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Elo-Hanna Seljamaa
and song celebrations. The very last pages display photographs of industry, modern
agriculture and industrial fishery (Figs 11 and 12). This sequence of images tells
a story of progress from nature to culture, agriculture and manual labour to indus¬
try. Yet while the text, too, is structured chronologically, proceeding from the first
song festival to the most recent one, the photographs are not: images of leading
Soviet Estonian conductors are placed side by side with photos of organizers of the
very first song celebrations and singers of the bygone days are juxtaposed with con¬
temporary choirs (Fig. 13). This creates a sense of permanence and self-sufficiency
of the festival tradition.
Land of Song, the other book by Mesikapp analysed here, begins and ends with
images characteristic of Estonian nature and climate. Nested inside these nature
photographs are smaller black-and-white photos of the very first song festivals and
of modern celebrations and folk musicians. Images of singers and dancers, on the
other hand, are juxtaposed with small coloured photos of birds, berries, butterflies,
and flowers native to Estonia (Fig. 14). No reference is made to new buildings,
machines, and other markers of socialist advancement. Rather, the juxtapositions
of nature and culture bring to mind the Herderian view of national groups as units
of a natural kind. Seen as living organisms, national groups are inseparable from
particular natural environments, which over the course of many centuries have
given rise to unique national cultures. These ties between local nature, people, and
culture are understood to be direct and unshakeable, bound to outlive any politi¬
cal, human-made systems."
Yet both books also abide by the rules of official iconography, demonstrating
the friendship of peoples and the central role of the communist party: included
are photos of performers from other parts of the Soviet Union, of army choirs and
Soviet officials. “Century of Song’, in particular, includes collages demonstrating
the diversity of Soviet-era song festivals and modernisation: men and women, old
and young, black and white, Europeans and Central Asians, peasants and urban
dwellers, people in folk costumes and smarts suits are all shown to be participating
together and, for example, listening to the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, an
honorary guest of the 1969 jubilee song festival (Figs 15 and 16).
Both books represent song and dance festivals as a distinctively Estonian phe¬
nomenon by means of grounding this tradition in local nature and emphasizing its
continuity. However, there also is no confrontation with Soviet ideology. Subtle,
ambiguous interpretations enabled by this representational strategy become more
easily discernible when it is juxtaposed with coffee-table books where the Estonian
and Soviet are visually coalesced.
"Cf. an excerpt from the text accompaniying the images: “The songs born on the edge of the land fly
out to the sea; the wide expanse of the sea will melt them into its roar or its silence; the fields, the forest
and the meadow, too, will take back the songs they gave. Yet something will remain with the people: beauty”
(Mesikäpp 1985, unpaginated, emphasis added).