bal'24
On being a “female poet” and an “Estonian-Russian identity poet” in 21st-century Estonia
Sveta Grigorjeva
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As one of my poems starts: “I was born in 1988”. In the midst of the gloomy tropics of the panel houses of Tallinn. Two years before my brother. Three years before the fall of the Soviet Union. Thirty-six Estonian winters I have seen to date, during which I have lived in a world without the internet and I have lived in a world with the internet. I have lived in a world without mobile phones and in a world with mobile phones. The first Lays crisps hit the kiosks by the time I was six. Sometimes I can't remember the name of my grandmother, who died long ago, yet I know exactly where the first McDonald's was built. I also remember exactly what was the first rude word I learned in the yard: impotent.
At the same time, for the first time, the TV was showing adverts of beautiful women demonstrating their opening and closing palms. How many winters did I live with the knowledge that becoming an adult woman meant some mystical choreography of the hand, blue fluid and the absorption of the latter into a tiny white cylindrical object hidden in a palm? And then, of course, there's the melody which, to this day, haunts me – the opening instrumental of a strange series in which all the characters kept wanting to know who killed Laura Palmer. The little girls, of course, weren't so interested in that, since we were all so very much in love with Leonardo DiCaprio. How many winters have I seen, how many more winters am I yet to see? Isn't it funny, all of us who know that the climate is warming dangerously – we are the ones who are often called snowflakes.
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One could say that if one decides to write about marginalization – be it belonging to a minor national identity or queer sexuality or just “simply” about experiencing womanhood in a patriarchal society – one is expected to receive a certain amount of criticism from the so-called status quo.
Poetry books rarely cause scandals, especially nowadays (who reads them anyhow when there is instagram-poetry?) but in 2013 something happened in the Estonian literary scene. It caused exactly this: a heightened discussion on poetics and language – a poetry scandal!
In the midst of this were mainly two debut collections written by two women: Liina Tammiste's Refresh and my own collection titled Who is Afraid of Sveta Grigorjeva?. The latter was the first poetry collection written by a bilingual Estonian-Russian poet. The fact that it was written in Estonian by a woman with a clearly Russian name, made it even more sensational. When the book was published it was quickly labeled “feminist”, “punk” and described on many occasions as “an angry young woman's poetry”. The reception of the poetry collection has been controversial. Opinions expressed in reviews were contradictory, especially regarding language, form, and my persona. I have always been opinionated regarding wider societal issues surrounding art and the main themes in my poetry are tightly related to social criticism. But what made Who is Afraid of Sveta Grigorjeva? so scandalous back then?
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I was born in 1988 to working-class parents, an Estonian mother and a Russian father. My mother comes from a small town called Rapla and my father from one of the big cities in Russia called Ufa. They met in Tallinn, fell in love and as a result they had me and my brother. As a child, I read a lot of poetry, and soon started writing it myself. My first collection was published when I was 26 and it was very much concerned with deconstructing the post-socialist Estonian-Russian identity, as the lyrical I says in one of the poems: for Estonians, I was more Russian, or “russ”, and for Russians, I was more Estonian, or “kuratka” (kurat means "damn" in translation).
The question of national identity was central to the reception of my debut collection. Although it was discussed in almost all of the reviews, most critics eventually concluded that there are more important issues next to the national identity itself, from the reproaches of the exploitation of the “exotic Other” to creation of a new kind of Estonian. Also the principle of the transformation of the lyrical self was argued more important than a fixed identity: national identity can be a phenomenon to be deconstructed and played with. On the other hand, some argued that the national identity portrayed in the volume was external and represented the media image of an Estonian citizen and not so much the poet's inner sense of self. Even though the stereotype of a young, angry Estonian woman was somewhat inevitable in a male-centered poetry landscape, reducing my poetry to the national question was mainly agreed to be a gross underestimation.
