Following the crusades to the then-pagan Baltic region that started in the 13th century, German-speaking knights became the landowning class in both Estonia and Latvia, retaining their influence locally even as political control shifted to Poland, Sweden and later Russia. Often dominant in the cities, Baltic Germans also asserted control in the countryside, ruling from manor houses over generally Estonian- and Latvian-speaking peasants. Much of the physical evidence of their presence disappeared during the 1905 revolution, which was particularly violent in Latvia and which led to many manors burning to the ground. Then, the community departed, almost in its entirety, in the aftermath of the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that carved up Eastern Europe, as Hitler – aware that the Baltics would soon be occupied by the Soviet Union – encouraged Germans to leave for the Reich, assigning many lands in occupied Poland.
British-born, Latvian-based writer Mike Collier’s latest novel Stārks (“The Stork”), recently published in Latvian, attempts to reconstruct a world that existed not too long ago, honing in on a fictional German manor in northern Latvia, Blanckenhof. In the early years of the 20th century, a Russian doctor of German heritage is engaged by an eccentric baron, obsessed with the study of birds, to help him and his wife conceive a child. Between pursuing medical studies in Tartu, the doctor observes the apparently rigid and unchanging relations between the gentry and the servants and peasants living around the manor, and participates in a time-honoured ritual: a procession to the sea on Midsummer Day (Jāņi in Latvian) led by the baron. Collier recently spoke to Vilis Kasims about the traces of German rule that can still be detected in the landscape (as the doctor in the novel puts it “show me a larch and I will show you a baron”), his experience of writing the book, and the place of German-speaking writers in Latvian literary history.
[The conversation begins with Mike Collier explaining that as a long-time resident of Latvia, he feels he is no longer offering a view from outside, but a “view from the middle”]
Vilis Kasims: Since you mention that middleman kind of thing, the half-Russian half-German doctor in your book, he also feels like someone in the middle of things, kind of thrown in there.
Well, you say half-Russian, half-German, but he’s not really either of those things. And part of the book is him really trying to find somewhere to fit in, and I guess he never really does. He becomes literally trapped, in a way which maybe reflects some of his interior conflicts as well.
But as I’m sure you’re leading up to, everyone in the book is, let’s say, “mixed heritage”, to use the modern parlance. And I think that’s very much the case in the modern world as well. We tend to have a view of history where back then it was very well defined who was German and who was Russian and who was Latvian – or a Lett or whatever you want to call it. But even the most cursory reading of the literature of the period or a bit of historical research shows that everyone was mixed up and certainly were a lot more mixed up than they ever acknowledge. Part of the reason that aristocracy is part of the theme as well is that we cut them a lot of slack too in saying “oh, they have these special rules” and we believe their rules – but the rules are all really nonsense, Potemkin-village type rules. So who they say they are is not necessarily who they really are.
And through the course of the novel we have several different families kind of interweaving; they identify as different families, but are they really? They’re all really mixed up. And part of the novel’s ambition, the thing I was really interested to see if people pick up on – and from speaking to the first few readers, I think they do – is to what extent this little mystery within the novel is solvable or not, or hinted at.
I mean, I can talk about some of the different influences on the book if you like, where I’ve kind of stolen things from, particularly tonally.
That was my first planned question – about both the influences and the research that I’m sure you did, both probably reading and also visiting places, and trying to absorb that atmosphere, also the physical atmosphere and the material atmosphere.
I find myself playing a bit of a double game, in that I have to stress: this is fiction. It’s not a fictionalised account of a particular individual or a particular family – but I’ve taken things from lots of places, lots of families. And as you say I’ve visited lots of places and made a sort of amalgam. But I can’t claim that it is history, even though people want to know about the research, they want to know if this or that is accurate.
I mean, I did go to a certain amount of trouble to check things like railway timetables from the Tsarist era, that you could have got from this place to that place on a certain train at a certain time – or would you have had to go via Dvinsk [now Daugavpils], or would you have had to go via somewhere else?
