Underi ja Tuglase Kirjanduskeskus

The Renaissance can surely be called a great amalgam of diverse historical, cultural and philosophical impulses. Its outwardly impressive traits hide a pedigree of a confused and enigmatic nature that had combined the bulk of Christian, ancient and medieval motifs in their mutual interaction. The marks of the Renaissance are therefore ambiguous, allowing for explanations from differing or even contradictory positions. Focusing on German Dominican thinking of the later medieval period, the present article argues how some characteristics of the Renaissance can be deduced from the background of Albert the Great, Dietrich of Freiberg, and Meister Eckhart, and how they provided material for the symbiotic work in the person of Nicholas of Cusa.

The infinite, understood as transcendency, stood in the background of most medieval thinking. Embraced in the early Middle Ages by the concept of universal natural symbolism, which organized the reading of the syntax of natura, the infinite posed new epistemic problems for medieval thinking after the re-emergence of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, with some of its strongly finitist strings, in 12th century Europe. In fact, the collision of scholastic natural philosophy with supernatural theology, included judiciously in the structure of the medieval university, proved highly fruitful from the perspective of the development of knowledge as such. The effective, as regards the preparation of via moderna, entanglement of Franciscan Platonism and Aristotelianism in the philo­sophies of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham is testimony to it. The present article under­takes the task to offer some insights into the way infinity was accommodated in medieval Christian thinking, especially from the point of view of concept formation in culture, and of the interrelations between different cognitive demands of the human mind.

This article is based on the interpretation of a segment of the reception of J. Randvere’s provocative, short essay-novella “Ruth” (1909), which was written by Johannes Aavik, a well-known Young Estonian and one of the principal modernizers of the Estonian language. This segment of reception regards “Ruth” as the quintessence of Young Estonia’s ideology, but does not offer a full explanation of how this ideology in “Ruth” is associated, on the one hand, with Young Estonians’ ambitions in modernizing Estonian literature and, on the other, with the broader fin de siècle European culture. I shall ask through which discourses does this ideology, which is innovative in the context of Estonian culture at the beginning of the 20th century, express itself in “Ruth”? What imaginations, representations and associations appear in “Ruth” in relation to the Young Estonian program, which interweaves tradition and/ or Estonian national-mindedness on the one hand, and Europeannes and/or modern ideas on the other. Or who are these Europeans and Estonians with whom Young Estonians wish to identify? Although Young Estonian ideology in “Ruth” has mostly been associated with connotations of decadence like “a culture of individuality”, “artificiality” and “aestheticism”, I will argue that in “Ruth” counter-discourses also come to the forefront. In other words, “Ruth” becomes the quintessence of the Young Estonia ideology, because it serves as a metaphoric counterpart to the Young Estonians’ program: “let us be Estonians, but let us become Europeans”. Through the reproduction of decadent discourse, which is in this text in the dominant position, “Ruth” oscillates between the ambivalent valorizations of signs of health (norms) and disease or decadence (deviation from the norms), accompanied, on the one hand, and among other things by opposition to the national discourse and, on the other hand, to the signs of decadence, that is the neutralization of the symptoms of decadence.

The following article analyses the description of towns in the short novels of Elisabeth Aspe: Kasuõde (Stepsister, 1887), Ennosaare Ain (Ain From Ennosaare Farm, 1888), Anna Dorothea (1891) and Aastate pärast (After Many Years, 1910). Aspe (1860–1927), one of the first Estonian female writers and an early realist, lived on the town border of Pärnu in south-west Estonia. During this historically interesting period, towns grew rapidly, but the ideology initiated by the national awakening movement concentrated on the idea of a nation being tightly bound to the countryside. Aspe’s works are like a litmus test of her time, and were influenced by German authors (Ottilie Wildermuth, W. Heimburg and Eugenie Marlitt), as well as by the Estonian national awakening period. Her first (epistolary) novel is based on a pure opposition between the city and the country; in her later novels, the emphasis has changed: the contrasts are suddenly more ambivalent. One possible explanation is the impelling emergence of city thematics, and the early city novel replacing the village story – a process that began in Estonian literature at that time – resulting in a more complicated picture than a simple black-and-white opposition. This was a period of mapping, describing and exploring the townscape with curiosity and eagerness; also, it was a period of warning social criticism. For example, Eduard Vilde wrote a novel about factories consuming their workers, and men from country villages coming to a town. It was also a time of a fight for Estonia’s own town space, persuading the Estonian reader that he/she had the same right to live in towns, and even to govern towns, as the existing upper classes from other nationalities. In Ain From Ennosaare Farm, the protagonist has a double Estonian- German identity, belonging simultaneously to the town and to the countryside; finally, he acknowledges his ethnic origin. Throughout Aspe’s novels, the word “city” has a controversial meaning. However, the importance of the city does not preclude the importance of other landscape details in her work. Aspe’s novels do not depict the anticipated problems of the city as an industrial monster destroying the health of workers; in fact, the word factory is mentioned only once, and the novels reflect the strong inviting glow around towns. In her novels, the cityscape changes pivotally, from a medieval burg into an open space. Aspe describes two cityscapes in parallel: first, a very visual, safe and protected space with walls, where the inner safety is protected from outsiders, and then an already changed, open world with its hazards. Her characters are well aware of the changing town structure: the disappearance of walls and gates, and the loss of the borders of the previous world, which divided the world into the (free) townspeople and the peasants, the wild and the civilized. The importance of moving into cities is also anticipated in the level of language as a keyword of the era. Aspe’s novels may also be seen as momentary still-lifes during the final outbreak of city-life: fundamental changes had already taken place, but their direction was uncertain. The vision of the urban future might also have been illuminated by the attraction of other cities Aspe mentions by name, but which she had not herself had a chance to visit: for example, she describes Moscow, the old capital of the Russian emperors, as an old painting of a holy city. For closer examination of Aspe's short novels, the theoretical works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Franco Moretti and Yuri Lotman were used; the language-based survey was carried out by means of building a corpus of three novels (Stepsister, Ain From Ennosaare Farm and After Many Years) digitalized by the Estonian Literary Museum and using computer-assisted corpus-based analysis.

