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Since when is Jakobson a 'radical'? |
Riga governorate was renamed already in 1796 into Governorate of Livonia (Лифляндская губерния) |
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Lydia Koidula was born Lydia Emilia Florentine Jannsen on December 24, 1843, but her sobriquet, Koidula meaning ‘Lydia of the Dawn’ was given her by the nationalist activist [[Carl Robert Jakobson]] when he wanted to include some of her work in his popular ''Aabits'', A-B-C for children. Writing, like elsewhere in Europe, was not considered a suitable career for a respectable young lady in the mid-nineteenth-century and although she was the correspondent of [[Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald]] (1803-1882) the writer of the Estonian national epic, ''[[Kalevipoeg]]'' (''The Son of Kalev'') the founder of the Estonian theatre and the friend of the influential [[Carl Robert Jakobson]] (1841-1882) Koidula’s poetry and her newspaper work for her father, [[Johann Voldemar Jannsen]] (1819 – 1890) remained anonymous.
Lydia Jannsen was born in Vändra, in south-west of the modern Estonia, a territory at the time part of [[Riga Governorate|Governorate of Livonia]] of [[Russian Empire]]. The family moved to the nearby county town of [[Pärnu]] in 1850 where,in 1857, her father started the first local [[Estonian language]] newspaper and Lydia attended the German grammar school. The Jannsens moved to the university town of [[Tartu]], the most progressive town of Estonia, in 1864. Nationalism, including publication in indigenous languages, was a very touchy subject in the Russian Empire but the rule of Czar [[Alexander II of Russia|Alexander II]] (1855-1881) was relatively liberal and Jannsen managed to persuade the imperial censorship to allow him to publish the first national Estonian language newspaper in 1864. Both the Pärnu local and the national newspaper were called ''[[Postimees]]'' (''The Courier''). Lydia wrote for her father on both papers as well as publishing her own work. In 1873 she married Eduard Michelson, a Latvian army physician and moved to Krondstadt, the German quarter of [[St Petersburg]], Russia. In 1876-78 the Michelsons visited [[Breslau]], [[Strasbourg]] and [[Vienna]]. Koidula lived in Kronstadt for 13 years but spent her summers in Estonia but she never stopped being inconsolably homesick. Lydia Koidula was the mother of three children. She died on the 11 August 1886 after a long and painful illness. Her last poem was ''Enne surma- Eestimaale!'' (''Before Death, To Estonia!'').
Koidula’s most important work, ''Emajõe Ööbik'', (''The Nightingale of the [[Emajõgi]] [the Mother] River''), was published in 1867. Three years earlier, in 1864, Adam Peterson, a farmer, and Johan Köler, a fashionable Estonian Saint Petersburg portraitist, petitioned the czar for better treatment from the German landlords who ruled Estonia, equality and for the language of education to be Estonian. Immediately afterwards they were taken to the police where they were interrogated about a petition that ‘included false information and was directed against the regime’. Adam Peterson was sentenced to imprisonment for a year. Two years later, in 1866, the censorship reforms of 1855, that had given Koidula’s father a window to start ''Postimees,'' were reversed. Pre-publication censorship was re-imposed and literary freedom was curtailed. This was the political and literary climate when Koidula started to publish. Nevertheless, it was also the time of the National Awakening when the Estonian people, freed from serfdom in 1816 were beginning to feel a sense of pride in nationhood and to aspire to self-determination. Koidula was the most articulate voice of these aspirations.
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