It’s fiction, and it’s very important to remember that it’s fiction, even though it’s dressed up as a historical novel. I’m definitely not one of these novelists who… say like Robert Graves, for example, who is kind of synthesising lots of historical primary and secondary sources and then weaving it into I, Claudius or something like that. A kind of crypto-history, as it were. I’m not offering it as crypto-history, although people are free to read it this way if they want – because it’s supposed to have this whole other layer of basically symbolism. It’s a symbolist novel in my view, in the sort of French, Italian, German traditions, which I think is something that is largely missing [in Latvian literature]. Well, it’s there to an extent in [Jānis] Ezeriņš and [Rūdolfs] Blaumanis, people like that, I think. But it’s a form that interests me.
So you’re right that, yes, I went to lots and lots of muižas [manors] and parks and so on.
But it’s really the roads which are more of an indicator. They’re what strike me in the Latvian landscape, particularly the Vidzeme and Latgale landscapes: the avenues of trees. Maybe the location of the muižas but not so much the actual buildings, and then there would be a fairly regular form of the manorial ensemble, and then the workshops, granaries, this kind of thing.
I did get to the stage where I would do a lot of exploring along the Latvian-Estonian border in particular, and I would go to a new place, say just across the border in Estonia, and I would see where the manor house or the remains of the manor house was. And there’s a certain alleyway, and then I could kind of work out by a sort of pidgin instinct – alright, well the burial site is probably going to be over there, and I can expect to see the stables over in this direction. And it’s surprising how often you can come up with a pretty accurate mental topography. So I think a lot of these Baltic German set-ups were quite similar – almost like industrial. I make this point as well about it being essentially an industrial cartel or an economic cartel, as much as a bloodline or anything like that.
So that was kind of the extent of the research; it was sort of a psychogeographic experience really, which I think anyone who has more than a cursory interest in these things will experience just by walking or driving or riding through this landscape. It seems to me it’s much closer to the surface these days than, say, the Soviet architecture and landscaping – once you get outside of Riga certainly. So you feel almost that the baronial time is closer than the occupation time in some ways. Maybe this is just my particular feeling.
It certainly did feel that way for me growing up. Because I grew up in a village that was built basically on the grounds of these manor houses.
Where was that?
Ungurpils, also in northern Vidzeme.
Oh yeah, I know.
And there were the ruins of the manor house, of the stables, and the servants’ quarters. Obviously, the village has spread out from the centre.
And even when the Soviets came along and they positioned the apartment blocks specifically as a sort of face-off against the manor house or whatever was there, even that plays into the whole narrative of like: we need to show that we’re as good as you, or to spoil the view.
And they did use some of the old stones from the manor house to build factory foundations as well.
The border markings from the baronial cemeteries as well are often re-used at the side of the road, or to mark off other things. They’re like little teeth which pop up in the landscape sometimes, and you just know: well, that’s out of place but I think I can have a fairly accurate guess as to where it came from.
It adds so much to your experience of the landscape, I think.
Did that surprise you when you were exploring and looking into these manor houses, or did you expect that already?
It’s a good question. I hadn’t really even thought about it. It’s not like I’m some big fan of visiting country houses or anything like that – I like travelling around, mainly on my own, and just letting my thoughts wander off, and they seemed to end up following these avenues, more often than not. The avenues literally point you in a direction; if you see one of these great oak or larch avenues, you want to know what’s at the end of it. More often than not, there’s nothing at the end of it. But you’ve got a fairly good idea of what was at the end of it, or why there’s no longer anything at the end of it. Even the characters of the different trees, which is something I try to bring out, tell you something. Larches are not native – they really symbolise the barons for me, because they’re always there, in their parks, in quite dominant positions. And they’re particularly always there at the entrances to the cemeteries.
So it’s like the choice of tree, the distances. I mean, I attended lectures about avenues and their renovation – very, very interesting.
At universities?
