You've compiled at least eight collections in the Estonian National Library's publication series, featuring authors who explore the emergence and development of Estonian written culture from various perspectives. Since 2008, seven volumes have been published as part of a separate subseries titled "Raamat ja aeg" (Libri et memoria), but in terms of content, the 1998 volume "Kirik ja kirjasõna Läänemere regioonis 17. sajandil," which was published in the general series, also belongs with the subseries. When you were putting together that first collection in the 1990s, did you already have a sense that the project would become so extensive and far-reaching or did the idea for a dedicated subseries only take clearer shape later on?

The National Library's publication series had already been in print back when today's Estonian National Library was still the State Library of the Estonian SSR. When the library gained national library status, the format of the series was revised on the initiative of Helgi Vihma: the publications began to feature scholarly articles focused on a specific theme. I've compiled five volumes in that series.

In the mid-2000s, together with Janne Andresoo, who was then head of the research department, we decided to take the series to a new level. The plan was to publish it in two subseries: articles on written culture under "Raamat ja aeg" (Book and Time) and library-specific studies under "Informatsioon ja ühiskond" (Information and Society). We formed editorial boards and began publishing peer-reviewed articles. The series received a new numbering system and Inga Heamägi created a new visual design for it. But the tradition of centering each volume around a clearly defined topic continued.

I remember that the newly formed editorial board didn't have much faith that we'd actually succeed in producing a serious scholarly collection. The first volume of the new series only came together thanks to the goodwill of good friends. Naturally, I owe thanks to all the authors — these books were made by them, not by me. The first volume featured contributions from Tiina Kala, who has published in every book in the series to date, as well as Janet Laidla, Kristiina Savin, Lea Kõiv and Sirje Lusmägi. The most extensive article was by Aivar Põldvee — "The Superstitious Customs of Simple Estonians and the Return of Johann Wolfgang Boecler" — which was later awarded the Cultural Endowment of Estonia's annual prize.

After that, it got easier. The themes for the volumes seemed to find me — they were in the air, so to speak. One example is the relationship between image and text in today's increasingly image-centered world. On the one hand, images have come to dominate; on the other, printed books are increasingly being made by people who've never actually read one. I borrowed that phrasing from my daughter, but I recently came across the phenomenon myself — which just goes to show that even people unfamiliar with the written word can still sense the power of print.

These collections all revolve around the 17th century. Some contributions look back at earlier centuries and a few even reach into the early 19th century, but the central focus remains that one century. What makes the 17th century so significant and worthy of such close examination?

It's true that I've become somewhat stuck in the early modern period. Partly it's because I'm most familiar with that era and with the scholars who study it — both historians and philologists. But that's not the only reason. The 17th century was pivotal for the Estonian people and culture. Had we become part of the Russian Empire without a native-language written tradition — which came into being thanks to the efforts of German and Swedish clergy — we likely wouldn't have our own country today.

During the Soviet occupation, studying the Swedish era, church history and religious literature wasn't outright banned, but it was certainly discouraged. Secondary literature published abroad wasn't accessible and foreign archives were completely out of reach. So it's no surprise that when Estonia regained its independence, everyone with an interest in those subjects eagerly rushed to the Swedish National Archives in search of primary sources. The articles that grew out of that research have made it possible to interpret the Swedish Empire's role in Estonian cultural history much more thoroughly than before.

Historical research has also become far more interdisciplinary, which has highlighted gaps in earlier scholarship. For instance, Latinist Kristi Viiding continues to fill in the gaps caused by historians' often limited knowledge of Latin — including in several articles in our collections. Researchers of the Estonian literary language — yourself included — have also contributed. Meelis Friedenthal and Kristiina Savin have introduced intellectual history perspectives. The list could go on and there's certainly still room for more volumes dedicated to the early modern period. Of course, that doesn't mean other historical periods are any less important or interesting. In fact, the next volume in the series will focus on shifts in the meanings of Estonian words, and I expect a few articles will even reach into the present day.

The series also includes your own monograph on Heinrich Stahl, which is based on your 2010 doctoral dissertation at the University of Tartu's Faculty of Theology, titled "Heinrich Stahl's Pastoral Activity in the Swedish Baltic Provinces in the First Half of the 17th Century." It seems the Stahl phenomenon has particularly captivated you. Why is that?

