Lydia Koidula

Lydia Emilie Florentine Jannsen was born on 24 December 1843, 12 December old style, at Vändra, the first child of Johann Voldemar Jannsen and Juliana Emilie Koch. The house where she was born, a former parsonage, stands near the road from Vändra to Viljandi; since 1958 Vändra has also had a memorial stone with her portrait by Juhan Raudsepp. Her father would later edit the Perno Postimees and publish the Eesti Postimees, help found the Vanemuine Society and write the song Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja rõõm. In 1843 all of that still lay ahead. Five more children followed Lydia: a sister, Eugenie, and the brothers Julius, Leopold, Harry and Eugen.

In 1850, when Lydia was six, the family moved to Pärnu. Her father became schoolmaster at the Ülejõe schoolhouse, built that same year, and the house stayed the Jannsens’ home for thirteen years. Today the address is Johann Voldemar Jannseni Street 37, and since 1945 the building has housed the Koidula Museum. A tablet on the wall reads that J. W. Jannsen lived here from 1850 to 1863 and that his daughter Lydia grew up here. Her brother Harry, later a journalist and one of the founders of Estonian national theatre, was born in Pärnu in September 1851.

Her first lessons came from her father at home. From August 1854 to December 1861 she attended the Pärnu Higher Girls’ School. The school was German-language: German was the language of schooling and of the educated class in nineteenth-century Estonia, and it was the language she would later translate a great deal from, prose, poetry and drama. In the autumn of 1862 she passed the home-teacher’s examination at Tartu University, the highest education then available to a woman. She never took up work as a governess. Her work was waiting at home, at her father’s editorial desk.

In 1857 her father began editing the weekly Perno Postimees ehk Näddalileht, the first Estonian-language periodical. Its appearance is regarded as the beginning of the national awakening, and the paper was put together in the same Ülejõe schoolhouse where the family lived. The editor drew his daughter into translating and adapting reading matter. Lydia’s first piece to reach print was the story Kiwwi-rist in 1861; she was seventeen. She translated and adapted stories from German for the paper and worked beside her father on it, in Pärnu as later in Tartu. In practice that made her Estonia’s first woman journalist.

Her first book appeared in 1863 at her father’s initiative: the translated and adapted story Ojamölder ja temma minnia, licensed for print on the last day of November. The subtitle says who set the tale down: “A tale for the joy and instruction of the Estonian people, set down by Lydia Jannsen.” Ojamölder was later translated into Finnish and German. The later stories, Peru oma viimane Inka in 1865 and Juudit in 1870, came out under her father’s name instead. In December 1863 the family moved to Tartu, where the Eesti Postimees began in January 1864 and Lydia became its working editor for ten years. But that is the next chapter.

Eesti Kirjanike Muuseumide Ühing: Lydia Koidula · Eesti Kirjanike Muuseumide Ühing: Koidula paigad (Vändra) · Eesti Kirjanike Muuseumide Ühing: Lydia Koidula ajatelg · EWOD, Eesti kirjanike leksikon: Koidula · Vikipeedia: Lydia Koidula · Kreutzwaldi sajand (Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum): Lydia Koidula · Vikipeedia: Koidula Muuseum · Pärnu Muuseum: Koidula Museum · Eesti teatri biograafiline leksikon: Lydia Koidula · Eesti teatri biograafiline leksikon: Harry Jannsen · Wikipedia: Johann Voldemar Jannsen

In December 1863 the Jannsens moved from Pärnu to Tartu, and from January 1864 the Eesti Postimees appeared there. Lydia was her father’s right hand: she translated stories, wrote, put together the story section, the Eesti Postimehe jututuba, and handled subscriptions. For ten years, until her marriage in 1873, she was the paper’s working editor. The story and calendar supplements increasingly fell to her; most of her prose appeared there. Her first book, the adapted tale Ojamölder ja temma minnia, got its printing permit on the last day of November 1863; its subtitle says the tale was set down by Lydia Jannsen. The next, Peru oma viimane Inka (1865), came out under her father’s name.

