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The article discusses the cultural and narratological aspects of melancholic understanding of history in postmodern Latvian fiction. The first part of the study offers a brief overview of Latvian fiction of the 1990s and early 2000s with a special attention to the interrelated questions of history, trauma, and representation. The second part shifts from cultural contextualization to defining melancholic temporality and highlighting narrative ways of expressing it in fiction which addresses trauma, collective and individual, from a posttraumatic place in time. The third part analyzes the indirect and disjointed engagement with Soviet occupation in Gundega Repše’s novel Conjuring Iron (2011). This is done by focusing on the poetics of unnarrated as a sign of prolonged mourning and by thinking about the epistemology of a fragment.

The present article will analyze the intertextual dimension in the work of the Lithuanian essayist G. Radvilavičiūtė, especially focusing on her most successful book, Šiąnakt aš miegosiu prie sienos. In the introduction a brief review of U. Eco’s ideas on intertextuality will be presented, paying special attention to the notions of metafiction, dialogism, double coding, and intertextual irony. Within this theoretical framework, the main intertextual strategies used in Radvilavičiūtė’s book are examined in the core of the study. Particular attention will be paid to dialogism; for this strategy a detailed classification based on the two parameters of target and modality will be proposed. Then a peculiar kind of intertextuality is presented: while the author frequently makes a conscious and obvious use of references to other texts, I will suggest that it could also be possible to find traces of unconscious “intertextual echoes”. To demonstrate this, some similarities with V. Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark are discussed. Such similarities could be due to an unconscious influence of this novel on the author (in this case they would be “echoes”), or to pure coincidence. In both cases, however, this is an interesting instance of hermeneutic cooperation between the author and the reader. Far from diminishing Radvilavičiūtė’s flourishing creativity, these considerations reinforce the idea that any open text calls for the addressee’s cooperation. Hence, the reader not only decodes intertextuality, but also actively creates a net of references that sometimes go beyond the author’s (conscious) intentions.

A. H. Tammsaare was drawn to the musical tonality of prose. Importantly though, he did not wholeheartedly embrace sound patterning as a mode of writing. Rather, he preferred a semantic widening of ordinary language within a comprehensively holistic “spherical music”. In his novels, we can detect a deliberate use of rhythmic motion in sentences. This is evident primarily in the wealth of lexical and syntactic repetitions resulting in a parallelism of patterns. An obvious, although discreet, rhythmic design emerges in the thesisantithesis- synthesis parataxis the core words of which are the adversative and coordinating conjunctions aga (‘but’), and integrative ometi (‘yet’, ‘indeed’). The frequency with which these bound conjunctions occur in Tammsaare’s work surpasses that of ordinary speech by about four times, and it is twice as high as the statistical mean for literary texts. One might call this expressive of an epic but-mantra, a prose-poetic but-meter, or a narrative polysyndeton, and, from a philosophical point of view, a but-dialectic. Whenever a reader fails to appreciate Tammsaare’s underlying tone and does not discern the emotional flow of longing scepticism that issues from his dyadic-triadic chains, this pervasive, yet inconspicuously arguing, textual mode may seem unduly pretentious. Indeed, there is nothing to prevent a prose text from featuring a poetic style that is rooted in a poetry-like, paradigmatic parallelism as the poetic principle of formal and semantic equivalence.

As a literary scholar based in German Studies outside of Germany, I am confronted with German being considered a minor subject matter. There are evidently clear differences between the German departments within German-speaking countries and abroad. The latter are shrinking considerably almost everywhere and need to focus on few aspects, often related to historical issues and some general successful movements, such as gender or postcolonialism. In Germany, there seems to be a preoccupation with didactics and media. But since I consider these symptoms part of a wider issue, I prefer making some more general observations. World literature is – at least in the dominant anglophone cultures – increasingly identified with English language literature. Comparative literature programmes mostly work with translations as if those were original literary texts which – roughly speaking – reduces literature to its plot and, possibly, its structure. This is also reflected in the tendency in literary studies to be oblivious of the poetic approach. Philologies are often subservient to outer goals (history, sociology, psychology), and, in their efforts to justify their existence in the eyes of the market economy, they believe they cannot afford to deal with the core of what litera ture is about, the literary. In my view, this is one of the reasons for the difficulties of the philologies and possibly Humanities altogether. Literary studies, despite the various enriching overlaps with various other disciplines, should not forget this specificity, which I call poetics, the interaction of the form of language and the form of life. By making a strong case for the relevance of an understanding of what language is and does – and literature is the privileged field of observation – philologies would be of obvious importance for society as a whole.

