Seite 508 [508]
OCR
506 Elo-Hanna Seljamaa This discussion will bring us back to the title of this article and to nationalism. Nation building in post-Soviet Estonia has conceived of Estonia as the land of ethnic Estonians, a community of descent that has been living on this territory for thousands of years. Though the following analysis focuses on the Soviet era, its underlying aim is to contribute to a better understanding of present-day Estonia and the workings of nationalism: links between Soviet-era visual representations and the production and perpetuation of static truths about Estonia and Estonians as national entities (cf. Handler 1988; Herzfeld 2005). However, we take an excursion into the format and history of Estonian song and dance celebrations before proceeding with the analysis. Estonian Song and Dance Celebrations ‘The first choirs consisting of Estonians have been dated to the 1810s and were organized in parish schools by Lutheran ministers (Vahter 1965: 7).° The popularity of choral singing began to grow in the middle of the nineteenth century and came to be inseparable from the national movement that reached its peak in the 1860s to 1880s. The first gatherings of Estonian choirs took place in the 1850s—1860s through the initiative of Baltic German ministers, who were inspired by similar joint singing events organized since the 1850s in Germany, Switzerland, and also in Estonia and Livonia by local German male choirs (Kuutma 1998; Ojaveski et al. 2002: 239). The first all-Estonian song celebration was held in Tartu in 1869 with forty-six choirs and five brass bands—878 men altogether—from different parts of Estonia. Since then, at least one song festival has been organized every decade. Since the sixth festival in 1880, song celebrations have taken place in Tallinn; from 1928 onwards at Tallinn song festival grounds where a choir stand was erected for this purpose. The current modernist choir stand with an arch-shaped roof designed for choral singing was completed in 1960 for the fifteenth song festival. Female singers were first admitted in 1896, children’s choirs in 1910 (Mesikapp et al. 1969; Ojaveski et al. 2002). Folk dancing took off as a hobby in the 1920s and as part of the process whereby earlier folk culture, including peasant attires and ways of dancing, were transformed into national symbols representing national culture. Voluntary associations of various kinds organized dance classes and people dressed in folk costumes started performing folk dances for audiences in different venues (Arraste et al. 2009; Kuutma 2009). Following the example of Nordic countries, folk dancing was introduced 6 What is today Estonia consisted at the time of Estonia and Livonia and was part of the Russian empire. y However, German nobility governed local life and the court system with the evangelical-Lutheran church playing an important role in the society. The majority of people of Estonian descent were peasants and until 1816 (in Livonia until 1819) serfs who depended on Baltic German landlords. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, peasants would identify themselves by their home region rather than by membership in an abstract national category.
