On Some Aspects of Life Writing in Bernard Kangro's Kuus Päeva And

INTERLITT ERA RIA 2013, 18/2: 397–411 On some Aspects of Life Writing in Bernard Kangro’s Kuus päeva and Seitsmes päev1 MAARJA HOLLO Abstract. The Second World War cleft Estonian literature into two halves for half a century: the literature of the homeland and the literature of the diaspora. Bernard Kangro (1910–1994), who fled Estonia in 1944, was a prolific writer, the editor of the magazine Tulimuld and the head of the main diaspora publishing house Eesti Kirjanike Kooperatiiv. Kuus päeva (Six Days, 1980) and Seitsmes päev (The Seventh Day, 1984) are Kangro’s last novels. Kangro began drawing up plans for these two novels at the beginning of the 1970s, when western scholars were taking a deeper interest in life writing. From the perspective of form, Kangro’s novels have a special status in Estonian literature; in Kuus päeva, Kangro uses the diary form to create a meta-level in the novel with the goal of analyzing the specificity of autobiographical writing; in Seitsmes päev this meta-level is achieved through the imaginary diary of the biographer-protagonist, which consists of his reflections and experiences while writing a biography. These reflections and experiences derive from Kangro’s own preliminary research for the historical novel Kuus päeva. Seitsmes päev thus becomes the metatext for Kuus päeva. The main theme of the first novel of the dilogy is the writing of autobiography as such. Through the protagonist Andreas Sunesen, a historical figure, questions are raised concerning the concept of truth in autobiographical writing, the relations between autobiographical writing and historical writing and the function of confessionality in autobiographical narrative. The second focus of this article is on the issues connected to the writing of biography, as thematized in Seitsmes päev. In Kuus päeva, three meanings of the concept of truth can be differentiated: the truth expressed by the autobiographer (which the protagonist also refers to as “eternal truth“); the truth of historical events, which is expressed in their claim to authenticity, their correspondence or harmony with reality; and the truth about the existence of the autobiographer, which should appear as a result of the verbalization of his self-examination and memory work. The story of the mission to the eastern Baltic Sea region contained in Andreas’ autobiographical narrative points rather to the inseparability of the first two dimensions of truth, at least to the extent that the narrator of these historical events is also their witness and participant. Thus, it is unavoidable that he would relay what has happened from the vantage point of his present needs and purposes. Kangro’s novel seems to support the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s claim about self-narration: 1 This article has been written with the support of ESF grants 8530, 9160 and the TF Project Sources of Cultural History and Contexts of Literature. 398 HOLLO the autobiographical narrative can only answer the question of what a person was, not the question of his or her existence. In Seitsmes päev, the second novel of the dilogy, a philosophical question is foregrounded – the question of the task of the biographer. As far as the poetics of this novel is concerned, the answer to this question remains ambivalent. Keywords: Bernard Kangro; Estonian literature in exile; philosophical aspects of life writing DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/IL.2013.18.2.09 Bernard Kangro’s last novels Kuus päeva (Six Days, 1980) and Seitsmes päev (The Seventh Day, 1984) have remained marginal in the reception of his works for different reasons, such as the diminishing readership in exile. However, they have a special position in his oeuvre as well as in Estonian literature as a whole. Endel Nirk, one of the few critics who has written an in-depth analysis of these Kangro’s late novels, sums up the difficulty of addressing these texts: „They indeed are quite different from what we have been accustomed to call novels.” (Nirk 1990: 695) Though others have acclaimed Kangro as an innovator in the form of the Estonian novel (e.g. Annus 1997), Nirk sees his contribution differently, emphasizing the thematic newness of the dilogy, which is visible in a finely-textured presentation of the characters’ inner lives. Another distinctive feature of Kangro’s last two novels is the central theme of the writing of life into narrative. In Kuus päeva, Kangro is more concerned with the problems of self-narration; in Seitsmes päev, with the writing of biography. In Kuus päeva, Kangro is interested primarily in the work- ings of autobiographical memory, and its relations on the one hand with historical sources of the time, on the other, with historical writing today. The memories of the protagonist, Andreas Sunesen, an historical personage, are simulta neously a testimony – the testimony of