Introduction: Colors, Corruption, and “Breathing in Common” in Leida Kibuvits’s “Ladybirdred”
“Ladybirdred” is a 1938 short story by Estonian writer, journalist, and translator Leida Kibuvits (1907-1976). As the title suggests, it is a story about vivid colors. It is also a story about feeling, first, that the world is alive and, second, “breathing in common” with its various colorful inhabitants as the inspiration for art. This translation completes the first full translation of a story by Leida Kibuvits into English from Estonian, a process that began with the publication of the first section of the story in the Fortnightly Review in 2023. In the first section, readers encounter protagonist Margus Suurul midway on his stroll in Paris on a hazy spring day. Like the weather, Margus’s head is rather foggy and he walks as if in a dream, where vividly colorful memories of a childhood spent in another country haunt him, reminding him of happier days. This newly translated section charts Margus’s disenchantment with Paris and subsequent embrace of a decadent artistic style followed by his recuperation upon returning to his hometown. In this introduction, I build on work that appeared in Feminist Modernist Studies situating Kibuvits within transnational feminist modernism and including a translated excerpt from her novel An Evening Ride (1933) (Talviste, “Writing Gender”). This introduction focuses on Kibuvits’s interest in visual art, materiality, and themes of gender roles and nationalism in Estonian historical context.
Like the novel An Evening Ride, “Ladybirdred” illustrates Kibuvits’s idiosyncratic style, with which she strives to capture feelings, sensations, and emotions in art. Feeling for her is always inextricably bodily, where the body is understood as the living, fleshy organism in continuous encounter with other material beings. Kibuvits’s work is thus, retrospectively, available to a dialogue with posthuman theories, such as new materialism and some affect theories. Kibuvits’s feminist politics are also on display in this story.
To begin, Kibuvits narrates “Ladybirdred” primarily in the simple present, and where bygone memories resurface, she uses the simple past. At times, tenses move between past and present to enhance how the past—often and unexpectedly—resurfaces in the present moment. The story is narrated in a limited third-person point of view: readers primarily inhabit Margus’s head, but Kibuvits also uses free indirect discourse, which makes it difficult to distinguish between the narrator’s and character’s views and beliefs. Both the narrator and Margus enjoy satire, which complicates unravelling Kibuvits’s intentions when deploying stereotypes. What neither Margus nor the narrator satirize is the effort of capturing in art – whether in paint or words or music – the feeling of being alive.
In “Ladybirdred, the struggle to express feeling in art is embodied in Margus Suurul, a painter gained fame for his bold use of colors. The inspiration for Margus Suurul is probably Konrad Mägi (1878-1925), an Estonian landscape painter renowned for his use of color. Kibuvits was Mägi’s student in the early 1920s when she studied at the Pallas Art School in Tartu. Of all Kibuvits’s stories and novels, “Ladybirdred” most explicitly expresses her life-long love for art, color, and painting. Although she had to quit art school for financial reasons, her painterly eye is apparent in all her writing, and she used to crochet and knit to decorate her own clothes and furniture (“Biography”).
A less obvious connection between Kibuvits and Mägi might also be their brief sojourns in the town of Viljandi, located in southern Estonia. Kibuvits lived in Viljandi for a year in 1936. When Mägi returned to Estonia in 1913 after a ten-year stint in Western Europe, during which he spent time in Paris, he also spent time in Viljandi, at the home of his friend Fried Sangernebo, to recover from depression and revive his interest in painting. Mägi met Sangernebo in Tartu before he first left Estonia in in 1903 (Reinart). Mägi’s letters indicate that his depression worsened during his second stay in Paris between 1910 and 1912 (Reinart). He was still depressed when he returned to Estonia, and he found little inspiration in Tartu. To help him regain his spirit, Sangernebo invited Mägi to stay in Viljandi where she lived with her husband. It also appears from the letters that these stays, including a longer stay in the winter of 1913, indeed helped revive Mägi’s interest in painting and perhaps in life more generally. The Estonian location where “Ladybirdred” begins and ends seems to be Viljandi – a small town by a long lake, which is surrounded by steep streets with wooden houses near the shore. In this town, protagonist Margus Suurul regains the inspiration he lost in Paris: he falls in love with the light and again feels “a breathing in common.” The latter, for him, is,
something like this: Margus stands in sunshine and feels how everything around him breathes—houses and trees, stones and metal, air, fire, and water. And Margus breathes together with them, deeply, fiercely, inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale!