Visual poetry in Latvian literature is still an extraordinary phenomenon. In this case, by extraordinary is meant its scarce appearance among the corpus of Latvian literary texts – only very few examples of it exist in Latvian literature even in the 21st century, though it has gained a visible presence in other literatures of the world since at least the era of Modernist poetry, and experienced in most cases a turn of critical attitude towards it from disregard or denial to acceptance and consideration. At first evaluated only as a pastime on the margins of serious literature, since Apollinaire it has evolved into a serious genre of poetry and art of its own, and is no longer considered a childish game. Given this situation in contemporary criticism, it is quite a peculiar situation that Latvian literature and literary criticism still does not pay adequate attention to it, thus visual poetry has stayed an outsider genre up to this day. In this paper a concise historical account of Latvian visual poetry will be given and some examples of visual poetry from various decades of Latvian literature will be given, as well as quotations from Latvian literary critics and scholars regarding visual poetry will be provided, in order to illustrate the overall situation in Latvian visual poetry and the possible reasons why it is still being mostly neglected and disregarded both by poets/artists and critics, though there seems to be slight indications of a visual turn.

The theme of the present paper is a tendency in Latvian literature that flourished from 1960s to the late 1980s and has so far not been subjected to research. It is the phenomenon of short stories with science fiction elements appearing in humor magazines of Soviet Latvia, mainly in Dadzis (The Thistle) and Dadža kalendārs (The Thistle’s Almanac) as well as in the short story collections by the regular authors of these periodicals. In these stories renowned Latvian satirists such as Andrejs Skailis, Žanis Ezītis, Miermīlis Steiga and others use the disguise of science fiction to ridicule the negative aspects of Soviet reality that the authors of “serious literature” rarely dared to touch upon. Although this phenomenon obviously existed only for a couple of decades, it must be recognized as a specific hybrid genre the writers created and used to talk about problems everyone knew and almost nobody talked about.

That revenues, profits, wealth, valuables, properties and various forms of riches can be so attractive to most people is because these resources affect the operational mode of social economy and personal well-being. As a major driving force of social development, the desire to accumulate wealth affords people the prospect of leading a comfortable life. Yet the acquisition of which may bring down other people to become poorer and creating potential social injustice. Three interrelated concepts in money spending: consumption, fear of poverty and social justice/injustice are markedly shown in some of the great minds among English writers. In this article, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Thomas More’s Utopia are used to demonstrate the concerns of the early modern English mentality. Some scholars have suggested that the first two playwrights reflected the fear that their London would come to be ruled by corruption, swindling, greediness, vicious competition and unethical business practices. In this pre-capitalist economy, people are seen to adopt unfair competition and reciprocal malice in order to accumulate wealth. Entrepreneurial liberation in economic affairs sets off the dark side of hu manity in which the playwrights were most probably implicated. To counteract this rapacious thinking, Thomas More offers his conception of a wealthy and happy worldly life. Not to attack the self-centered, bene fit gaining intentions, Utopia builds up a society that claims fairness, commonwealth, more obligations than privileges and the wiping away of vanity. Mercantilism is not denied, yet private property is contained. Written earliest among the three works, Utopia anticipates the two plays that dwell on social evils sparked by over concern for personal gains. Generally, the three works lay the foundation of positive and negative aspects of economy in terms of production, marketing, circulation, consumption and services of the English mind of that era. The social mood borders on the financial and political matters of the bourgeois class while providing a mega-worldview as well as micro-worldview of economic concern of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England.

