Literary culture had a prominent role in the evolution of the Estonian diaspora in the West after the Second World War. Publishing houses were created in many diaspora centres for publishing literature in the Estonian mother tongue, a printed press in Estonian was started up, and cultural periodicals were established. The organisation of literary life took place primarily by way of correspondence between compatriots who were scattered throughout different continents. The archives of expatriates started being sent to the Estonian Literary Museum in the 1990s. Numerous topical themes have emerged in the process of working through these archives, for instance a complicated complex of questions regarding relations of expatriates with their Estonian homeland. A fragment of academic literary life in America in 1962 to 1964 is at the centre of this article. Several interesting questions open up through correspondence between two men of letters who belonged to different generations.

The productive translator and grand old man of Estonian literary criticism Ants Oras (8 December 1900–21 December 1982) was a professor of English language and literature at the pre-war University of Tartu. He fled from Estonia by boat to Helsinki in April of 1943, worked briefly at the British Embassy in Stockholm, and thereafter as a lecturer at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Starting from 1949, Ants Oras took a job as the professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he received an honorary doctorate in 1975.

Hellar Grabbi (22 September 1929–28 July 2018), who primarily lived in Washington in exile, was a literary critic, essayist, commentator for Radio Freedom and Radio Free Europe, and the long-standing editor of Mana, the literary and cultural periodical of Estonian expatriates. He crowned his life’s work with memoirs that were published in four volumes in his free Estonian homeland in 2008–2014. An overview of the life work of both men is sketched out in the foreword of this publication, and the receipt of Hellar Grabbi’s archive by the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu in 2015 is described at greater length. The article stresses Grabbi’s somewhat exceptional role in the relatively conservative Estonian expatriate society, where communication with the occupied Estonian homeland was deplored. As the editor of the periodical Mana, Grabbi developed a remarkably large number of contacts with Estonians throughout the world during the years of occupation. He repeatedly visited Estonia himself as well. He consistently published reviews of works that were published in the Estonian homeland and treatments of cultural events in Mana. His point of departure was never ideological principles, but rather only aesthetic principles and his personal taste.

The correspondence between Ants Oras and Hellar Grabbi, who was considerably younger than Oras, can be considered an exchange of views between two literary giants, both of whom had something new or instructive to offer to one another. Since he lived in America far from the larger communities of the Estonian diaspora and interacted primarily in academic spheres, Oras was quite estranged from the literary life of his Estonian homeland. Compared to Grabbi, he did not notice and did not know how to adequately assess quality literature that had been created under the conditions of the occupation of Estonia. Important renewals had taken place there in literature starting at the end of the 1950s and especially in the 1960s.

In his letters to his young colleague Hellar Grabbi, Ants Oras explains the context of Estonian literary life in the Republic of Estonia before the Soviet occupation and the Second World War. As a polemical critic who set the tone at that time, Oras had represented a new generation of poets that had emerged in the 1930s. Oras had compiled the anthology Arbujad (The Soothsayers) in 1938 to introduce their oeuvre. In comparison with the realism of earlier verse, these young poets strove for greater intellectual and emotional intensity. They aspired to achieve a classical discipline of form, fullness and clarity of treatment, freshness of imagery as well as purity and ease of utterance. With its emphasis on the independence of the individual, this new poetry found itself in opposition with the official mentality of so-called realism of everyday life. The latter was a realistic and naturalist literary movement based on leftist ideology. Many of its representatives were later part of the Soviet nomenklatura. On the grounds of this pre-war antagonism, those writers who remained in Estonia, whose oeuvre provided reason for accusations of formalism, bourgeois nationalism, and other such charges, were later repressed and ostracised.

Ants Oras’s lengthy letters add quite a few nuances to better comprehend literary life in the Republic of Estonia in the 1930s. As the leading figure in pre-war Estonian criticism, Ants Oras has written the deepest analyses of the specific features of Estonian poetry in the first half of the 20th century, especially his favourite poets Marie Under, Gustav Suits, Betty Alver and Heiti Talvik. He contextualised their works within a broader frame of contemporary world literature, using his close ties with Anglo-American New Criticism and the critical ideas of T. S. Eliot. His essays were masterly works of criticism in which he phrased the aesthetic and ethical mission of the art of poetry in national culture as well as in the history of human culture.

The values phrased by Ants Oras in works of the great Estonian poets provided support for nationalist self-confidence on both sides of the Iron Curtain. After fleeing from Estonia in April of 1943, Oras published his personal impressions of the Soviet occupation in his book Baltic Eclipse (London, 1948). The name of Ants Oras – even as the author of translations of the works of W. Shakespeare – was banned by the occupying authorities due to this work. Oras himself also remains uncompromising in assessing works that appeared in Soviet Estonia: he does not forgive even the former arbujad (soothsayers) who remained in the Estonian homeland for losing their ethical backbone in the poetry that was published under ideological pressure. It is precisely along this axis that the views of literature reviewers from two generations intersect.

Grabbi’s subsequent letters to Oras apprise him more and more of the new and valuable things that were currently taking place in the literary life of their Estonian homeland. Hence Jaan Kross, who first of all became known as a poet, but also Aleksander Suuman and many others, find recognition in Grabbi’s letters. Literary problems in exile and the publication of Ants Oras’s translations of Shakespeare, which had previously already been published in Estonia but nevertheless did not come to pass in exile, emerge as separate themes.

After the Second World War, the centres of the Estonian diaspora were in Sweden and Canada, where large national communities of Estonians took shape. Large distances separated Estonian compatriots in America. The continuation of literary life in the Estonian mother tongue played an important role in maintaining contacts. It can even be said that after the Second World War, the printed word in Estonian and literary life that organised it connected Estonian compatriots throughout the world. Walter Anderson has pointedly characterised such cultural practices as global linguistic natuinalism in communities located in different geographical locations. The correspondence between two Estonian expatriate critics Ants Oras and Hellar Grabbi is a genuine example of how literary life of academic Estonians functioned in America, together with chances that rarely cropped up for meeting in person during congresses.

The nine letters published here are found in the personal collections of Ants Oras and Hellar Grabbi, which are preserved in the Estonian Literary Museum’s Estonian Cultural History Archive. There are 26 preserved letters from Oras to Grabbi (22 April 1955–11 October 1979; f. 413, m. 14: 5 and m. 3: 16) and 22 letters from Grabbi to Oras (16 December 1962–29 August 1979; f. 237, m. 10: 20). Consecutive letters from the correspondence have been selected for publication from 1962–1964.