I came to Stahl from the wrong end, so to speak. I first encountered him during the later phase of his life, when he was already superintendent of Ingria — a position that has long been viewed as proof of his insatiable ambition. But the reality was quite different. Ingria was the Swedish Empire's Siberia: a poor and hostile region riddled with problems for the Swedish state. No one wanted to go there, and those who did tried to leave as soon as possible. Stahl didn't want to go either — but he stayed for seventeen years, until his death.

The image that emerged of a zealous catechizer (to borrow Georg Rauch's term) didn't align with the portrayal of Stahl in Estonian research tradition as a vain and contemptible writer. I noticed that scholars often pulled adjectives from complaint letters to describe his character — words that had also been used for other clergy, such as Petrus Bjugge, the Bishop of Vyborg — but without the same critical scrutiny that researchers elsewhere would apply. Back then, everyone wrote complaints about everyone else; you can't take every word at face value.

Tracing things backward, I eventually arrived at the sharp-minded schoolboy in Tallinn who earned scholarships both from the Swedish state and the Tallinn town council to continue his studies. Those scholarships enabled him to receive an excellent education, but they also came with binding obligations that shaped his life. It's anachronistic to assume that Stahl wrote his Estonian-language religious texts with the goal of immortalizing himself as the founder of the Estonian written language. In 1838, German-speaking Estophiles founded the Learned Estonian Society to study the language, history and culture of what they saw as a vanishing people. At the start of the 19th century, no one could have imagined that one day history would be written in Estonian.

For Stahl, the Estonian language was just a means of saving Estonian souls. That was his faith and his mission. His dedication naturally led him to new positions, where he could make better use of his talents. And yet, in Estonian literary tradition, ambition and careerism have become almost synonymous with his name. No one says that Johannes Gezelius or, say, Bengt Gottfried Forselius were overly ambitious.

I felt I had to put my interpretation into writing — even if I turned out to be wrong. And for Stahl, nothing less than a dissertation would do. Besides, as you know, a dissertation has to pass through the filter of expert review.

Your interest in Heinrich Stahl connects to another one of your long-standing themes: Ingria. Back in 1974, while studying history at university, you wrote a term paper titled "Nevanlinna as a Swedish Trading Town in the 17th Century," and three years later, your thesis was "Swedish Economic Policy in Ingria in the 17th Century." In 2022, together with Taisto-Kalevi Raudala and Ergo-Hart Västrik, you compiled the volume "Memory Sites of Ingria: Continuity and Disruption." Why does Ingria matter so much to you?

Unlike most researchers of Ingria, I have no personal connection to the Izhorians, Votes or the region itself. I knew nothing about Ingria until my advisor, the late Professor Helmut Piirimäe, assigned it to me as a research topic. I had been studying Swedish and had asked for a topic where I could put it to use. Why Swedish? For as long as I can remember, I've been captivated by Scandinavian literature. My first real book was Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, followed by Sigrid Undset, Selma Lagerlöf, Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg — whatever had been translated or could be found in secondhand bookshops during the Soviet era.

Unfortunately, I disappointed my professor. He had hoped I would become an economic historian, but economics didn't interest me at all — it felt dry and tedious. He found his true student ten years later in Enn Küng, who has carried on his work at a high level. I read Enn's studies with the same fascination as a crime novel. It turns out that anything you dedicate yourself to deeply enough inevitably becomes interesting — both to the researcher and to the reader.

As for Ingria, I never quite escaped it. There's a kind of enchantment about the place. A desolate corner in the northwest of Europe, yet one that has sparked the imagination of many creators. As a historian, of course, my aim is to understand the people who lived there centuries ago and the events that shaped their lives.

Setting aside Stahl and Ingria for a moment and returning to Estonian written culture more broadly — looking back, which of the collections seems to you the most successful? Which one was the most exciting to put together?

I honestly can't answer that question. Over time, the collections have developed a core group of contributors whose academically rigorous articles always come across as vivid and fresh. They've created a foundation into which new authors fit quite naturally. Each volume has deepened my understanding — not just of historical events, but also of how those events can be interpreted — and has taught me a great deal. I imagine I would have been a better historian if I'd had access to this kind of research as a student.

