Notes

Notes

¹ The same set of variant names can also refer to the administrative district of which the town ofV?ru (Werro) is the center, but this discussion will refer only to the town.

² A copy of her decree and a contemporary town plan appear in [Pullat] (plates following page 96).

³ On Catherine’s 1764 tour of the region and her subsequent initiatives, see [Voeikov etc.: 114].

⁴ A secret instruction from Catherine to Prince Vyazemsky stresses the peculiar status of the Baltic and some other non-Russian parts of her empire [Nechaev: 12].

⁵ Unless otherwise noted, the statistics and chronology here and below are from [Pullat: 28–31] and [Vrangel’].

⁶ By 1881 there were fewer Germans than Estonians in the town, which then numbered 2697 inhabitants: 976 people, or about 36 %, vs. 1339, or about half. By 1897, Estonians comprised nearly two thirds of the population, and Germans – a fifth. In the latter nineteenth century the town also had a sizeable lewish community (over 6 % of the population in 1897) and an increasing but never large number of Russians and members of other ethnic groups, notably Latvians. The surrounding countryside was “сплошь эстонское” [Vrangel’: 49].

⁷ He arrived with a post as a private tutor, but his intention from the start was to establish a school.

⁸ For a recent overview of the role of German Pietism, in particular of Moravian missionaries from Herrnhut, among different social classes in the Russian Baltic region, see [Wilpert: 105–112].

⁹ H. Eisenschmidt recalls a rapid decline in the early 1840s [Eisenschmidt: 74–78],but M. Telk’s statistics suggest a more differentiated pattern [Telk].

¹⁰ The arithmetic book was a significant enough achievement to appear in Laul’s index entry on Kr?mmer [Laul: 563].

¹¹ For details of Kreutzwald’s publication history, see the first part of H. Laidvee “Fr.R. Kreutzwaldi T??d” [Laidvee: 15-170].

A more straightforward and updated chronology is at the beginning of “Fr.R. Kreutzwaldi bibliograafia” [FRKB:7-19].

¹² Fet’s statement about never hearing about a doctor has not escaped the notice of researchers in V?ru. V. Ots [Ots: 17] notes Fet’s observation and states that of course we know that there was a doctor, Kreutzwald. Since, however, Ots is writing for an Estonian audience, specifically one in V?ru, she situates the problem in the world of what was and presumably still is known to everyone in V?ru, not the much stranger world of Fet’s prose poetics, or the less well-informed one of a twenty-first century non-Estonian readership.

¹³ Kreutzwald’s correspondence on this point is quoted in [Ots: 19–20].

¹⁴ Although Sivers was some three years younger than Fet, they were indeed together at school. Sivers was sent off to boarding school slightly early because of his family situation [Spehr: 3–4]. Fet, for his part, might never have gone to this particular school at all had it not been for a traumatic change, around that time, in his legal status (he lost his claim to be a Shenshin and was declared a German subject resident in Russia), which his family evidently preferred he learn about after he was already settled in with Kr?mmer in a German-Russian environment.

¹⁵ For the period up to the end of Kreutzwald’s life [Laidvee: 341–343,356,363–365] lists responses to Kalevipoeg in Estonian-, Russian-, German-, and French-language venues. Miller offers a late nineteenth century view of the issues.

¹⁶ According to “Fr.R. Kreutzwaldi bibliograafia”, the book really was published only in 1904 [FRKB: 12].