Everything Is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia

In an evocative companion work to her previously published Ph.D. dissertation in social anthropology, History, Memory, Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia, Rausing, the head of a philanthropy trust in her name and now owner of Granta magazine and Granta Books, returns to the year of her field research in poverty-stricken Estonia. Swedish-born, schooled in England, Rausing homed in on the Noarootsi peninsula for her anthropological fieldwork in 1993 because of its large Swedish population before World War II: in 1944 most of the Swedes left, while the remaining villagers found themselves in to a Soviet military garrison inside a welfare state; after Estonian independence in 1991 the economy collapsed, and by 1993, the year Rausing resided in Purksi and worked as an English teacher, the whole area was depopulated, ravaged by alcoholism and lack of opportunity. With a keen, level eye, Rausing reconstructs the blasted landscape of abandoned farmhouses and watchtowers, the truculent personalities of the locals, including her louche drunken landlord Toivo, and the terrible scars of history. Gradually, as she expresses in this engaging book, Rausing began to feel at home, reminded of her own childhood in Sweden, warmed by the peacefulness of the place, as it was inevitably drifting toward the wider globalized culture, a fragile “society in transition.” (Mar.)