“Kurz ist der Schmerz, ewig ist die Freude!” The Landscape and Monuments of Puhtu „Vaev üürike, kuid rõõm on igavene!” Puhtu maastikest ja monumentidest

Abstract

Puhtu (German: Pucht) on the west coast of Estonia is first mentioned in legal documents in 1478. It is quite a small – about 0.5 square kilometre – sea islet that belonged to the Virtsu (Werder) Manor at the time, and which was basically used as a hayfield until the 18th century. In 1777, Carl Thure von Helwig acquired the Virtsu Manor, and he started designing Puhtu Islet into a grand park. To achieve this, he built several paths and seating areas in the southern end of the islet; he had ponds dug and cleared land to open up the views. He also erected pavilions on the islet, with a three-story Chinese-style summerhouse in the middle of it all. As a result, several travellers from the turn of the 19th century have characterised Puhtu as one of the most picturesque and elegant English-style parks in Estonia at that time.

To enhance the park, Carl Thure von Helwig also installed various monuments. Most were hewn of dolomite obtained from Märjamaa (Merjama). He erected them in memory of his relatives and his best friends, but also dedicated one, for instance, to the world’s “most endearing female creatures”.

However, one of the most famous of the Puhtu monuments, which is dedicated to the poet Friedrich Schiller, was not installed until 1813, which was three years after Carl Thure von Helwig’s death. Currently, a copy can be seen in Puhtu, since the original was taken to the Lääne County Museum in Haapsalu in 1958 – a short 1.3-metre high round column in the Neo-classicist style which is crowned by a decorative stone pine cone. In addition to the dedication text, a few lines from the second verse of Schiller’s poem “The Maid of Orleans”, which was written around 1801, is engraved on the monument. For a long time, it was thought that the monument was erected by Carl Thure von Helwig’s youngest daughter Dorothea Augusta (1781–1826), who inherited the Virtsu Manor after her father’s death. However, it seems more likely that her older sister Anna Christina (1780–1845) was the initiator behind the monument. For instance, it is known that on one of her visits to Germany, Anna Christina met Schiller, and she maintained a correspondence with Schiller’s widow Charlotte even after the poet’s death. Anna Christina and her husband Otto von Rosen owned the Vatla (Wattel) Manor in the near Puhtu, and therefore, Puhtu served as a kind of summer home for them, and it actually later ended up in their possession. It should also be noted that Anna Christina’s husband, Otto von Rosen, grew up amidst monuments dedicated to literary figures. Namely, already in the 1790s, his father, who was a theatrical director, erected monuments, to Laurence Sterne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the small Löwenruhe summer manor near Tallinn that he owned. As far as the other Schiller monument in Estonia that was erected early on – that is, the monument erected in his honour in the Helme (Helmet) Manor in Southern Estonia – we know that Elisabeth Dorothea von Gersdorf, the lady of the manor, had it erected right after the poet’s death, already in the summer of 1805. However, it is quite likely that this monument was not a new one, but that an already existing structure was used. Namely, between 1805 and 1812, the monument has been described as a 30-foot-high (i.e. about 9 metre-high) granite obelisk on a simple pedestal. And a more or less similar column can be found on a picture of Helme Manor that dates from 1797. We can suppose that an inscription to Friedrich Schiller was added to the existing column and that the last verse of his poem “Life and the Ideal” written in 1795 was painted (or engraved) on it as well. Nevertheless, both memorials deserve attention – the one in Puhtu and the one in Helme – as the earliest known monuments honouring Friedrich Schiller erected anywhere in the world. Starting in the middle of the 19th century, Virtsu Manor, and Puhtu that belonged to it, was owned by the Uexkülls – and quite a number of enthusiastic descriptions of the English-style park date from that time. Although the summerhouse mostly burned down in October 1917, during World War I, and the Schiller monument was vandalised, Jakob von Uexküll, who had become a respected biologist in Germany in the meanwhile, and his whole family used the islet as their summer retreat between the two world wars and even built a new house in the spring of 1929. Since 1939, Puhtu islet has been under nature conservation and thus for the last three-quarters of a century, the predominant process has been one of naturalisation, which is what happens to nature when it is left without a master or gardener. Thus, today there is no sense in talking about Puhtu as an English-style park.