Heino Kiik

[Eric]

Heino Kiik

Heino Kiik (born 1927) is one of the unsung heroes of Estonian literature. He doesn't really yet merit a thread of his own, as nothing of his is available in English. Born in the countryside, like Mats Traat, Kiik became an agricultural expert and, latterly, a dendrologist (tree expert, to you). But as a literary author, he has two strings to his bow:

Realist novelist. After writing the predictable books on trees during the 1960s, Kiik began writing about the time when Estonian farms were turned into kolkhozes under the new Soviet r?gime. His novel "Tondi??maja" [Lodging for a Ghost; 1967] makes fun of the clumsy way in which the Soviet authorities "reformed" Estonian agriculture. This novel was followed by a whole series of further comic novels with the somewhat Shvejkian figure, towny and folksy Arve Jomm, as hero.

Diarist. Kiik has published at least 15 thinnish booklets containing his diary notes, and, not least the routes his various books took to achieve publication. In the Soviet Union, this was a complex process, as an author did not simply send his manuscript to a publisher to be accepted or rejected, but had to use an enormous amount of persuasion, cajoling, pleading, etc., with all manner of people, from the Estonian Communist Party First Secretary downwards, via the head of the writers' union, the Glavlit censors, and others. Some Estonians don't like the way Kiik exposed all these wanglings and wranglings, tiffs and patch-ups, but for an outsider like me, who have never lived under the absurd Soviet system, Kiik's diaries give a fascinating glimpse of Soviet Estonia in the 1960s to 1980s, the two steps forward and one back that writers were eternally taking. The Communist Party leadership would have whole discussions as to whether a particular book was suitable for publication. (I can't see Gordon Brown and his cabinet discussing whether a slightly jokey and anti-New Labour novel could be published or not!)

[Stewart]

He doesn't really yet merit a thread of his own, as nothing of his is available in English.
Everyone deserves their own thread, translated or not. It's much easier to find out about someone if they have their own thread, readable or not, when you can see them listed in the Writers (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/writers/) area, especially if some members aren't following the Estonian Literature (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/general-discussion/113-estonian-literature.html) thread. To that extent, I've copied this here.

[Eric]

If you say so, Stewart. His diaries are great. An amazing collection of facts and detail, all involving trees, sport but mainly what I said: getting books published under absurd conditions in the Soviet Union.

I like the bit on the Estonian literature thread where he writes about his KGB files. Just shows what a pedantic waste of time all this informer business was. Imagine if MI5 or MI6 had nothing better to do than say that John Bloggs knows foreigners and that his father-in-law was executed.

So, what I wrote and translated on the other thread, reproduced to fill the thread here:

*

A little excerpt, picked totally at random, from one of Heino Kiik's books of diaries. I opened the book called Rekord [Record; 1996] at page 134. But I knew there'd a be juicy bit, as almost every page of the Kiik diaries has something funny, sad, infuriating or tongue-in-cheek. But this is as real as real can be:


(Reading this document today, i.e. 24th April 1995, it came as a total surprise that the KGB knew that I was writing my diaries. As far as I am concerned, I wrote these diaries in strict secrecy. How did people get to know about them?

I don't know who "Agent Peeter" is nor his proxies. According to records, their assessment of me in 1985 was positive. This was at the beginning of the Gorbachev era. Did this in any way affect the outcome of the novel competition? Anyway, I feel it is necessary to reproduce this short document here.)

CONFIDENTIAL DOCUMENT IN ONE COPY

On checking we have found details of how Kiik, Heino Jaanovich, signed the "Letter of Forty" in 1980. This was, of course, an unbalanced and impulsive thing to do. Earlier, he aired politically immature opinions regarding our national politics. He has acquaintances among emigrants and foreigners in the USA, Canada, Sweden and Finland. His father was sentenced to 17 years incarceration in 1945 on account of anti-Soviet activities and died in 1947 in captivity. His mother and brother spent the years 1947 to 1957 in internal exile, being guilty of being members of a nationalist family.