No, there was some public lecture given at Auciemmuiža. By – it wasn’t Valsts meži [State Forests]; it might have been Dabas aizsardzības pārvalde [Nature Protection Department] or something. But very, very interesting, which gave me some insight. But interestingly, at one point I’d written about a mixed avenue of oak and larch, on two different sides, and they sort of end up crossing over – not cross-pollinating, but the trees are moving from one side to the other. And I was a bit worried in case that was stretching the facts too much and this can’t happen. But then when I attended this lecture, they actually mentioned that this is a thing that sometimes happens. Usually you see mono-cultural avenues, but you can have alternates and different patterns, and certain regions or certain barons preferred… they were all slightly in competition with each other so they’d all want something a little bit more impressive or a little bit more distinctive than the others. So you did actually get these quite telling variations, which is effectively a language written there in the landscape which is sort of lost to us.
Again, people will talk about the disappearing muiža buildings, but it’s actually the plantations I think – this sort of backbone of trees – which is a real language speaking to us about who they were, what they were trying to do, what they were trying to prove to themselves and to other people and to each other. And beyond anything else, how permanent they thought they were. Because you don’t plant a grand avenue of oak trees unless you think your family is going to be there for another eight hundred years, or for another three or four hundred years at least.
And yet within a generation of the story it’s all gone.
Within a few years, because it’s set in 1904.
Well, exactly – the next year we had 1905 [the 1905 revolution], and quite a lot of the manors would have disappeared anyway. I don’t specify whether the destruction of Blanckenhof was then. I did actually finish off the book differently originally, and I had stories about all the different characters and what happened to them subsequently, but I wasn’t satisfied with that – I thought it explained too much, and removed these symbolist aspects, kind of unexplained things. So I brought the finish date forwards quite considerably, and I think it’s more effective for that.
I think it works very well like that. I don’t think it would have been improved by adding all these trails.
Well, that’s the one real discipline with writing that I think I am good at, which comes from a journalistic background, is just being taught to “cut, cut, cut”, which I think is something that’s been lost in the internet age, largely. Now people can have as much space as they want. Whereas when I set out I wanted it to be about the same length as Heart of Darkness, which I regard as the best novel published in the English language – novella, at least. And I think is the perfect length for today’s attention span, and also makes you boil everything down and be intense. So I take no shame in saying “thank you, Joseph Conrad, for saying 65,000 words is about the right length“.
I do find it interesting as well, that genuinely is what I think is the best short novel in the English language, and of course it’s written by a Pole.
I was now trying to figure out if I can see any resemblance to Heart of Darkness, but that would be quite far-fetched.
Not really, no. Only in as far as not everything is completely explained to you.
But the closer models really were: first of all, The Leopard by Lampedusa. I know there’s this – I think it’s largely a myth – notion that he did an early sketch for it while he was up in Stāmeriena [Palace, in northern Latvia]. So I actually started writing this at Stāmeriena under the big oak tree there, because I figured “he definitely started writing it here”. If you’re a writer and you’re going to start a book, you’re definitely going to do it under this tree. So I sat under there.
Because the starting idea was – I’d read The Leopard and I thought it was an absolutely brilliant piece of writing, apart from a section in the middle which I really didn’t like – the whole kinky sex section. But the journey to the coast and so on was brilliantly described, and obviously there’s some overt references to that in there, including one line which is repeated.
But the idea was: well, he’s told the side of the Italian side of his family; what if his wife, the Baroness von Wolff, had told her side of the story? Because in many ways she’s a much more interesting figure than Lampedusa, and I think she ended up as the chairwoman of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. And I thought, well, I would have been interested to hear her side of the family’s story as well – so that was the kind of starting impetus. Then after that I started reading Eduard von Keyserling’s novella The Waves, which I thought was just a really brilliant short novel, and is all in a Latvian setting, and in a way supplied the answer to: well, what if that side of the family had written a similar environment book at a similar time with a similarly symbolist or kind of painterly way of writing?
And it also got me onto this whole notion of who belongs and who doesn’t. Why isn’t von Keyserling considered a part of Latvian literature? I think he is, it just happens that he writes in German.
It’s similar to [Leonid] Dobychin [born in Daugavpils in Latvia], who wrote in Russian.