He feels this joy when he first moves to Paris, and one of the brightest moments of a breathing in common appears in a passage where Margus encounters three glass globes:
The glass globes lay motionless in front of the three blossoms, but they lived, light and colors moved and changed in them, ever more new lusters and glimmers died out and ignited in them. Once they turned reddish then bluish, then something silvery twinkled in them, then they were bluish again. The glass globes lived on and stayed in Margus’s mind. I too am this kind of a glass globe, he thought back then, only that I move around, and life and people bring countless shades of colors and sparks to me, and I have to return these hues and flashes to them again. Then he hurried home and got to work, with no food, no drink, no rest.
This passage, particularly the last two sentences, imitates the inhale-exhale rhythm Margus experiences: longer lyric descriptions make readers inhale, followed by shorter sentences of action, which let readers exhale. These passages illustrate how Margus’s pleasure in life and inspiration for work is intrinsically bodily and depends on the material world around him. Kibuvits describes this liveliness in erotic, almost sexual, language, an uncommon practice among Estonian women writers during the first half of the twentieth century. When Margus first arrives in Paris, it is walking in particular that gives him bodily pleasure:
This is the way he set out in the evenings, as if driven by love to find satisfaction. He wanted to cuddle the big city, yes, that’s what he wanted! He kept walking onwards, from street to street, always onwards, no matter where to. Across squares, along boulevards and avenues, in an utterly unknown environment. A stream of people pulled him along and pushed him from behind, pulled him inside itself. He was only a tiny particle in the rushing of human flesh and blood—it was so pleasurable!
The eroticism of the urban environment is explicit in these passages, triggered by Margus’s strolls, which are important parts of his experience of Paris, and an inspiration for his art. In this sense, Kibuvits portrays Margus as a typical flaneur of the early twentieth century, a male artist, part of and yet aloof from the crowds of Paris, who takes visual and bodily pleasure in walking in the city of Paris.
Although there is no evidence that Kibuvits ever visited Paris, she captures the figure of the flaneur accurately. Kibuvits knew that flaneurs were men, not women. Walking the streets freely, and the erotic pleasure of observation it might bring, is explicitly gendered masculine, as Kibuvits would have known that a woman who wandered the streets of Paris risked being classified as a prostitute (see Coates 28-30, 37-38; Parsons 21-28, 43-82). Kibuvits is aware that her gender and class also kept her, like many other women in the early twentieth century, from wandering the streets as Margus does in “Ladybirdred.” Kibuvits’s male contemporaries, such as writer Friedebert Tuglas, lived and worked in Paris for a while – it might be through him and Konrad Mägi that Kibuvits was able to imagine Paris so vividly without ever being there. Kibuvits would have also been familiar with some of Charles Baudelaire’s work, a hallmark text of Parisian flânerie, which was first translated to Estonian in 1930.1 Realistically, then, the protagonist of “Ladybirdred” can only be a man, whose “sensorial and mobile engagements with the urban landscape generate distinct forms of creative practice” (Coates 28). Kibuvits illustrates this distinction by including women immigrants in the story: the three Lithuanian girls who arrive in Paris to fulfill their professional dreams become petit rats at the Paris Opera Ballet, a class of working women professionals who suffered sexual exploitation and poor working conditions (see Mainwaring).
The notion of breathing-in-common, however, distinguishes Margus from the usual flaneur. He had reveled in an apparently relational experience of the city and its inhabitants. However, Kibuvits takes the relational pleasure of flanerie away from Margus as the story progresses. Although he can roam the streets of Paris, his walks no longer elate him with moments of a breathing in common and his gaze becomes predatory. The mood of the story changes to one of decadence. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, for example, is mentioned in the text, and Paris, urban spaces, and masses of people are associated with corruption that seeps into the innocent country boy Margus. He loses his love for life: “Margus has gotten older, corrupted, bitter. He knows the names of the streets now but cannot feel their intoxicating newness. He knows where this street runs, and where the other one leads.” He no longer knows Paris through what Jonathan Flatley would call affective mapping, but through a geographical map of Paris used primarily for practical navigational purposes (Flatley 56-93). Margus is no longer an inspired flaneur, but a tired man. As Margus becomes disenchanted with Paris, his color choices and subjects change, and become “Grey-brown like water in which countless unclean human bodies have been rinsed.” The disgust is visceral – in describing Margus’s painting, Kibuvits’s narrator uses words that evoke bodily repulsion at the idea of masses of people among whom Margus walks. The city and its crowds that used to inspire Margus now make him think of degeneration.
