“Oh mother river, where still flowers the tongue of an ancient time, where its song and string sounds still call after us.” Words of nostalgia from Lydia Koidula (1843-1886), the foremost poet of Estonia’s “national awakening”. Unusual for her time and place, she wrote with emotion, and her poetry reads so still today.
The Emajõgi flows quietly as we take a look, its slow brown current idling through the university city of Tartu. Not being sure what to make of Estonia’s iconic river from appearances; I should read first, perhaps, to better appreciate.
The mother river, Tartu: Visit Estonia website
Emajõe kaldal, on the bank of the mother river, is the second poem of Koidula’s anthology, Emajōe ööbik, Nightingale of said river, published in 1867. The date is important. The previous year the Tsarist regime shut down the first Estonian language newspaper Koidula’s father had started in 1857, Postimees or Postman.
The themes in the anthology are often patriotic, pointedly so, and heavy with metaphor. The next stanza runs, “Where Kalevipoeg’s words and deeds recall an early generation, and a greatness of old springs from them to feed our soul.”
Koidula is reminding Estonians – so I take her meaning – that the Estonians were once independent, and could strive to be again.
This was a time of educated Estonians (often of Baltic German origin) learning to write and read in their own language. Koidula means “of the dawn”, a sobriquet bestowed on her by Carl Jakobson, another leader of the national awakening, along with Friedrich Kreuzwald whose national epic, the Kalevipoeg, took shape in the 1850s.
Walking along the southern bank of the Emajõgi in golden evening light, our interest is more prosaic, looking for replicas of the barges that plied the river from the Peipsijärv, the fifth largest lake in Europe, to Tartu and back. Once there were 800 of such craft moving goods to and from Pihkva (Russian Pshkov) and Novgorod, hence Tartu’s status in Mediaeval times as a Hanseatic town.
Draining one lake and discharging into another, the Emajõgi is navigable for its 80-kilometre length, Tartu situated roughly at the halfway mark. This site more than 1000 years ago was the most fordable point. The banks are marshy for much of the west-east trajectory, making the river challenging to cross or bridge.
Born on 24 December 1843 in Vändra, near the coastal resort town of Pärnu, Lydia Emilie Florentine Janssen attended a German language grammar school, and moved with her family to Tartu in 1864. Nine years later she married army doctor Eduard Michelson and moved with him to a Russian naval base near St Peterburg. There the family had three children.
Inconsolably homesick, Koidula spent summers in Estonia when she could, and continued writing poetry. She died of breast cancer, aged 42. Her most important work was Emajõe ööbik.
Many of the 45 poems sing of such matters as a birch tree, a lost love, or the return of spring to the land. Several have patriotic titles, “My fatherland; they have buried you”, and best known of all, “My fatherland is my love”. Set to music, this song became always the last to be sung at the four-yearly folk song festival in Tallinn, the laulupidu, and thus became an unofficial national anthem. In this and other ways, the long road to an independent Estonia began.
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