His wife has acquaintances in various capitalist countries; people in the category "friend".

Deputy Chairman of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republican National Defence Committee [aka KGB], V. Poryvkin, June 1985

Travel was also of interest to the KGB. So this diary entry continues:



In my travel file, there was also the first, unedited draft without a signature. Here you can read:

He is mentally unstable and has a tendency towards extremist behaviour, a tendency towards machinations. He is nationalist by nature, says anti-Soviet things and moves in emigrant circles.

(There is a mistake in the above. My mother and brother were deported in 1949, not 1947 as stated.)

Helmi [Kiik's wife] filled in her application for a tourist visa for Egypt and Greece, starting 15th January 1986.

On 28th March 1986, the KGB issued a secret document stating:

On checking, we have found that her husband has broad contacts in capitalist countries. Connections of a friendly nature. Her father [presumably a Soviet citizen, even then] was sentenced to 7 years prison in 1935 for anti-Soviet activities, but in 1938, the Dalstroi NKVD troika [committee of three judges] sentenced him to death. The sentence was executed on 10th May 1938. (...)
Never a dull moment with Heino Kiik! Do you now see why Estonian literature is not boring (unlike chartered accountancy in the Monty Python sketch)?

[Mirabell]

Not translated into German either. bummer. with all these east europeans, one often gets lucky with gdr translations.

[Eric]

"The Letter of Forty", which Kiik signed, was a petition, intended for publication in Pravda, complaining about the lack of press freedom in Soviet Estonia and similar.

The KGB weren't too keen on this act of anti-Soviet defiance (what we call grassroots democracy in the West). So they interviewed all the signatories. The names are all famous including a linguist, Kiik, Kaplinski, a future prime-minister, a future professor of journalism, a poet, Mati Unt the novelist, a future theatre director, a future magazine editor, etc. I suppose it must have been worthwhile for the KGB to meet all these interesting people on their terms. The KGB in the ESSR was run by Russian-speakers, but at lower ranking there were Estonians as well.

As I mentioned elsewhere, these interviews are well documented, and a whole 200-page book has been written about the whole incident.

[Mirabell]

the BRD isn't too keen on acts of anti-German defiance either. luckily, our supreme court tends to uphold sanity in that respect.

[jackdawdle]

Not translated into German either. bummer. with all these east europeans, one often gets lucky with gdr translations.

i was under the impression that the berlin wall had come down.

[jackdawdle]

eric, if u please, the phonetic pronunciation of heino kiik lest i suffer a stroke to my face.

[Mirabell]

i was under the impression that the berlin wall had come down.

ah. glad to correct that misapprehension.


no, really, I was talking about getting them used. they didn't vanish, you see. the books still exist. ;)

[jackdawdle]

cryptic as ever, that's why we luv u.

[Mirabell]

ok.

the books eric refers to were largely published pre-1990.

they were translated by the trusty old commie translators at, for instance, the gdr publisher volk und welt.

these books, once printed, made their way to used bookshops and the used section of amazon etc., where one can buy them for a small(ish) amount of money. this is especially great for soviet sf, obscurish east european writers and Marx/Lenin editions.

[jackdawdle]

i see. heino kiik. my best guess: hi-no i better leave this alone

[Eric]

Jack Dawdle: if you've not yet gone mad or suffered a stroke, the name Heino Kiik is pronounced (using English equivalents, not some fancy phonetic alphabet):

Hey-no Keek

That wasn't difficult, was it?

Most of Heino Kiik's novels were indeed published before the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. This was a major publishing, as well as political, watershed. This is not usually appreciated greatly in the West, where censorship and political repression have been minimal (unless you wanted to join the equivalent of the Rote-Armee-Fraktion, and gun decadent capitalists down on the street as a blood sport and write propaganda for them, or publish certain types of pornography).

