petitioned the emperor for better treatment from the German landowners who ruled the Baltic provinces, equality, and for the language of secondary and higher education to be Estonian instead of German. Immediately afterwards they were taken to the police where they were interrogated about a petition that 'included false information and was directed against the state'. Adam Peterson was sentenced to imprisonment for a year. Two years later, in 1866, the censorship reforms of 1855 that had given Koidula's father a window to start Postimees were reversed. Pre-publication censorship was re-imposed and literary freedom was curtailed. This was the political and literary climate when Koidula started to publish. Nevertheless, it was also the time of the national awakening when the Estonian people, freed from serfdom in 1816, were beginning to feel a sense of pride in nationhood and to aspire to self-determination. Koidula was the most articulate voice of these aspirations. German influence in Koidula's work was unavoidable. The Baltic Germans had retained hegemony in the region since the 13th century, throughout German, Polish, Swedish and Russian rule and thus German was the language of tuition and of the intelligentsia in 19th century Estonia. Like her father (and all other Estonian writers at the time) Koidula translated much sentimental German prose, poetry and drama and there is a particular influence of the Biedermeier movement. Biedermeier, a style which dominated 'bourgeois' art in continental Europe from 1815 to 1848, developed in the wake of the suppression of revolutionary ideas following the defeat of Napoleon. It was plain, unpretentious and characterised by pastoral romanticism; its themes were the home, the family, religion and scenes of rural life. The themes of Koidula's early Vainulilled (Meadow Flowers; 1866) were certainly proto-Biedermeier, but her delicate, melodic treatment of them was in no way rustic or unsophisticated, as demonstrated in the unrestrained patriotic outpourings of Emajõe Ööbik. Koidula reacted to the historical subjugation of the Estonian people as to a personal affront; she spoke of slavery and the yoke of subordination as if from personal experience. By the time of the National Awakening in the 1860s, Estonia had been ruled by foreign powers – Danish, German, Swedish, Polish and Russian – for over 600 years. In this context, she was conscious of her own role in the destiny of the nation. She once wrote to a Finnish correspondent: "It is a sin, a great sin, to