Inimene kui looduslik keha
Human being as a natural body

The perceptual worlds of Estonian literature from the 1960s to the 1980s

Summary/Abstract: People develop their sense of self partly as a social self-consciousness, but also through the way their immediate perceptual world registers upon consciousness. This primary place perception of the self is, at the same time, inseparable from the circulation of ideas within culture more broadly. This article considers the relationship between a sense of self and the natural environment during the Soviet period, as it appears in the fiction and nonfiction of that era. More particularly, the art­icle analyzes the role of the natural environment in cultural consciousness, viewing it in the context of the global sphere of ideas and the behavioural patterns of the time. The self is understood not as a closed and fixed set of characteristics, but as a relational space where different factors are constantly creating and recreating the self-consciousness of the subject. In support of this reading, the article develops a multiscalar model of naturecultural selfhood.The first part of the article focuses on perception-based selfhood and its representation in Estonian literature, while the second gives an outline of the main aspects of environmental thought and environmental issues of the time and builds on the notion of a perception-based selfhood to conceptualize a multiscalar, perception- and idea-based selfhood. The discussion touches upon Jaan Kruusvall’s short story “Sorcerer’s Bread” (Sortsi leib), Teet Kallas’s short story “The Death of a Dog” (Koera suremine), Mats Traat’s novel “Pasqueflower, a Cure of Sadness” (Karukell, kurvameelsuse rohi), Edgar Kase’s auto-ethnographic “Road to Tranquility. Muraka Wetland Complex” (Tee vaikusesse. Muraka soostik), and Jaan Kaplinski’s essays. Kaplinski traces the relationship between selfhood and the living environment back to childhood: the self is based on a child’s sensuous experience of place. Kruusvall and Traat bring a literary focus on the intensification of place-attachment that leads to the recognition of one’s “true self,” or the feeling of being completely one with the surrounding world.From the late 1960s, discussions of environmental ethics in Estonia come to refer to the moral philosophy of Albert Schweitzer and the cautionary modelings of the future offered by the Club of Rome. Schweitzer’s environmental ethics binds the selfhood constructed from the experience of one’s own environment with a sense of global responsibility and the idea of oneness with all life.

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