Sovetiseerimine kui eesti rahvusliku folkloristika konservant
Sovietisation as a preservative for Estonian national folkloristics

Summary/Abstract: In the first post-war decade, Estonian folklore studies were, like the rest of the Estonian humanities, subjected to certain impacts of Sovietisation, which brought along not only institutional reforms but also changes in the research paradigm. As a result, the folklorists had to perform some tricky maneuvers with the words rahvalik ‘popular’ and rahvuslik ‘national; ethnic’, and to withdraw, for a period, from collecting and studying archaic folklore, which used to be the core of Estonian national folkloristics. Estonian folklorists adapted to the changes so that without bringing practically anything new to the field, just by changing the discourse, they managed to leave an impression of having acquired a new “Marxist method”, while the novel tasks of fieldwork addressing contemporary Soviet folklore and the tradition reflecting Russian-Estonian ethnic relations were taken rather lightly. Actually, Estonian folklore of the time was extremely poor in the material anticipated, because the political and economic changes had taken place only recently. The few findings matching the new paradigm, however, were publicised with great zeal. As the possibility of connecting both folklore and hobby culture under popular creative activities seemed strange to Estonian folklorists, hobby folklore was never included among research objects. The unsolicited and hypocritical Russian studies were abandoned first chance. Total absence of relevant publications can be seen as evidence of the failure of the new tasks. Hence the conclusion that Sovietisation acted as a preservative for Estonian folkloristics. Although Estonian folklorists had already studied contemporary folklore as well as the folklore of ethnic minorities in the pre-war period, as soon as Stalinism showed signs of moving to the close they immediately returned to the collection and studying of the old “classical” genres of national folklore. It was actually Kreutzwald’s Kalevipoeg, fitting into the theme of heroic epics that happened to be prestigious in Soviet folkloristics, which provided the researchers an escape back to the rescue collecting and publication of runic songs and old legends. So the archaic genres of folklore remained in the foreground of research up to the final decades of the 20th century, while more recent folklore failed to attract research attention until the 1980s.

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