While the figure of a man walking already draws attention to who and on what terms subjects may indulge in flanerie, “Ladybirdred” also uses the man-as-artist/ woman-as-muse paradigm to explore gender politics through art. Before his disillusionment, Margus took an interest in the individuals who make up the crowds, and he became a portrait painter known for celebrating the best in his subjects. In Margus’s decadent period, his portraits depict the worst in people and women are particularly disdained. Margus describes them as “cows,” and “all the same,” to a popular artist’s model, beautiful woman nicknamed Madonna, who is often painted and often painted as the Madonna with children. In this episode, it is difficult to distinguish Margus’s misogynist views from the perspective of the narrator. But Madonna the model, by her own admission, sleeps with the men who paint her: by early twentieth-century standards, this Madonna is also a whore, blurring the line normally drawn between sexually inactive and sexually active women, and repeating the themes evoked by the petits rats, who often supplemented their low pay with sex work. What complicates the traditionally gendered active painter/passive muse dynamic is the fact that it is Madonna who observes Margus’s artistic difficulties and urges him to leave Paris. The Madonna – often depicted as a beautiful object with no agency or voice – speaks out, offering her professional opinion based on her experiences: he should leave Paris for his homeland to “exchange the glasses” and see the world anew, because this is what artists need. Predictably, Margus rejects her advice and kicks her out—only to receive a note later that day notifying him “that his old mother had died suddenly in his distant homeland.”
The ironic deus ex machina redeems Margus without forcing him to admit a debt to a woman. On his return to his hometown, Margus begins feeling again, and he experiences breathing in common. This renewed interest in life and colors is triggered by his encounter with an unnamed girl whom Margus wants to paint and who aspires to paint herself—with vivid colors rather than grey pencil. It is not a coincidence that Margus meets the girl during one of his walks, while the girl sits on a doorstep: a well-off, well-known man, a professional painter, enjoys a walk and finds a subject to paint, while a young unnamed girl whose family cannot afford to buy her a paint-box, sits. The power dynamic here is not just class- and age-based, but also gendered, bearing in mind the previous portrayals of women in the story. Kibuvits’s decision to send the bitter Margus back to his homeland—where he encounters a girl with ambitions to create art, stops and talks with her, truly listens to her, and then offers to buy her a paint-box—steers the story towards a resolution where men take active part in paving a way for aspiring women artists.
Kibuvits seems to show us that gender equity is a precondition for experiencing a breathing in common. That is, when Margus in his depressive, decadent period, he has a general distaste for women, whether young or old, married or unmarried. This era in Margus’s life seems to reflect the period of “dark melancholy” that Mägi experienced in Paris (Reinart). During this period, Margus dismisses women’s observations and ideas. However, he does return to his homeland, as Madonna suggested, and before he leaves he contemplates that Madonna might have been right in advising him to leave Paris. He also displays genuine interest in and concern for the girl he encounters on a doorstep in his hometown. Importantly, in the middle section of the story, before his decadent period, Margus displays a deep admiration for his landlady Belka’s artistry, and her “wonderfully strange human dolls,” whom she helps Belka to craft. In fact, it is Belka who advises Margus to become a portrait painter because of his interest in her dolls. In this light, the gender politics of Kibuvits’s story seem to be feminist. However, Margus’s sense of corruption also transforms his fascination with urban cultural difference—if stereotypical—into racism. Here, Margus’s stance is difficult to differentiate from that of the narrator. The text paints Cossacks, Georgians, the English, Estonians and Parisians in stereotypical ways, building the impression that it is no wonder that Margus cannot be happy in Paris because he naturally belongs to a different place.