In 1865 Jannsen was among the founders of the Vanemuine Society in Tartu; this men’s choral society marked its fifth anniversary on 24 June 1870. In July 1865 the Eesti Postimees printed the poem Kodu, known by its first line, Meil aiaäärne tänavas. It is Koidula’s translation of a Low German poem by Klaus Groth, not her own original, yet it became a folk song. The register of monuments lists as no. 4376 the house where Lydia Koidula and Johann Voldemar Jannsen lived from 1865 to 1868. On Tiigi Street, where the Jannsen home once stood, an oak linked with Koidula grows, with an information board explaining why.

In March 1866 a thin collection, Vainulilled, spelt Waino-Lilled at the time, appeared anonymously in Kuressaare: 32 poems inspired by German poetry, printed at the expense of Christian Assafrey. A year later, in 1867, Emajõe ööbik, The Nightingale of the Emajõgi, appeared in Tartu, again without a name, at the expense of Heinrich Laakmann. This is the book that holds Ema süda, Sind surmani and Mu isamaa on minu arm. Karl August Hermann wrote in his history of Estonian literature that almost all of Koidula’s poems are original, not translations or arrangements, and that the poems of Emajõe ööbik became her best known among the people.

The book carried no name, and Carl Robert Jakobson wondered in public who this Nightingale of the Emajõgi might be. He was compiling his school reader, the Kooli Lugemise raamat, and wanted poems from the collection for it. To its author he gave the name Koidula: it meant the time of dawn. The reader received its permit in October 1867, carried twelve of her poems and printed the full name Lydia Koidula for the first time. Koidula herself found the name beautiful, poetic, mysterious and lofty. Lists of Estonian bynames still record her as Koidulaulik, the dawn-singer, or Emajõe ööbik. Jakobson remained her only Estonian correspondent of about her own age.

Her father was an early figure of the awakening, working through his paper and two song festivals; his daughter came to hold the standing of Estonia’s national poet and is counted among the central figures of the awakening. In 1867 she wrote first to Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, asking the author of Kalevipoeg for advice as a beginning poet. By the account of the publisher of the 2023 edition of the correspondence he called her letters the only points of light in his life and enjoyed her witty descriptions of Tartu life. With Jakob Hurt she had a deep friendship and nothing more; her letters to him never reached the archives. At first Kreutzwald, Koidula, Jannsen, Jakobson and Hurt supported one another; the sharp split between Hurt and Jakobson came in the late 1870s.

Finnish friends came to Tartu in person. History professor Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen visited the Jannsens in 1867 and remained a correspondent. In March 1870 her letters with Antti Almberg, the young editor of the newspaper Uusi Suometar, began. In June and July 1871 her father, Lydia and her brother Harry went to Finland. Almberg and Thiodolf Rein received them in Helsinki; after a ceremonial lunch near Helsinki on 27 June they travelled through Hämeenlinna, Tampere and Hyvikkälä, Hakoinen manor and Yrjö-Koskinen’s estate Leppälahti, returning to Tartu on 8 July. The letters with Almberg ended in Koidula’s veiled declaration of love, from which he withdrew; they appeared as a book in 1925.

Kreutzwaldi sajand (Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum): Lydia Koidula · EWOD, Eesti kirjanike leksikon: Lydia Koidula · Vikipeedia: Emajõe ööbik · Vikipeedia: Vainulilled · Vikipeedia: Lydia Koidula · Keel ja Kirjandus: Koidula kirjad · Eesti Kirjandusmuuseumi Teaduskirjastus: kirjavahetuse 2023. aasta väljaande tutvustus · Keel ja Kirjandus: Koidula nimest ja „Emajõe ööbikust“ · Wikipedia: Johann Voldemar Jannsen · Kultuurimälestiste register: mälestis nr 4376 · Vikitekstid: K. A. Hermann, „Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu“, Lydia Koidula

On 19 February 1873 Lydia Jannsen married Eduard Michelson, a Latvian-born physician who had studied medicine at the University of Tartu. By marriage she became Lydia Michelson, and her ten years as the working editor of the Eesti Postimees came to an end. The couple settled in Kronstadt, the naval fortress town on the island of Kotlin near St Petersburg, where he served as a military doctor. Koidula lived there for thirteen years. She spent the summers in Estonia, but is said never to have stopped being homesick. In Kronstadt she grew distant from her circle of friends and from the national movement.

