Daija, Pauls Literary History and Popular Enlightenment in Latvian Culture (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 569 Any collected volume must answer the question of to what extent the individually admirable essays hang together as a collection. This volume grew out of an international conference in Munich in 2010. Its contents were already published in 2012 in a special issue of The Journal of Ukrainian Studies (volume 37). Given that that volume is readily available and modestly priced, one wonders whether it was necessary to have it appear as a free-standing book. To best accomplish that end, and to make the book more broadly useful to nonEastern Europeanists who work on religion, the book would have benefited from a substantial theoretical introduction to notions of nation and secularism — and, for that matter, to Ukraine’s tumultuous modern history. As it is, it will be of interest to anyone who works on Polish and Ukrainian Catholics in their encounters with one another, and for anyone interested in the role of Greek Catholics in Ukrainian cultural history. Department of History Nadieszda Kizenko University at Albany Daija, Pauls. Literary History and Popular Enlightenment in Latvian Culture. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2017. ix + 152 pp. Notes. Bibliography. £58.99. Pauls Daija’s work, translated from Latvian, uses literature to explore aspects of the history of Latvia’s peasant population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It ‘follows the process during which the Enlightenment of peasants mobilized local Baltic German elites to launch a literary culture in Latvian and to build the preconditions for Latvian emancipation in the nineteenth century’ (p. vii). It seeks to contribute to the European scholarship on popular Enlightenment, peasant culture and emancipation movements; but it downplays traditional emphases on serfdom and political reform in Livonia in favour of researching Latvian-language literary production and reflections of peasant identity. ‘Popular Enlightenment’ (German Volksaufklärung) is here defined to cover liberal but not radical Baltic German authors who wished to enlighten but not necessarily to emancipate the peasantry. The modern form of the Latvian language only crystallized in the nineteenth century; the earliest Latvian-language productions were for religious purposes, the first printed text appeared in 1525, and the Bible was translated by Ernst Glück in 1685. In the eighteenth century the economic and social theories of cameralism and Physiocracy brought a new focus on the peasantry as primary producer and workerinagriculture,nowacknowledgedastheessentialsectoroftheeconomy: as elsewhere in Europe, the view of the peasant as feckless and ignorant began SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 570 to give way to idealized images of the wise and virtuous peasant, as the Baltic German Popular Enlightenment projected German bourgeois values onto the Latvian population. From the mid-century Baltic Germans, often pastors, began to write in Latvian for the country folk; Daija follows the development of such writing into the mid-nineteenth century, when the first Latvian university graduates formed the Young Latvian movement and Latvian literature became national. The book consists of five chapters. The first studies eighteenth-century Baltic German interest in the common people and peasant education; the second and third deal with the literary history of the Popular Enlightenment in Latvian and its literary practice and spread. The fourth analyses the idealization and Germanization of peasant identity, while the last examines the ideology of the Enlightenment and such topics as serfdom, patriotism and historical understanding. The moderate writers of Daija’s Popular Enlightenment wanted to enlighten the (usually servile) peasants but not to make them discontented with their class or their lot: to change their mentality but not their relationship with their Baltic German master. This was a different approach from more radical voices such as J. G. Eisen in Estland (referenced here pp. 19–20), or Garlieb Merkel. Daija points out the dilemmas of some of those involved — for instance, the weighty pastor Gustav von Bergmann wrote a ‘happy peasant’ text in Latvian, but criticized serfdom in German. These writers’ aspirations raised problems of language choice, social status and ethnic identity, but as the French Revolution unfolded at the end of the century issues of security also arose. While focusing on Latvian culture, Daija takes care to refer occasionally to Estland/Estonia, where similar processes were taking place, and his concluding proposals for...