In August 1914 Estonia was immersed in the mood of an impending war. There was anxiety, fear and militarism. All over the country volunteers turned up, eager to rush into battle to punish the Germans. In the first few days of the war, eighty volunteers gathered in Viljandi. Perhaps some of them are in this photograph. The men here are relaxed and their clothes are clean. Their faces reflect confidence and a certainty that the war will not drag on for long. In the words of an elderly Viljandi reservist, comforting his wife: "I won't be long. We have a piecework system. I'll knock off my quota and come back." We all know from our school textbooks how the world war ended. We do not know alas how many of these valiant volunteer horsemen actually returned home alive.

Pekka Erelt, editor of history section of the weekly Eesti Ekspress.

volunteers from viljandi county, 1914

Imagine that dreams and history coincide, and with twenty years of independent statehood behind us, why can't we now face a quiet and bloodless war of recovery lasting at least two hundred years, wrote Ene Mihkelson in her novel "The Sleep of Ahasuerus", published four years ago. This text has already been called one of the most remarkable summits in the local cultural landscape during the last decade. It tackles the Second World War, two deportations of Estonians to Siberia, broken families, guerrilla fighters in the forest. I was occupied, deported or forced into the forest, says Mihkelson. It is significant that the novel attracted attention not so much for its unexpected topic, but rather for the mastery of writing. After all, people started analysing, playing and filming WW II, its preceding and subsequent years soon after the war ended. The first reflections were naturally works brimming with Soviet propaganda bathos, but already in the 1960s we can talk about forbidden, and also published works that time and again returned to the war and the lost freedom. I remember from my childhood in the mid-1980s some fragmentary sentences about one or another art event that touched topics unfamiliar to me, which however brought a different kind of expression to the faces of the adults when they talked about them.
Compared to this, the silence in Estonian culture surrounding the First World War and the War of Independence, seems especially eloquent. I could immediately recall at least a dozen works tackling the events of 1941-1945, whereas if pressed to name something about the period 1914-1920, all I can forthwith come up with is Albert Kivikas's "Names in Marble", a patriotic novel about volunteer schoolboys going to war. Otherwise... silence in literature, in film, theatre and drama, let alone figurative arts that have always been emphatically indifferent towards social phenomena. It is the more surprising that the first Estonian independence in history was, after all, gained in the aftermath of WW I, and unlike the Second World War, the War of Independence involved a genuine Estonian army. What raw material for mythologisation, what inspiring sources for culture! Instead... silence. Why? Military losses were far too great for such a small nation, although the 1920s saw certain economic success along with rapidly boosted foreign policy relations and domestic power struggle that characterise all normal states. Or maybe it proves that economic or 'visible' reasons are not enough to explain why no 'lost generation' appeared in Estonia, as it did in the USA that also emerged from both wars with relatively little losses (from Hemingway to the Beatniks). Why did a generation never emerge who would start actively writing and analysing events and persons who brought freedom to the country? Why was myth never created - dozens of monuments to those killed in the War of Independence were sprayed all over the country, although most of them in cemeteries, not in public squares? (Only in recent years have we erected a monument to the commander-in-chief of the War of Independence, and talking about the so-called Freedom Column, both however largely carried by the pseudo-patriotism of domestic politics). Was it the conviction that independence has been achieved for good? Or the other way round: the fear that independence could soon vanish made people act hastily, without wasting any time? Was it an inexplicable sense of freedom, totally novel and barely perceptible, that overshadowed all military moods, even the road along which the freedom arrived? Maybe the silence in culture was caused not by fear (like in the 1950s), but by happiness, overwhelming feeling of bliss? Was Mihkelson right?
Imagine that dreams and history coincide ...

Eero Epner