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Kas kodu on või kodu tehakse? Kodustamise problemaatika Johannes Semperi ja Tõnu Õnnepalu loomingus

Author(s): Katre Talviste,Madli Kütt / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 07/2015

The article investigates questions concerning home and domestication in Johannes Semper’s and Tõnu Õnnepalu’s work. Both authors have participated in „domesticating” Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu in Estonian. Semper is known to be the first ever Estonian translator of Proust. His translation of the infamous excerpt of madeleine cake introduced Proust’s work to Estonian readers already in 1923. Tõnu Õnnepalu’s translation of Le Temps retrouvé (2004) is up until now the last published translation from the Recherche and also the only part of the novel completely translated into Estonian. Both authors-translators have rather opposing approaches to the relations of foreign and domestic, which come across also in their translations of Proust. For Semper, domestication depends on the understanding of the foreign. Belonging somewhere, considering a space or a fictional world one’s own is not an impossible task, but may require some effort, which Semper is ready to take in order to make the foreign his own. Õnnepalu’s work presents belonging as a serious challenge as his fictional home-space remains, most of the time, out of reach. Moreover, the borders between the foreign and the domestic are not always clear; the otherness is inaccessible partly because it is not clearly defined. For Proust, both losing and searching have equal value in the task of creating a fictional world and a work of art. The two translators each bring forth either one or the other aspect of Proust’s writing process and worldview.

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Venna ja õe abielu tagajärjel tekkinud järve muistend: Perekonnaajaloolisi tõlgendusi

Author(s): Merili Metsvahi / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 08-09/2015

A popular Estonian legend, known above all in southern Estonia and the West-Estonian islands is analysed. The legend tells about a brother and sister from a higher stratum of society, who are intent on getting married to one another. Despite a special permission obtained from the Pope, at the big moment the house of the ceremony, with all the wedding guests, disappears under the ground and a lake appears instead. The only one to survive is a brother of the couple’s mother. Most of the 20th-century records refer the legend to Lake Valgjärv of Koorküla. According to several historical documents, the legend had been recorded in the Livonian Chronicle written by monk (later canon) Siegbert of Riga in 1489. According to that (probably perished) book the described events took place in about 1300. In the article the meaning of the legend is interpreted in the context of Estonian family history studies, with an emphasis on the fact that there are as many as seventy three versions of the legend telling about the wedding of a brother and sister, but only one similar story about a father and daughter. As a strong tabooing as well as folklorization of brother-sister incest is characteristic of the folklore of matrilineal societies with a strong female position it is considered likely that the Estonian territory was also inhabited by a matrilineal community, where women’s status was relatively high. This argument is supported by facts from archaeology and legal history. The analysis leads to the suggestion that the legend reflects a conflict of two cultures in the 13th-century Livonia. The folk tale presents the country people’s view of an event, possibly a cousin marriage among German settlers. Most likely, the local community, whose social order still bore relicts of collectivity and matrilineality had a radically different idea about endo- and exogamy than the German-speaking arrivals from a more individualizing society.

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Leigri tegelaskuju hiiumaa jutupärimuses: Lõbus leigar või manajast maatark?

Author(s): Helen Kõmmus / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 08-09/2015

The article discusses the tradition about Leiger, the central figure of the giant and hero legends of Hiiumaa, covering the history of collecting, studying and publishing of the relevant folklore, as well as the historical, cultural, ethnic and mythological factors behind this popular figure and his specific local traits. Since 1890, seventy six legends or shorter tradition records of giants’ activities on the Isle of Hiiumaa have arrived in the Estonian Folklore Archives at the Estonian Literary Museum. A comparison of the giant stories collected from the parishes of Emmaste, Käina, Pühalepa and Reigi with those from other regions reveals some parallels of Leiger with Suur Tõll of Saaremaa and the Devil as well as with some heroes of local legends such as the Hiiu Witch, the Kõpu Man, and the Wizard Mats. Also, the points of interest include some local specifics and community problems reflected in the local plots, such as, for example, the story of Leiger liberating Hiiumaa from wolves. Attention should also be paid to the Swedish etymology läkare ‘doctor’ of the local Swedish version of the name Leiger. In addition, the article points out historical data available on the first farmers of the name Leiger, who were either of Finnish or Swedish origin, as well as on the folk healers and sorcerers known to have lived on the lands of Leigri village. In summary, Leiger is an integrated cross-genre central figure of the narrative tradition of Hiiumaa, combining various historical and cultural layers and incorporating the wider Estonian narrative tradition of giants and heroes, some local Estonian and coastal Swedish legends of place or origin, as well as stories of remarkable persons told through the ages.

