Esimene maailmasõda eestlaste mälestustes
World War I in the Memoirs of Estonians

Summary/Abstract: War diaries, however sketchy and skeletal have immediacy, even simultaneity with events, and thus are often imparted a greater trustworthiness than memoirs. This article examines the World War I diaries of Estonian soldiers, which have recently been made available to the general public in monumental and accessible form(Historian Tõnu Tannberg’s 2015 edited collection of here to fore unpublished Estonian World War I letters, memoirs, and diaries,approximately 1000 pp in length.) Estonian participation in the Great War remains virtually invisible in relation to the dominant narratives of the Western Front. Perhaps this peripherality (even in relation to the grand narrative of the Eastern Front) is sufficient for it to command interesting retrospection. „Memory sources” require attention to the conditions of their textual production, the poetics of their composition, and their uses of rhetoric with respect to a (familial or more extensively public) readership. However „simple”a remembered account may seem, its rhetorical dimension is social, thus historical, as are the narrative scaffolding and texture.This article also examines the literary memoirs of World War I written by popular author Oskar Luts, who participated in the war as a pharmacist, and asks the question of what textual resources make memoirs „literary”. For Estonia, there was no „lost generation”or „generation of 1914”, as Robert Wohl has defined it. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the German occupation of Estonia in1918, the birth of the Estonian republic in February 1918, and the War of Independence 1918–1920 were a chaotic cascade of events,194to which the following decades in the Estonian republic assigned priority as more memorable. This cumulation and acceleration of events obscured the previous layers, thus permanently sedimenting and occluding the cultural memory of World War I beneath these layers. Mapping the absence or occlusion of World War I remembrance through the use of autobiographical texts or textual remains is a topic of renewed research in the context of the hundred-year anniversary of World War I across Europe.

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