MÕJUKRIITIKA KUI NOOR-EESTI KÕVERPEEGEL
Influence Criticism as a Distorting Mirror of Young Estonia

Summary/Abstract: Influence criticism was one of the trends practiced in Estonia in the 1920s. The article is based on microhistorical analysis of a large corpus of literary critical texts; attention is drawn to the role of the individual and to the contextual meanings of a critical review. The Estonian quest for literary influences began with a literary seminar on Foreign Influences in Estonian Literature announced by Gustav Suits, the first professor of Estonian Literature at the University of Tartu, in 1921. The participant young writers published their studies as critical reviews, while the method they used contravened the traditional discourse. Surprisingly, the new trend of looking for foreign influences resulted in prolonged conflicts between authors. However, the long polemics between authors and critics were useful in leading to metacritical issues and, eventually, to the formulation of the functions of criticism and reviews. As a result, Estonian literary criticism underwent an explosive development of self-realization. In the article, the quest for literary contacts and their influences manifested in literature is viewed as in dialogue with the earlier programme of the Young Estonian movement (1905–1915), intending to establish better contacts with European culture. In Estonian literature and culture in general the 1920s were just the time for the programme to be realized and to yield results. Analysis of literary criticism of the time, however, reveals how an opposite system of values – the ideology of national literature – was built up. True, the national cultural identity is formulated using European as the other and the foreign, but the Young Estonians' aim to enhance the contacts between the Estonian and European literatures had turned to its opposite.

• Details
• Contents