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Kahest aiast ja mõnest mullast: Kaplinski aiad ja peenramaad

Author(s): Ene-Reet Soovik / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 11/2015

The garden as a literary trope has a time-honoured tradition behind it. Its classic manifestations include locus amoenus, a pleasant and delightful space in perpetual bloom, as well as hortus conclusus, an enclosed leafy space bearing religious connotations. Gardening as an occupation has been compared to a continuation of God’s work of creation on earth. However, these traditional tropes need not pay much attention to soil that has a crucial role in the cycle of matter between the living and the nonliving parts of the environment and makes the cultivation of surface vegetation possible.In the early poetry of the Estonian author Jaan Kaplinski (b. 1941) the traditional garden image, particularly a fruit garden in bloom, tends to appear as a place suggestive of a promise of eternal solace. Independent of these, there are also poems that demonstrate an awareness of the living soil, as well as the underlying bedrock, as important components in the environment. Occasionally these texts also acquire a (quasi)religious dimension of death and resurrection; the latter may occur in the guise of a plant. The soil and the garden come together at a somewhat later stage of Kaplinski’s poetry, in particular the collection Evening Brings Everything Back (1985), which documents the passing of nearly a year in the life of the poet. The poems give evidence of the spread of kitchen gardening and preserve-making in Estonia during the Soviet years that helped to fulfil a gap left by the limited availability of food, and was thus also endorsed by the official Party line. The poems record the bodily engagement required by managing a vegetable garden, weeding and watering. In their treatment of the human mastery of the environment the texts stand out in the context of Kaplinski’s work that more usually has been linked to deep ecology. Still, his take-on of gardening does not fully amount to an anthropocentrism that would counter the principles of land ethic as suggested by Aldo Leopold.

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Airootsi - Lauri Pilteri kirjanduslik omailm

Author(s): Brita Melts / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 10/2015

Ever since his first book Lauri Pilter has associated his narratives with personally meaningful places. Gradually his interlacing of fact and fiction has caused a network of real places develop into a literary mindscape fictitiously called Airootsi. In real landscape its counterpart could be seen in the Noarootsi peninsula, Western Estonia. Noarootsi is also the initial name of Pilter’s mindscape. Gradually, however, some odd place names start appearing, which blurs the possible correspondence between literary and real geography.In the framework of different interpretations of landscape, literary mindscape and Umwelt, the article analyses the literary mappings of Noarootsi and the gradual transformation of the area into the fictitious Airootsi in Pilter’s oeuvre. Four Pilter’s books are examined, namely, three novels in stories: Lohejas pilv („Dragonish cloud”, 2004), Retk Rahemäkke („Up to Mount Rahemägi”, 2010) and Aerudeta köisraudteel („On a funicular railway without oars”, 2012), and the collection Vilekoor ja teisi jutte („The booing chorus and other stories”, 2014). Pilter’s portrayal of the Noarootsi peninsula, his choice of places and characters, his rendering of natural impressions, down to the attainment of an extensive overall view, differs across the four books, deepening step by step on the way to his personal mindscape. The aim of this study is to explicate how visual selection and purpose are at work in the literary rendering of a real landscape, how that landscape develops into a mindscape, what its main features are and how Pilter’s character goes about creating his own network of experience. This network is manifested in emotional rambling episodes, where the surroundings are mapped in great detail and very sensuously, which is exactly how a real landscape, renamed as Airootsi, is transformed into a personal mindscape.

