In October 2024, I opened a solo exhibition ‘The Life and Death of Mr N: Bourgeois Spaces by Urmas Lüüs’ at KUMU Art Museum. Together with curator Eero Epner, we created a fictional Mr N – but who was he? Mr N was probably born in the second half of the 19th century into a peasant family in some rural area. His school education gave him the opportunity to further himself, which led the more successful men of his generation first to the smaller towns and from there some were hired to some fancy positions. Those who were lucky enough in life made sufficient money to be included in the local bourgeois middle class society – but this certainly did not come easily. It involved great effort to cut through the ropes of the past, and the traditional German or Russian middle class were not welcoming. You had to stand by, in the waiting rooms, corridors and hallways of change – persistent in your aspirations, respected at home, often humiliated by the authorities. 

A survey conducted among graduates around the time examined the future perspectives of the students of the Secondary School for Girls of the Estonian Youth Education Society in Tartu.² Only a few envisioned their future in the countryside. It is boring and monotonous there, country life sucks, while you can dive into the social life of towns, enjoy culture that is close to hand and have so much more fun in town than in the country. They say that urban circles are more developed and civilised compared to the rural people who are said to be numb and underdeveloped. Rural people are said to have worse taste and they are spiritually dumb. Town people are cleaner, rural people dirtier. There are more opportunities to be hired and to fulfill one’s intellectual ambitions in the towns.

When looking back on local rural life with the romance inevitably characteristic of that era, it is easy for us to get carried away. Beautiful farmhouses with flowerbeds and apple orchards have not always been a part of rural life, but emerged only when the first President of the Republic of Estonia, Konstantin Päts, imposed home decoration campaigns in the country. At the beginning of the 20th century, farms did not even have outdoor toilets. A wooden chamber with a heart-shaped incision on the door was reluctantly domesticated – why go to a stinky booth when for generations you have taken a dump in the bushes behind the farmhouse. Heiki Pärdi has added a gratifying contribution to research on the history of daily life, including toilet culture in Estonia. Pärdi has pointed out the paradox: “Ethnologists and folklorists have achieved great progress in researching and documenting Estonian traditional culture. Various local antiquities have been diligently studied and carefully preserved in museums and archives; however, the seemingly most trivial aspect of all – how people actually lived – has remained more or less unknown. And therefore, our folk culture lacks smells and tastes, instead, it is clean and sterile – quite the opposite of real life.”³

In the book Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle Class Life, authors Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren focus on Swedish society and how the peasantry became middle class. In an audio recording from the 1960s, the daughter of a stonemason speaks of her childhood in Blekinge, the island of Tjurkö around 1910. The father spat his snus directly behind the sofa, the young people used the same handkerchief. Insects were living under the wallpaper and everyone had lice in their hair. People occasionally rinsed their hands and faces in a basin of water, but bodies were never washed. The lack of hygiene was evident throughout the house. Sweat, dirt and unwashed genitals stank. The odour of clothes and bodies was in the air, as well as the smell of cooking fumes, chimney smoke and the stench from human waste.⁴

Let’s now go back to the girls from the secondary school who used to see women at home peeing on the move, sometimes barely pulling their dress away from their bodies and then shaking off the droplets. At home, the girls were laughed at for having gone picky, for wasting time on pointless self-hygiene and for stuffing fine underpants under their dresses – but the generation gap was now there. The girls didn’t want to stick to the old habits, and yet, they didn’t know how to do things differently. How can you become new when there is no tradition, no role models to look up to? Magazines of the time, such as Maret, or specific textbooks on modern life translated into Estonian, such as Gottfried Andreas’ Lexicon of Modern Life did a great job in educating the new generations. The art of cinema introduced new idols, whose red lips and vivid make-up were also adopted in Estonia. Fake it until you make it!

