Looming, 1934 - still relevant

What interests me about issues of a literary and cultural magazine from almost three-quarters of a century ago is not the exact geo-political situation of the day along with passing fashions and fads. I leave that to the cultural historian or ethnologist. What interest me are the questions they asked then in Looming which are still relevant today.

So, when Linde, Treiberg and Suits were asked those three questions, as in my previous posting on Looming, some of the issues have never gone away. Not even after a World War, a Cold War and regained independence for Estonia. Foreign languages feature a great deal in the three replies, something that rarely gets discussed in a country like Britain, which happens to speak the "world language" English.

Bernhard Linde mentions, for instance how, when the somewhat nationalist poetic movement "Noor Eesti" (Young Estonia) first got off the ground between about 1908 and 1915, the young generation invited Estonia to reorient from a Russian-German axis to an Anglo-French one. They were mocked for upsetting the status quo. But by 1934, there was what Linde describes as Anglomania. And he continues that he is firmly committed to an orientation towards Britain, when it comes to Estonia's political choices. However, he feels that a broader orientation should be possible culturally. He lists a few countries where this has taken place, such as Czechoslovakia which, while Anglo-French politically, remains culturally in the Russo-German sphere. He mentions the French influence on Turkey, the Italian one on Slovenia, and so on.

These questions are still relevant today, especially for the countries of Eastern & Central Europe, with their often fragile economies. The very discussion of political versus cultural orientation shows that a good literary magazine (nowadays also a blog) can go beyond literature and book reviews, and examine cultural issues in their national and international context.

Linde also says that they could stop teaching foreign languages altogether at primary school level and try to give children a broader education instead.

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Peeter Treiberg was very pro-French. In his opinion, more French should be introduced at secondary school level. Nor should a knowledge of German and Russian be neglected, otherwise, he says a large part of Estonian libraries would become "dead capital". He gave a whole list of reasons why France is the bee's knees. Nowadays, French and its promotion are rather popular in Estonia.

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Gustav Suits' reply is a whole history lesson, much of which is a grumble at the Baltic Germans. But he too mentions the value and importance of knowing the Russian language. He says that during independence (i.e. from about 1920), Estonian schools rather threw the baby out with the bathwater when, in dumping the language of Lenin, they inadvertently got rid of the language of Pushkin and Tolstoy as well. This same tendency is happening right now, anno 2009, in Estonian schools, where a whole generation are growing up with little or no knowledge of Russian. Estonia cannot shift its geographical position.

One irritation that bothered Suits is no longer there at all today. In 1934, the upper classes in Estonia were Baltic barons, all of whom had German as their mother-tongue. These people were called "back" to a Reich they had never lived in, during the late 1930s by Adolf Hitler. So, nowadays, German is a popular foreign language alongside English and French. But in 1934, the role of German was a fraught issue. Suits thought that at university level, they should teach more French in the humanities, English coming second in this, whilst in the sciences, the orientation should be the other way round.

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So in 1934, even just looking at the first issue of twelve, this literary magazine discussed and displayed history, philosophy and actual literature. Less than a decade later it had become a showcase for Soviet literature and Socialist realism.

But the story has a happy ending. In the early 1950s, the magazine sank to its lowest ebb, but after that started climbing back, and one very interesting development was the Looming Library series of, originally in weekly or fortnightly supplements in small book format, where, for instance, Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", some Kafka, Borges and lots of other "decadent Western" authors were published in Soviet times in Estonian translation. And the magazine Looming itself, and the Looming Library supplements, now less frequent, exist to this day.

But even back in 1934, they were busy presenting an article about contemporary Scottish literature, reviewing a recent German book about Danish literature, books about Eino Leino and L. Onerva, an international philosophical congress in Prague, a book about Freud, a mention of D.H. Lawrence, and, most interestingly, a list of the numbers of works in translation appearing in various European countries for the previous year, 1933:

Italy - 930
France - 662
Soviet Union - 659
Germany - 536
Poland - 534
Spain - 461
Czechoslovakia - 431
Britain - 346
Hungary - 309
Sweden - 304
USA - 298
Denmark - 240
Norway - 147

I will occasionally, when there are lulls in our flow of postings, revisit Looming 1934, to afford more insights, linking material found there to the issues of our day.

Looming - a literary magazine, anno 1934, issue 1

I happen to have the complete set of twelve issues of the Estonian literary magazine Looming for the year 1934. So over several blog articles, to make the information more digestible, I will highlight some of the contents of this magazine for that year.

Looming [pronounced: LAW-mink] was founded in 1923 by Friedebert Tuglas, as celebrated in other blog articles here. So by 1934, it was an established magazine. The covers of the 1934 issues had the word "Looming" (Creative Endeavour or Creation) in alternate black and red capitals letters, then an overview of the contents, in the same way as the Finland-Swedish literary magazine Horisont used to do in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the editors and regular contributors were of a left-wing persuasion, social democrats for the most. These included the Modernist poet Johannes Vares, pseudonym Barbarus, who later committed suicide in 1946, after having been made puppet prime-minister of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic not long before; and Johannes Semper, who became the Minister of Education under the same arrangement, but survived. In 1934, these two were still very impressed by French Modernist poetry.

1/1934
Obviously, Estonian intellectuals of all persuasions had noticed the rise of Hitler the previous year. And Barbarus' poem in issue 1/1934 had echoes of a crossroads; Cain and Abel were mentioned, and the idea of blood-thirstiness. Johannes Schütz also wrote poetry there; he later Estonified his surname to Sütiste - and continued to publish poetry in Looming. Major Estonian prose author Eduard Vilde had just died the previous year; there were articles about his works, visiting his grave, etc. The issue is 116 pages long. In this issue, most of the poetry, prose and reviews are home-grown Estonian ones.

And the editors sent a questionnaire round to authors with three questions:

1) Towards which country's sphere of influence would you prefer we orientate ourselves? Where do you hope that impulses for our intellectual life will come from?

2) Which foreign language would you prefer to be promoted in Estonia, and which language would you like to see as first foreign language in our schools?

3) How desirable or undesirable do you regard the recent enforced cultural orientation in the direction of Germany or Russia for the future of an independent Estonia?

Sensible questions for the epoch, answered at length by three Estonians, author Bernhard Linde (47 years old), historian Peeter Treiberg (39), and poet and academic Gustav Suits (50). Suits, being a rather professorial type and a renowned poet, increased the number of questions off his own bat to seven. He ends his reply with:

7) A propos of Sweden. As we have such a clear tendency to cultivate Germanic languages and cultures, let us not forget the merits of the Swedish language and Scandinavian culture.

As the replies by these three are so long, I'll have to stop here and read them in detail. But suffice it to say that the Zeitgeist was very much in evidence!