And you know, we seem very, very keen to claim Isaiah Berlin or even Wagner, who hated Riga and couldn’t get out of it fast enough, but we fall at his feet.
I think we’d be much better off claiming someone like von Keyserling, who was from Kalvene [in western Latvia] and wrote some really, really good books, which I think we could quite easily claim. And very little of his work seems to have been translated either into Latvian or into English. There’s a book of his called Dumala which I’m particularly keen to read. I wish someone would do a translation of it, because it seems it’s set in one of these manor houses in the winter. I think that’s a really interesting environment because it’s not going to be, you know, the Chekhovian sun-bleached summer days of listlessness and drinking tea and discussing things.
It’s going to be miserable.
It’s going to be miserable, so what were they up to in those days?
And he is quite good at including the local populations as well, as active and intelligent members of the cast. If any of your esteemed readers who can translate from German would like to do a translation from Dumala, I’d be very grateful to them.
I guess going back to Lampedusa’s The Leopard there’s obviously a theme of the decline of the aristocracy. And the aristocracy being presented as – not really as lampoons, so much as somewhat narrow-minded and unaware of the world around them.
Well, either that or they are aware but they will ignore it, because “this is the way we’ve always done it”. And in a way there is a sort of sunset feeling to it. Another slight influence would be Brideshead Revisited; that’s where I get this notion that you return to a building many, many years later and suddenly everything comes rushing back to you as a memory, and it’s very different now and you’re remembering a whole different world that no longer exists. That’s exactly what happens with the doctor, in the bookended structure.
So, yes, are they narrow-minded? But there’s also a certain heroism in going down with the sun and not bending to the modern world, as long as you go through with it properly. You can’t be half and half. You’re either the new man or… I suppose that is Chekhovian, isn’t it? You’re either chopping the cherry trees down or you’re just sitting there and kind of vegetating. So the baron, it is quite easy to see him as this austere, inflexible – he certainly is inflexible – but you’re never quite sure how intelligent he is or how emotional he is, what his inner life is, if he even has an inner life.
But the point is you’re not sure; it’s not that you think he doesn’t have one, you’re not sure whether he has one or not. So you can’t really censure him, because if he’s living by these rules and he’s dying by these rules – well, fair enough.
And of course the counterpart to him are the Limsack brothers, who do represent this progressive, engaged model. Whether they end up any better than him in the end is an interesting question. Which again was tackled in this kind of subsequent section. But I leave it to the readers to imagine, because it could have gone either way, I think.
After the revolution, would they have survived, or wouldn’t they? I think it’s better not to know…
Exactly. Were they one of the ones where the peasants burned it down, or where the peasants protected it? Like the Vegesacks in Raiskums – apparently they were quite liberal, and had done lots to set up infirmaries and schools and things, so when it came time for burning down the manor houses, actually the local peasants stopped the burning from happening. There were lots of cases like this, of course – other places, well, it was payback time. You’ve been grinding us down for generations, we’re going to give it to you. And that also is understandable.
It’s interesting you say that, because I feel like in contemporary Latvian literature, there’s this undercurrent of almost nostalgia for the time of the barons, of the manors. Partly I guess because of this sense of the values having been lost. Whereas in Stārks I didn’t really feel this nostalgia. The baron did feel both a comic and tragic figure at the same time.
So I was wondering is this how you see the Baltic German aristocracy in Latvia? As both comic and tragic.
Definitely, definitely.
There are representatives of all the local ethnicities in the book – and that was part of an early notion as well, to see the movement of them and to have them present. So you have the Latvians, Russians, Jews and Germans – two of those have largely disappeared, or at least partially disappeared from the landscape. But in a way the Germans disappeared even more than the Jews – in a way which is fairly unique, in that it was voluntary, or semi-voluntary at least, let’s say. But again, not all of them went. Some of them did stay and assimilate, because they felt – well, “this is my home, my family have been here for hundreds of years, I’m going to throw my lot in here and see what happens”.
All images credit – Mike Collier
A version of this interview originally appeared in Latvian on Punctum
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