The introduction to the special issue of Methis on Estonian environmentalism provides an overview of the phenomenon of environmentalism and its spread across political periods, economic formations, and regions. The essay starts by contextualising the central concepts of the issue, ‘environmentalism’ and its possible translation into Estonian as ‘keskkondlus’, and its relationship with the concept of ‘nature’. At the end of the 1980s, amidst a deepening awareness of environmental crisis, some authors announced ‘nature’ to have met its end. While this end has become widely accepted within environmental discourse, the approach clashes with the traditional thinking about the beauty of nature and its strong bonds with national identities. To foster discussion and to bridge the discursive and ideological gap between the two perceptions, the authors of the articles use the concept as an umbrella term for both paradigms.
 The second part of the introductory article discusses East European environmentalism, drawing attention to the research into erroneous assumptions regarding the lack of environmental activism within the Soviet Union. Before its brief heyday in the 1980s, East European environmentalism was hidden within economy, policy, society and culture. However, its roots went deeper, reaching back to 18th- and 19th-century thought, to Baltic German – and later Estonian – early voluntary associations and the value seen in the homeland and its natural objects. The founding of animal and nature protection societies in the late 19th century was an early practical outcome, and similar thought became pronounced in print culture. In early 20th century, several nature protection areas were established, and people became avid consumers of popular science journals – an interest that would continue throughout the Soviet period. The 1970s saw an environmental movement to protect the wetlands of Estonia which were in danger of being drained. Throughout the 20th century, also fiction reflected the prevailing views of nature and emerging concerns about the environment.
 The issue’s opening article by Ulrike Plath and Kaarel Vanamölder takes us back to the 17th century to demonstrate the possibility of climate movements more than three centuries ago. This is followed by Karl Hein’s case study that depicts in detail the emergence of animal protection in Estonia a hundred years ago in the context of local and regional history. The next four articles focus on different aspects of environmental movements in the Soviet period. Elle-Mari Talivee retells the story of the peculiar character of Atom-Boy created by the childrens’ author Vladimir Beekman who depicts in this form the various developments in the Soviet nuclear industry. This example from children’s literature is paralleled by similar environmental concerns expressed in visual arts, as outlined in Linda Kaljundi’s article. In a more theoretical take on liberal and autocratic environmental protection, Viktor Pál discusses the Soviet propagandistic use of environmental issues. Olev Liivik contextualises the protests against phosphorite mining in the 1970–80s within the wider trends in the Soviet Union, including the practice of sending letters of complaint to the media, and the various waves of environmental dissent. The discussion of a more compact case of the so-called Green Cycling Tours by Tambet Muide demonstrates the same increasingly oppositional stance that took hold in the 1980s. Regarding the post-Soviet era, Tõnno Jonuks, Lona Päll, Atko Remmel and Ulla Kadakas analyse the various conflicts that have emerged around natural and cultural objects protected by law since the 1990s. In the freestanding article of the issue, Raili Lass writes on interlinguistic and intersemiotic procedures of translation in the theatre but, as our introductory essay suggests, points of convergence may be found here with the discussion of staging of conflicts in environmental protection. In the “Theory in Translation” section Timothy Morton’s classic discussion of environmentalism is published in Ene-Reet Soovik’s translation, accompanied by introductory remarks from the translator and Kadri Tüür.
 The final part of the issue’s introduction offers a comparative and interdisciplinary take on the themes discussed. The revelatory nature of historical events of any era, especially natural disasters or the conditions of their unfolding, uncovers the socio-environmental relations that push people to respond. Whether or not such responses become environmental movements depends on the context that either recognises or ignores human embeddedness in the environment. Searching for such parallels connects 21st century climate activism and 17th century upheavals, animal protection in the 1920s and a hundred years later. The Soviet period allows a simultaneous scrutiny of both the limited and ideological take on the apparent lack of Soviet environmentalism as well as the methodological challenges of finding the footprints of hidden awareness and activism. Unearthing this from literature, art and the restrained presence of expert voices also provides an explanation to the sudden explosion of activism in the 1980s. The silence of the next decades further proves that there is nothing obvious in the ways in which environmentalism can take hold of society, which demands precise and detailed inquiry such as provided by the authors of this special issue.