In this article I write about the split of London described in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll, decent and belonging to the middle class, fail s to resist the transformation into Mr. Hyde, gross and belonging to the lower class. It represents the fear of the West Enders, who thought that the East Enders were uncivilized and threatening. In order to rationalize their fear, the West Enders imagined the East Enders as criminals, which corresponds to Edward Said’s discussion of Orientalism. In Orientalism, Said discusses how the West represents the Orient as the Other, and produces the category of the Orient grounded on a geographical framework of thinking. In much the same way, the story of Jekyll and Hyde demonstrates a narrative construction of the lower class living in the East End London as criminals. The influence of Cesare Lombroso’s theory of criminology present in the story serves as important evidence of the West Enders’ imagination. In Criminal Man (1876), Lombroso investigates the atavistic criminal, which illustrates the middle-class imagination of the body of the East Enders. Establishing the notion of atavism, Lombroso belittles the lower class by criticizing them as the demonstration of “regression to an earlier stage of evolution.” Examining the details of the geographical demarcation portrayed in the story, this paper hopes to elucidate the cultural imagination of criminals in Victorian London.

This article sets out to explore, from a socio-cultural perspective, the heavy use of omission in the English translation of a popular Chinese novel Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong and its side effect: the shifts that take place on the characterization of the main character in the translated text. The descriptive perspective on the use of omission, the highly motivated, deliberate operation, shows that this method is well justified when taking into consideration the socio-cultural constraints. Nevertheless, its side effects that come along cannot be overlooked.

A short but cardinal passage of Goethe’s Faust is the rhymed dialogue between Faust and Helen at their first encounter: the depiction of the very idealistic encounter consists of the process by which the ancient Greek mythical figure Helen learns about the difference and charm of the German poetic language, as well as its formal practices explained and guided by Faust. This passage is not only a description of the meeting of Helen and Faust but also, at the same time, verses on poetry and poetics. This remarkable passage leads us to look into other cases in world literature. With this inquiry I have found out many similar cases in the literature of my own country and of other East Asian countries, Japan and China. As an example, here is presented a highly sublime poetic dialogue, drawn from an outstanding work of premodern Korean literature, the very first Korean “novel” Kumo-shinhwa, from the mid-fifteenth century: an exchange of ekphrasis, verses of picture description. With its perfect, more than perfect, rhyme, the poetic dialogue presents the symbolized union of two persons as a matter of course. By means of this poetic dialogue it will be pointed out how a standard canon does not remain itself but finds its incessant dialogues on behalf of other rather hidden works. Or in short: how the margin shifts itself through exchanges and translations.

The dialogic nature of language use and the impossibility of an uninfluenced work of literature complicate the notion of poet-as-originator. Yet originality persists as a sought-after quality in literature for both writers and readers. The article focuses on the Northern Irish poet, writer, and translator Ciaran Carson, known for his fascination with language as a medium and his linguistic experimentalism. In 1998, Carson published two collections of poetry: The Alexandrine Plan, translations of sonnets by Mallarmé, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and The Twelfth of Never, a sequence of his own sonnets – both in rhyming alexandrines, suggestive of simultaneous composition. In its borrowed form, The Twelfth of Never offers a kaleidoscopic montage of motifs and discourses from Irish history, literature, folklore, music, and myth, and flits to and fro between Ireland, France, and Japan, evoking a never-land in which “everything is metaphor and simile”. The article adopts a neuro-anthropological view of human culture as distributed cognition and of art as a way of knowing and self-reflectively putting the world together for both artist and audience. The analysis of Carson’s poems seeks to explicate how recognisable characters, emblems, and rhetoric appear in and are altered by unfamiliar guises and settings; how cultural symbols and literary forms are interrupted in the act of representing; and how the dreamlike quality of the collection depends on the looping and metamorphosing of motifs, images and voices from one poem to another. I suggest that this does not generate a chaotic textual product but amounts to an engaging reflection on the nature of originality in the making and making sense of poetry.

In this paper, the role of popular culture in fin-de-siècle Latvian literature has been explored by analysing the mid-nineteenth century Latvian translation of Christoph Schmid’s novel Genoveva (1846) by Ansis Leitāns, and unfinished drama Genoveva (1908) by Rūdolfs Blaumanis. While the first version of the Genoveva story was created according to the patterns of popular literature and played a significant role in the development of the Latvian reading public, the author of the second version attempted to turn the plot of popular fiction into a work of elite literature, elaborating the issue of female agency and adding psychological ambiguity to the plot. The mixture of popular melodramatic imagination and modernist themes, as observed in Blaumanis’s work, provides a deeper insight into fin-de-siècle literary techniques by turning attention to the conscious use of different literary styles and narrative levels and illuminating interactions between popular and elite culture. By comparing both works and interpreting their aesthetic innovations in terms of the relationship between idealism, realism and modernism, this paper traces the ways in which fin-de-siècle Latvian literature appropriated and reworked models of popular culture and developed new aesthetic insights by merging elements of low and high culture.