To an extent, Kibuvits aligns appropriate artistic inspiration with a return to the national birthplace, opening the story to rather simplistic ethno-nationalist interpretations. The potential alignment of national patrimony and artistic inspiration is important given the stereotypical portrayals of various ethnicities in “Ladybirdred” and the historical context for this story. “Ladybirdred” was first published in 1938 in the collection Rist ja Rõõm (Joy and Sorrow) just before World War Two. It was published at the end of a short-lived period of independence, which lasted from 1918 to 1940, for Estonia. Before achieving independence in 1918, the area was ruled by various foreign powers, such as Denmark (1219-1346), Sweden (1561-1710), and Tsarist Russia (1710-1917). Under these foreign regimes, the people who inhabited the area always maintained a distinct Estonian language and culture. In the period leading up to independence, Estonian culture and language enjoyed a peaceful revival via the collection of folklore and the founding of Estonian language newspapers, schools, and theatres. The Bolshevik Revolution and the end of the World War One offered a strategic moment to declare political independence as Russia was in political turmoil and shattered by the war.2 The declaration of independence was, however, followed by the Independence War as Soviet Russia was no keener on letting go of Estonian territory than their Tsarist predecessors. With the support from Finnish, English, and other Western troops, the Estonians prevailed and the Treaty of Tartu, which recognized Estonia as an independent nation-state, was signed in 1920. This independence was short-lived as in 1940 Soviet Russia occupied Estonia. The first Soviet occupation ended only because the Nazi Germany occupied Estonia from 1941 until 1944. Estonia fell to Soviet forces again in 1944 and remained part of the Soviet bloc for nearly 50 years (1944-1991) because of the secret and illegal protocol that was part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and which divided northeast Europe between Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany, depending on whether Nazi or Allied forces won the war.3
Estonia’s long and complex history with foreign powers means that Estonian nationalism is, in many ways, a means to fight an oppressor and to preserve a language and a culture. Thus, the seemingly rosy notion of a return to “the homeland” in “Ladybirdred,” requires both historical and immediate context. Kibuvits composed the story in the late 1930s, publishing in 1938 when the threat of Hitler’s invasion from the west, and Stalin’s invasion from the east, was in the air. As yet another occupation loomed, the story is not simply nationalistic but expresses a longing for a birthplace lost to Russia’s imperial designs.
Estonia’s political history and continuous struggles for independence shaped artists’ lives, and Leida Kibuvits’s life was no exception.4 For Kibuvits, the end of the independence in 1940 had painful personal and artistic results and little verifiable information about her life exists. What is known comes from Maarja Vaino’s work, which relies on newspaper accounts, Soviet criminal records, and personal interviews with Kibuvits’s friends Regina Guli and Lennart-Hans Jürgenson. Vaino’s work is largely the source for the information below. Because Soviet forces controlled the content of art – only art that reflected Soviet ideology was acceptable – artists, like most people in the Soviet Union, lived with the knowledge that displeasing authorities had consequences. Because Kibuvits’s first husband August was a lieutenant in the Estonian Army, she was already subject to potential persecution for fascism. Further, August Kibuvits escaped to Canada without her or their small daughter. It is not known why he left without his family, but it is known that the taxing years of World War Two strained their marriage. In 1950, Kibuvits told Soviet investigators that the last time she saw her husband was in 1945, and, although she tried to find her husband after the war, she could not locate him. In fact, Kibuvits claims that unspecified witnesses told her he was dead. Only years later did Kibuvits find out that her husband had escaped to Canada. Kibuvits also stated under interrogation that her husband had sent her papers for evacuation to Finland, but she had decided not to go. It is not to verify this story, as Kibuvits may have invented it as proof of her loyalty to Soviet Estonia. Further, any statements, especially written records, could be twisted into incriminating evidence; Kibuvits probably deliberately destroyed some of her letters and diaries.