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Kaplinski kaugused

Author(s): Ene-Reet Soovik / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 02/2016

Triggered by the image suggested in Hamlet that even while bounded in a nutshell it is still possible to consider oneself the king of infinite space, the article attempts to chart the reach of the dimension of the far-away space in Jaan Kaplinski’s poetry. The point of departure is found in the chrestomatic works on space and place in humanistic geography that underscore the nature of space as „amorphous and intangible and not an entity that can be directly described and analysed” (Relph 1976: 8). Thus, while lacking stability and connoting with openness, freedom and mobility, space is made meaningful by places for which it creates a context. In Kaplinski’s poems four major kinds of far-away spaces can be detected, each signalled by the type of places embedded in them. Firstly, there is the cosmic space that can be described by evoking the names of celestial bodies and constellations; there is an awareness that distances in this type of space are measured in light years. Secondly, a type of space appears that bears features of the Fairy land described by folklorists, such as being vaguely located somewhere unmeasureably far away with scarce toponymic reference mostly used just to signal distance, and being possibly surrounded by a boundary that cuts it off from the everyday world. Tropes emerging in connection with this space are mountains, the desert and the sea. Thirdly, there is a kind of space constructed by places and regions on the actual political world map, usually sites of tension and conflict an awareness of which may explictly come from the media. A prominent subcategory, directly connected with map-making and the related naming of foreign places, is (post)colonial space. Also other culturally or politically mediated spaces are gathered under this umbrella. And finally, there is the far-off dimension of the world that the persona can relate to as a traveller, either by having visited certain places or dreaming of the possibility. What also emerges in the course of the discussion is that the spatial types appear already in Kaplinski’s slim first collection and are elaborated in a more individual manner throughout the poet’s later oevre.

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Eksiilis ja varjus: Sonettide kuningas August Pihlak

Author(s): Rebekka Lotman / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 03/2016

The article examines the poetical works by August Pihlak (1903-1970), Estonian exile poet who fled from Estonia to the USA during World War II. Although, from a strictly objective point of view, his poetry’s contribution to the Estonian sonnet tradition is remarkable, he has practically been left out from Estonian literary history. Also, none of his seven poetry collections has ever been reviewed in any literary magazine. Among other poems Pihlak’s poetry collections include 229 sonnets, which makes him one of the most productive Estonian sonneteers. Furthermore, he is the only Estonian poet who has written six heroic crowns (sonnet redoublé). The formal aspects of his sonnets are often multifarious and playful – he frequently experiments with the sonnets’ rhyme schemes, stanzas and verse meter. The characteristic feature of Pihlak’s sonnet production is their so-called autometapoetical function: his sonnets’ formal elements tend to harmonize with their verbal message. The article analyzes August Pihlak’s rich sonnet production by discussing different aspects of his poems: rhyme schemes, meter, stanzas, poet’s voice, lexicon, thematics and ideology; also, this is an attempt to explicate a poet’s exclusion from a poetry tradition despite his indisputable contribution to it in some levels. The introductory part of the article gives a brief overview of his life.

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Kirjandusvälja toimimisviisist Jaan Krossi saksa retseptsiooni näitel

Author(s): Cornelius Hasselblatt / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 04/2016

Der Artikel beruht auf den entsprechenden Kapiteln der Monographie des Autors (2011) über die Rezeption der estnischen Literatur im deutschsprachigen Raum, ist aber stellenweise gekürzt, bearbeitet und weiterentwickelt. Da von Jaan Kross vergleichsweise viele Bücher auf Deutsch vorliegen, bietet sich sein Werk für eine eingehendere Rezeptionsanalyse an. Im Vordergrund stand dabei die Frage, warum die zwischenzeitlich sehr lebhafte Rezeption zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts erlahmt ist. Hierzu wird die Theorie des literarischen Feldes von Pierre Bourdieu angewendet, anhand deren untersucht wird, welche Rolle die jeweiligen Akteure auf dem Rezeptionsfeld gespielt haben. In erster Linie werden Verlage und Kritiker in Abhängigkeit von ihrer Position auf dem literarischen Feld betrachtet, ferner inhaltliche Aussagen der Kritik und begrenzt auch quantitative Angaben. Im Ergebnis scheint es vier Faktoren zu geben, die in ihrer Addition eine spezifische Situation für die deutsche Rezeption von Jaan Kross geschaffen haben, die auf andere Länder nicht zutrifft und die sich nachteilig auf die Aufnahme der Werke des Autors ausgewirkt hat: Das Nicht-Bekommen des Nobelpreises (trifft freilich für alle Länder zu), zurückhaltende Aufnahme eines Romans in tonangebenden Medien, infolgedessen Verzögerung der Herausgabe der weiteren Werke, und schließlich die Aufspaltung zwischen verschiedenen Verlagen.

