Belated Nations: Grand Apocrypha as a Challenge to the Mythic Establishment
Belated Nations: Grand Apocrypha as a Challenge to the Mythic Establishment

Summary/Abstract: For those who look at Estonia from a great distance and see the country geographically belonging to the same Russian plain as Russia – for those any fictional achievements, written in the complicated, little known language of Estonia are bound to be overshadowed by the fiction of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Quite obviously, the brilliant literary merits of those writers have become, among more respectable things, institutionalized myths, or master narratives in the Lyotardian sense, supporting, at the expense of Russia’s neighbouring nations, the legend of the “great Russian soul”. That the works of outstanding Estonian fiction writers of the second half of the twentieth century have not attained a comparable fame is understandable, given their relative novelty as regards the Russian classics; but that even the Estonian novelist A. H. Tammsaare (1878 – 1940), a classic considerably distant temporally, still offers almost no interest to readers and researchers around the world, is a fact which evidently has to do with institutionalized tribal myths, with linguistic prejudices, a kind of cross-cultural nepotism among the bigger nations, a power play determining in a plain politicized language who on the literary scene is significant and who is not.

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