Gentleman, bohemian and husband

Vilde in 1890-1905

“40 roubles in my pocket I travelled to Berlin in the autumn of 1890. I did not expect to become a great writer there, I only wanted to live in this million-people city, see everything, taste the effervescence of the world and for once let myself be rocked in the ocean of life.” (E. Vilde, 1957)

This travel to Berlin played an essential role in Vilde’s personality development. This was the time he started to take an interest in social-democratic ideas and the theories of Marx and Engels. In addition to his political discoveries and frequent visits to the theatre, he managed to commit “the greatest stupidity of his life” – he married Antonie Gronau in 1891. They had met in Riga. In 1893 the young couple returned to Tartu and Vilde began to work for the newspaper Postimees under K. A. Hermann. Vilde, having travelled in Europe and considering himself an experienced journalist, aimed at improving the paper, making it more attractive. Vilde translated from the German language, wrote articles and tried to follow the principle that the text has to be easily readable and understandable even to those readers who had not had proper education. In 1897 Vilde became the executive editor of the Narva newspaper Virmaline/Northern Light. Living in Narva, he wrote the novel Iron Hands. Already in 1900 Vilde moved to Tallinn and started to work at the editorial office of the rather radical paper Gazette. Before the culmination of the revolutionary events in Tallinn he worked also at the editorial office of the newspaper Bulletin. Working at these papers Vilde published most of the things he wrote at that time there.

By that time his marriage had run upon the rocks already. Both, their ideologies and characters clashed badly. Vilde got his divorce only in 1920 when he had cohabited with his would-be wife Linda Jürman for several years. They had got acquainted when Vilde worked at the Bulletin.