As part of an expected further investigation into the role of infinity in stimulating contacts among religion, knowledge, and art in Western culture, the article focuses on the change in the attitude to infinity occurring in Neoplatonism and early Christianity. The overcoming of the so-called disgust with infinity, characterizing the ancient thought, must be linked largely to two factors. First, Christian monotheism provided the means for channelling the monistic (and theological) undercurrent of ancient thought, which had secretly let it drift (in Platonism) towards the positive concept of ápeiron, while retaining simultaneously a wish to offer a rational and dialectically founded explication for the world. The fitting together of these divergent ends – theological and rational – was rendered possible by a second factor, by the specifically Christian, i.e. Trinitarian, concept of God. Assisted by the seminal studies of Pierre Hadot, the present article tries to elucidate the conceptual developments and mutations underlying the emergence of the new understanding of infinity in Christian culture.

The model of entangled history appears to be extremely helpful for the literary history of multilingual and multiethnic spaces, since it not only transcends how nations are fixed in the sense of state, ethnicities, and language, but also reveals the manifold entanglements of structures relationships, interactions, and the like. The processes of change in literary history from an epochal structure to an everyday one set the shape of the literature as a whole and of the single text, and as a rule they appear different when seen from a global perspective rather than a local one. Therefore, how suitable the interlacing model is for describing and analyzing these conversion processes needs to be examined.

Artiklis on vaadeldud Narva ja Sillamäe linnast inspireeritud kirjandust ja üht mängufilmi, mis tegelevad lähemalt maastikuloomega ning kohamälu tekitamisega pärast II maailmasõda. Sõjajärgse Kirde-Eesti ülesehitamine tööstuspiirkonnana on peegeldunud memuaristikas, tagasivaatelistes omaeluloolistes tekstides ning oma kaasajas ehitust kajastavates allikates. Vaadeldud näited avavad seda, kuidas on kirjeldatud nõukogude perioodi tööstuslinna, alustades sõjajärgsest taastamistööst ning lõpetades Andrei Hvostovi tagasivaatega nõukogudeaegsele lapsepõlvelinnale. Tekstide analüüs võimaldab märgata sõjaeelse maastiku transformeerumist tööstusmaastikuks, selle kajastuste vastuolulisust ning sõltuvust kirjutamisajast.
 
 The article observes literary depictions of two towns in North-East Estonia, Narva and Sillamäe, both of which were reconstructed as industrial towns after World War II, in fiction, life writing and a film script, as well as in a feature film made on the basis of the latter. The texts are simultaneously engaged in the making of landscape and creation of local memory after the region’s dramatic change caused by the war.
 Ida-Virumaa became an industrial region in the second half of the nineteenth century; the Kreenholm Textile factory was one of the world’s largest by the end of the century. In 1916, industrial mining for oil shale was started in North-East Estonia. Oil shale was a strategic resource in World War II as well. In 1944, with the second occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union, uranium mining was started as a secret object of interest for the military industry.
 The historical town of Narva was almost completely destroyed in World War II. Few buildings were restored, while the city was filled with blocks of flats typical of the Soviet period and the historical street network was transformed significantly. Still, Narva did not become a utopian Stalinist city – in Estonia, the only example of the latter is Sillamäe, a closed city built according to an all-Union standardised project, that attempted to embody an image of Communist happiness.
 Postwar literary depictions of Narva have often proceeded from the baroque city centre that has become a separate symbolic site of memory. In the more recent past, different genres have started to complement one another, different periods have been compared and, as a result, representations of various spaces have received a more analytic artistic treatment that connects the pre-war period with the post-war one.
 The first set of texts discussed here consists of POW memoirs of the immediate post-war reconstruction works, set down some decades later. After that, contemporary reflections of the reconstruction in Soviet Estonia in the 1950s-1960s are considered. Finally, attention is paid to texts that comment on the reconstruction era from a larger temporal distance: a backward look at Soviet-time Sillamäe from 2011 (expanded edition 2014) by Andrei Hvostov, a journalist with a degree in history, who spent his childhood in the town. Hvostov’s memoirs and his short stories on similar topics that were published earlier serve as attempts at parallel interpretations of several possible local memories. A work that in a way unites all three periods is Vladimir Beekman’s novel The Narva Waterfall (1986). Its protagonist Stiina was born and grew up in Narva, left the war-ravaged city and criticises harshly the changes that have taken place in the city.
 The examples of memoirs, retrospective autobiographical texts and sources reflecting their contemporary period also reveal how industrial cities of the Soviet era have been depicted in different periods. An analysis of the texts discloses the transformation of the prewar landscape into an industrial one, the contradictory nature of its descriptions, as well as dependence of the latter on the time of writing. Examples are given of the possibilities of representing large-scale industrial constructions that significantly also involve not just the creation of new values but also the way of doing this – reflecting the work of the udarniki of the Young Communist League. According to Katerina Clark’s typology of Stalinist novels, one of the texts observed, the film script concerning the shock workers’ building of the Balti Thermal Power Plant to which the youth from the Young Communist League contributed, can be categorised as the most widespread and ritualised type of Soviet fiction, the so-called production novel.
 The selection of texts discussed in the article is by no means exhaustive and the Ida-Virumaa region may offer fruitful material for future studies using the categories of space and memory, both as regards ways of describing a real region in literature as well as analysing the stories clustered around a site of memory. The notion of a literary city emerging in the texts is broad, as areas and objects with different functions form part of it. The observed texts display an interesting conflict in spatial memory: a deliberate loss of memory induced during a certain period and the creating of something new as if into a void can be emphasised as can be using rhetorical devices to bring forth a new spatial representation, a site of memory in its own right.

