Moisei Fishbein | InterviewLiterature & Democracy
NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey talks with Estonian author, academic, and translator Rein Raud about language learning as a form of freedom, “ideological products,” and preserving the humanity of fictional characters.
Rein Raud is one of Estonia’s most acclaimed novelists and thinkers. Along with writers such as Olga Tokarczuk and Gábor Schein, as well as theorists such as Ivan Krastev and the late Leonidas Donskis, Raud belongs to the post-communist generation of creative artists and thinkers dedicated to literature and democracy. Like Tomas Venclova and Ana Blandiana, his work spans a range of genres including prose, poetry, and scholarly studies. Raud has published five collections of poetry, eleven novels, and three collections of stories. He has also authored six scholarly and philosophical works. His dialogue with the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, Practices of Selfhood, discusses, among other topics, how selfhood is produced in social practice. He has written on current topics in the Estonian press. His recent novel The Sun Script received the Estonian National Cultural Award and will appear shortly in English.
Ellen Hinsey: I’d like to begin with a bit of biographical information—you were born in Estonia in 1961. Although the presence in America of writers such as Czesław Miłosz and Tomas Venclova has helped to broaden a general knowledge of Eastern European and Lithuanian history, Estonia—a very different Baltic country—is less well-known. Perhaps you could begin by speaking a bit about your upbringing and the early imprint of Estonian language and culture on you—
Rein Raud: In retrospect, one might say that my intellectual and political life began on my first trip to kindergarten, in 1965, when I was three years old. I can still remember the precise spot where my father, who was accompanying us through the morning city, told me two things: first, that in that kindergarten I would be hearing a lot about a man named “Lenin” and that he was a good guy but I was to believe none of it. Secondly, that I was to tell no one, including other children, that I did not believe all this talk. That was how it was for the entire society. I didn’t know anyone who knew anyone who actually believed the official narrative. In this, Estonia may have been a bit of an exception in the Soviet bloc, even among the nominally independent “peoples’ democracies” such as Poland and Hungary. By 1950 the naïve communists of the 1930s had been long ago purged from the ruling elites and replaced by loyal Party people brought in from the USSR—mostly descendants of Estonian resettlers from the nineteenth century. In the 1970s, another wave of Russification of the Estonian puppet government took place and tensions persisted till the end of the occupation. Sadly, by that time a certain percentage of Estonians had adopted a stance of pragmatic collaborationism. Well, there were no signs that the end of the regime might be drawing near, and lives had to be lived. That said, some of these same people, who had taken on higher positions in the regime, later ended up playing key roles in the liberation process.
EH: The Second World War had an immense impact on individual fates across the entire region—in what ways was that felt when you were growing up?
RR: My father, who was born in 1928, narrowly escaped the German draft following the 1941 Nazi invasion of Estonia. But he had friends who fought the war on all sides: those drafted in 1940 by the Soviets during the first occupation, those who were forced to fight for the Nazis, and those who escaped to Finland to evade both Soviet and German inscription. These friends frequently got together at our house and exchanged stories. There were no ideological conflicts, as none of them had considered the war their own. A large percentage of them were sent to the Gulag after the war. Most of them were highly educated intellectuals—Lennart Meri, for example, the first post-1991 president of Estonia, was one of these. A year younger than my father, he did not fight in the war, but was deported along with his family in 1941 and shared the Siberian experience with my father’s friends. Ain Kaalep, a poet and translator from many different languages, also joined these discussions. These evening conversations were a crucial part of my education.
EH: Your early language learning also served as a form of freedom before the 1991 restoration of the Estonian state.
RR: One of the things that differentiated Estonia from the rest of the Soviet bloc was the fact that we were not cut off from the (relatively) free Western information space of Finland. Finnish is closely related to Estonian and easy to learn, and Finnish TV and radio were available in the northern part of the country, including Tallinn, the capital, where I grew up. My parents soon tired of translating the TV for me and gave me a textbook for learning the Finnish language. I must have been about ten years old at the time. It took me some six months to become fairly proficient in Finnish; next, I decided to take up Swedish. Some Finnish friends brought us Swedish textbooks and my next year was spent going through these. My school taught English (not Russian) as the first foreign language—there were a few such schools for English, German, and French in all three Baltic countries—and since Finnish TV mercifully used subtitles instead of dubbing, we were able to verify the truthfulness of what we were being taught at school.
