Lydia Koidula

Lydia Koidula, (Vändra, near Pärnu, December 24 [O.S. 12 December] 1843 – Kronstadt, August 11 [O.S. 30 July] 1886), was the pen name of Lydia Emilie Florentine Jannsen, an Estonian poet.

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 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, a region in the south-west of Estonia, then administered via the Governorate of Livonia of the 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 where Lydia attended the German grammar school. The Jannsens moved to the university town of Tartu, the most progressive town in 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 (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 besides publishing her own work. In 1873 she married Eduard Michelson, a Latvian army physician, and moved to Kronstadt, a seaport town near St Petersburg, Russia. In 1876-78 the Michelsons visited Breslau, Strasbourg and Vienna. Koidula lived in Kronstadt for 13 years but despite spending her summers in Estonia, she never stopped feeling inconsolably homesick. Lydia Koidula was the mother of three children. She died on August 11, 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, had 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.

German influence in Koidula’s work was unavoidable, as German was the language of tuition and of the intelligentsia in 19c Estonia. Like her father (and all other Estonian writers at the time) Koidula translated much sentimental German prose, poetry and drama and there is a particular influence of the Biedermeier movement. Biedermeier, a style which dominated ‘bourgeois’ art in Germanic Europe from 1815 to 1848, was plain, unpretentious and characterised by pastoral romanticism; its themes were the home, the family, religion and scenes of rural life. Though the themes of Koidula’s early Vainulilled (Meadow Flowers; 1866) were certainly proto-Biedermeier, her delicate treatment of them was in no way rustic or unsophisticated as the unrestrained patriotic outpourings of Emajõe Ööbik are anything but Biedermeier. By the time of the National Awakening in the 1860s, Estonia had been ruled by oppressive foreign powers, Danish, German, Swedish, Polish and Russian for over 700 years. Koidula reacted to the historical subjugation of the Estonian people as to a personal affront; she spoke of slavery and the yoke of subordination with all the grief and anguish of personal experience. However, Koidula was no mere victim or wilting plant. Her work is full of passion and pride and she was conscious of her own role in the destiny of the nation – ‘It is a sin, a great sin, to be little in great times when a person can actually make history’ she wrote to a Finnish correspondent.

The tradition of belletristic poetry started by Kreutzwald continued with Koidula but whereas ‘the Bard of Viru’ tried to imitate the regivärss folk traditions of ancient Estonian, Koidula wrote (mostly) in modern, Western European end-rhyming metres that had by the mid-century become the dominant form in Estonian poetry. This made Koidula’s poetry much more accessible to the popular reader. But the major importance of Koidula lays not so much in her preferred form of verse but in her potent use of the Estonian language. Estonian was, still, in the 1860’s, in a German dominated Baltic province of Imperial Russia, the language of the oppressed indigenous peasantry. It was still the subject of orthographical bickering, still used in the main for predominantly patronising educationalist or religious texts, practical advice to farmers or cheap and cheerful popular story telling. Koidula successfully used this neglected and abused language to express emotions that ranged from an affectionate poem about the family cat, in Meie kass (Our Cat) over delicate love verses, Head ööd (Good Night) to a powerful cri de coeur and rallying call to an oppressed nation, Mu isamaa nad olid matnud (My Country, they have buried you). With Lydia Koidula the colonialist view that the Estonian language was an underdeveloped instrument for communication was, for the first time, very powerfully contradicted.

Koidula is also considered the ‘founder of Estonian theatre’ through her drama activities at the Vanemuine society, a society started by the Jannsens in Tartu in 1865 to promote Estonian culture. Lydia was the first to write original plays in Estonian and to tackle the practicalities of stage direction and production. Despite some Estonian interludes at the German theatre in Tallinn, in the early 19c, there had been no appreciation of theatre as a media and few writers considered drama of any consequence, though Kreutzwald had translated two verse tragedies. In the late 1860s, Livonia (modern Northern Latvia and Southern Estonia) and Finland both started to develop performances in their native tongues and Koidula, following suite, wrote and directed the comedy, Saaremaa Onupoeg (The Cousin from Saaremaa) in 1870 for the Vanemuine society. It was based on Theodor Körner’s (1791-1813) farce Der Vetter aus Bremen, (The Cousin from Bremen) adapted to an Estonian situation. The characterisation was rudimentary and the plot was simple but it was popular and Koidula went on to write and direct Maret ja Miina, (aka Kosjakased; The Betrothal Birches, 1870) and her own creation, the first ever completely Estonian play, Säärane mulk (What a Bumpkin!). Koidula’s attitude to the theatre was influenced by the philosopher, dramatist, and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), the author of Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race; 1780) - her plays were didactic and a vehicle for popular education. Koidula’s theatrical resources were few and raw – untrained, amateur actors and women played by men - but the qualities that impressed her contemporaries were her creation of a gallery of believable characters and the fact that her finger was on the pulse of contemporary situations.

At the first All-Estonian song festival of 1869, an important rallying of the Estonian clans, two poems were set to music with lyrics by Lydia Koidula - Sind Surmani (Till Death) and Mu Isamaa on Minu Arm (My Country is My Love), which became the unofficial anthem during the Soviet occupation when her father's Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja rõõm (My Country is My Pride and Joy), the anthem of the Estonian Republic in 1921-1940 was forbidden. Koidula’s song always finished every festival, with or without permission. The tradition persists to this day.

Bibliography

• Loone Ots. The History of Estonian Literature. University of Tartu.
• Lydia Koidula. Sirje Olesk & Peep Pillak (2000).
• Estonian Literature. Endel Nirk (1987).
• Estonia and the Estonians by Toivo U.Raun (2001).