Johannes Gutslaffi 1644. aastal ilmunud teos „Lühike teade ja õpetus“ ja selles sisalduv „pikse palve“ kuuluvad Eesti varauusaegsete tüvitekstide hulka. Lugedes seda keskkonnahumanitaaria vaatenurgast, saavad ilmsiks seni tähelepanuta jäänud kliimaajaloolised kihistused ja seosed. Artikkel väidab, et „Lühike teade ja õpetus“ on üks varasemaid siinmail ilmunud teoloogilisi käsitlusi ekstreemsetest ilmastikutingimustest 17. sajandil. Raamatus on kirjeldatud esimest teadaolevat ilmastikutingimustest põhjustatud mässu Balti ajaloos. Artikkel pakub seega esimesi tõlgendusi Balti nn „ilmamaade“ sügavamatest kihtidest ning analüüsib „kliimamässu“ tekkimise probleeme, kasutades selleks keskkonnahumanitaaria ja kliimaajaloo metoodikat. Summary Johannes Gutslaff’s Kurtzer Bericht und Unterricht Von der Falsch-heilig genandten Bäche in Lieffland Wöhhanda ('Short Report and Lesson on the Võhandu River, Wrongly Regarded as Sacred in Livonia') that was printed in 1644, and the “Thunder prayer” included in it belong to the main corpus of Early Modern texts in Estonia. Hitherto, this material has been interpreted mostly from the perspective of cultural history. Reading the text from an environmental humanities perspective, we claim that so far unrecognised layers and connections to climate history can be found in it: the book and can be read as a scholarly piece about changing climate conditions and their different interpretations. Kurtzer Bericht belongs among Baltic theological reflections written in German about the extreme weather in the 17th century, which was marked globally by rapidly worsening climatic conditions and social unrest caused by these. In Gutslaff’s book we can also find a detailed description of the first climate-caused uprising in Baltic history known so far. In the Early Modern period, or during the peak of the “Little Ice Age”, the Baltic region, similarly to the rest of the world, was affected by a wider trend of cooling, with extreme fluctuations of temperature and precipitation proving to be the biggest problem for peasants growing crops. A look at climate history, however, makes it clear that cultural or social reactions need not be linked to particularly extreme weather phenomena, as they can culminate and explode at a favourable later moment. Climate does not dictate cultural behaviour, but the latter’s interweaving with climate needs to be studied more broadly on the basis of the existing regional sources. When looking for traces concerning climate in Baltic German religious literature, we can contextualise Gutslaff’s text as belonging to Early Modern “weatherlands” (Tim Ingold) that transgress cultural and regional borders. The article offers first interpretations of the clashing Baltic early modern “weatherlands”, combining methods deriving from literary scholarship, environmental humanities and climate history. The interconnectedness of climate and culture makes it possible to see the challenges climate change poses to culture and social order. Thus weather can be a mirror of relationships and a “moral barometer” of society that can measure not only the state of relations between God and people or society, but also the tensions between people. According to such an interpretation, weather plays almost as significant a role in religious thinking as do measuring instruments in secular science. As weather phenomena are loaded with different societal and religious meanings, explosive conflicts can emerge in climatically extreme times, showing the tension between different layers of society. Conflicts around weather and climate can therefore be seen as inevitable in periods of climatic challenges. Johann Gutslaff's Kurzer Bericht is placed among the theological-meteorological literature that had spread across Europe and can be traced back to the Antiquity and the Bible. As phenomena related to vernacular religion are of a cross-ethnic nature and with migratory motivations, it is no wonder that the rebellion by the Võhandu was not limited to ethnically Estonian peasants, but linked representatives of different linguistic and social layers. It can be noticed that in interpreting the events Gutslaff attempted to attribute the power and competence to change the weather only to God, and the ability to react to the weather changes only to upper classes – the agency of peasants in reacting to climatic extremes was not taken seriously. They were left alone with their concerns caused by climate change due to the lack of a societal process of addressing climate fears. It was from here that the potential for the conflict that exploded on the banks of the Võhandu derived. The article shows that combined analysis of historical, cultural and natural sources that was started in Estonia about half a century ago, but has been forgotten due to the complexity of the phenomenon and for ideological reasons, is needed to explain the connection between climate and culture.

The translated text has a specific value in the new culture: it can be a translation of a literary text, and it can be a translation of culture, i.e. a synchronic text of a cultural system. There are two principal concepts which are used in the present article: 'translation' and 'reception'. Reception begins with the selection of the author, literary or historical epoch, literary style, or ideology. So, every translation and reception begins with reading, and every reading creates meanings. At the same time, reception is also translation: it is a moment when two distinct cultures mix, and this situation needs understanding of the other. The translated texts create the image of the translated culture and/or nation. The article examines texts from Latvian and Lithuanian literatures from the second half of the 18th century to the early 20th century which have been translated into Estonian: what kind of texts are translated in different periods and by different translators (the selection of the authors and the texts); what the purpose of the translations is; how these translations translate Latvian or Lithuanian culture into Estonian; and how Estonians understand and accept these translated texts. And, finally, how these translated texts create the image of the translated culture and/or nation.