EH: You continually expanded this language learning, and it would go on to play a significant role in the development of your intellectual life—
RR: At some point my father, who had studied German at university but had never really mastered it to his satisfaction, took notice of how much pleasure my new hobby was giving me, and decided to brush up on his German as well. Soon we were doing the exercises together, and I acquired a decent knowledge of German. This was important, because we had an excellent German library at home, inherited from my father’s stepfather, a polymath intellectual who had fortunately returned from the Gulag in time to see me born and for whom I am named. Unfortunately, I have no memories of him, but many from his library, which, among other things, included a large number of academic works on, and translations of, Asian thought. These changed my world. I read volume after volume of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese thinkers, and even though I later came to realize that many of the interpretations of Asian thought presented in the books were quite dated, they provided me with a fairly solid foundation.
Asian thought was also not something included in our school curriculum, which made it all the more interesting: I was constantly under the impression that the things that really mattered were hidden from us by the authorities and replaced by communist simulacra. For example, the history of recent world literature consisted principally of authors who had communist sympathies and whose names were fairly unknown in their native countries. Not to mention history, where the US, Britain, and France were nearly as bad as Hitler’s Germany because they had fostered the growth of the Third Reich “to use it in their struggle against the Soviet Union” (the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was mentioned only in passing and its actual contents were not). So, clearly anything not included in the school program must have been important. Not surprisingly, quite a few of the first generation of leaders of post-1991 Estonia had studied history at the university and had been in trouble with the authorities while doing so.
EH: November 9, 1989—the fall of the Berlin Wall—is often evoked as the key turning point that symbolizes political change in Central and Eastern Europe. It is often forgotten, however, that Estonia was at the vanguard of change in 1988 with its “Singing Revolution,” a series of democratic protests that put increasing pressure on the communist regime.
RR: That is true. I am always sad to read about the “watershed of 1989.” In Estonia, an active movement that was heading toward the restoration of independence in all but name had started in 1987 and was in full swing by 1988. I visited the German Democratic Republic in September 1988—it was still completely asleep. When I talked to the dissidents there, they said it was important that the Baltics hold back and “do nothing”—we were to accept our historical destiny as a part of a reformed Russia rather than “rock the boat.” They were convinced at the time that any progress on human rights would only reach the GDR from Gorbachev’s Moscow.
1988 Estonian Singing Revolution
EH: To return to your personal history with languages, this has evolved into a life journey that combines linguistics, cultural theory, and philosophy—as well as literature, including your own writing. How do you see the integration of these areas of your work?
RR: I think of my work as “reading and writing” across the spectrum of what is read and written. I have always been intellectually curious and interested in learning about new things, and even though my own scholarly publications are in the field of the humanities, primarily, and social sciences, I also read a bit in the hard sciences as well. I have always been perplexed about how obsessively self-reflective all the disciplines are. When political theorists speak about culture, their concepts are completely outdated—by about seventy years. Philosophers speaking about linguistics are hardly better. Of course, it is impossible to keep yourself informed about developments in every field, but one can try, especially if students from different programs are attending your interdisciplinary seminars, as is luckily my case.
EH: And these overlapping subject matters and interests have, in turn, had an effect on your creative work—
RR: My academic work has had an influence on my literary work, for instance, on how my heroes think and act, although very few among them are intellectuals themselves. I do have occasional philosophical passages in my novels, and I hope the writing style in my academic books is not too bad in a literary sense. In any case, one genre of writing gives us a rest from another, so after finishing a monograph, say, I am more inclined to take on a new novel for a while.
EH: Your novel The Sun Script, which won the Estonian National Prize and is currently being translated into English, is a good example of the integrative nature of your work. It takes us on a fascinating journey through history: it recounts the fate of an Estonian strongwoman—based on a real-life individual—who at the time of the 1917 Revolution in Russia traveled the world. In parallel, we follow a Japanese linguist who discovers a language that he believes might lead to a unified, peaceful world and travels to Estonia.
RR: I discovered the fascinating figure of Anette Busch (1882–1969) quite by chance. Someone had asked me for materials that touched on Estonian-Japanese historical connections for a celebration to mark one hundred years of diplomatic relations. In the process, I came across an old newspaper article about her. Not much is known, though—there are a few photos and facts, but hardly enough to put together a reliable biography—so I built a new character upon her life trajectory, someone about twenty years younger, but just as strong. My heroine, Lily, travels with a circus through Czarist Russia and is pursued by an angry Georgian nobleman, just as Anette was. She escapes from Siberia to Shanghai and then to Tokyo, where she finally becomes a sumo wrestler. All of this really happened to Anette Busch as well, but I have filled in gaps with events of my own design.
