Baltic Surprise : ESTONIAN LITERATURE Historical Survey With Biobibliographical Appendix, Second Edition : <i> by Endel Nirk; translated by Arthur Robert Hone and Oleg Mutt (Perioodika Publishers, Tallinn, distributed by Imported Publications, Chicago: $13.95; 414 pp.) </i>

Estonia is in the news. Nominally a Union Republic, more independent on paper than the sovereign state of California in our own union, it has been treated all along by Big Brother as a colonial cranny of foodstuffs and minerals for the subarctic Russian megalopolis of Leningrad. In 1988, it dared call the bluff of the hypocritical Soviet constitution, but in a measured, peaceful and reasoned manner. It chose not to secede, although even that right was in theory legally available, but rather to assert in practice its dormant and ignored autonomy, before another round of Gorbachevian legerdemain deleted even that dead letter from the tightened federal constitution. The resulting standoff is strident with mutual recriminations of illegality. Estonia, a vital laboratory and proving ground for union-wide perestroika, has turned into a fractious instigator of constitutional crisis. Normally such matters in the Soviet orbit have been settled by reprisals and tanks. So far so good.

Glasnost made it possible in the first place. Starting in 1987, the easing of penal sanctions and censorship allowed ferment by political dissidents and disgruntled intellectuals. Suddenly hitherto unthinkable utterances flooded the media in condemnation of earlier Stalinist horrors and more recent corrupt torpor. This in turn galvanized the repressed collective subconscious; 1988 saw an unprecedented outpouring of popular fervor. Mass rallies have engaged much of the population; national emblems (flag, anthem, monuments) have been restored, and the short-lived independent Republic of Estonia (1918-1940) is being openly idolized. Stalinist and Brezhnevite holdovers have been eased out of the political leadership. A new Popular Front with massive across-the-board support has mobilized the broad political center for a nonviolent confrontation with Moscow, eschewing separatist ultranationalism and trying to allay the anxieties of the hefty 40% Russian minority while working to choke off further influx from the east.

This fencing match has made the world take notice of Estonian history and culture. These deserve to be better known and presented, including the literature of what must be one of the most bookish places in the world (first editions of 50,000-100,000 are not uncommon for a population of 1 million). The need for enlightenment is acute everywhere, inside the Soviet Union and abroad. In Estonia itself, adults and schoolchildren alike have been systematically lied to for two generations. Textbooks are being scrapped and redesigned. Writers, long censored and forced into allusiveness, are blinking at the new freedom and engage in politics at the expense of creativity. In a memorable essay in September, 1987, the noted literary critic, Heino Puhvel, pointed to the paradox that a new freedom in letters has arrived but has as yet no literature to sustain it.

In the outside world, two books published in the watershed year 1987 purvey essential data. Toivo U. Raun’s “Estonia and the Estonians” gives a concise and compactly informative outline of history on a dispassionate American academic model. The reissue of Endel Nirk’s “Estonian Literature” is a Soviet product for external dissemination.

The author is a respected senior literary historian, and the book is a rich compendium of data and evaluations, starting with “origins,” especially the vast treasury of nearly timeless folk poetry that is rivaled by very few countries in Europe (Iceland, Ireland, Finland, Latvia). Main chapters deal with the rise of a full-fledged national literature during the 19th and early 20th centuries, the independence period of 1917 to 1940, and Soviet Estonia, with an intercalated 12-page rump section on “Estonian writers abroad,” and a lexicon-like appendix on a few dozen significant literary figures. This device helps keep the facts and figures under control and allows some measure of discursiveness in the earlier sections. Nirk manages many a felicitous sentence, capturing the essence of a period or a writer in exemplary fashion.

Yet the work has an inglorious pedigree. It is a distilled summary of a five-volume official history of literature that was in interminable gestation during the “stagnation era” by teams of workers under the overall editorship of a notorious party hack. The distiller often rises above his dreary source, but vacuous Marxist cant and gratuitous obloquy still mar the final product. The first edition of 1970 (which I had occasion to review in Books Abroad in 1972) has been only modestly retouched and expanded in the reissue of 1987. It is essentially a pre- glasnost leftover. Now that the dam has burst, and the hacks have been put out to pasture, daunting tasks await the Estonian literati. A re-edition of the main encyclopedia was stopped in midstream and needs to be restarted. A radical reworking of the biographic lexicon of Estonian literature is in progress. Hopefully Nirk can now also revise his “Estonian Literature” to his own true tastes and abilities, without some superannuated Stalinist peering over his shoulder.