Childhood

Eduard Vilde (1865-1933) comes from Virumaa. He was born on 4 March 1865 at the Pudivere estate, Simuna parish. Soon after their son’s birth his parents moved to the Muuga Estate that the writer remembered like that: “A small simple two-roomed flat in the “lower house”, facing the old dilapidated distillery and cattlesheds, behind it a muddy pond full of leeches and an old park next to it, farther away a green meadow sprinkled with flowers and an old barn and smithy in it – and beyond, everywhere around, woods, the woods to go picking berries in.”

The manor and the estate were what Vilde called the theatre, the theatre where “servants and maids, labourers and daily help, Russian fishvendors from Lake Peipsi, coopers from Avinurme, pot vendors from Mustvee and Räpina, pedlars, craftsmen, Russian masons and whoever else, gave their performances.” Writing about his childhood Vilde remarks as an aside: “I was never tired of watching their comings and goings, their talking and grimaces, eating and drinking… and I was always asking mother questions about it all.”

Schooldays

It was mother who taught the son and brought him up. Father did not intervene. His love for travelling also came from his mother. This brought him trouble soon enough. He was expelled from the Tallinn district school in June 1882 and this was the end of his formal education. He had namely gone to offer himself as a sailor to a ship. It is not said where he wanted to go but it is possible that it was America. He did visit America later but did not like this country at all.

Tuglas said that Vilde was an impatient tourist who travelled around the world picking up something here and there and then put it down in his books that were based but on casual impressions. Travellogues were indeed Vilde’s favourite genre. He peopled his travel stories with imaginary characters and invented adventures, nevertheless his descriptios were authentic and have remained a treasury of information about his contemporary conditions and customs. His talent became evident at an early age. He wrote his first story On the Road of Evil at the age of 17 and this enabled him to find work at the newspaper Virulane in Tallinn, in the autumn of 1883. He wrote reports, theatre criticism and translated stories and news from foreign press. When he had time he wrote his own short stories that were published in the literary supplement of the paper.

Vilde as a journalist

Vilde worked for all the bigger papers and established one of them. Together with the lawyer and would-be premier Konstantin Päts, Vilde launched the Gazette. In July 1904 Vilde moved to Tartu to work at the liberal paper News, where he edited the feuilleton and jokes page and published his own stories. This is where his best known short story for the young My First Stripes appeared as well. Being a journalist gave Vilde an opportunity to earn his living but also to air his views and beliefs.

In the spring of 1905 Vilde plunged into political activities and participated in founding the Tartu department of the Estonian Social –Democratic Workers’ Union. His reports at that time made him a wanted person and together with his newly-wedded wife Linda Jürmann he escaped first to St Petersburg and from there to Helsinki, where he began to publish the satirical paper Kaak (The Gallows).

While in exile, Vilde visited almost all the bigger countries and cultural centres of Europe and returned home only in 1917. In these eleven years he had written several books.

Eduard Vilde trunks

Work

Vilde became a writer of high repute when his War at Mahtra was published in 1902. This was the first part of his historical trilogy followed by When the Men of Anija Went to Tallinn (1903) and Prophet Maltsvet (1905-1908). All these novels are based on notes made after people’s remembrances, letters and notes. We could say that people wished somebody to record their history and this is what Vilde did. The best example of just this is the third part of the trilogy that is a curious mixture of fact and fiction, history and religion, dreams and reality. For the Crimean Estonians this has become almost a cult book to find material about their forefathers who moved there in the 1860s.

The Milkman from Mäeküla that was published in 1916 is considered to be Vilde’s best book. In this novel Vilde managed to avoid moral condemnation and show his characters in a psychological development.

Vilde’s humour and skill at drawing expressive characters are at their best in his plays and short literary forms.

Copenhagen

The years spent at his favourite place Copenhagen (1911-1916) were prolific indeed. He was his own master and could take his time. The Stories and the play The Inscrutable Mystery attracted great attention but the board of prizes at the Estonian Literary Society did not dare to award him, offering a subsidy instead. This caused a public outcry and scandal. The latter inspired Vilde to write another play The Hobgoblin about which Tuglas wrote: “The humour of the play is so open that even strangers who have no idea about the paltry trifles that Vilde makes fun of, would grasp it.”

Vildes in Copenhagen

Vilde who returned from abroad in 1917 was invited to the post of the dramatic expert at the theatre Estonia in the autumn of 1918.

In January 1919 the Provisional Government asked Vilde to go back to Copenhagen where he supervised the Estonian Information Bureau up to October. In November he started working in Berlin as the representative of Estonia. Vilde was certainly not a career diplomat, he just happened to be at the right place in time. With the help of businessmen, the brothers Puhk, Vilde managed to purchase a building for the Estonian Embassy to Germany, where the embassy works also today.

The last period of Vilde’s life

On 5 March 1925 whole Estonia celebrated Vilde’s 60th birthday. A festive meeting had been arranged in the concert hall of the theatre Estonia that many people attended. Vilde got a lot of congratulations from home and abroad – from Finland, Hungary and Latvia. The government allotted a summer cottage together with some land to his use for life anda subsidy of 200 000 marks. Vilde was elected an honorary member of the Estonian Literary Society, the Academic Literary Society and the Estonian Journalists’ Association.

Vilde at home

Vilde’s last years were busy, 9600 pages of his work were published in ten years. He was the only and single reviser and editor of his work and we could say that some novel was not written just because of that. Vilde retained his belief in the omnipotency of the written word up to his death.

Vildet died in 26. december 1933

Vilde’s work is awe-inspiringly volumnious – 33 volumes of Collected Works or 7459 pages of text. No other Estonian writer has left us an heritage like that. However, his critics have been rather similar in reception. They have always wanted to make him either a critical realist or a fighter for socialism. The only critical analysis worth its name was The Style of Eduard Vilde’s “The Milkman from Mäeküla” by Daniel Palgi, published in 1925. Among the present-day critics Toomas Haug and Toomas Liiv have diametrically opposite opinions but they at least add something to Vilde’s reception.