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Stseenilise oleviku mõjujõust kirjandusliku realismi esteetikas

Author(s): Indrek Ojam,Jaak Tomberg / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 04/2016

The article explores one possible source of the verisimilitude of literary realism – its prominent detailed descriptions of material and social reality. Our aim is to relate this poetically autonomous descriptive faculty to the alleged representational objectivity of literary realism, and explain how descriptions function as a source of realist verisimilitude from a philosophical as well as poetic point of view. We use Madis Kõiv’s phenomenological explanation of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity from his little-known text „On the Objectivity of Subjectivity” to see how it reflects upon Fredric Jameson’s recent elaboration of literary realism as a poetic balance between the distinct faculties of narrative and scene, emotion and affect, personal fate and impersonal bodily present. We show how Kõiv’s thoughts on the objectivity of phenomenological existence supplement Jameson’s claim that realist descriptions, as autonomous poetic units, signify the impersonal affective present common to all bodily experience. We analyze the poetics of literary descriptions by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola to trace the gradual historical autonomy of affective bodily present from realism to naturalism and beyond. Madis Kõiv’s own work is presented in this context as an example of Estonian literary modernism.

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Paljas elu laagrimälestustes ja Jaan Oksa loomingus

Author(s): Leo Luks / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 06/2016

The article compares the prose oeuvre of Jaan Oks with certain death camp memoirs with a documentary background, based on the concept of ‘bare life’ borrowed from the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. The hypothesis is that Jaan Oks’s short stories of village life keep consistently outlining the contours of bare life. Bare life means a life emptied from normal human desire for happiness and for a future. The article compares the peasants depicted in Oks’s short stories with the camp residents called ‘Muselmänner’, who had given up fighting for their lives, thus finding themselves halfway between life and death. In Oks’s prose peasant life is also a mechanical existence emptied of all meaning and without any chance of developing one. The consequence is that life is not worth living and suicide is the only exit. The final part of the article describes, based on camp memoirs, some of the so-called survival strategies and speculates a little on modern life in general. It is observed that in the extreme conditions of the concentration camp all aims normally giving sense to human life were superseded by the necessity of mere survival, that is, bare life came to occupy people’s whole consciousness and their system of values. However, such a shift is not confined to concentration camps only; the end of the article attempts to demonstrate how a similar regard of the mere fact of staying alive as the ultimate value is flooding the whole space of modern thinking.

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Kaval-Ain ja Vanapagan: Nooruse kihermeid I

Author(s): Arne Merilai / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 07/2016

The article discusses the inspiring literary commentary published by mentor Ain Kaalep alias O. Muusapoeg ‘lit. O. Son of the Muses’ in the 1960s editions of the magazine Noorus („Youth”), which was officially addressed to the Communist youth of the Estonian SSR. It highlights the rhetoric of irony cleverly hidden between the lines, which could be regarded as critical counterpropaganda. On the one hand, the writings carried an important mission of educating the rising generation in classic literature, Estonian as well as world and from the Antique to the exuberant current literature, trying to fulfil the deficiency in aesthetic knowledge afflicting post-war Estonia. On the other hand, using hints like in the classic Aesop’s language the author addressed the informed readers with messages close to their hearts, such as prohibited or nearly banned literature, or the censored historical and cultural memory of Estonia, while vulgar speculations on fine arts and life were ridiculed as manifest ignorance. The author has termed his pragmatic tactics as „showing the [red] colour”, which means that using Soviet phrases and motifs as Trojan horses he often managed to send opposite signals, thus reversing echoed praise to sarcastic censure. Such hidden or half-revealed contraband served not Soviet interests but those of cultural resistance. Kaalep’s subtle counter-demagogy stimulated the Estonian spirit, although those scratching the mere surface may of course have been misled. The cessation of the series in 1970 coincides with the end of the political thaw.

