Hurt, Jakob

Born July 10 (22), 1839, in the Vana-Koiola volost (small rural district), now Pôlva Raion; died Dec. 31, 1906 (Jan. 13, 1907), in St. Petersburg. Estonian folklorist, linguist, and public figure.

Hurt graduated from the University of Tartu. In 1886 he defended his doctoral dissertation in linguistics in Helsinki. From 1872 to 1901 he was a minister. A leader of the Estonian national movement, Hurt was a member of its bourgeois-clerical moderate wing. He did research on the Estonian language and worked on its standardization. As a collector and publisher of Estonian folklore, Hurt established an extensive network of approximately 1,400 correspondents from whom he obtained recordings. He planned a fundamental edition of folklore works, part of which was published—namely, the collections of folk songs Starinnye gusli (vol. 1, parts 1–3, 1875–86; vol. 2, parts 1–2, 1884–86) and Pesnisetu (vols. 1–3, 1904–07).