JOHANNES SILVET 125, OLEG MUTT 100 Ilmar Anvelt
Editor of OPEN!
Early in May this year, we marked the birth anniversaries of two grand old men in English language teaching in Estonia – 125 years from the birth of Johannes Silvet (12 May 1895 – 17 February1979) and 100 years from the birth of Oleg Mutt (6 May 1920 – 19 February 1986). In the current article, I will try to view their life and work in parallel. Johannes Silvet was born to a poor working-class family in Tartu. As Estonia was part of the Tsarist Russian Empire then, he received his education in Russian; the only subjects taught in Estonian were the Estonian language and religious instruction. Still, he says, “I do not remember the time when I could not read in Estonian, and books (usually borrowed from others) were the objects of my greatest interest long before I went to school” (TÜR KHO, F 118, s. 16). No foreign languages were taught at the schools he attended. Being interested in languages, Silvet learned German on his own and French from a Swiss woman residing in Tartu. It remains, however, unclear from whom and how he received his initial knowledge of English. In 1917, during World War I, the Tartu Teacher Institute where Silvet was a student was evacuated to Herson in Ukraine. Before the evacuation, one professor (Vasili Fidrovski) and one student (Silvet) were sent to Herson to prepare for the relocation. They travelled through St Petersburg where Silvet met a Brit for the first time in his life – Professor Fidrovski’s wife (TÜR KHO, F 118, s. 16). Although the professor and his wife talked in English, Silvet could not have acquired much of the language during this short stopover. J. Silvet’s way back home after graduating from the institute in Herson was adventurous. He voluntarily joined the White Guard and fought in Denikin’s and Wrangler’s armies. Johannes Silvet’s granddaughter, Marju Silvet (2018), thinks that he might have learnt some English from British officers who served in the Russian White Guard Army. Throughout his life, Silvet considered fighting against communists in the Russian Civil War important, and collaboration with communists, whom he called “reds”, was unacceptable for him. To return to Estonia, he had to travel through several countries – Bulgaria, Serbia, Austria and Germany (EAA.2100.1.15538). By 1920, when Oleg Mutt was born, Johannes Silvet had returned to Estonia and was working as a primary school teacher in Tartu. He had even qualified as a temporary teacher of English for primary school classes. Oleg Mutt was born into the newly independent Republic of Estonia, and his social background was quite different from Silvet’s. His father, Victor, had a military and diplomatic career. His mother Eugenie was a teacher of history. Victor Mutt participated as a military expert in the negotiations of the Tartu Peace Treaty, later he served as an Estonian diplomat in the United States, for the longest time as the chief consul in New York (1926–1932) (Mutt, M. 2009a: 57). During their stay in the USA, Eugenie Mutt published a collection of Estonian fairy tales in English translation (Fairy Tales… 1930). As Oleg Mutt went to America with his parents at an early age, this had a profound influence on 32