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Lõunaeesti keele tagasitulek proosasse

Author(s): Eva Velsker,Mart Velsker / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 08-09/2016

Although the turn of the 20th century marked a retreat of the South Estonian literary language, also called Tartu language, from the printed word, the period brought some new ways to use dialects in fiction. The most prominent users of South Estonian dialects in the prose of the time were August Kitzberg, Jaan Lattik, Ernst Enno and Hermann Julius Schmalz, which makes the four authors responsible for bringing South Estonian back to literature. Kitzberg, who was the first of the four to start his literary career, offers various solutions. Nevertheless, his oeuvre demonstrates all those techniques regarded as typical of the literary use of dialects. The Mulgi dialect as used by Kitzberg mainly occurs in direct speech, providing cues of social status, education and background, often serving as a comic device. However, Kitzberg can as well be found using dialect speech in a serious text, without an emphasis on differences in social status. With Lattik, dialect use serves a mild comical effect, being avoided in more serious narratives. Võru dialect usually occurs in his memoir-based prose as direct speech uttered by persons of a lower social status or by uneducated people (often children). Enno also wrote sketches largely based on personal experience, using dialect in direct speech, but his use of the dialect is more natural than that of the rest. Enno has considered Tartu dialect eligible for serious texts as well, while the language of his characters is individualised. Here, too, there is some consideration of social status and education, but these were also ref lected in normal communicative situations of the early 20th century. As for the prose by Schmalz it contains dialect speech all the way through, both in direct and reported speech, which is not really typical of the period in question. What is typical, though, is his attempt to add comedy to his stories (standing out for their first intent of being funny) by using Setu dialect. The dialect use of the above four authors was groundbreaking for the time. The 20th century favoured Lattik’ approach, especially concerning the use of dialects in direct speech. Completely South Estonian texts did not start appearing again until the late 20th century. However, the stories by Kitzberg and Enno remain an early evidence of the diversity of literary options for dialect speech.

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Marie Under Juri Živago luuletuste eestindajana

Author(s): Irina Z. Belobrovtseva / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 10/2016

The present article is focused on the first Estonian translation of Doctor Zhivago’s last chapter „The Poems of Yuri Zhivago”. This translation was published in 1960 by the publishing house Vaba Maa in Stockholm shortly after Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature (1958). Artur Adson translated the prose, while „The Poems of Yuri Zhivago” were translated by Marie Under. The article aims to reproduce a succession of some facts related to the translation process and the translation itself with the purpose of helping readers to appreciate this translation as a milestone in Estonian (and also Russian) literary history. The analysis of the translation reconstructs the aged Under’s understanding of Pasternak, i.e. the translator’s concept of the cycle as a whole, its poems, and some components of the poems.

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Üks reis, kaks päevikut: Anna Sophie ja Gustav Adolf Stackelbergi Euroopa-reis 1797-1799

Author(s): Kairit Kaur / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 10/2016