a participant in the same historical events; memories and eyewitness testimony enter into a dialogue with the accounts of the chroni- clers of the era and with the writing of history in a broader sense. In addition, it is important to note that as a historical novel, Kangro’s text (albeit belatedly, given its publication date in Estonia, 2006) participates in shaping the Estonian reader’s historical consciousness. In the course of writing a biography, the protagonist of Seitsmes päev encounters a different problem: the historical personages reawaken, come back to life and talk back, interfering with his interpretations of the past and his knowledge of history. In addition to sharing a theme and an object, Andreas Sunesen, the two novels have a common form: both are metafictions, presented to the reader in the guise of the protagonists’ diaries. A number of Estonian writ- ers have made use of the diary form in their novels: Friedebert Tuglas in Felix 399 On some Aspects of Life Writing in Bernard Kangro Ormusson (1915), A. H. Tammsaare in Varjundid (Nuances, 1917), Karl Ristikivi in Rooma päevik (Roman Diary, 1971), Enn Vetemaa in Munad Hiina moodi (Eggs Chinese Style, 1972), and Jaan Kross in Keisri hull (The Czar’s Madman, 1978). However, no one has made as thorough and far-reaching a use of the diary novel as a genre than Kross and Kangro, who concentrates directly on the processes of life writing. By depicting these processes, Kangro’s novels enable us to investigate how a rhetorical illusion of life as a coherent narrative is created, where the events are presented in the form of a meaningful succession with definite orientation, which according to Pierre Bourdieu “is continuously and ceaselessly consolidated by the whole literary tradition” (Bourdieu 2003: 92). The first part of this article focuses on three aspects of autobiographical narrative: the concept of truth, the relationship between autobiographical writing and historical writing, and the function of confession in such a narrative. The second focus of this article is on the issues connected to the writing of biography, as thematized in Seitsmes päev. Truth in Autobiography The paradoxical relationship of a person with his or her memory is vividly de- scribed in the poem entitled “Birthday”, written by Fernando Pessoa under one of his heteronyms, Alvaro de Campos. The poem speaks of an elderly man, who on his birthday finds that his memory is empty; he can only recall one event, the celebration of his birthday when he was still a child. Thus all of his past is concentrated into a single birthday memory; because of the emptiness that rules his past, he savours the morsels of this one memory “like hunger bread, and his teeth do not notice the butter” (Pessoa 2009: 38). The symbolic equivalence between remembering and eating hunger bread is an apt charac- terization of the memory work engaged in by Andreas Sunesen, the protagonist of Kuus päeva, the 13th century archbishop of Lund, who was the papal legate in Scandinavia, and organizer of the eastern Baltic crusade.2 When he contracts 2 The historical Andreas Sunesen (ca 1167–1228) was a renowned intellectual and theologian, as mentioned in the chronicles of Arnold of Lübeck and Henry of Livonia (Nielsen 2001: 99). He received an exemplary education, and studied theology and law in Paris, Bologna, and Oxford. Evidence of Andreas’ literary interests can be seen in his 8040 line epic Hexaëmeron and his Hymns to Mary, of which no copies survive. His career as a politician and theologian began in the year 1201, when he was elected bishop of Lund. Five years later, Pope Innocentius III commissioned Andreas to enter into combat with the people in the Baltic Sea basin who had not yet received the Christian faith. It is known that Andreas took part in the battle for Saaremaa (Ösel) in 1206 and the battle of Reval in 1219. 400 HOLLO leprosy,3 Andreas is forced to renounce the bishopric in Lund and retreat into exile. Having been cut off from his previous life, Andreas starts keeping a diary, devoting himself to examining and recording his past. At the beginning of his diary, Andreas reflects on the paradoxes of writing about his life: as a leper, he has already been ritually removed from among the living, and has thereby gained a distanced vantage point from which to regard his past; this privilege is unavailable to those individuals who are still active participants in social life. However, these same factors may act to preclude such retrospective examination: at the time he begins writing, the life Andreas lived prior to his exile – his “real life” – is over. The rhetorical question addressing the impossibility of this task is followed by a vow to speak nothing but the truth, and a confession of his sincerity and unworthiness: Let it be only the pure truth that – sub specie aeternitatis – I endeavour to record on this parchment.

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