Modernismi muutuv tähendus eesti kirjanduskultuuris. Rekonstrueerimiskatse
The changing meaning of the term ‘modernism’ in the Estonian literary space. A reconstruction

Summary/Abstract: Fredric Jameson has suggested in “A Singular Modernity” (2002) and elsewhere in his works that every interpretive act in culture includes in itself an act of periodization and implicit historical narratives are at work everywhere where a claim is made to assert the final meaning of a work of literature. The aim of this article is to take up Jameson’s challenge and reread various disputes over modernism in Estonian literature in the light of the periodizing function of the term modernism. This means reconstructing what has been considered modern in contemporary literature and what has been juxtaposed to it. In the early 20th century and especially among the members of the Noor-Eesti (Young Estonian) movement the claims of modernity and modernism in literature largely coincided with the ideology of style. Roughly during the first decade of Soviet occupation the word modernism obviously did not appear in public debates over literature because of its connotations with western ideologies of art such as decadence, cosmopolitanism and formalism – labels which were stigmatized by the official Soviet ideology. However, in the later Soviet period the works of Endel Nirk and Pärt Lias reveal specific ways of periodizing literature, which follow similar patterns of periodizing common in the rhetoric of modernism (although the term modernism is not present). Most thorough studies of modernism in the contemporary, post-soviet Estonian literary space have been conducted by Tiit Hennoste. Hennoste’s generalisations, however, demonstrate that there has been a certain hermeneutic discord between the local literary tradition and its relation to European modernism. Estonian literature has been described as “lagging behind” or desperately trying to catch up with the so-called “Greenwhich meridian of literature” (Pascale Casanova).

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