Kirjanik Vladimir Beekman kirjutas Nõukogude Eesti lastele kaheosalise raamatu nimega „Aatomik“ (1959) ning „Aatomik ja Küberneetiline Karu“ (1968), kus uraanituuma lõhustumisel tekkinud energiale on antud inimeselaadne kuju. Piiritu jõuga peategelane osaleb looduse ümberkujundamisplaanides, millel on suur keskkonnamõju. Raamatud järgivad Nõukogude Liidu tuumaenergeetika arendusplaane, nii nn rahuaatomi kui ka külma sõja jutupunkte. Artiklis on võrreldud raamatuis kujutatud tegevusi tõelisuses aset leidnud sündmustega, uuritud kirjutamiskonteksti ning teema levikut lastekirjanduses. Fosforiidikaevandamise ohu algusaegadel ilmus Beekmanil aga keskkonnakatastroofi eest hoiatav romaan „Eesli aasta“ (1979).
 
 Summary
 In Soviet Estonia, Vladimir Beekman (1929–2009), a writer with a degree in engineering, wrote a two-story sequence for children: Aatomik (‘The Atom-Boy’, 1959) and its sequel Aatomik ja Küberneetiline Karu (‘The Atom-Boy and the Cybernetic Bear’, 1968), in which the energy generated by the fission of uranium nuclei was given a human form. The publishing of the books was followed by puppet-animation films. The protagonist, a boy with immense power, is involved in several plans of transforming the natural world, projects that had or would have had major environmental impact and caused catastrophes. The stories follow the Soviet Union’s nuclear development plans, both the narratives introducing the “Atoms for Peace” policy and the Cold War propaganda. The article juxtaposes the adventures of the Atom-Boy with the nuclear tests and the achievements of the nuclear industry in the Soviet Union.
 Beekman began his literary career as a poet, eagerly reflecting the ideals of Soviet society, including the Cold War propaganda and the nuclear arsenal development. He had a background that suited the regime, having spent part of his boyhood in a Soviet orphanage and making his literary debut in the Stalinist period. He graduated from the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute as a chemical engineer, but made his career as a literary administrator, serving as a long-standing secretary and chairman of the Writers’ Union. He left behind a valuable legacy as a translator of Western children’s literature into Estonian (Selma Lagerlöf, Astrid Lindgren, Tove Jansson, Annie M. G. Schmidt, etc).
 Beekman’s stories of the Atom-Boy fit into the tradition of writing about nuclear energy for children. Both Soviet and Western literatures provide examples of this genre in children’s and young adult literature. Such books might belong to the genre of popular science for kids (The Walt Disney Story of Our Friend the Atom), face the fears or casualties of the nuclear accidents in power plants (Joe Holliday’ s young adult book series in the 1950s, Leonid Daien’s Chornobyl – the Bitter Grass), or advocate and justify this energy source. Beekman’s stories belong to the last category: the experiments of the Atom-Boy finally all end well, without doing irreversible damage to the environment. He even melts the ice of the Arctic Ocean with the help of nuclear power.
 As nuclear testing and the related problems and accidents were classified in the Soviet Union, it remains unclear whether Beekman's tales of the Atom-Boy belong to the realm of popular science or science fiction for kids. They are usually given the label of ‘the fairy-tale of the Century of Technology’. The stories follow the Soviet Union’s propaganda points on nuclear power, but also on nuclear arms race.
 In 1979 Beekman published the novel Eesli aasta (‘The year of the donkey’), which warned of environmental disaster during the early days of the phosphate mining plans. The Writer’s Union played a role in the campaign against phosphate mining, known as the Phosphorite War.

Any consideration of Estonian theatre from the point of view of biographical theatre needs to include the work of playwright and director Merle Karusoo. Productions based on various life narratives (diaries, letters, biographical interviews) form the core of her work that can be defined as biographical or memory theatre. Her work has also been viewed within the context of community theatre or political theatre; Karusoo has herself referred to her work as sociological theatre. Life narratives have functioned in Karusoo’s productions as the basis for restoring oppressed or denied collective discourses of memory. Her productions emerged within the framework of the more general process of restoration of historical heritage and the rehabilitation of collective memory at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Life story can be viewed as the essence of Merle Karusoo’s theatre. The personal in the life story in the production activates the emotional memory of the audience; for older generations such theatre facilitates a legitimisation of remembering one’s life story in entirety, and for younger generations it functions as a vehicle of collective, historical and national memory. The current article outlines the main stages of Karusoo’s biographical theatre, highlights major productions of each stage and provides an overview of their reception. Karusoo’s theatre dates back to 1980s. Productions based on life stories of the generations born in 1950s and 1960s, Meie elulood (Our Biographies) and Kui ruumid on täis ... (Full Rooms) both in 1982, mediated fragments of life stories of 16 drama students, focusing on the processes of self-conception and -reflection of young persons. In the context of the Soviet regime that exerted firm ideological control over the private lives of its citizens, Karusoo’s productions struck an especially powerful and unusual chord. Karusoo’s biographical theatre has gathered momentum and assumed a more solid shape since the end of the 1980s. Productions based on the diaries and/or letters of women--Aruanne (The Report, 1987) and Haigete laste vanemad (The Parents of Sick Children, 1988)--are mono-dramas, reflecting upon the loss of the voice and life story of an individual and the theme of historical conformism and fear brought about by the violent and hypocritical nature of the Soviet society. The next stage of Karusoo’s work focused on the “destiny years” of the Estonian nation, featuring, for example, life stories focusing on failed emigration to the West and the life experience of those executing the orders of the Soviet authorities during the 1949 deportations. Productions such as Kured läinud, kurjad ilmad (Snows of Sorrow), Sügis 1944 (Autumn 1944), both in 1997 and Küüdipoisid (The Waggoners, 1999) belong to this stage. The reception of Waggoners as a production that eroded the “us” and “them” binaries of the national community was especially polemical. In 2000, when the bilingual Save Our Souls was staged, focusing on the lives of prison inmates convicted of manslaughter and featuring both Estonian and Russian-speaking actors, marked the emergence of the theme of ethnic minorities in Estonia in Karusoo’s work. Karusoo’s biographical productions have evolved from generational life stories and the life stories of individuals to collective portraits of historically and/or socially determined groups. In 2006 Karusoo staged generation monologues Täna me ei mängi (Today We Will Not Play) and Küpsuskirjand 2005 (Essay 2005) that make visible how the semantic space of “us” and the phenomenon of “returning” the life stories to the people have assumed increasingly wider dimensions in Karusoo’s work over decades. Karusoo’s theatrical method has been compared with the work of Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba, Ariane Mnouchkine and Suzanne Osten, Anna Deavere Smith and German theatrical grouping Rimini Protokoll. Karusoo has herself emphasized that the process of self-conceptualisation needs to proceed via the story of one’s own people, and the past has to be remembered in an emotional way. Her biographical theatre has subjected life stories to artistic filtering, resulting in the enhancement of their affective resonance as well as in generalizations. Her productions have theatrically mapped an extensive share of Estonia’s life narrative and historical memory-scapes.