1797–1799 führte eine Europareise Gustav und Sophie von Stackelberg, zwei Adlige aus Estland, nach Deutschland, Österreich und in die Schweiz. Das eigentliche Reiseziel – Italien – konnte wegen Besetzung durch napoleonische Truppen nicht besucht werden. Während der Reise haben beide Ehepartner separat ein Tagebuch geführt. Dies gibt Gelegenheit, dieselbe Reise aus zwei verschiedenen Blickwinkeln bzw. aus männlicher und weiblicher Perspektive zu beobachten. Das Tagebuch der Frau ist wesentlich umfangreicher. Es setzt schon fast am Anfang der Reise an, für die Frau war die Fahrt von Anbeginn bis zum Ende ein Abenteuer. Das Tagebuch des Mannes ist viel kürzer, es beginnt erst in der Nähe von Dresden und schließt in Königsberg. Entsprechend ihren Gender-Rollen zeichnet der Mann seine Reise als grand tour/Bildungsreise, die Frau vordergründig als eine Kurreise (verborgen Bildungsreise). Im Tagebuch des Mannes findet man Beschreibungen verschiedener technischer Verfahren, oft begleitet mit kleinen illustrierenden Zeichnungen. Die Frau führte ein Skizzenbuch, in dem sie vor allem malerische Landschaften und Kompositionen mit Menschen abbildete. Die finanzielle Seite der Reise und die wirtschaftliche Lage der besuchten Länder kommen deutlicher im Tagebuch des Mannes zum Ausdruck. Von der Frau erfährt man dafür wesentlich mehr über Begegnungen mit Menschen, auch gedenkt sie ihrer Kinder, während der Mann sie (bewusst) kaum erwähnt (es passt nicht ins Modell). Auch über ihren Partner sprechen sie unterschiedlich. Der Mann sagt meistens „wir”, nur ein paar Mal spricht er von „meinem Weibchen”, die Frau bleibt oft unsichtbar. Die Frau spricht oft von „meinem Mann”, sie definiert sich mehr über die Zugehörigkeit zu ihrem Gatten, dieser Mann wird dennoch als eigenständige Person sichtbar. Verbindend für das Paar sind ihr Interesse für die Kunst und die Liebe für malerische, romantische, erhabene Landschaften und Bauten (gotische Kathedralen). Die Reise war ein gemeinsamer Höhepunkt ihres Lebens.

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Antihumanism ilma reservita: nalja funktsioon ja hävituse mõõtmed (:)kivisildniku viimase aja luules

Author(s): Neeme Lopp / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 10/2016

In keeping with Kivisildnik’s disposition of construing poetry, which opposes any socially or culturally dominant value or meaning, his poetry of the first half of the current decade – especially in the collections Liivlased ja saurused („Livonians and dinosaurs”, 2011), (:)soari evangeelium („The Gospel of (:)soar”, 2012) published in collaboration with Navitrolla, and Inimsööja taksojuht („The man-eating taxi-driver”, 2013), but also Enne sõda ja kõike seda („Before the war and all this”, 2012) – strikes the eye with some antihumanist traits. Although Kivisildnik’s palette of literary devices had always implicitly spoken of antihumanist ideas („machine poetry”), the above collections mark a transition from implicit antihumanist pathos to a nearly explicit programme, which could as well be called an antihumanist counter-ideology. The mission of Kivisildnik’s antihumanist counter-ideology is to reveal the biologist and commercial foundation of the humanist illusion, i.e. to unfold the covert cynical core of humanism. To achieve this aim, Kivisildnik uses the reversal technique, creating a comical effect. The fun, however, is not innocent, as it enjoys seeing its object as small, low and despicable by exchanging an ideological hyperbole for a litotes, thus performing a symbolic neutering of the object. With the same purpose in mind the author is trying to neuter the humanist image of man, the core of which is human free will. However, this leads us to Kivisildnik’s paradox: the condition of the possibility of his vision is also the condition of its impossibility. As long as there are readers of that poetry the realisation of Kivisildnik’s vision of total destruction must be still a little away. Yet, with no more readers around the prophecy must have been realised. Thus, the poetry referred to above manifests itself as a kind of text of warning, with a constantly haunting menacing potential on its limits.