After her first husband fled, and after the Soviet occupation began, Kibuvits supported herself, her young daughter, and her aging mother through work as a journalist while she continued writing short fiction. In 1948, she married her second husband, Leo Aisenstadt, a communist who belonged to the Estonian Communist Party and was employed as the Vice-Secretary for the Estonian Communist Government’s Finance Department. This marriage allowed Kibuvits to quit journalism and dedicate herself to fiction writing. This marriage was also strategic: being married to a man who belonged to the Communist Party eased Kibuvits’s financial concerns and presumably protected her from persecution. However, both Aisenstadt and Kibuvits were arrested in 1950. Her husband was arrested first, accused of failing to fulfill the financial aims of the Estonian SSR (it remains unclear what these aims and their failure mean). Shortly after, Kibuvits herself was arrested, on 13 February 1950, and accused of publishing anti-Soviet, fascist texts in 1942. Both were imprisoned; Kibuvits was sentenced to 25 years in the forced labor camp (gulag) in Siberia. Kibuvits’s contemporaries, especially Aadu Hint, petitioned for her early release due to her declining health, and Kibuvits returned to Estonia after two years, but the camp left marks on her physical and mental health.
Ironically, her marriage to Aisenstadt left marks on the reception of her fiction. Although Kibuvits did not join the Communist Party or write Soviet propaganda, and although she was sent to Siberia, her name is to this day associated with communism. This reputation is one of the reasons why her work is not well-researched or much taught during the post-1991 independence years in Estonia. Kibuvits remains little known to either common readers or literary critics in Estonia, much less beyond Estonian borders, and she has never been translated into any other language. If her work was translated into Russian for the periodicals of her time, no record has yet been found.
Despite Soviet dissatisfaction with Kibuvits herself, “Ladybirdred” proved popular as an anthology selection. After appearing in Kibuvits’s original short story collection in 1938, “Ladybirdred” was reprinted three times during the Soviet occupation: in two collections, Elagu Inimene! (An Ode to People! 1962) and Endistest Aegadest (Of Bygone Times, 1977), and then as part of a 1987 short story anthology which takes “Ladybirdred” as the collection title. It is somewhat surprising that a story like “Ladybirdred” was reprinted three times during the Soviet regime because it stages an epiphanic return to a homeland that can well be interpreted as a patriotic glorification of ethno-nationalism.5 Perhaps the reason lies in Kibuvits’s characteristically anonymous geographical references: the place to where Margus returns is not named. Hence, the location could be assumed to be the Soviet area more generally rather than Estonia specifically. Soviet forces must have favored the depiction of Paris – the heart of Western Europe – as a decadent place one needs to leave to create authentic art. Considering the political history of Estonia, further comparisons with Irish women’s writing might reveal interesting aspects of gendered nationalism in the context of small nation states annexed to big empires such as Britain and Russia.
Regardless of the ideological regimes and Kibuvits’s struggle to navigate them to remain alive and protect her family, Kibuvits’s writing transcends the parameters of her own lived world(s) and should therefore be contextualized and analyzed outside the historical parameters of Estonian national history and as part of transnational dialogues. As “Ladybirdred” demonstrates, Kibuvits’s work shared themes and formal concerns with the work of other artists of the time. In other stories and novels, Kibuvits strongly writes against gender stereotypes in national narratives, as she does in “Ladybirdred” (see Talviste, “Thoughts” 18-20, and “Slow-Burn”). As I hope the translation and this introduction indicate, Kibuvits’s aesthetics, ethics, politics, and thematics resonate with those of her Anglophone and Irish contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, and Jean Rhys. She explores gendered experience and a sense of belonging in the early twentieth-century’s nascent nation states as well as in big empires. In this light, the fact that the breathing in common, which happens both in Paris and in Suurul’s hometown, seems to move beyond gender and national stereotypes towards a posthuman sense of belonging to a vibrant world where all is alive. Now that one of her short stories is fully available in English, I hope it will spark further transnational modernist dialogues connecting Kibuvits, her contemporaries, and her successors across ecologies.