The second part of the word autobiography – bio – means life, in this instance referring to the story or account of a person’s life. But it can also be understood in the sense of being alive, of the fact of existence. Such interpretation of the concept of autobiography examines not only the construction of a life-story, but also other textual, poetic and stylistic devices that convey a personal perception of living. Such dimension of autobiography could also be referred to as self-writing. In this article, I seek to explore the meaning of the term self-writing, if it is not exactly the same as autobiographical writing: how a text as a whole might be a representation of a particular mode of “selfhood” expressed through textual figures distinct from the telling of a ”story.” The first part of the article is discussion of the concept of narrativity in the work of some philosophers such as Peter Lamarque and John Christman. According to them, narrativity is not a necessary precondition for coherent subjectivity; on the contrary, a steady and unified subjectivity is a precondition of autobiographical narrative identity. Paul Ricoeur distinguishes between identity and ipseity: identity can be changed without selfhood being lost; there is the role or contextual identification of the self, the “story” told of the self to the others. But the concept of ipseity is about the inner perception of selfhood and is not a ”story”, but expresses an idea of differentiating between self-writing and autobiography. In principle, this is a distinction where, on the one hand, the narrative identity as sameness is created in the past and, on the other hand, there is the ipseity, which is more oriented to the present and the future. While the story gives the “self” some coherence and teleology, we can, by different textual devices, observe the “gaps” in the coherence of the “self”, the ambivalence of self-perception, and the fleeing of selfhood from the reflecting gaze, so that the text does not seem to recount the life of the “I” in retrospect, but seems to present it in the sense of living. It is not so important how these things are thematized in the text, as it is to observe what textual devices embody or represent it. This may also explain why the poetical/fictional devices have some advantage over the factual ones when it is about the self-perception of the writer, its necessity and uniqueness. The main part of the article attempts to describe and analyse some examples of self-writing, which are construed so that the identity is not based on the sameness of the role, but instead, they express the uniqueness of selfhood and a perception that is on the borderline of the present and the future. Tõnu Õnnepalu’s diaries (Anton Nigov’s Exercises and Õnnepalu’s Spring and Summer and) are discussed with regard to the motifs of the now-moment, devoid of identity; in this void a sharp perception of ipseity is most clearly felt, which is open to despair and uplift at the same time. In the light of Ricoeur’s ideas the title of Nigov’s Harjutused (Exercises) acquires a new meaning, stressing the wish to leave life as a habit (harjumus) and move towards life as an exercise (harjutus) – Ricoeur’s ipse is something that emerges as the basis of an identity and is beyond the habit that creates sameness. In Õnnepalu’s diaries we can observe the writer’s orientation to “nothing” in between the identities that are perceived as inauthentic, and by moving through the “nothing” for a moment we get a glimpse of the authenticity of ipseity. An autobiographical bestseller by Mihkel Raud, Musta pori näkku (Throwing Mud in the Face), recounting the story of the writer’s youth when he was a punk musician and an alcoholic, is textually ambivalent, as the author’s position and the subjective focus shift: there is a somewhat warning and moralistic I, who looks at his own past, but there is also a past I, who was carelessly and absolutely in love with punk lifestyle. The peculiarity of the text is that these points of view are not clearly distinguishable but are fused. However, it is precisely that which makes Raud’s book an interesting example of self-writing, as he has abandoned teleological coherence that would enable the reader to arrange in order or to oppose the author’s different identities. Consequently, an ambivalent gap has been created in which an authentic pattern of selfhood, which cannot be reduced to one-dimensional identity-narrative, is created. The six-part series of memoirs by Madis Kõiv with a title Studia memoriae differs from the ordinary memoirs because in addition to or instead of objective restoration of memories, there is a search for precise subjectivity; it is an attempt to focus on the process of recollecting. Thus Studia memoriae strive to reach a moment that brings to mind the occurrences in the past in such a way that the person who remembers them would see something new that he has not seen before – as if one or another memory has come to his mind for the first time. The focus is not on the I as the recounting identity assembled over the past, but the present I (ipse) who relates and coheres with his own past. Self-writing is usually something outside the coherent I-narrative; it is essentially in the present and in the future, as the self itself is sliding towards an unknown future, towards something which is “not yet the self,” towards something that is nothing in relation to the self, nor reducible to clear-cut ready-made identities. Such “not-yet-self”-being is one of the essential states of being oneself and being alive. What I mean by self-writing is the flash of the patterns which cannot be reduced to identities based on sameness, the gap that points to the unique in self perception or a puzzle in the texture of the self-account.