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Transgressiivse kirjanduse poeetikast (I) - Näiteid eesti nüüdiskirjandusest

Author(s): Janek Kraavi / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 11/2016

Transgressive poetics is a genre-appropriate selection of devices to describe deviant behaviour and phenomena regulated by prohibitions. The article presents a two-level approach starting from the theoretical framework of transgressive literature, which is subsequently filled in with examples of transgression found in contemporary Estonian literature. At first, the general concept of transgression is discussed based on Georges Bataille, which is followed by the description of a transgressive work of literature as an event formatted by provocation and scandal. The transgressive nature of the conditions and phenomena ousted from this or that culture is also explained using Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and the concept of Carnival as influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin’s oeuvre. In contemporary Estonian literature the transgressive element emerges in the period 1996–1998, when several works (e.g., in the first place Sven Kivisildnik’s Eesti Nõukogude Kirjanike Liit 1981. aasta seisuga, olulist („The Estonian Soviet Writers’ Union as in 1981: the essentials”), Peeter Sauter’s Kõhuvalu („Stomach-ache”) and Lauakõne („Toast”), and also Toomas Vint’s opening works of his post-modern period and Kaur Kender’s Iseseisvuspäev („Independence Day”) provoked a lively controversy spreading beyond literary life. Kaur Kender’s novel „Check Out” of 2001 can be regarded as emblematic of the transgression aesthetics of the time. In the Estonian literature published after the restoration of independence the recurrent transgressive themes include taboos of depicting sexuality and violence, to a somewhat lesser degree also criticism of national sanctity, addictive behaviour and gay identity. From the aspect of genre poetics the transgressive experience of contemporary Estonian literature reveals a gradual increase of graphicality and the visualizable element in descriptions, while depiction of taboo themes may easily involve parody reversing certain social mythologies. Another prominent device of transgressional poetics is reflexivity, which means the presence of a narrative level to explain the reasons and consequences of the transgression. The latest boom of transgression aesthetics in contemporary Estonian literature is mostly associated with Kender’s novel „Untitled 12” (2014), which has even led to court action.

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Transgressiivse kirjanduse poeetikast II: Juhtumikäsitlus: Kaur Kenderi "Untitled 12"

Author(s): Janek Kraavi / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 12/2016

In his short story „Untitled 12”, ambivalent Estonian author and journalist Kaur Kender describes sex addiction in a middle-aged man, which supported by the need for control leads to a growing succession of acts of violence, torture and murder. Kender has received a criminal charge for his detailed and violent descriptions of sexual intercourse between the man and children. From the literary point of view, Kender uses the language of pornography in its whole richness, yet not with an aim of stimulating the sexual instinct, but rather to criticise the power relations ruling in an over-sexualised society. Kender’s metaphor of such a society is, indeed, violent sex subordination and the attitude of control and objectisation characteristic of the pornographic discourse. However, towards the end of the story the exaggerated graphic detail attains such intensity that the boundaries of realistic representation start cracking and we find ourselves amidst a black parody of pornography. In the end this disgusting „unrealistic world” becomes too much for one’s imaginative powers, forcing the reader out of that world. Another element used by Kender to alienate pornographic writing consists of several series of mythological and religious images (pray, offering, seed, spirit, lamb, Maria, serpent, Enkidu etc), which associate his text with the classical discourse of transgressive literature, especially with Marquis de Sade, but also with The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. On the narrative plane, the story is based on the mechanism of routine repetitions deriving from the theme of addiction, but at the same time obsessive-compulsive addiction becomes a metaphor applying to contemporary Western culture as a whole. More specifically, the social critical allegory of the story addresses the East-European capitalist reality, where normality and law are struggling on the surface of the depths of animal instincts, the law of the strongest, and criminal behaviour.

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Mittekuulumise valu ja võimalus - Andrei Ivanovi erand eesti kirjanduses

Author(s): Eneken Laanes,Daniele Monticelli / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 01/2017

