Anton Petrovitš ja sfääride muusika
Anton Petrovich and the Music of the Spheres

Summary/Abstract: The article is focused on music in the oeuvre of A. H. Tammsaare. Music certainly has a significance for Tammsaare and musical motifs are essential for his poetics. His comparison of religion and music, the sacred undertone of Tammsaare’s reference to music in his miniatures and his recurrent reference to the Pythagorean concept of the music of the spheres give sufficient reason to argue that for Tammsaare music means a trandescendence fit to convey the transcendental experiences of his characters taking them beyond time, space and linguistic expression. Often such emotional states are connected with love. When speaking of music, Tammsaare considers, at the same time, both the gospel and the woman. The theme of music acquires an interesting aditional nuance in the story called Varjundid („Nuances”), where one of the characters, Anton Petrovich can be interpreted as a tragic embodiment of the author’s own musical ambition, while his suicide symbolizes the discontinuation, for health reasons, of Tammsaare’s musical pursuits. Also discussed are the image of the violin and the status of violin playing among the Estonian intellectuals in the early 20th century. The strong emotions aroused by the sound of the instrument were referred to in the belles lettres of the time as well as in later memoirs about the time: a violinist became an epitome of a, so to say, real artist practising pure art. The rather mystical effect produced by the violin in the cultural space of the time is described in Tammsaare’s short story Viiul („The Violin”).

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