With this year being dedicated to books, there's been a lot of discussion about the present and future of reading. People often lament that young people don't read anymore and suggest that something must be done to entice or even force them to read. What's your take? Is the situation really so dire or has reading always only appealed to a certain segment of society?

You've already answered your own question. Just look at online comment sections — they often reflect the views of older people who either don't want to read or don't know how to read critically. How many of your classmates, for example, truly saw reading as a vital need? I believe that people who can't imagine life without books have always been in the minority — and even fewer take what they read and build on it. But without those people, we wouldn't have a language or culture. We wouldn't have a country worth defending.

Today's young people have far greater access to learning and reading than we ever did. The young people I've encountered know how to make use of those opportunities. They're better educated than my generation and show a great deal of goodwill, creativity and empathy. We can place our trust in them. It doesn't matter if most people have other interests and goals — that's always been the case.

There's also growing concern that libraries, faced with space constraints, are starting to phase out books that aren't read often enough. The number of books keeps increasing, and since publishing has become so easy and affordable that nearly anyone who wants to can put out a book, the problem is likely to become even more acute. How should this be addressed? Should everything that gets published be preserved at all costs?

Even Martin Luther complained that too many books were being printed. The question of which books are worth preserving became especially pressing during the Enlightenment. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, for instance, believed there should be a library containing only the most essential scientific works for society.

Today, the system has taken shape so that national libraries preserve a copy of every publication issued in their respective countries — and, generally, also acquire humanities literature published in other countries and languages that is deemed important for that society. Specialized libraries collect and preserve works relevant to their specific fields. It's public libraries that face the greatest challenges — both with space and with deciding what to keep. At the same time, public libraries have found their place again, unlike during the occupation period. Homes simply can't hold as many bookshelves.

So I'm not particularly worried about public libraries. What saddens me more are personal libraries. You've probably seen this yourself: the carefully assembled multilingual libraries of scholars or translators — books essential to their work, some of them rare, many gifted with personal dedications full of love and respect — become unwanted after their owner passes away. A library that was once someone's life dies with them.

But to end on a less morbid note — I don't believe the printed book is going anywhere anytime soon. And from new books, new libraries will grow.

When we think about the early days of Estonian written culture, it's hard to ignore the fact that Estonians held a rather marginal position in society during the 16th and 17th centuries. There was no intellectual elite fluent in the local language as a native tongue. Given those conditions, was the emergence of the Estonian-language book an inevitable and natural development or was it more a matter of chance and good fortune that things turned out the way they did?

Here I'm reminded of Friedrich Schlegel's remark that a historian is a prophet who predicts the past. Just like the future, the past is always described from the perspective of the present — and as we know, the present is ever-changing. We can never truly know what might have become of the Estonian people without the German conquest. But considering the geopolitical and religious policies of our eastern neighbor, it's fairly certain that we wouldn't be talking about Estonian-language books today without that conquest. Such a book could only have emerged within Western Christian culture.

Its emergence was, in a way, inevitable — because the printing press made it possible to bring the foundation of Western societal values — the Ten Commandments — to every person, thus involving the entire population. That our first book, a catechism, marked the beginning of a journey that transformed the Estonian language and the Estonian people, and ultimately led to the creation of an independent state, feels — at least from today's standpoint — almost inevitable. The German conquest took away our freedom and dignity, but in a roundabout way, eventually returned them.

On the other hand, had we been Christianized by the Danes or Swedes instead, perhaps Estonians wouldn't have been pushed to such a low social position in the first place. If we look at Finland under Swedish rule, it's reasonable to assume that our native-language written culture might have developed more smoothly as well.

In studying the history of the Estonian written language, scholars often emphasize the key role of Martin Luther's teachings in the emergence of Estonian-language writing and books. But sometimes people ask: would the Estonian written language have failed to emerge under the influence of another confession? Could that have happened? Or how deeply rooted in Lutheranism is Estonian written culture?

The few surviving Estonian-language texts written by Jesuits show that they were genuinely interested in the native language and had a real gift for acquiring it. It's quite possible that the development of Estonian as a written language would have followed a somewhat different path — perhaps even a faster one — if South Estonia had remained under Polish rule. The books produced by the Jesuits would have tied us to the Catholic world. What the Estonian language and identity would have looked like in that case, I can't say.

