The Latvian student corps and politics in the inter-war period of the twentieth century

Abstract

To date, Latvia's student corps have remained a neglected topic in the country's political history, notwithstanding the size of these organisations and the fact that they have been in existence for more than a century. Those accounts that do exist have for the most part been written by corps members themselves, and have not included any real analysis of the corps' interaction with society or their role in Latvian political life. A study of these issues opens up new avenues towards a better understanding of the activity and influence of interest groups in Latvian politics during the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike many other social organisations, the student corps (also including the alumni societies) are often seen as linked to the activity of the major parties, to the coup d'état of 1934 and to radical Latvian nationalism.     

Estonian Folklore as A Source of Baltic-German Poetry

Estonian folk tales form a common element in Estonian and Baltic-German (lyro)epic poetry. Baltic-German interest in Estonian folkloric heritage originated in the eighteenth century, when J. G. Herder first encouraged the collection of Estonian and Latvian folk songs. Systematic collection began in the 1830s, and peaked in the Estonian language area with the Estonian epic Kalevipoeg (1857–1861). Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald implemented this epic, but it was also influenced by many collectors and adaptors and was published in both German and Estonian. The myths of Friedrich Robert Faehlmann, presented in the Learned Estonian Society between 1840 and 1852, have had the biggest influence on the German-speaking audience. Literary adaptations of folk tales quickly found their way into journals, newspapers, poetry collections, and anthologies, often in the popular form of a ballad. This paper seeks to explore the role of Estonian folklore in Baltic-German lyroepic poetry.     

Performative Translation Options Under The Soviet Regime

Translations must be read in their immediate social context in order to understand their performative meaning. The Soviet period in Estonia featured censored and self-censored public writing, whereas cultural discourse that doubted the hegemonic ideology could be conducted primarily through translation. This reality renders significant the selective differences between translators on both the metatextual and textual levels. The topic of this article is the translations of Enn Soosaar (1937–2010), a writer keenly aware of the value of his translations as weapons of communication trained on their environment.     

Everyday Construction of Identity in the Estonian Refugee Community in Sweden

Social constructionist approaches underscore that identity is constantly negotiated. It emerges as values and attitudes are promoted and confronted in everyday actions, behavioral patterns and fleeting comments by participants in social events. This article analyzes membership categorization and pragmatic code-switching in the Swedish Estonian refugee community, demonstrating the fragile balance between ‘Estonian’ and ‘Swedish’. The speakers orient to Estonian Estonian as the target variety of language, while frequently using Swedish for sense-making. The analysis is based on audio and video recordings of Swedish Estonian club activities and research interviews.     

Description of the peasants’ sexual behavior in August Wilhelm Hupel’s Topographical Messages in the context of the history of the Estonian family

The aim of this article is to introduce the work of August Wilhem Hupel, a Baltic German author of the 18th century. The article focuses on the sections in his most voluminous work Topographische Nachrichten von Lief- und Ehstland (1774–1782) that describe Estonian peasants’ sexuality. Hupel’s writings belong to the sources of the history of the Estonian family, a field that has been rediscovered at the beginning of the 21st century. Thanks to the work of Marika Mägi and Nils Blomkvist, a new paradigm for research in this field has been opened up. This article adheres to that paradigm.     

Kalevipoeg: Aspects of Genre and Authorship

F. R. Kreutzwald introduced the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg (1861) as genuine folklore, overshadowing his own prevalent role in its creation: the problems of genre and authorship persist in the text. Firstly, Kalevipoeg was shaped by the poetics of romantic balladry. This can be proved by its author’s devotion to the ballad; in addition, many a lyro-epic folk song has been integrated into Kalevipoeg. Thus, a ballad-like lyro-dramatical-epical structure bears upon the work which gave rise to a new form: the lyro-epic epic. Secondly, a complex cluster of authorship can be extracted from Kalevipoeg: personal, fictional, intertextual, and discursive authorships.     

Public Discourse of (De)legitimation: The Case of South Estonian Language

This paper focuses on two different argumentative strategies for dealing with a regional variety of Estonian, one of which may discourage the use of South Estonian in favor of Estonian, while another legitimates the lesser-used regional variety. These argumentative strategies are studied by critical discourse analysis (CDA) of six articles in Estonian language newspapers and magazines published in 2004–2005. The use of South Estonian is discouraged by presenting real or imagined threats that it will undermine Estonian. This discourse also parallels the Estonian-Russian majority-minority discourse of recent years by employing zero-sum arguments of the Estonian language losing to Russian as a consequence of the recognition of South Estonian. Language ideologies, which also construct some varieties worthier than others, re-enforce an essentialist representation of separate languages. This representation will work toward suppressing linguistic variation.     

A new faith and a new name? Crusades,conversion, and baptismal names in medieval Baltics

The baptism of the natives in Estonia and Latvia in the thirteenth century did not result in compulsory name change. The native population accepted the “Christian” names by the mid-sixteenth century as a result of general cultural adaption of elements of the “German” culture of socially higher classes, but this process does not directly reflect the process of acceptance of the Christian religion. The few examples of receiving a new name in the crusading period indicate the re-arrangement of political relations, which were related to creating patronage ties and god-parenthood relations.