The "trusty Commie" translators from the GDR did, in fact, occasionally manage to translate perfectly decent novels, like ones by Jaan Kross, but the East German secret police, the Stasi, made sure that nothing too controversial got published, even if it came from the already heavily censored Soviet Union.

This totalitarian and centralised political interference in every area of fiction publishing in the whole Soviet Bloc from 1945 to about 1989, is something that Westerners still find very, very hard to grasp or understand.

Unlike Mirabell, I don't attempt to be too cryptic, because the facts of Eastern & Central Europe during the Soviet era of domination are hard enough for Westerners to understand, in any case.

[Mirabell]

Unlike Mirabell, I don't attempt to be too cryptic, because the facts of Eastern & Central Europe during the Soviet era of domination are hard enough for Westerners to understand, in any case.

also, we know what a strenuous relationship you have with facts.

[Eric]

Nothing strenuous, Mirabell. Once you discover the truth, in well-documented form, you no longer want to wallow in "truth-lite". That's for beginners.

[Mirabell]

Nothing strenuous, Mirabell. Once you discover the truth, in well-documented form, you no longer want to wallow in "truth-lite". That's for beginners.

ok. I guess it's fun in your own weird little world...
pffff
just, you know, stay away from topics others have actual knowledge of and things will work out fine.

[Eric]

ok. i use capitals, like tallinn and and london in my postings. you use small ones like bonn where the dutch immigrant van beethoven was maybe born and death-masked.
i like people who are sane when sober (but rabidly nutty when drunk). i think poems when drunk is verygoodly.
lets arrest a few people who have not got detailed knowledge. its fun to play stasi-and-seek.
irony is the cousin of sarcasm. fun is the uncle of wit; when i write my poetry, i think that others are rhyming...

so which exactly diaries have you of heino kiik, silly freak, read? i am liking your ironics but your one-upmanship is lacking in purport.

good evening, and decorate your capitals with lower case.

Hello! (notice the capital litter, poet.)

[Eric]

I'm now reading one of Heino Kiik's many slim volumes of diaries, mostly covering a year at a time. The one I'm reading now (just before Christmas 2008) is about the Kupar publishing house, set up in Tallinn during the mid-1980s, as more leeway was given economically under Gorbachev's perestroika.

The Kupar publishing cooperative had been set up by a number of leading Estonian authors, including Jaan Kross, Enn Vetemaa (humourist-novelist), Arvo Valton (absurdist short-story writer), Mats Traat (as on these threads) and others. Kiik was the chairman of this book-publishing cooperative.

But as usual in the Soviet Union, by 1989, when no one yet knew that the Soviet Union was going to fall to bits, the KGB (who hated Kiik) and others were gunning for Kiik. And the crisis unfolded as the Council of Ministers at the centre of the Soviet administration in Moscow had suddenly decided by diktat to "regulate" the workings of cooperative ventures throughout the USSR.

It has to be said that a number of very Estonian authors found Kiik a little hard to deal with (c.f. Lionel Britton as a human being?). But what Kiik always does beautifully in his diaries is give a blow-by-blow, almost day-by-day, account of the machinations, snide comments, character assassination, paper shortages, and other undermining that went on to try to, in this instance, split or close down a cooperative publishing initiative. Newspaper articles, high-level Estonian Communist Party discussions, it's all there. This booklet is only 90 pages long, but that should be enough to be going on with at Christmas. I want to return to Anthony Powell, fairly soon.

If this had been the diaries of someone working in publishing in New York or London, it would have been hot stuff. But as Estonia is what Mirabell so subtly terms "your own weird little world...", there are few people outside Estonia, beyond me and the odd Finnish translator, that read such "obscure" material.

Obscurity is in the eye of the reader, but for me, these brief diaries speak volumes about the destructive nature of the Soviet mentality, not just what was going on in the "weird little world" of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. Estonia was a microcosm highlighting the absurdities and contradictions in the whole of the USSR.