From Unity of the Artists to the Intervention of the P.I.D.E.: the 2nd General Exhibition of Plastic Arts. This essay aims at presenting a historical study about one of the most significant artistic event during the Portuguese dictatorship in the twentieth century. We examine how, in that political and artistic context, a range of ten exhibitions – Exposições Gerais de Artes Plásticas (General Exhibitions of Plastic Arts) – designed and made by a new generation of artists who opposed the authoritarian government and wanted to transform the country through art and culture accessible to all, marks the Portuguese artistic and political panorama; in particular, as the Second General Exhibition of Fine Arts which occurred in the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (National Society of Fine Arts) in 1947 in Lisbon becomes a symbol, probably the greatest symbol of political repression and censorship in the creation and exhibition of visual arts during the years of dictatorship in Portugal. The confiscation of art works in this exhibition, all of them with a markedly social realist figuration, and the sequent interrogations to opposition artists by the political police of the regime, while denoting an exercise of power by the authorities, also patent emblematically an attitude of resistance and onslaught of the united front of the artists against the Estado Novo (New State).

Through an examination of the censorship reports made by the relevant authorities in Spain and Portugal between 1968 and 1974, I intend to study and compare the way that films from Spain were censored in those two Iberian countries during the last period of their respective dictatorships.For Portugal, the present investigation is based on a study of the archives of the Secretaria de Estado da Informação e Turismo (SEIT). All the information produced by the Comissão de Exame e Classificação de Espectáculos, the section of SEIT which was responsible for the censorship of films under the Estado Novo, is to be found in the relevant section of the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT), in Lisbon.For the Spanish material, the study is based on the Expedientes de censura [censorship files] that can be found in the Archivo General de la Administración, in Alcalá de Henares. For Spain I also draw on the survey and analysis provided by Teodoro González Ballesteros (Aspectos jurídicos de la censura cinematográfica en España. Con especial referencia al período 1936–1977, 1981).Through an analysis of the censored Spanish filmography in Marcello Caetano’s and Francisco Franco’s time, I aim to contribute to an understanding of the way the Censorship Commissions operated in each country. What, for example, were the most censored topics, thematically? This study may lead to a broader understanding of mentalities in Portuguese and Spanish history.

Cortázar and Saramago: the Representation of Dictatorship and the Strength of Engagement. Julio Cortázar and José Saramago create the poetics of compromise focused on a critique of the Argentinian and Portuguese dictatorships as paradigms of oppression and censorship. With this study, based on a comparatist analysis approach, we intend to show how the short stories “The Second Time Around” and “The Chair” denounce the evils of dictatorship, shaping fictions that explore the experience of impoverishment of the self. Cortázar’s text explores the practice of disappearance during Videla’s dictatorship from a absurd Kafkaesque perspective whereas Saramago’s writing focuses on the decline of Salazar’s dictatorship as a carnival game. Cortázar and Saramago assume the relevance of compromise, the aim of which is political disalienation in order to shape consciences enabling reassessing the evil effects of disalienating dictatorial regimes.

First, I would like to comment on the motto of the EACL 11th International Conference (Tartu, September, 2015) derived from Juhan Liiv’s Poem “A Coffin”, in which the poet-philosopher suspects that translation as such, instead of enriching a national culture, would curb and suppress it, if not destroying national creative energy and talent. After that I proceed to enlighten some passages of poetry translating practice from the history of Estonian literature and world literature (medieval epics, etc., and especially Dante Alighieri’s Commedia). My main purpose is to undermine and specify both claims, that is, of poetry’s translatability, as well as of its untranslatability, and to accentuate the relative yet undeniable value of poetry translation as such. In the final part of my discussion, I will concentrate on the recent attempts, in which I have myself been involved, of conveying some inkling of Juhan Liiv’s poetry to the readers in English, Spanish and Italian.