In the development of the multilingual secular literature of early modern Livonia, the 1630s and 1640s mark not only the beginning of vernacular poetry in Estonian and Latvian, but also the first attempts to break free from the dominant paradigm of occasional poetry and to write single authored collections on universal topics. Following the classical and humanist tradition, Joachim Rachel’s Epigrammatum centuria (Hundred epigrams) poetized his knowledge and ideas without a link to a public or private event, elevating a collection of short poems in Livonia to the similar level of individual literary achievement as the publication of an epic or chronicle, and the poet to that of an individual author.

Teesid: Artiklis kirjeldatakse, kuidas on võimalik kogeda ontoloogilist diferentsi – oleva suhtes täiesti teist. Säärane ontoloogiline kogemus leiab siinse arutluse kohaselt aset negatiivsuse, ei(miski) kogemises, mis omakorda seisneb tähendusloome luhtumises olulisimate üldisemate probleemide puhul ning sellega kaasnevas negatiivses häälestuses. Ontoloogilise diferentsi kogemine leiab aset afektiivsel väljal, häälestustes, mis toimivad üldjuhul intentsionaalsete aktide taustal horisondina, kuid muutuvad erilistel puhkudel keskseks, halvates sujuva kogemuse, muutes tähenduslikkuse tõrke sedavõrd intensiivseks, et negatiivne häälestus haarab kogeja läbinisti enda võimusesse. The aim of the article is to describe how it is possible to experience an ontological difference —i.e. something completely different from all beings. Such an ontological experience, the author argues, takes place in the experience of negativity, of nothingness, which in turn consists in the failure of meaning-making in the most important general problems and the negative attunements (Stimmung) that accompanies it. Thus, the experience of ontological difference takes place in the affective field. Experiences of this kind have been analysed to some extent in the light of Martin Heidegger’s thought. The originality of this article lies in its attempt to describe the experience of ontological difference in the vocabulary of classic, Husserl-inspired phenomenology. According to the mainstream interpretation, Heidegger’s ontological radicalism abandons the original idea of phenomenology to remain within the boundaries of things themselves (i.e. given to consciousness as intentional objects). This interpretation is also deepened by Heidegger’s post-turning renunciation of the description of his own thinking as phenomenology. Inspired mainly by Husserl (and often also by the sections of Heidegger’s Being and Time devoted to everyday experience), contemporary phenomenology analyses all kinds of phenomena and spheres of subjectivity given to everyday experience, leaving nothingness, ontological difference, etc. as a mystical-paradoxical remnant about which nothing can be said. In the first chapter of the article, ‘The Radical Failure of Significance in the Clash of Horizons’, ontological experience is reconstructed in terms of the concept of the horizon. Already in his late phenomenology of the lifeworld, Husserl pays considerable attention to the horizonal construction of experience. Horizons in experience are either not given intentionally at all or have a weak, background intentionality. It is true that in ordinary perceptions it is possible to transform the horizon into a full-blooded intentional object. However, according to the discussion here, this is not the case for special boundary horizons, for general horizons that maintain the overall coherence of meaning-making, e.g. world, death, infinity. The urge for meaningful fulfilment inherent in consciousness in general (and philosophy in particular) tries to thematise these too, but unsuccessfully, incompletely. While there is much that is horizontally non-intentional in the simple acts of meaning-making, all the parts play together to produce meaning. In the case of a negative boundary experience, it is the failure that becomes the central seized sense (Auffassungssinn), rather than—which is amplified in the absence of meaningful content, in the case of empty intentionality—the attunement. This is the focus of the second chapter of the article, “Ontological Experience in Negative Attunements”. The chapter begins by discussing the question of the intentionality of attunements, and, following Husserl, arrives at the premise that attunements thus constitute a horizon of emotionality and have an ambiguous intentionality inherent in the horizon. As a horizon, attunement not only organises the general palette of conscious sensations, but also ‘colours’ the experience of all objects, even the world as a universal horizon of all experience. In the ontological experience, only a few particular negative attunements, which, using the vocabulary of existentialism, can also be called marginal experiences, are present. In the case of these strange, frightening (unheimlich) states, the affective horizon intrudes, so to speak buries the person under itself, but not in the manner of an emotion (together with the intentional object in relation to which the emotion is felt), but in a non-objective way, without any apparent cause, thus creating—as in the reflection on the universal horizons discussed above—a total repulsion in the movement from object to object. Such an experience also dispels self-consciousness. Regarding the relationship between the themes explored in the two chapters, the article argues that, while it seems that creative activity (including philosophy) inspired by the fundamental problems of a strained ontology, clashing with so-called universal horizons, is often accompanied by a persistent negative attunement, so that the creative person falls out of everyday life, the causal links between these phenomena remain open. The specificity of the human being does not lie in the mere operation of linguistic meanings, but in the fact that it is inherent to him/her to philosophise: to push towards the most important horizons of experience and to experience in relation to them the failure of the creation of meaning, to experience the ontological differentiation of not-ness. Here, the article remains in the position of the phenomenological epoché: it is not possible to know that such a mode of not-ness is something proper (Ereignis), as Heidegger implies throughout. However, the derivation of such experiences from the valorisation of language, as naturalists and pragmatists proclaim, remains equally unproven. It remains the task of phenomenology to bear the human incongruity, to remain—to paraphrase Husserl’s famous slogan—directed towards the things themselves (zu den Sachen selbst).