EH: This is where your second storyline comes in—
RR: Right from the start I had the feeling that this could work well with another historical narrative that has been of interest to me over the years. This is the similarity between certain Japanese esoteric Shinto writing systems and the ideas of the Estonian linguist Jakob Linzbach. Linzbach developed his theory of signification in a book published in St. Petersburg in 1916, but was subsequently forgotten amid the upheavals of the Russian revolution. So I set the completely imaginary son of a Shinto priest, Nitta Tsuneo, on a journey in the opposite direction, from Japan to St. Petersburg and finally Estonia, in pursuit of Linzbach. In my novel, Lily and Tsuneo meet only once and by chance, but there are a fair number of people they both encounter on their respective journeys. Quite a few of the things that happen to Nitta-san on his travels through post-revolutionary Russia, including some of the most incredible ones, are also based on historical events, recounted in the memoirs of Japanese who were in Russia at the time.
EH: While not a rule, in recent decades much Anglophone literature treats interior psychological states rather than historical events. This is not necessarily the case with Eastern European literature. One suspects that decades of censorship mean that there are still many stories to tell. I am thinking here also of your most recent novel, The Plague Train, not yet translated into English.
RR: Historical prose has indeed been central to recent Estonian literature—for example, Karl Ristikivi (1912–1977) and Jaan Kross (1920–2007), two of the great twentieth-century classics, have both written a lot of it, and there are quite a few other writers currently working in this genre. And even for those authors for whom history is not central, there are often historical themes that are interwoven with contemporary issues. The Sun Script is an example of this, as is The Plague Train. The novel is loosely based on the life of my grandfather who was trained as a field surgeon in the Czarist Russian army. He was sent, with a couple of fellow graduates, to Manchuria to fight the major plague epidemic there in 1910–11. He later lost his house and had to accept a job as a medic in Tallinn’s central prison—because it came with an apartment. All of this also happens to Jakob Sarapik, my central character, who is nonetheless a very different human being. And the main trigger of the intrigue is wholly my own invention—namely that a former colleague of Jakob’s from the plague train is now an inmate of the prison, suspected of spying for the Soviets.
EH: You have remarked that the process of writing a novel is, in part, an exercise in putting oneself in another’s place. While this does not imply moral acceptance of a character’s actions, it is nevertheless an exercise that requires us to attempt to inhabit another’s world and understand their viewpoint. This is relevant to the practice of ethics—
RR: Yes. I think that all of my characters, including the most unsympathetic ones, need to have a little piece of humanity in them; I want to avoid describing a character from the inside while judging them from the outside. This, obviously, does not mean that I share their views or life goals, or that I would behave as they do in the situations in which they find themselves. At many crucial junctures, I am sure I would have done the exact opposite of what my characters do, but there are also choices, including difficult ones, where I am not sure. I don’t know how I would have behaved if I had found myself in a totalitarian country during wartime, for example, Nazi Germany, the USSR, or Japan. It is easy to imagine taking the moral high ground when you are not actually confronted by concrete risks. Then again, I have repeatedly wondered whether I would be capable of writing about the mind of a Russian soldier who, at this very moment, is perpetrating war crimes in Ukraine. My answer has been no, I cannot. I feel no obligation to give voice to someone who has decided to forfeit their humanity to accommodate the dreams of a deranged dictator.
EH: One might say that your novel The Death of the Perfect Sentence also relates to this, in that the reader is taken through a myriad of viewpoints—
RR: That was indeed a very difficult book to write. It started from a dream, actually, in which two young people, both part of an underground network that is passing information—but who are unaware of each other’s roles—repeatedly meet near the dead drop they both visit, become acquainted, and fall in love. Neither of them is particularly political, they are just doing the right thing. The rest of the story came quite naturally—it presents many of the tensions, choices, and conflicting visions for the future from the last years of the Soviet occupation of Estonia.
What was difficult was to recreate the feverish atmosphere of that time when so many things that have now become natural dimensions of our life—like mobile phones—were absent, as were ways to access information. I therefore decided to integrate quite a few of my own personal memories into the book, which are irrelevant to the story, but make it more understandable for present-day readers, especially those who have no personal memories from that time.
EH: A staging based on The Death of the Perfect Sentence was recently done in Latvia—there was even a character who portrayed you on stage.