The language itself might not differ all that much from what we know today, since the two confessions often debated through printed texts and influenced one another in the process. But without the Reformation, we wouldn't have had the Jesuit order working here in the first place — so even in that alternate scenario, Martin Luther would still have played a central role.

It's not just early Estonian literature that's Lutheran — whether we always recognize it or not, our worldview has also been shaped by Protestantism through that literature. Pietism and the Moravian Brethren movement have also left their mark on our language and helped shape the Estonian mindset.

One of the crowning publications of the Year of the Book is the recently released collection "That First Book: 500 Years of Shared Written Culture," a joint project of the Estonian and Latvian national libraries. You were the Estonian-side editor. How much had you previously engaged with the history of Latvian written culture as a researcher and what aspects of Latvian cultural history have you found most interesting or instructive from our perspective? Did you discover anything new or unexpected from the Latvian side while working on this volume?

Calling it a "crowning publication" is definitely an overstatement. That label would be more fitting for the bibliography of foreign-language books published in Estonia (1494–1830), which is also on my desk right now and happened to come out in this Year of the [Estonian] Book — or for your own edited dictionary of early Estonian Bible translations (1600–1739). Both are the result of long-term collaborative research and have lasting value. They contain unique information and will remain indispensable as long as there are scholars studying Estonian language and history.

As with Estonian cultural history, my interest in Latvian history has primarily focused on texts from the 17th century. If you were to ask me that now-popular question about which book has had the greatest impact on my life, I'd say it's the 1992 monograph by Latvian historian Janis Kreslins, "Dominus narrabit in scriptura populorum," about Georg Mancelius — the author of the first Latvian-language sermon collection and a contemporary of our Heinrich Stahl. Kreslins, who was born in the U.S. and studied at Harvard and Boston, brought to the subject a level of scholarship that was, to me, utterly eye-opening — a flash of light in a dark room. His treatment of the educational paths and literary works of early 17th-century clergy also prompted me to re-examine Stahl's work from a new perspective.

Incidentally, Mancelius served as pastor of the German congregation in Tartu and professor at Academia Gustaviana from 1625 to 1636. "Tartu is a city where it is good to live and good to die," he wrote. In the end, though, he didn't die in Tartu — he was invited in 1637 to become court chaplain to the Duke of Courland. Even just these few details show how closely intertwined the intellectual life of early modern Estonia and Latvia really was.

The goal of the jointly compiled essay collection by the Estonian and Latvian national libraries was to highlight the significance of printed publications in each society. At the same time, the essays can be read as an introduction to the book cultures of Estonia and Latvia — as one contributor aptly put it, a kind of ABC of book history. Since Estonia and Latvia have followed parallel political trajectories, the book also asks: What role has written culture played in each society? How similar are our book histories and where, if anywhere, do they diverge?

The most surprising discovery for me came from Latvian linguist Mara Grudule's article on the first Latvian Catholic hymnal. That early 17th-century collection includes classical Alexandrines and Sapphic stanzas! In general, religious and educational literature in both countries developed in step with each other, often drawing from the same sources. Differences become more apparent in the realm of literary creativity. For instance, the poetic style of the Latvian prodigy Peteris Petersons, known as Blind Indrikis and a contemporary of Kristjan Jaak Peterson, differs from that of our Estonian author. Latvia's first original novel, "The Times of the Surveyors" by the Kaudzite brothers, is more realistic and reached a broader readership than Jaak Järv's sentimental historical novel "The Maiden of Vallimägi." "The Times of the Surveyors" was translated into Estonian in 1959 and into German as recently as 2012.

It would have been fascinating to compare literary developments in both countries after independence, but the book's page limits required us to end with the declarations of independence. That said, I didn't only discover new and interesting things on the Latvian side — many of the essays by Estonian humanities scholars also revealed fresh insights. Since they reflected the authors' latest research, nearly every essay offered a new angle, nuance or even an entirely new fact. No study holds the definitive historical truth — but the search for it reflects the vitality of a culture. Right now, the collection feels fresh and alive to me. I hope our collaboration with our good neighbors to the south will continue, even when this book is old and worn.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook, Bluesky and X and never miss an update!