This paper will focus on the translators as their situation has proved to be more and more difficult in France. With examples, we want to consider how one’s position has evolved in the publishing world from the 16th century to the present. Looking at the 16th century, we can observe a real fever for translations of ancient texts. In the Netherlands, Italy and France, printers were translators and signed their translations with their proper name. Playwrights did the same with Latin and Greek works. For example, we know Oedipo tyranno by Giustiniani who translated Sophocles. The name of the Greek or Latin writer was eclipsed by the translator’s name such as Plantin and the Biblia Polyglotta, or Belleforest with his translation of The War of the Jews written by Flavius Josephus. The translation of the title gave the work a new specificity and was considered as the genuine work of the translator even though the name of the original author was still given. During the 16th century in France, Literary Property Laws were called “Privilège” and were attached to the author of the printed text. Later on, this law changed. We know that playwrights used translations and never mentioned the authors as they had actually never done before. Indeed, this particular type of literature often evaded the law. The publishers became more and more important and could thus decide what would be announced on the book’s cover. The author is to be mentioned for legal reasons, but translators are rarely mentioned. Today, you have to search for their name inside the book despite the fact that as our world is becoming more and more global we need them more and more. To some extent, on stage, some directors plunder translations done by specialists and attribute them to themselves. Two avenues of enquiry should help us understand the French translator’s paradox, which consist in the fact that the translator’s status evolves from a finder and producer to an intellectual whose name is today nearly ignored – despite his/her legal status.

Denis Diderot’s work has recently been enthusiastically translated into Estonian. Translations of Neveu de Rameau, Jacques le Fataliste, Paradoxe sur le comédien, Lettre sur les aveugles and Lettre sur les sourds et muets have been published from 2003 to 2015. In the 20th century, there was seemingly much less interest for his work. Only a few excerpts from his texts were translated and critical attention rarely focused on him. However, a closer look reveals that Diderot has held a rather important place in several culturally significant debates and that the relatively discreet response to his work reflects some key developments of Estonian literature.

“Foundations” is the first part of a two-part article to be published in Interlitteraria. It gives a brief account of the post-humanistic, foundationless, and traumatic world encountered in Ene Mihkelson’s Katkuhaud (‘Plague Grave’) and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and continues with more detailed elaborations of the loss of specific foundational ideals, such as their contemporary experience of the failure and limits of language, of sense-making, and memory; the haphazardness of history; the invalidity of compensatory justice, and above all the deletion of their childhood fields of joy and love or of what Panksepp calls their “affective mind.” It prepares for a fuller comparison of Mihkelson and Sebald’s tonality, and their art of valediction and memory in Part two.

Chinese interest in Henrik Ibsen’s plays has flourished for more than a century and many of his plays have been performed on or adapted for the Chinese stage since the early twentieth century. However, attempts to adapt his plays for the traditional Chinese theatre were only made in the past decade with Peer Gynt adapted into Peking opera in 2006, The Lady from the Sea and Hedda Gabler into Yue opera in 2006 and 2010. A close study of the re presentation of two Ibsenian women characters, namely, Ellida Wangel and Hedda Gabler on the Chinese traditional Yue operatic stage during Ibsen’s centenary in 2006 reveals the Chinese cultural assimilation of the two Norwegian women with their distinct character and outlook of life to suit the traditional Chinese notion of femininity and morality, as well as the conventionality of the Yue theatre with its unique theatrical and aesthetic considerations. What is more important is the Chinese desire to invite the audience, especially the young audience, to reconsider what constitutes happiness and integrity for married women in the Chinese context with an emphasis on moral responsibility.