RR: Yes, I was quite surprised by this. The director had put someone called “Reins Rauds” (Latvian adds the nominative ending “-s” to foreign names) on stage and each of the characters comes to him in turn, saying that if you want to tell the world about what happened, you also have to hear out my version of the story, you have to be able to see it from my point of view. And yet all the points of view—those of pro-independence activists, collaborationists, and KGB officers, as well as simple people who wanted nothing more than to go on with their lives—were different, irreconcilable even, but still considered legitimate from the vantage point of the person who held them. I don’t think it is possible to have a functioning society, capable of evolving and making smart collective decisions, if a single “correct” narrative is imposed on it—a story of what was, is, and will be.
EH: We have entered a period of political intolerance, and this environment reduces relationships to base binary forms. In turn, this affects our ability for subtle discernment—as well as compassion and our ability to build bridges—
RR: This is true. Political views have hardened into sets; if you know someone’s views regarding gay marriage, you are likely to guess correctly how they feel about environmental politics. And it is increasingly difficult to find friends if you oppose the actions of Hamas and Netanyahu equally and simultaneously. This development makes it much easier to sell what one might call “ideological products” to specific target groups, and this in turn keeps people entrenched in their positions, so that it is very difficult to change your mind about an issue, even when confronted with powerful reasons to do so. For example, it is difficult to see the reactions of some prominent people of the left concerning the war in Ukraine—they are accustomed to seeing Russia as the antipode of US imperialism and fail to see the imperialism of Russia, which has taken on a much more malign form.
EH: This brings us to the vulnerable geographical position that Estonia occupies, which the current war in Ukraine has once again highlighted. Estonia, like Lithuania and Latvia, was forced to surrender its sovereignty to the USSR in 1940, and only regained independence following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
RR: Indeed. For us, Nazis and Bolsheviks were both criminals, mirror images of each other. Both of them were willing to eradicate whole groups of people for ideological reasons, to seek some sort of pathological purity through mass murder. There may have been people in Estonia who, at certain points, genuinely believed that one or the other of these ideologies was a conduit for the good, but on the whole, our society firmly rejected this kind of view. This is also reflected in our political structure—our constitution and voting system make it almost impossible for one political party to achieve an absolute majority and to form a government alone. At least this has never happened (except in one of my novels), so all of our governments have been coalitions, in which parties representing different segments of society have to share responsibility and negotiate to find common ground. This has helped Estonian society to maintain a level of diversity in political opinions. This perhaps slows down the decision-making process, but it also makes it more difficult to make wrong decisions. What is happening in the world at the moment should remind us that democratic institutions are not a given, and that they can be dismantled—or preserved only in name—while being turned into their opposite. And if that can happen even in such traditional democracies such as the US, then the danger is much more imminent in societies where the history of democratic practice is not as long. After all, most of the elements that would have allowed Russia to evolve into a democratic state were in place in the 1990s—and look what happened.
EH: You have recently written a very interesting essay that concerns citizens’ accountability for crimes committed by an authoritarian state—referencing Karl Jasper’s classic work The Question of German Guilt. In it you explore, among other topics, the formation of groups that support, or are pulled into supporting, the logic of a dictatorial state’s actions.
RR: Yes. Having grown up in occupied Estonia—a totalitarian state, but a freedom-loving society—one observes how the human mind is never the clear-cut, well-ordered structure that some social scientists make it out to be. For example, we don’t trust the sociological research on present-day Russia for good reason, just as we do not trust the results of their elections. But even if in that atmosphere of fear a genuine sociological inquiry could miraculously take place, there is no reason to think that people would answer truthfully—for what if the results were being monitored?
It is not impossible that people who, by all appearances, enthusiastically support the war at this moment, may actually one day stand up, point their finger at their neighbors, and condemn them as the actual fascists as soon as the regime is toppled and a new fear—being identified as a supporter of the former regime—replaces the present one. These things happen all the time, when there are historical ruptures. More interestingly, people are able to create narratives for themselves that their behavior was always consistent, they have always been true to themselves and their principles, which is nonsense, of course.
EH: Following upon this, it seems that perhaps a danger—that the West has not yet fully come to terms with—is how, through social media, we witness not only the impact of disinformation, but, by agreeing to take part in social media and its proliferation, one risks becoming complicit—whether cognizant or not—in an authoritarian state’s war aims. We see this with the constant leveraging of social media regarding Ukraine and the Middle East. More than ever, due to the evolution and weaponizing of social media, one is now presented with the question of whether participation in any social media may require an unequivocal “no”—unless one can be sure one is not being instrumentalized.
