Inimene ja jõgi Emajõe Ateenas. Jõest ülikoolikirjanduses / The Human and the Riverine in the Athens on the Emajõgi. The River in Estonian University Fiction

Abstract

Teesid: Artiklis vaadeldakse, kuidas kirjanduses on vahendatud ning ka kujundatud inimeste teisenevaid suhteid veekoguga; konkreetsemalt keskendutakse Emajõe ja Tartu kui ülikoolilinna ühisosa kujutamisele peamiselt 20. sajandi eesti proosas. Lähtekohaks on geokriitika pakutav kohakeskne raamistus, mis hõlmab eri autorite ning vaatepunktide arvessevõtmist, jõe ja linna suhete käsitlemist ajas muutuvatena – seega ruumi kihilisuse teadvustamist ning nii kultuuris kinnistunud püsikujundite rolli märkamist kohakuvandi kujunemises kui ka vahetu aistilisuse silmaspidamist kirjanduslikus kohakogemuses.

Although the field of blue humanities originally stems from the study of oceans, it is currently paying increasingly more attention to all manifestations of water, including fresh water. This article is concerned with the study of a river and its evolving interactions with humans inhabiting its banks. The focus is on literary representations of the intersection of the Emajõgi River and the city of Tartu that is best known as a university town. The main emphasis is on 20th-century Estonian fiction, and the broader framework draws on geocriticism. Thus, the discussion recognises the layered quality of space as it considers different authors and points of view; the relations between the city and the river are treated as dynamic and evolving in time. Place-related fixed rhetorical formulae and images established in the cultural tradition are set side by side with immediate sensory experiences conveyed in the texts, which allows observing the tensions emerging from the simultaneous presence of these two approaches to space when dealing with the intersection of the urban and the riverine. In order to avoid the danger of veering into the study of pure intertextuality, the ecocritical principle of considering the actual material environment and its agency is taken into account.

Early modern texts related to the city of Tartu as the location of the Academia Gustaviana extol it as the dwelling place of the muses of the Emajõgi (Musae Embecciades) and call the city ’the Athens on the Emajõgi’ (Athenae ad Embeccam), yet seem to follow well-established formulae of river descriptions. This means a focus on the abundance of general ecosystem services offered by the Emajõgi without highlighting any particular relationship between the academic community and the river. In the 19th century, the Emajõgi (Embach) as linked to student life at the Kaiserliche Universität Dorpat (Jurjew) emerges as a scene for boat trips related to liberal alcohol consumption and as a winter road offering the shortest way to inns located behind the city limits. For the 19th-century Baltic German students, the river also served as a boundary across which lied the city’s ill-reputed Estonian suburbs. The attitude towards the river tended to be instrumental, with scarce attention paid to it for its own sake. On the other hand, in the nation-making period in the 19th century the Emajõgi acquires the status of a significant element in the newly minted national mythology for Estonians.

The young Estonian men studying in Tartu in the early 20th century appear to have been more informed of the Emajõgi’s workaday functions than the Baltic Germans, and also recognise its power as a potentially dangerous force of nature that can tangibly affect the city space, e.g. in the flood season in spring. At the same time, texts by women seem to avoid the river. The representations of the Emajõgi rely on the characters’ immediate experience of boats, bridges or ferry rafts, as well as orally transmitted information and opinons. In fiction set in the 1930s a student generation appears who have recieved their secondary education in independent Estonia; their river imaginary is affected by the 19th-century national mythology and contrasted with the actual perceived reality. This generation of students seems to have had the most intense relationship with the river, which is retrospectively depicted through a nostalgic prism from the diaspora or recalled with a necessary ideological judgement in post-war Soviet Estonia. Yet the descriptions of the Emajõgi as a site of mundane activities remain overshadowed by focusing on the river’s recreational and symbolic aspects.

The depictions of the student life and the river in the Soviet years and in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, seem to be roughly divided in two: there are human/city centred accounts in which the experience of the river is mostly limited to crossing the bridges across it, and river-centred ones that let the characters walk upstream and experience the relatively cleaner stream outside the city. Thus, literature can be seen to reflect the development patterns of urban rivers from an initially utilitarian approach to a more recreational use. The latter is gradually abandoned with the significant growth in pollution due to the intensification of industry and agriculture in the mid-20th century, which makes citizens distance themselves from the river. The most representative river texts from this period display either late-20th-century postmodernist metafictionality or early-21-st-century environmentalist attitudes supported by the student status of the novels’ protagonists.