This article brings to light the socio-political conditions in the Triestine region, at the end of the 19th century and in the fi rst half of the 20th century. Th ese conditions infl uenced the formation of stereotypical, regionally coloured perceptions of Slovenes and Italians in the Slovene and Italian poetry about Trieste from the fi rst half of the 20th century, which were specific to the Triestine area or rather the wider region around Trieste, where the Slovene and Italian communities cohabited. This article also points out that these stereotypes are constructs. The Italian Triestine literature most frequently depicted the Italians (native culture) before the First World War, in accordance to the needs of the non-literary irredentist disposition. In this light, it depicted them as the inheritors of the Roman culture, wherein it highlights their combativeness and burning desire to “free” Trieste from its Austro-Hungarian prison. An increase in auto-stereotypes among the Slovene poetry is noticeable after the First World War and is most likely a consequence of the socio-political changes in Trieste. The Slovene Triestine literature depicted the Slovenes (native culture) after the First World War as “slaves” and simultaneously as the determined defenders of their land, who are also fully aware of their powerlessness against the immoral aggressor and cruel master (Italian hetero-stereotype) and so often call upon the help of imaginary forces (mythical heroes and personified nature in the Trieste region) and God. The Italian Triestine literature mostly depicted the Slovenes before the First World War as an inferior people, often referred to by the word “ščavi”. After the First World War, the Slovenes are depicted merely as the residents of the former Austro-Hungarian Trieste, meaning they were part of the narrative surrounding Trieste, only in when the narrative was set before the First World War. In this case, pre-war Slovene stereotypes appear, also depicted as part of the literary myth of the “Habsburg” Trieste, namely as the folkloric characters from the surrounding countryside.

The paper outlines the main features of Estonian translation poetics in the 20th century, examining the expression of the prevalent ideas guiding literary translation in writings about translation (mostly reviews and articles) in juxtaposition with examples from actual translations. The predominant ideal of translating verse and prose has been that of artistic translation, especially since the end of the 1920s. On the other hand, this general principle can be shown to have had somewhat differing emphases depending on the field of application as well as time period, ranging from the mostly form-oriented to mostly content-oriented translation.

In reference books and specialised literature, the traditional distinction between the culture hero and the trickster remains surprisingly unequivocal: the latter mythological character is usually defined as the demonic or comical counterpart of the former. While it might be a useful if rigid description for an encyclopaedia, does it always hold true in works of fiction? The present essay attempts to demonstrate that the interaction of the two types is much more ambiguous, and this complex and contradictory relationship is traced through the juxtaposition of probably the best-known characters in Estonian and English folklore, Rehepapp and Robin Hood. Albeit to a different degree, these personages possess traits of both the trickster and the hero but play somewhat different roles in their respective societies. The aim of the article, therefore, is to compare these functions in Rehepapp ehk november by Andrus Kivirähk and The Adventures of Robin Hood and His Merry Outlaws by J. Walker McSpadden and Charles Wilson.

The Danish classic Karen Blixen (1885–1962) wrote both in English and Danish and she is better known for the English-reading audience by her pseudonym Isak Dinesen. The article takes its departure from two extremes in her reception. The first extreme is the paramount interest in her person and life, and the other one is the new-critical and post-structural rejection of her biography. The present article pursues the middle way. First of all, this is done by tracing the presence of the fictional construct of the author and the storyteller (however, in many ways related to Karen Blixen’s person) in her texts, such as “Babette’s Feast”, “The Young Man with the Carnation” and “Deluge at Norderney”. Second, the article demonstrates how Blixen’s texts sanction the audience’s freedom and imply that reception is part of the artistic act. Finally, it suggests that Blixen’s readers can return the generosity, which Blixen’s oeuvre demonstrates in their respect. This can be done by applying biographical material intertextually, when interpreting these stories or staging them in one’s mind – without any obligation to treat the writer’s person and life as the ultimate and stable source for the meaning of these stories.

Ciaran Carson is a renowned Northern Irish poet with a distinguished record of translating poetry from Irish, Italian and French. This article focuses on his translation practice as evidenced in his three volumes of French poetry in translation: sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud; prose poems by Rimbaud; and poems by Jean Follain. Guided by the music, the matter, and the linguistic and ontological going-beyond of the originals, Carson variously ‘adapts’ prose poems to a rhyming alexandrine format, makes explicit use of derivation, shifts spatio-temporal perspective, and ‘doubles’ his French translations with English originals. Carson’s approach of ‘fetching’ poems from ‘elsewhere’ is assessed in the light of Meschonnic’s poetics of translation, which would define the overarching objective as producing new poems in English which do in English what the originals do in French. The analysis of Carson’s new poems is also informed by conceptualizations of creativity and originality arising from research in cognitive science, literary studies and critical theory. Carson’s practice of working under constraints suggested by the original poems and exploiting possibilities offered by and between the two languages leads to an expressive plurality that unsettles notions of source and target language. His translation artefacts and commentaries are examined for the light they shed on originality and derivation; writing and translating; the subjectivity of the translator; and the relationship between original poem and new poem.

