Juhan Liiv (Estonia)
1864-1913
Born
into an extremely poor family in the small rural community of Riidma, Estonia
in 1864. His father was a peasant working on the Alatskivi estate, one of whose
sons died at an early age. The others, however, all showed remarkable talents, Elias
becoming a schoolmaster and musician, and Jakob playing a major role in
Estonian literary history.
But Juhan displayed the most talent,
although he attended only three years of school in the village of Naelavere,
and another few winter months at the Hugo Treffner private school in Tartu.
In 1885 Juhan Liiv met the daughter of the
coachman of a nearby manor Liisa Marie Golding, and fell in love. His first
attempts to write poems belonged to that period. His first published poem was “Maikuu
öö” (“A Night of May”), a sonnet printed in the Tallinn newspaper Virulane.
One of Liiv’s best-known love poems, “Mu viimne laul” (“My Last Song”), dedicated
to Golding, dates from September 1896. However, they did not get married, she
going to live and work in St. Petersburg, while Liiv suffered in 1893 his first
attack of mental illness.
Liiv’s mental illness—a form of
schizophrenia—was never cured, but the fact remains that the major part of
Liiv’s best known poems were really created after that fatal year of 1893. His
madness alternated with clarity and moments of recognizing the truth, during
which he was able to create poetry charged with extraordinary power of
imagination, aesthetic sensitivity and philosophic penetration.
Having spent the end of the century in
obscurity, Liiv reappeared in public from the start of the new century, when
the young generation of writers, led by Gustav Suits and Friedebert Tuglas,
formed the nucleus of the literary-cultural movement Noor-Eesti (Young
Estonia). In the years 1904 and 1905 when Liiv lived at the mental hospital of
Tartu, he started to gain wider recognition as a poet.
As Liiv himself did not publish any
collection of poems, the canon of his poetry was almost entirely established by
the young writers Gustav Suits and Friedebert Tuglas. Suits chose poems for the
first book selection, Luuletused (Poems, 1909/1910), while the steady
dedication of Tuglas, after the poet’s death, made Liiv famous. Liiv’s poems
were taken to school anthologies and textbooks. And over the years Liiv has
become one of the most beloved and read of Estonian poets.
In early 1913 conductors, taking the ill
writer for a tramp, rudely pushed him off the Tartu–Valga train, into a marsh.
Added to Liiv’s life-long smoking habit, this event helped induce the
tubercular pneumonia that resulted in his death on the 1st of December.
In 1924, the factory Tegur, of Tartu, set
up at Liiv’s grave in Alatskivi a monument with a bas-relief and the poem “Kui
tume veel kauaks ka sinu maa” (“Though Your Country Be Dark For a Long Time”).
Liiv’s nature lyrics and patriotic
prophesies, as well as his prominent feature of “essential simplicity” (in the
words of the emigree Estonian poet and critic, Ivar Ivask) have a lot to do
with his world perception as an anti-anthropocentric thinker. The nucleus of
Liiv’s thought could be qualified – in terms coined after the poet’s lifetime –
as a kind of intuitive existentialism and holism, intensely intertwined. Liiv
claimed for life a totality—simultaneously spiritual and corporeal—in which
every element was indispensable. As Jüri
Talvet wrote, “Much more than any rationalistic or materialistic aspirations of
the human species, love and death, according to Liiv, reveal our deepest and
noblest self. He created a large body of lyrical poems transmitting the tragic
sense of our existence, and at the same time, the beautiful and the purifying.”
Over the years, several collections of his
short stories have also been published, as well as non-fiction works.
—Biograph
based on Jüri Talvet’s entry in the Estonian On-line Writer’s Dictionary
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Juhan Liivi luuletused, edited by G. Suits (Tartu: Noor-Eesti, 1909, 1910); Juhan Liivi luuletused, edited by F. Tuglas (Tartu: Noor-Eesti, 1919, 1926); Valitud luuletused, ed. by K. Kesa (Detmold, 1949); Teosed. Proosa; Luule, ed. by A. Vinkel. (Tallinn: Eesti Riiklik Kirjastus, 1954, vol 2 1956); Rukkivihud rehe all. Valimik luuletusi, ed. by Paul Rummo (Tallinn: Eesti Riiklik Kirjastus, 1964); Juhan Liiv, ed. by August Sang (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1969); [Sari “Väike luuleraamat”] Sinuga ja sinuta, ed. by A. Vinkel (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1989); Oleksin ma luuletaja, edited by Karl Muru (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 2005); Meel paremat ei kannata. Valik luulet eesti ja inglise keeles (The Mind Would Bear No Better. A Selection of Poetry in Estonian and English) ed. by J. Talvet, with the English translation by Jüri Talvet and H. L. Hix (Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2007); Tuulehoog lõi vetesse, ed by Jüri Talvet. Tallinn: Tänapäev, 2007); Oh, elul ikka tera on. Mõttesalmid. “Killud.”Jüri Talvet.(Tallinn: Tänapäev); Lumi tuiskab, mina laulan. Valik luulet ed. by Jüri Talvet (Tallinn: Tänapäev, 2013)
ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS
Meel
paremat ei kannata. Valik luulet eesti ja inglise keeles (The Mind Would Bear
No Better. A Selection of Poetry in Estonian and English) ed. by Jüri
Talvet, with the English translation by Jüri Talvet and H. L. Hix (Tartu: Tartu
Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2007; Snow Drifts, I Sing, trans. by Jüri Talvet and
H. L. Hix (Toronto: Guernica, 2013)
For
a selection of poems, go here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/juhan-liiv
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