Koidula L. (Lydia Koidula, 1843-1886)
Lydia of the Dawn, sobriquet of the bushy-browed Lydia Emilie Florentine Jannsen, Estonian kirjaneitsi (maiden of letters), poet and journalist. Mugshot on 100-krooni note (for information on Estonian currency, see Krooni). Lydia was the right-hand woman of her father Jannsen’s pioneering newspapers under whose name her first poems also appeared. In those days, writing, even poetry, was not a respectable occupation for a young lady. Her collections were later published as the work of ‘Koidula’, the name given her by Jakobson. Koidula articulated emotions that Estonians had bottled up for centuries, and her work retains its potency to this day. Throughout the Soviet period, while singing the national anthem of independent Estonia was forbidden, song festivals great and small ended, as the sun went down, with her Mu Isamaa on Minu Arm (My Fatherland is My Love) sung to a melody by Gustav Erneseks, whether the censor liked it or not, as has every All-Estonian Song Festival since 1869. Earliest records (19th C, date unsure) have the street as Catharinenthalscher Weg (see Kadrioru), mutating to Tihvti in 1885, from tihvt, a tack or pin, not impossibly due to its proximity to the ‘metals’ sector (see Hõbeda). In 1907, however, while the German camp translated it as Stiftstr., with the Estonians, oddly, following suit a year later by switching to Stifti, the Russian camp called it Институтская ул., institute, perhaps realizing that the German for tihvt (which probably came from German anyway), Stift, can mean not only metal pin but also seminary or suchlike educational establishment. This, of course, was not enough: having failed to confuse the greatest possible number with these shenanigans, in 1921, the Estonians named it both Institudi and Instituudi, revealing once again their perennial perplexity as to the consonance of vowel length and the magnetic schoolboy pairing of drawing-pins and teachers’ chairs.