In 1874 the first child, Hans Voldemar, was born in Tartu. A daughter, Hedvig, called Hedda, followed in 1876. That autumn Eduard Michelson received a two-year study scholarship to Germany and Austria. In early October the Michelsons left with Hans for Breslau; four-month-old Hedvig stayed in Tartu in the care of her grandparents. The family lived in Breslau, Strasbourg and Vienna, where a daughter, Anna Emilie, was born on 23 January 1878. When Koidula returned to Tartu with the children, Hans caught an infectious disease in the summer and died at the age of four.

It has been said that homesickness made Koidula useless and mute in Kronstadt. Elo Lindsalu, in an article based on her doctoral thesis, sets the figures against that: in Kronstadt Koidula wrote over a hundred poems, most of them artistically more mature than her Tartu work. The Sirp article ‘Koidula müüdi surm’ recalls in turn that in her final years there she was lonely and unhappy. In 1880 she wrote in Kronstadt the comedy Kosjaviinad ehk Kuidas Tapiku pere laulupidule sai, her last play. The same year her father’s time as publisher of the Eesti Postimees, begun in 1864, came to an end. In February 1884 a son, Max, was born and died after a few days.

Koidula suffered severely from breast cancer. She was operated on twice, and by some accounts her left breast was removed. The fight against the cancer made her dependent on opioids, with several injections a day. In 1886 both daughters took the entrance examinations of the Kronstadt gymnasium. Lydia Koidula died in Kronstadt on 11 August 1886, 30 July in the old style, aged 42. Hedvig was ten and Anna eight. Twenty years earlier, in Mu isamaa on minu arm, she had written ‘su rüppe heidan unele, mu püha Eestimaa’: into your lap I lie down to sleep, my holy Estonia. She was buried at the German cemetery in Kronstadt.

The daughters attended four classes of the Kronstadt gymnasium, learned French and took piano lessons; later their father sent them to Feldmann’s German-language boarding school in St Petersburg. Eduard Michelson died in Kronstadt in 1907. Hedvig, who had nursed him, kept the estate; she studied at an agricultural school to help Russian peasants and lived alone in Leningrad, where her attempt to move to Estonia fell through and where she died in 1941. Anna studied and lived in France and Italy, spent the years 1934 to 1944 in Estonia and died in Florence in 1965. Their mother’s grave in Kronstadt was lost in the devastating years.

In the summer of 1946 it was decided to bring Koidula’s remains home. The family burial site in Kronstadt was located, and on 11 August 1946, the sixtieth anniversary of her death, the government of the Estonian SSR and figures of Estonian culture reburied her at Tallinn’s Metsakalmistu according to the Soviet ritual of the time, beside other figures of Estonian culture. Only the poet herself was moved: the order from above concerned Koidula alone. Eduard Michelson and the son Max remained in the Kronstadt cemetery. She was not taken to the Jannsen family plot at Tartu’s Maarja cemetery, where her father lies. Her grave at Metsakalmistu is a protected monument, number 1111 in the national register.

Vikipeedia: Lydia Koidula (wording adapted, CC BY-SA 4.0) · Vikipeedia: Eduard Michelson · Tartu Postimees: Koidula haud kadus laastavates aastates · ERR arhiiv, Pealtnägija: Lydia Koidula traagiline eraelu · Postimees: Lydia Koidula tütar Anna Michelson · Elo Lindsalu doktoritöö naisekujudest kirjanduses (naised.net) · Sirp: Koidula müüdi surm · Eesti Entsüklopeedia: Koidula, Lydia · Wikipedia: Lydia Koidula (wording adapted, CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikipedia: Johann Voldemar Jannsen · Wikipedia: Mu isamaa on minu arm · Kultuurimälestiste register: Lydia Koidula haud, nr 1111 · Wikimedia Commons: Johann Voldemar Jannseni haud Tartu Maarja kalmistul