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One thread running through my poems is a play on the Estonian reader's expectations of a poet of partly Russian origin. About deconstructing stereotypes but also about connections between the poet´s (my own) name and identity. For example, in the text “I was born in 1988…” is stated: “no, I do not speak Estonian with an accent / especially not / if I leave my name unsaid // no, I don't speak in Russian with an accent / especially not / if I leave my mothers name unsaid”. In my debut collection I often use multilingualism as a poetic technique in texts on identity themes, and the same quoted poem ends with a code-switch from one language to another: “onju // папа” (translation: “right, dad?”). Switching from one code to another emphasized my own concerns on identity: what happens to a person when they do not fit into any particular pregiven national frame?
For a long time my double-identity made me feel like I was inhabiting liminality in terms of belonging: being neither “this” nor “that”. What happens to a person when there is no single story with which they could identify? The liminality was at first painful in many ways, it also made me analyze my own situation in terms of segregation in Estonia. Especially living in Lasnamägi, the so-called ghetto of Tallinn, made me ponder about different school systems: the unification of the Estonian and Russian-speaking schools in Estonia is yet to happen in 2024. It has also given food for thought on questions such as what is nationality, what does identity and representational politics do to certain groups of people and why is it better to have one strong identity instead of maybe two or three “weak” ones?
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Since 24 February 2022, I have often returned to my childhood, to the time when Estonia as a democracy was freshly emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union, and I – although I didn't quite know why at the time – as a sensitive child, felt very clearly that being Russian is something very, very bad. Now, 30 years later, the same feelings are back. The difference is that now at least I understand what these feelings stem from. In this sense we can speculate that today's Estonian-Russian or Russian-speaking Estonian children will inevitably also begin to suppress a part of their identity for reasons that are at first incomprehensible to them. Maybe in ten or twenty or thirty years we will have another literary book which delves into such “double identity-heritage” problems.
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My entering into the Estonian literary scene (as well as some other poets) was also marked by being vigorously labeled with the prefix “woman” or “female” in reviews written mostly by males. Wanting to disparage or simply categorize, some critics or literary researchers still use terminology like “women's poetry” but it is much rarer than ten years ago. But what is interesting is that not all women are “female poets” and even men's poetry can have women's poetry tendencies. But what does it mean then? Is it something less or more than poetry? Something more biological-social? Just a word expressing a power dynamic in patriarchal society? Why is this prefix always associated with exaltation or demotion, but rarely with gender equality? On one hand “women's/female poetry” can be taken as a purely descriptive and non-judgemental term, conveying a more specific female experience, meaning poetry written by a woman and communicating the experience of being one. On the other hand it can also mean writing which moves in a certain poetic framework and tending towards the so-called amateur style.
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Poet and literary scholar Aare Pilv described the use of gendered terminology 10 years ago as something that can be understood in many ways but in particular as the following two: a) There is a semi-mythical conception of female-centredness in Estonian poetry. The tradition has been carried through history mainly by women poets: Koidula, Haava, Under, Alver, Vaarandi, Luik, Kareva. This line can, with minor concessions, represent the development and establishment of the artistic mastery of Estonian poetry as a whole. Hence the first meaning of women's poetry is the main line of Estonian poetry at its highest level. b) However, the term “women's poetry” is also used to denote a certain kind of “bad poetry” that follows certain stereotypes and is epigonic. It is seen as a good sign when a poet departs from the characteristics of women's poetry in their texts. And as Pilv states, it is quite odd that this poetry should be called “women's poetry” and that the word “women's” or “females” should have such an evaluative quality.
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Looking back at the reception from ten years ago it does make me think whether the derogatory use of the term “female/women poetry” was a symptom of a quite misogynist and sexist literary scene. Today we can state that the situation has clearly improved. Virginia Woolf wrote in her infamous essay A Room of One's Own that for a woman to write, she needs space and money as a prerequisite for stability. Looking at the present day, however, it seems that Woolf's assertion goes only so far. While many women writers today have these conditions fulfilled, the question remains, whether women's writing is valued in the same way as men's. Perhaps it would even be appropriate to ask: even if a woman has her own room, even if a woman has her own money, why is her work in 21st-century Estonia not valued in the same way as a man's? Why in 2024 the literature prizes of the Estonian Cultural Endowment were given to eight men out of nine categories altogether? So clearly – even though the reviews don't use terms such as “female/women's poetry” for a derogatory purpose anymore, in comparison to the literature written by male writers, women's literature still tends to be undervalued.