Naming and Claiming: Mental Maps of Estonia in the Poetry of Viivi Luik and Jaan Kaplinski
Naming and Claiming: Mental Maps of Estonia in the Poetry of Viivi Luik and Jaan Kaplinski

Summary/Abstract: It is difficult to imagine the core of the canon of contemporary Estonian poetry without representatives of the so-called Cassette generation, those poets whose slim first volumes appeared in the 1960s, published together as “cassette sets”. This paper sets out to observe the mental maps outlined by the experience of place in the poetry of two of them: Viivi Luik (born in the Viljandi region in 1946) and Jaan Kaplinski (born in Tartu in 1941). Their first collections of poetry, titled Pilvede püha (The Holiday of Clouds) and Jäljed allikal (Tracks at the Spring), respectively, were published in the same “cassette” in 1965. Luik’s last collection that comprises a selection of earlier poetry as well as a handful of new verse, Maa taevas (The Heaven of Earth) appeared in 1993, Kaplinski’s Öölinnud, öömõtted (Night Birds, Night Thoughts) came out in 1998. Thus their oeuvre spans several decades and witnesses major social and political shifts, visibly manifested in the re-structuring of the political map of Europe, with their native land, hitherto camouflaged as a Soviet republic, acquiring a distinct shape on it.[...]

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