The Nationalization of Latvians and the Issue of Serfdom: The Bal ...

The writers prominent in this discourse in the 1780s and 1790s were Heinrich Johann von Jannau (1753–1821), Wilhelm Christian Friebe (1761–1811), Karl Philip Michael Snell (1753–1806), and Garlieb Helwig Merkel (1769–1850). August Wilhelm Hupel’s (1737–1819) publications—the Nordische Miscellaneen and the Neue Nordische Miscellaneen⁵—provided an important literary forum in which an enlightened discourse focused on the indigenous Latvians, and the issue of serfdom was discussed by advocates and opponents of reform and improvement of the conditions of the indigenous Latvian population. The Baltic German landholding aristocracy made up, at best, between 0.5 and 1.0% of the entire Livonian population⁶ within the Livonian Ständegesellschaft.⁷ Poverty, maltreatment, and social and political disparity were major issues of the agrarian and social reform agenda.

There exists widespread consensus among the scholarly experts that the radical—and at times creative—reinterpretation of history in Livonia was a main tenet of the polemical argumentation aimed at improving the lot of the indigenous and enthralled Latvian and Estonian serfs in Livonia.⁸ However, there has been comprehensive and holistic study neither of the historical, anthropological, and ethnographical dimensions of this discourse that led to the nationalization⁹ of the Latvians, nor of its implications for the first half of the nineteenth century. Research has typically focused on the nature of the agrarian and social reform proposals and not the changing nature of the terminology, modes, and strategies of argumentation employed in the discourse over this period of time. This book seeks to fill this gap by critically examining the works of the agrarian and social reform discourse and the strategies of argumentation employed not only in publicizing the plight and conditions of the Latvians but also in reviewing the historical, anthropological, and ethnographical dimensions of the Latvian national character and identity in the late eighteenth century.

This literary reform discourse can be broken into a number of stages that ultimately resulted in a nationalization of Latvian identity in the late eighteenth century.