RR: It is true that social media has increased these risks considerably. I have always been of the opinion that technology cannot create human stupidity, it can only amplify it, but some forms of technology are really very efficient in this and manage to suppress dissent and dialogue in the process. I used to write a lot of opinion pieces and essays on current political affairs, but I have almost given up as it is too easy for people to send you anonymous threats and hate mail. But in a way, this is only one aspect of the informational overflow that characterizes our age and has appeared as a result of processes that we should consider positive developments. More people now have a voice, it is easier to make oneself heard, access to information has been democratized, and so on. What has happened, however, is excessive simplification. As you mentioned, nuanced issues are boiled down to yes-no questions, nobody has time for analysis and debate, because more and more issues need to be decided upon, and quickly. Quite a few times I have been asked by journalists for an opinion that they have pre-formulated in their minds on the basis of how they understand me, and then they are puzzled when I say something entirely different.
EH: One thing that all of your work points to is the dangerous degree to which we are influenced by social constructs, forces, and pressures. This, in turn, evokes the question of discernment and responsibility for all of our actions. One thinks of Hannah Arendt’s hope that through thinking we can avoid the worst in human instincts—
RR: Now this is a very tricky issue, and one our age has not dealt with particularly well. Social constructionism as a current of thought has had a truly emancipatory role in our world, as it has highlighted that certain “truths” societies once held about particular groups—women and sexual and racial minorities, in particular—are nothing but ideological conceptions meant to justify disenfranchisement, exclusion, and oppression. There is no doubt that every form of what we call injustice is a social construct. This also means that we can consciously strive to make our societies more just, more inclusive, and more open to cultural diversity, which requires the integration of different perspectives for seeing the world.
But, conversely, this also opens up the possibility of ideas related to social constructionism being misused for other purposes by the same oppressive structures. In an extreme form, they can be twisted to imply that justice itself is also just such an illusion. The unspoken premise here is that if something is deemed “socially constructed,” it is worthless or at least of less value than something that exists “independently” of our will. But nothing could be further from the truth. If we have no problem accepting the human origin of the sublime beauty of poetry, music, and all other arts, why do we need to credit justice with a superhuman basis? Do we really need to have something or someone Absolute to tell us that we should be fair to our fellow beings? I think the yearning for such an Absolute is, in the final analysis, an effort to escape responsibility for the decisions we make ourselves.
For me, the best advice is that of my favorite Japanese philosopher, Dōgen from the thirteenth century: To emancipate ourselves from what we are, we need to let go of the trajectories—all the interlocking causal chains that have made us who we are—and not let ourselves be determined by them. Implicit in this is that we have to be open towards the world around us, and be able to listen to others, including those with whom we disagree.
Rein Raud (born 1961 in Tallinn, Estonia) is an acclaimed novelist, translator, and scholar of cultural theory, philosophy, and Japanese classics. He is the author of eleven novels, five poetry collections, four other books of fiction, numerous translations from Japanese, Italian, Lithuanian, classical Chinese, and German, in addition to many academic books and articles. For his literary work, he has received the National Cultural Award (2022) as well as the major literary awards of Estonia. He has also received the Order of the Rising Sun, 2nd Class, Gold and Silver Star (2011, Japan), Order of the White Star, 3rd Class (2001, Estonia), and several academic distinctions. Three of his novels have been published in English, The Brother (Open Letter, 2016), The Reconstruction (Dalkey Archive, 2017), and The Death of the Perfect Sentence (Vagabond Voices, 2017), which was longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award. A translation of The Sun Script, recipient of the 2022 Estonian National Cultural Award, is forthcoming from Norvik Press. His work has appeared in numerous languages. He lives and teaches in Tallinn.
Ellen Hinsey is the international correspondent for New England Review. She is the author of nine books of poetry, essay, dialogue, and translation. Her most recent books include The Invisible Fugue and The Illegal Age, which explores the rise of authoritarianism. Hinsey’s essays are collected in Mastering the Past: Reports from Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. Hinsey’s other poetry collections include Update on the Descent, The White Fire of Time and Cities of Memory (Yale University Series Award). Magnetic North, Hinsey’s book-length dialogue with Tomas Venclova on totalitarianism and dissidence was a finalist for Lithuania’s book of the year. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Irish Times, Poetry, and New England Review. A former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, she has most recently been a visiting professor at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany.
Photo of Rein Raud courtesy of Sohvi Vii
Subscribe to Read More