What was this bourgeoisie that Mr N yearned for? When we start to analyse the bourgeoisie and the middle class, we find that it is quite tricky to set the boundaries. As Hans Rosling has illustrated in his book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, most people do not suffer from devastating poverty neither are they overflowing in opulence.⁷ There is no point in talking about a poor peasant and a rich urbanite. Mostly, people function somewhere between the two, get by and sometimes treat themselves while affording something good and more expensive. There were peasants who could barely make ends meet, and on the other hand we can recall the character Jaska from Kassiaru in the novel Truth and Justice by Estonian author Anton Hansen Tammsaare, who had a fancy farmhouse and sat in the VIP room of the local tavern. In the context of that era, Jaska certainly belonged to the middle class, being wealthy. In this way, I prefer to observe the bourgeoisie through the attitudes with which their wealth and lifestyle were presented. Although I am not at all fond of dualistic oppositions, for the sake of clarity I will divide the people of interest to me into two in this article – those who lived a simple peasant life and the wealthier, better-off bourgeois people living in the towns. There was a wide gap between those two in terms of their outlook on life at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, which is perfectly illustrated by the attitude to hygiene already mentioned. A farmer’s hands had to be so dirty that seeds would sprout from them. A housewife had other urgent stuff to do than clean up the household. People almost never washed themselves, and if they did then not all of the body. Bodily fluids were considered something acceptable, burping and farting was rather a source of fun than disgust. Snot was wiped away with the sleeve and it was not unusual for a mother to suck the baby’s snot off into her mouth. Bourgeois culture, on the contrary, despised all of that. The bourgeoisie distinguished themselves from the peasants and the working class with sophisticated manners. Meals were eaten in accordance with the rules; eating became a procedure in which table manners played an important part of being an educated man. It was a shield to protect status like a stronghold. If any of the upstarts tried to blend in, then table manners would give them away immediately. Home meant order, the outside world meant chaos. Chaos had no place at home. The servant brought food to the table and ate his or her meal in the kitchen. The farmer could come from the stable straight to his own table, hands covered in stinking manure. In a bourgeois home, cleanliness prevailed, and people dressed up for meals. Pleats, raised collars and starched shirts were the symbols of an intellectual.⁸

For the KUMU exhibition, I also selected various artworks from the collections of the Art Museum of Estonia. Juta Kivimäe, head of the collection, offered me a plaster hand when I was browsing between the shelves, and added: “See, that would go nicely on the top of your piano.” I had to admit to her that, well, I had no piano. Juta gave me a surprised look and wondered why I didn’t have a piano at the exhibition. After all, the piano was a symbol of the middle class of the time, whether you could play the instrument or not, you had to have a piano, it was a sign of status. So I had to find one, and by that same evening, I had one. But more than the piano, I was obsessed with the attributes with which middle class people performed themselves. Money could not be seen, it was placed either in a safe or another hiding place, but one had to show the state of being well-off. To appear on stage in the middle-class costume, the same clothes that were uncomfortably adjusted to the body, in which one could neither dig the earth nor go fishing. Fancy shoes would sink heel-deep into the ground and lace dresses would get stuck everywhere.

So, the costume is there. But costume alone is not enough for a classical play, you need the stage. The guest room became the most important stage, as did the opening space of my exhibition. When looking at the farmhouse, we can see how all the daily activities took place in one room, where all family members ate, played, worked, slept and kept their animals. There are few pieces of furniture, and they are placed along the walls so as not to clutter the precious space. All daily activities had to be completed in the one room. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, loathed empty space – there were pictures on the walls, rooms were filled with sofas and chairs, shelves displayed a plethora of small decorative objects. Bourgeois living space was a stage that demonstrated their wealth. However, the backstage was also there. Servants moved invisibly in the adjoining corridors. The bedroom remained a private sphere where only the married couple had access. Bedroom furniture was much more modest compared to items in the guest room, as it was not meant to be displayed.⁹

People detached themselves to their personal sphere and made space for collective activities in their daily schedules. In the past, people used to wake up and go to sleep together. They worked and did whatever needed to be done – in summer in the daylight as much as possible, and in winter they stayed indoors. Now the life of the bourgeoisie was dictated by the clock. As a result, working hours and leisure time emerged. People preferred to spend their free time in a civilised way – to read books, go to the theatre, sit in cafés or visit the ‘cultured’ countryside to have a pleasant stroll along the promenade under the trees or to lay a picnic blanket down to separate one’s body from the unclean grass. Pandemic loneliness had got its first epicentres.