Prolegomena to a poetics of the character’s name. We propose in this article a poetics of the character’s name. The character’s name can be studied from an autonomous point of view as well as from a structural point of view. From an autonomous point of view, at first, we show that the character’s name especially reflects a personal, a social, a physical, a generic, a geographical, an autobiographical or a referential characteristic of the character. We also focus on two particular cases, the case in which the name of the character is incomplete and the case in which the identity of the character is changing. The structural point of view, on the contrary, consists in studying the names of the characters of a same work by comparing them to each other. We focus in this way on the thematic role of the characters’ names, and on the case in which some phonetic features are recurrent in the names of several characters and must therefore be interpreted. We eventually mention the problem of the translation of the characters’ names, focusing on two situations: the situation in which the character’s name has no obvious meaning, and is not really translated, and the situation in which the character’s name has a real meaning, and is either translated literally or adapted.

The aim of the article is the attempt of reading two texts of culture, i.e. Moscow-Petushki of Venedict Erofeev and Pulp Fiction of Quentin Tarantino using the comparative approach that goes beyond the range of factual relationships, historical influences or similarities functioning in the plot. The purpose of the publication is to see both works, representing totally different semiotic systems (cinema and literature), in their mutual intertextual relationships for which the style of postmodernism constitutes the constant reference point. Most literary studies associate each of the chosen texts (but never both of them together) with postmodern thinking, therefore in my research I concentrate on the categories which are considered crucial for understanding postmodern thematic quests and the change in thinking which took place at the end of the 20th century. I try to find out similarities existing in the structures of two texts, aesthetic ideas and tools used to express them. As a result, the interpretation focuses in particular on representations of the body shown in the American movie and the Russian “poem in prose”, as well as on the problems of beauty, space and addictions, which constitute the fundamental subjects in these texts.

The chosen research subject – stylization of commedia dell’arte in Latvian and foreign Modernist drama and theatre – is a little studied theme in Latvian literary and theatre theory. Unrealistic representations (which are connected with theatricalization) are key features of modern drama which manifests each of the modernism movements in different ways. The most important of these that will be discussed are commedia dell’arte stylization in drama and theatre, theatricalization and the principle of theatre in theatre or play in play; balagan, life and art balaganization etc. Commedia dell’arte stylization will be analyzed with examples from selected plays by Latvian authors who represent different types of drama – Ādolfs Alunāns, Rūdolfs Blaumanis, Elza Stērste, Austra Mētere-Ozoliņa and Valdemārs Dambergs. Theatricalization elements also are in Latvian authors’ plays that belong to different modernism movements – Rainis, Jānis Jaunsudrabins, Mārtiņs Zīverts, Edvards Vulfs, Linards Laicens, Leons Paegle, Kārlis Dziļleja etc. Foreign authors in whose works one can analyze theatricalization include such dramatists as Luigi Pirandello, Frank Wedekind, August Strindberg, Morris Maeterlinck, Arthur Schnitzler, Federico Garcia Lorca, Alexander Block etc. One group of these foreign authors directly influenced Latvian dramatists, because their plays had been regularly staged in the Latvian theatres; while the second group influenced them partly because their aesthetics typologically coincide with the Latvian authors’ aesthetics and aims.

The New Woman makes an appearance in the texts of both male and female fin de siecle writers, although unsurprisingly she was more often an important focus for women writers. And although women writers from the margins of Europe faced many challenges that were similar to those of their contemporaries in English speaking countries, they were also simultaneously confronted with local and contextually specific issues. In this article, we tackle the specificities of the literary New Women in Slovenian and Finnish literature, and in particular, the texts of Zofka Kveder (1878–1926) and L. Onerva (1882–1972). Both women writers sought ways of engaging with questions of female identity in societies obsessed with cultural nationalism, and which saw woman primarily in terms of her role as wife and mother. Both L. Onerva and Kveder foregrounded the New Woman, depicting her as wanting to live her life on her own terms, even if this coincided with a painful awareness of the difficulty of such an enterprise. Both writers suggested that the New Woman’s personal ambivalences and inhibitions were often felt more acutely than any external force. L. Onerva and Kveder enriched Finnish and Slovenian literature with bold new themes and depictions, adding their own provocative ideas about love, sexuality, and emancipation to those being expressed by other better known New Woman writers, including Ellen Key.

