Introduction

The present essay focuses on the Estonian national epic, Kalevipoeg (Kalev's Son, often rendered into English as Kalevide), on its genesis and its pre-requisites, as well as on its further functioning as the identity text of Estonian nationhood. This original work of fiction, consisting of two introductions and twenty cantos (more than 19,000 verses), which has been translated into 16 languages and published in Estonia in nineteen different editions, has become a public symbol of modern Estonian culture and its evolution. In modern Estonian cultural historiography, those Estophiles of the first half of the nineteenth century who promoted the epic's appearance – and particularly its author, the Estonian doctor Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882) – are regarded as something approaching iconic figures, as individuals who answered the call of their age. Yet, in the nineteenth century, the emancipation of the Estonian peasantry, social changes and the emergence of an Estonian national literature were by no means to be taken for granted, and should rather be viewed as a result of several historical and cultural contingencies.

The Estonian ‘Age of Awakening’ as a whole was, like Kreutzwald's epic, highly varied and complex in its cultural, social and political choices. Hence, the monolithic text of the epic can, from another angle, be viewed as just one of the various selections available to be made at the time – both as regards its sources and in a broader sense.