A Note on Translation
This translation draws mostly from the 1962 reprint of “Ladybirdred” in An Ode to the People!, but because of my own transnational moves, I have also consulted the 1977 edition. Both versions are checked against a 1938 version that is too fragile to transport. Both the 1977 reprint and the 1962 version slightly differ, in different ways, from the 1938 version. For example, when Margus tells Madonna to leave his studio, the original 1938 text refers to Madonna as “A mare!” (Mära!), as does the 1977 version. In the 1962 version, however, Margus yells “Out!” (Välja!) to Madonna instead.6 There are other similar minor changes: the 1962 version omits seven paragraphs of dialogue in which Margus argues with the elderly music teacher over lunch, an omission I have noted in the translation. So far, no information on the editors or their decision-making is available, as neither later collection has a foreword. Kibuvits may have made changes for 1962, but it is likely if not certain that changes to the 1977 version were made by the editors, because Kibuvits died in 1976, and the collection was published posthumously. In this version, the major change occurs at the conclusion. The 1938 edition ends with the sentence, “Like this, just one little word reconciled Margus Suurul with sunshine,” and the 1962 version keeps the sentence although it omits the word little. The 1977 version omits this final sentence. Because it is not clear who made the changes, I have kept the original 1938 ending and noted the presence of variations. In general, I have kept as close as possible to the original 1938 story. These distinctions indicate that the material history of this story requires more attention, especially to review changes made to all three reprints. The material history of books by authors like Kibuvits is important because her work is no longer reprinted, and accessing original copies of her short stories and novels can be difficult due to scarcity and fragility of the books.
Apart from the material conditions and issues faced when working with the text, the translation, which for me is the most intimate form of reading, has also been challenging when transing, to borrow a term from Jessica Berman, not only from one language to another but also from one culture to another and from one time to another. Linguistically, Estonian has no gender, not even for he and she, using a gender-neutral pronoun ta for all people. Like in English, however, there is a distinction between human and non-human pronouns: it in Estonian is see, which is used for animals and inanimate objects, although animals, especially pets, are increasingly referred to with a human ta. In grammatically standard Estonian, a street takes the nonhuman see, but Kibuvits refers to the street in “Ladybirdred” as ta, which is why I have translated the pronoun as she. In the context of “Ladybirdred,” attributing liveliness to things normally considered passive, dead matter, is an important component of “breathing in common” that signifies the liveliness of the world.
Kibuvits’s writing presents its own idiosyncrasies. She loves omitting pronouns and conjunctions: instead of saying “Margus walks,” she just writes “walks”; instead of saying “his mother,” she just writes “mother.” Estonian does not have articles: there is no the or a, which, together with Kibuvits’s taste for omitting pronouns, has proven tricky in some instances. For example, when writing about Margus’s mother, Kibuvits may be deliberately indicating the generality of being a mother by simply omitting a pronoun. However, there is no good way to keep this idea intact in English, because the articles and pronouns should determine which or whose mother. Apart from these grammatical nuances, Kibuvits’s writing has a particular rhythm and feeling in Estonian, which is sometimes expressed with ellipses, alliteration, or repetitions, and sometimes features words spelled with spaces between the letters for emphasis. Kibuvits also has a special fondness for portmanteau words. Although compound words are grammatical and common in Estonian, Kibuvits combines words more often than standard Estonian does, to express herself poetically. Overall, I have tried to keep her writing’s rhythm and feeling in English as best as I could. I have also tried to translate idioms as close to the original as possible and supplied notes around the nuances of these aspects of translation.
Most of Kibuvits’s texts, including this one, are written in simple present tense, as the present moment seems to be Kibuvits’s primary interest. Kibuvits was well-informed about her cultural and political present. “Ladybirdred” is vibrating with references to the 1930s on an international level: Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927 and the US tour that followed; ballet culture in Paris; and adventure stories and popular literature. The word Apache would have been known to her through either Estonian or German translations of such adventure stories. For example, some James Fenimore Cooper’s stories were translated to Estonian as early as 1880, probably via a German translation. Despite Russian occupation, the land-owning and ruling class on the area was Baltic Germans and German was the language educated people would have known and used (Annus, “The Problem” 29-35, Soviet 145-159). Kibuvits was educated in German, and in 1951 translated Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-6) and Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (1821) into Estonian. Kibuvits, then, might have read the American adventures stories either in Estonian or German, and her multilingualism further places her work in transnational contexts. I have annotated as many of these references to popular culture and literature as possible to highlight Kibuvits’s currency and international awareness.