Andrei Ivanov is one of the most interesting authors of contemporary Estonian literature, but he has not been easy to pigeonhole, both in terms of his personality and oeuvre. His texts written in Russian, but doggedly addressing vital issues of local culture, are often experienced as a challenge to the self-identity of Estonian literature and culture. The article investigates the role of Ivanov and his oeuvre in Estonian literature with the help of the concept of „exception”. The analysis of different identitarian categories, both on the institutional level of literature and the thematic level of Ivanov’s works, demonstrates how those works problematise the ethnic as well as linguistic distinctions traditionally employed to define Estonian literature. The institutional level is discussed in the article focusing on Ivanov’s novel Peotäis põrmu (A Handful of Dust). Some ideas of Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben are used to analyse the debate that erupted around the novel in 2012 and to show that at stake in this debate was the definition of the boundaries of Estonian literature that the novel apparently blurred. The second part of the article addresses the thematic level of Ivanov’s oeuvre, analyzing the refusal of Ivanov’s protagonists to belong to the Estonian as well as the Russian Estonian community. The article pinpoints the intertextual relations between Ivanov and T.S. Eliot, in particular similar tropes of aborted and stillborn children in their oeuvre. Edward Said’s ideas on exile and secular criticism allow to read those images as symbols of a broken lineages and crisis of filiation. With the help of these tropes Ivanov represents (internal) exile as a minority position, which enables a critical look at various ethnic and cultural communities.

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Põimiv mina - Jaan Krossi tegelikkuse manifestatsioonid

Author(s): Rein Undusk / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 02/2017

As an outcome of a paper presented initially at the conference „Entangled literature: national, cultural and generic intersections in the literary culture of Estonia”, the article tries to ground the concept of entangled literature in the presumably in-between and negative character of literary discourse in modern culture. Drawing inspiration from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, which states a kind of exclusion of literariness from the Western episteme since Cartesianism, the article argues for the specific role of modern literature (the novel) in building up minor (individual or national) consciousnesses as a result of undermining or controverting the incumbent epistemic reality of culture. This challenging function of modern literature is interpreted further as a task, assumed more or less openly by any culture, to relate the intelligible to the individual area of sensibility, which cannot succeed, as claimed by the article, without some recourse to the transcendental dimension of thinking. The inclusion of autobiographical elements and personal sense perceptions in the novels of Jaan Kross has been well attested to by the author himself. What has maybe not been so evident is that Kross makes the rationality of his historical characters to stand in some critical points of their action at pure sensibility, i.e. at the judgment of taste, which I would like to read as Kross’ way of dealing with contingency in history, but also as pointing to the deeper meaning of his concept of Estonia. Because Estonia, it seems to me, was to remain for Kross, and for his entangled egos, to some important degree, a fact of senses par excellence, i.e. something that defies rationalization in its essence but that, exactly for this reason, could offer an irresistibly clear perception of personal presence in the course of history. The historical fictions of Estonia created by Kross reveal us the aesthetic side of historical truth, not as inferior or additive to epistemic truth, but as something that relates truth to the presence and sensibility of a person.

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Luule ja foto dialoog eesti nüüdisluules

Author(s): Agnes Neier,Joosep Susi / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 03+04/2022

The inclusion of photographic material in poetry collections has increased significantly in recent decades. This may seem self-evident since we live in an era of visual culture. Despite the growing visuality in the literary field, the popularity of life-writing, the ambivalence between fiction and documentary, the affective turn and “New Sincerity” as an important trend in contemporary literature, photographic images in poetry collections are still mainly used in the traditional illustrative function. If the literature of recent decades is characterised by a thirst for non-textual reality, the inclusion of photographs in poetry collections could be a tangible opportunity to play with the contours of the factual and fictional, to seek authenticity, and to emphasise the autobiographical or documentary and physicality. But the potentially fruitful dialogue between the visual and the verbal manifests itself only on rare occasions in contemporary Estonian poetry. So, why does a photograph seem not to fit next to lyrical poetry? We take a closer look at four collections of poems where photographic images are an integral part of the book, and observe how the performativity of both media changes. The statement applies above all to printed poetry, as social media poetry is already multimodal. in the interaction of word and image. We believe that the selected poetry collections represent different relationships between lyrical poetry and photographic images that illuminate why we rarely see the two media participating equally in the meaning-making process. We take a closer look at Tõnu Õnnepalu’s epic poem The Glass Porch, Kristiina Ehin’s collection of poems on family history Thirst is the Same for Everyone, Kelly Turk’s work Applied Theologian, which at first glance resembles a fashion magazine, and Tõnis Vilu’s illness narrative A Gift to a Psychologist.

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