The final phase of the public programme for the exhibition included a discussion on the emergence of the bourgeoisie in Estonia, moderated by Eero Epner and the participants being literary scholar Tiit Hennoste, art historians Lola Annabel Kass and Tiina Abel. I deliberately threw in the question asking what attributes were used to perform the status of the bourgeoisie. One thing that was emphasised was the interior architecture of apartments and private houses, which followed the logic of the theatre hall and related spaces. Tiit Hennoste also mentioned the dresser – a beautiful piece of furniture that has endless drawers for placing one’s crisp white laundry and with all sorts of beautiful objects piled on top. The domestic space had to express abundance. It is fascinating to compare this opulence with the middle-class aesthetic of today, which unlike a century ago, is expressed using designer minimalism. Abundance today is only for the poor – those who don’t have enough space to put things out of sight or the money to buy something new to replace what they have thrown away. The modern bourgeois has exchanged objects for services. Dozens of pots and pans are forced on the person who has either a deep passion for cooking or lacks the resources to dine out or order food to be delivered. 

The role of performance is more than just to achieve something. What has been achieved must be preserved. We must perform stability because stability expresses designation. If something has been the same for a long time then it proves that it must be this way. Kings obtain their glory from God, kings are destined to be kings. The bourgeois remain between the proletariat and the noble. It makes no difference whether it is the petit bourgeoisie or the wealthy bourgeoisie, stability is important and must be honored. What has been achieved, one’s own or that of one’s family, must be held on to. This stability is created by daily rituals. Bourgeois mythology restores the world order of class society.

Both the film and the book Teorema (Theorem) by the brilliant Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini offer a valuable visual-cultural reference to people fighting tooth and nail to hold on to their status, and place stability above humanity. The family of a wealthy company director maintains stability through shared rituals. Rituals are a way of doing things ‘right’. When visiting another family, they bring flowers or wine, as Eddy had learned to do in the past to escape the working class. Family affairs belong backstage. Dinner is shared around a big table, chatting or silent, the family must be together, to express stability. One dresses according to the situation, sleeping clothes for sleeping, working clothes for working, city clothes for going to town, evening dress for dinner. Doing things the way they are supposed to be done, the way they are done, and the way others like you do them.

Go and walk around in the district of Tiskre in Tallinn, of course if you can get in, as this is a gated community so that strangers do not “get lost” and no one would disturb the stability. Similar white box-shaped houses, with no signs of life in the windows. A decent barbecue grill on the porch, a trampoline in the backyard. According to the local city government regulation, the height of grass in all households has to be the same – this is maintained by silent robotic lawnmowers. What an idyll. The lawn is there, the facades stand, stability is preserved. No disturbances are allowed in this life. Pasolini disturbs the idyll by creating a protagonist, an odd yet sensual male guest who seduces the nuclear family with its ideal structure, one member after the other: father, mother, son and daughter. The servant will not remain untouched either. The strange intruder, the catalyst of desires, a handsome and charming young man, unravels the urges bubbling under the stabilising rituals. The stranger fucks all members of the nuclear family. With his dick, he unlocks all bourgeois doors that are locked with jealousy. He pries off the seven seals covering the carnal urges with his cock. Then the worst thing happens – stability is disrupted and the structure collapses, the status quo wobbles, the kings lose their balance. 

Just as I started this with a fairy tale, I want to finish with one as well. The story is based on a Sicilian folk tale written by Italo Calvino and it tells of a dim-witted village boy called Giufá.