Aino Kallas Taine'i lugemas. Dekadentsist esseekogumikus "Noor-Eesti"
Aino Kallas Reading Taine: On Decadence in her Collection of Essays on Young Estonia

Summary/Abstract: Since the publication of the essays „Nuori Viro. Muotokuvia ja suuntaviivoja” („Young Estonia. Portraits and Trajectories” in Estonian Noor-Eesti. Näopilte ja sihtjooni, 1921) by Aino Kallas very different essays from the collection have been found worth special discussion, almost as if each writer’s portrait was an independent work in its own right. The aim of the article is to demonstrate how closely Kallas’s essays are related ideologically. The basis of this connection is the socalled theory of three influences – race (le race), the times (le moment) and the environment (le milieu) – by Hippolyte Taine, emphasizing the effect of those three contextual factors on any author’s work. Although Kallas’s first acquaintance with Taine’s ideas may well date back to the beginning of the 20th century, there are concrete references to her reading Taine’s „La philosophie de l’art” just before she started writing the collection of Young Estonian essays. Taine’s ideas form the basis for the structure and vocabulary of the collection, as well as for Kallas’s approach to her objects of research, and for her hierarchy of the authors portrayed. At the same time, Kallas’s interpretation of Taine is time-specific. In her essays there is a voice of the Decadent discourse, associating on the one hand, with the hyperdeveloped and, therefore, degenerant modern society and its representatives, and on the other hand with the inherited symptoms of a psyche lacking in vital power. Those Decadent connotations meet in the notion of an upstart, described also by Taine, first and foremost as the type of the period. In Kallas’s opinion the emergence of upstarts and upstartishness in Estonia can be explained by an all too sudden social change and educational progress, paradoxically revealing various signs of degradation. Kallas uses this notion to exemplify the adaptation difficulties experienced by Estonia in the transitional period of modernization in contemporary European context. This double context resounds with an ambivalent experience of modernity and the repercussions of such experience in the works of those authors who, like Kallas, also belonged to the Young Estonians. Kallas’s idea that those authors were the most national of their time opposes all the early 20th century opponents of Young Estonia.

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