Friedebert Tuglase "prantsuse daam". Prantsusmaa kui muusa ja maatriks nooreestlaste kultuurihorisondil
Friedebert Tuglas's "French Lady"

Summary/Abstract: During the early decades of the 20th century Estonian culture is especially open to the influences of French and French-language Belgian art and literature. The "Young Estonia" literary school introduces Baudelaire's work to Estonian readers and is looking for examples in French symbolism and decadentism. J. Aavik translates Bourget's work and takes a close interest in Huysmans. Maeterlinck is one of the first French-language symbolist authors translated, soon to be accompanied by Verhaeren. F. Tuglas writes his Jumala saar ("Island of God") probably under the influence of Maeterlinck's symbolist plays. In several Tuglas' short stories J. Aavik finds the art-for-art's-sake frame of mind. These new tendencies meet severe criticism from several older generation intellectuals, who accuse Young Estonians of playing vain aesthetes and imitating an overripe culture instead of creating original artistic works of their own. While comparing V. Grünthal's poem Sügiselaul with Verlaine's Chanson d'automne we can see a strong analogy of theme and motif as well as experimentation with a new form. Blank verse in Grünthal's poem is as new in Estonian poetry as Verlaine's disregard of classical rules in French literature. In his novel "Felix Ormusson" F. Tuglas "flirts" with decadentism in the character of Ormusson as the author's alter ego. Ormusson has recently arrived from Paris and, far from its smoky cafés, enjoys the Estonian countryside and the admiration of two young ladies from a purely aesthetic viewpoint. In the novel Tuglas hints several times to nature as a symbol (following the example of Baudelaire) and introduces into his descriptions some aesthetic vocabulary of the Parnassians. Still, at the end of the novel Ormusson discovers the emptiness of the purely aesthetic world view and here he can as well be compared with Tuglas himself who gradually approached realism, influenced by the formal perfection and realist content of Flaubert's work. As A. Kallas has pointed out, Tuglas's artistic itinerary is the same as that of the whole Young Estonia literary school, whose members ended up in a realistic approach to literature. Still, a search for the "French lady" remains one of the important characteristics of Estonian literature in the early 20th century.

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