men she considers exaggeration and bluff, although she has heard that Joseph Brodsky (who lives in Leningrad) and Paul-Eerik Rummo (of whom no one knows exactly where he lives) can be called in for interrogation for the dissemination of particular poems. Those words – called in for interrogation she repeats, carefree and mechanical as a parrot, and other people like her nod their heads, equally carefree and mechanical. Being called in for interrogation sounds almost as vague and grand as the Finnish Winter War, the Hungarian Uprising, the Three Baltic States.

In the Soviet Union, literature was never neutral. Any hint of revolt against the system, even in passing in a poem, could trigger off a negative response from the secret police, the Glavlit censorship apparatus or the Communist Party. One Latvian poet, Knuts Skujenieks, was sent to Siberia as recently as 1962 for possessing a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica!

The novel ends with the protagonist returning to Tallinn from Riga by train. The journey takes seven hours, in itself a critique of the inefficiency of the Soviet infrastructure. Trains formed a major part of Soviet travel, despite their slowness. Before the train has even begun to move, Riga is already unreal. The girls in the train are showing one another consumer goods they have managed to get hold of. Will she ever see Riga again, she wonders. At the Valga railway station, which marks the border between Latvia and Estonia, she sees a small boy playing with a flower as if it were a living creature. The Drunken Man is railing against the nearest that Soviet youth got to long-haired hippies.

At the very end, the Angel of the Lord, who has hovered over history throughout the novel, is replaced by the Angel of Death.

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As mentioned briefly above, Viivi Luik herself started her literary career as a poet. Given the fact that she was born in 1946, it is quite remarkable that she already managed to publish her first chapbook of poems in 1964, in a boxed set together with a number of other Estonian authors of her generation: Jaan Kaplinski whose work has appeared in English, the patriotic poet Hando Runnel and Ly Seppel, who nowadays translates literature from Turkish into Estonian, including Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. Estonian authors often double up as poets, prose writers and translators. This last activity sets them apart from the vast majority of British and American authors; the smaller the number of native-speakers of any language, the greater the tendency to do translation.

Luik went on, by way of her low-key symbolic poems that take everyday life as their point of departure, to become a popular poet. But as has been pointed out by critic Arne Merilai, there is a certain element of melancholy in her poems. Between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, she produced nine collections of poetry of varying sizes, most chap-books; then she moved over to prose and essay-writing. Viivi Luik has also written several books for children. Her collected poems were published in 2006.

We can ask ourselves why has it taken so long for this accomplished poetic novel to appear in English. The Finnish translation appeared before the original Estonian version in 1991, because then, as now, Estonia was going through troubled times; Yeltsin had not yet stood on his tank. It was not even certain that the Estonian version would ever appear. The Dutch translation appeared in the early 1990s and the undersigned helped Viivi Luik a little when she visited Amsterdam, and the publishing house in the southern Dutch city of Breda. The Swedish translation appeared in 1993. There was even a foretaste of an English translation in the magazine Transition 1: Writing From the European Borderlands a literary magazine partly edited by the present translator herself, Hildi Hawkins. But that was back in 1995; it is now 2007.

A word about the translation. As far as I am aware, this was done from the Finnish version, with close reference to the Estonian original — the Finnish version did, after all, appear first, so this course of events is justified. Any of the minor discrepancies and unhappy turns of phrase should be forgiven by readers, given the fact that the translator has been trying for over a decade to get the book published in Britain.

The afterword is by Richard C.M. Mole, lecturer in politics of Central Europe at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. Dr Mole concentrates on the geo-political and historical background of the novel, which may not always be immediately evident to the British reader, but does not touch on the poetics or aesthetics of the novel. That dimension is self-evident from the text itself.

Estonia continues to be haunted by its Soviet past even today. Ironically, owing to the riots in the capital Tallinn during late April this year, themselves sparked off by Estonia’s Soviet legacy, the country has gained the attention of the world again. But for all the wrong reasons. It would be so much nicer if Estonia were known, not for the smashing of the plate-glass windows of boutiques and wine shops, but for its wealth of sophisticated literature. When Russian-speaking youth rioted in Tallinn recently, protesting at the removal of a the symbolic Bronze Soldier from the center of the city, and the Russian Foreign Minister described such a removal as “blasphemous” , this formed an interesting coda to a period of history with little beauty about it.

Poetry and politics form the clue to most of Viivi Luik’s writing. People growing up during an occupation lasting decades learnt how to preserve that deeply private part of their lives that remains untainted by the wearying absurdities of the political system. Luik is a child of Soviet reality. A poetic rendering of such a life can dig deeper than mere history book description. We are introduced to the feel of what it was like to live in an vassal state of the Soviet Union.

The Beauty of History was launched at a reception the Estonian Embassy in London, during the London Book Fair.

*

Eric Dickens, Blaricum, Netherlands, April 2007

The Beauty of History
by Viivi Luik
Translator: Hildi Hawkins
Afterword: Richard C.M. Mole
Original language: Estonian
Length: 152 pages
Publisher: The Norvik Press, UEA, Norwich
Year of publication: 2007

ISBN 978-1-870041-73-7