According to theatre scholar Freddie Rokem, theatre portraying or performing historical events is seeking to overcome both the separation and the exclusion from the past, as well as ’striving to create a community where the events from this past will matter again’. This article covers the topic of interpretations of national history in Estonian theatre and in original dramaturgy during the Soviet era, with the focus on aspects like national self-reflection and the relationship to the common past. The main focus is on the 1970s, with examples from Rein Saluri’s, Mati Unt’s and Jaan Kaplinski’s drama productions. During the period in question, re-tellings of national history on Estonian theatre stages were clothed in metaphors, allusions and secret codes – Aesopian language. Within the Soviet cultural context, I analyse if and to what extent theatre of the time displayed resistance, political theatre or social allegory. Theatre was also connected with the principle of playing or playfulness, which on one hand indicates national resistance, national endurance, and a certain survival strategy, but on the other hand indicates the Estonian as being an involuntary homo ludens – the Playing Man, who through various enforced roles is trying to adjust to the whirlwinds of history. Saluri’s first play, the intellectual drama Külalised (The Guests), opens with an allusion to a drama classic the world over, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, adding a powerful national-symbolic background to the play. The role-play which permeates and structures the play (The Host–The Guest) however, displays allegorical references to changes in the status and self-image of Estonians. In Unt’s play Peaproov (Dress Rehearsal), the principle of playing/acting sheds ironic light on the makers of an historical film and their readiness to create superficially flashy interpretations at any cost: this take acts as an estranging and generalising reflection in a context of general humanism on the one hand and artistic ethics on the other. Kaplinski’s Neljakuningapäev (The Day of Four Kings) is based on a historically familiar tale about four Estonian kings. Here, the take with the play within the play helps amplify the play in both a mythical and a historically-philosophical manner as well as within the polemical stance of the author.

The Three Local Languages of Estonia in Edzard Schaper’s novel The Executioner and in its Estonian Translation. This article analyses the reflection of everyday multilingualism in Edzard Schaper’s novel Der Henker (The Executioner, 1940) and its translation into Estonian by Katrin Kaugver (Timukas, 2002). The novel deals with the 1905 revolution in the current Estonian territory, which was at that time a province of the Russian Empire. The novel was written shortly before the outbreak of World War II and translated into Estonian 60 years later after the end of the Soviet era. The complexity and the fluctuation of the contextual elements between the storyline of the novel, the time of its writing and the time of the translation make the novel a rewarding object of research into settings of multilingualism in everyday life. The article focuses on the manifest and latent forms of multilingualism, on the functions of the local languages, as well as on the question whether it helps to analyse language use in real life situations. It also looks at how local multilingualism, dominated by three local languages – German, Russian and Estonian – has been translated from one local language (German) into another local language (Estonian). The examples chosen in the article highlight some regularities in the use of the local and other languages, and offer a cultural-historical and socio-political interpretation of the use of multilingualism.

The article focuses on Andreas Virginius (1596–1664), a native of Pomerania who was invited to Livonia to become the first Vice Rector and Professor of theology at the university founded in Tartu in 1632. He was the only hereditary nobleman among the Tartu professors, but was soon accused of not being a real nobleman. In 1636, Virginius printed an apologia or treatise Nothwendige Vertheidigung against this accusation and slander, which has survived only as a manuscript transcription. The article presents the structure and content of this apologia, tracing the author’s argumentation with references to legal works and rhetorical devices such as proverbs. An analysis of the text reveals the typical intention of early modern nobles to defend their honour. Although Andreas Virginius succeeded in refuting the slander, his Livonian relatives faced a similar crisis about half a century later, when they had to prove their nobility once again.

Pühendatud Rutt Hinrikuse mälestusele Kõik, mis paigal püsib, olgu see asi või olgu see sõna, on sümbool. Reaalsus on liikuvus. [---] nagu Nietzsche lausub: [---] Tõe elu on alaline voolamine. (Semper 1915: 27) Nõnda peab ühes prantslase Henri Bergsoniga otsusele jõudma, et ainuke kindel reaalsus on liikumine, muutumine, arenemine. (Tammsaare 1988a [1919]: 354) 1910. aastal […]

From the sixteenth century onwards, those education institutions that were humanistic by rhetoric turned to a basic education in poetry, teaching the use of verse in everyday life. Initially, this was related to ancient verse and its meaning, then was transferred to Neo-Latin poetry and to German (vernacular) verse, thereby transforming literary culture. On this basis, the role of poetry in literary culture in the Baltics is shown using three examples: the late humanistic literary culture of Riga in the 1580s, mainly in Latin; the literary culture in Reval (Tallinn) around fifty years later, much more influenced by German-language poetry; and finally, German poems in love letters of that time, showing the application and function of verse in the private space.