When it comes to translating pejorative terms, I have kept the terms Kibuvits used. For example, the narrator often uses the word spinster (vanatüdruk) to describe elderly or unmarried women. The attitude toward women remains ambiguous throughout the story, but Margus uses the term kindly or cruelly, depending on his mood. I have thus kept the word spinster, as I have kept the words negro and gypsy, now considered pejorative. However, I hope that, by introducing an unjustly forgotten text written by an Estonian author, this introduction and translation is a means to think of the complex and indeterminable discussions – translation, material history of books, cultural and political nuances – which are ongoing in transnational literary studies.
The writing of this introduction and translation was supported by the ETAG project “Women, Nations and Affect: The Significance of Leida Kibuvits’s Writing in the Context of Transnational Modernisms” (SJD3), and by “Power of Women Leaders” (MHVLC23019).
Notes
1. Le Spleen de Paris (also titled Petits Poèmes en prose) was translated to Estonian in 1930 by Marie Under, an Estonian poet.
2. See Taagepera, Estonia; Kuldkepp, “Hegemony”; Annus, Soviet, and “The Problem,” for a nuanced discussion of Estonian history and its colonisations and occupations.
3. See Taagepera, Estonia; and Annus, Soviet and “The Problem,” for a discussion of modern Estonian history.
4. For information on how the Soviet ideology influenced literary works and art more generally, see Daniele, and Lange, “Translation.”
5. See Talviste, “Slow-Burn,” for a longer discussion on different appearances of nationalism in Estonia in the 1920s and 1930s.
6. The word mare was likely omitted because it is an expletive. It appears that the 1962 edition has omitted or softened other derogatory words and content that might be sexual.
Works Cited
NOTE: All sources referred to in the introduction and the translation are listed in this works cited.
Annus, Epp. “The Problem of Soviet Colonialism in the Baltics.” Journal of Baltic Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2012, pp. 21-45.
“Apache, N.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, Dec. 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9729384057.
Berman, Jessica. “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?” Modernism/modernity, vol. 24, no. 2, 2017, pp. 217-44.
“Biography of Leida Kibuvits.” The Kondas Centre, https://kondas.ee/exhibitions/2018/works-by-leida-kibuvits. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.
Coates, Jamie. “Key Figure of Mobility: The Flaneur.” Social Anthropology, vol. 25, No. 1, 2017, pp. 28-41.
Cooper, James Fenimore. Cooperi jutustused Ameerika maalt: Nahksuka jutud [Cooper’s Tales from the Land of America: Leatherstocking Tales]. Translated from the German by Johan Jürgenstein, K. Mattiesen, 1880. https://www.digar.ee/viewer/et/nlib-digar:427538/363295/page/3.
Dampc, Anna, and Maria Luczkiewicz. “Rhododendron tomentosum (Ledum palustre). A review of traditional use based on current research.” Fitoterapia, vol. 85, 2013, pp. 130-43.
Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Harvard UP, 2008.
Gampfer, Scott. “The Queen City Welcomes Charles Lindbergh and His Spirit of St. Louis, August 6, 1927.” https://www.cincymuseum.org/2020/05/20/the-queen-city-welcomes-charles-lindbergh-and-his-spirit-of-st-louis-august-6-1927/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2024.
Hugo, Victor. Le roi s’amuse, 1832. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/29549/pg29549-images.html.
Kibuvits, Leida. “Lepatriinupunane.” Elagu inimene! [An Ode to the People!]. Eesti Riiklik Kirjastus, 1962.
---.“Lepatriinupunane.” Endistest aegadest [Of Bygone Times]. Eesti Raamat, 1977.
---. “Lepatriinupunane.” Lepatriinupunane [Ladybirdred]. Eesti Raamat, 1987.
---. “Lepatriinupunane” [“Ladybirdred”]. Rist ja Rõõm [Joy and Sorrow]. Eesti Kirjastuse Kooperatiiv, 1938.
Kuldkepp, Mart. “Hegemony and Liberation in World War I: The Plans for New Mare Nostrum Balticum.” Ajalooline Ajakiri: The Estonian Historical Journal, vol. 3, 2015, pp. 249-86.
Mainwaring, Madison. “Ballet and Celebrity at the Paris Opera, or the Dreams of the Rat.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2023, pp. 36-52.
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