On Decadent Europe and the Intellectual Identity of Young Estonia: J. Randvere’s Ruth and Friedebert Tuglas’ Felix Ormusson
On Decadent Europe and the Intellectual Identity of Young Estonia: J. Randvere’s Ruth and Friedebert Tuglas’ Felix Ormusson

Summary/Abstract: “What is it that binds me to life?” asks Felix Ormusson. “Not my relatives, not my friends − no one! Werther had a mother, brothers, and friends, but is it possible for me to have any of these! It seems that I was even born into the world without parents! The perimeter of life is contracting. Everything is becoming more insubstantial. As my thought rubs against it, the glass wall dividing being from nonexistence keeps getting thinner. One of these days this merciless diamond will break the mirror of illusions. And what will happen then? The more conscious the human being becomes, the weaker he becomes when faced with lifeʼs tragedy, which is evident everywhere: in humans, nature, the starry sky. Every one of lifeʼs details comes to have a meaning, but taken together, existence loses its meaning altogether. What is left is a wordless, imageless despair, endless and pointless. Everything that is visible is for you only a symbol. You stand helpless before reality. You have no faith left in anything.” (Tuglas 1988: 102–103) This quotation from Young Estoniaʼs leading theorist and prose stylist Friedebert Tuglasʼ (1886−1971) novel Felix Ormusson (1914) is laden with references to literary decadence and the European fin de siècle. The novel and its protagonist, a would-be writer returned from Europe to spend the summer holidays at a friendʼs farm in rural Estonia, enact in diary form the conflicts and antinomies of a confrontation with the modern, experienced and recorded in the vocabulary of European decadence.

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