The paper focuses upon the specific tendencies of Expressionism in the outstanding Latvian poet and playwright Rainis’ (Jānis Plieksāns, 1865–1929) writings. Rainis always tried to follow the current trends in art, at the same time elaborating his own specific style of expression, therefore his oeuvre is characterized by a peculiar combination of the traditional and modern or, in other words, specifically Latvian elements combined with European modernist features. One of the brightest examples is his play Spēlēju, dancoju ( I Played, I Danced , 1915), which is marked by trends akin to Expressionist art, as well as their very specific translation into Latvian tradition. Although Expressionism in its most impressive manifestation appears in German literature, a kindred world vision can be also found in other countries, in some cases even earlier than in Germany. For instance, expressionistic tendencies are characteristic of the literary works of the Russian writer and playwright Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919). Rainis’ diaries, letters and notes demonstrate a stable and permanent interest in Expressionism and particularly Andreyev. Although the Latvian poet’s attitude to his Russian colleague’s literary works mostly can be characterised as negative, Rainis’ notes show that in Andreyev’s artistic quests he has also found some impulses for his own writings. While exploring the tendencies of Expressionism in Rainis’ writings, the paper discusses the specific use of grotesque and the intensified relations between the living and the dead in the play Spēlēju, dancoju . It is significant that the relations between life and death, the living and the dead is one of the central themes in Expressionism, and its relevance is determined by the political events at the beginning of the 20th century (especially, the First World War), as well as the development of industrial society. In order to demonstrate the most significant points of interaction shared by Spēlēju, dancoju and Expressionism, as well as the uniqueness of Rainis’ artistic manner, the paper gives an insight into the aesthetics of Expressionism and provides a comparative analysis of Rainis’ play and some examples of Expressionist art (e.g., writings by Leonid Andreyev, Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller).

W. G. Sebald wrote and published poetry from the early 1960s until his death in 2001. Even though Sebald’s oeuvre is among the most extensively studied in Germanistik today, however, his lyric poetry remains in the shadow of his prose and has yet to be afforded extensive critical attention. Working on what was to be his last novel, Sebald appears to have devoted more time to poetry than previously, which resulted in several publications: For Years Now (2001), a collection of micropoems juxtaposed with images by the British painter Tess Jaray, and Unerzahlt (2003), a set of similar poems in German, published together with etchings by the artist Jan Peter Tripp. The present article takes as its point of departure the observation that these two books overlap substantially – many of the poems exist in several versions none of which can be said to be the definitive one – and attempts to interpret a selection of poems with a particular view to their material, linguistic and intermedial particularities. Using the concept of differential poetry, a term coined by Marjorie Perloff, it asks what meanings may emerge from Sebald’s sparse verses when the subtle variations between the different versions – caused by versification, typography, translation, and word-and-image interplay – are brought to the fore.

This article examines how Lithuanian poetry was represented for foreign readers in 15 anthologies published from 1978 to 2013 in Lithuania and abroad. The object of investigation is not a huge corpus of authors representing the official canon but the cultural, historical, political, and aesthetic aspects of Lithuanian poetry revealed in the prefaces of the anthologies. The 35 year-long process of anthologisation reveals the changing modes of national representation: the trajectory from the unknown, closed or even censored Lithuanian literature (which was oppressed by social realism and divided in two parts – exodus and Soviet Lithuanian literature) to a united picture of national literature and later to the crumbling mosaic of its parts (representing particularities grouped by gender, generations, subjects, grouping and so on). During the Soviet period the more precise translation process of Lithuanian poetry for foreign readers became possible in 70s. Till the end of the 20th century the main goal of compilers of anthologies as well as authors of prefaces was to represent national literary history beginning with the 18th century and its origins in folk culture, and highlight the historical circumstances of delayed development of national literature. From the beginning of the 21st century the care about national literature’s representation turns into a commercial project orientated towards international text circulation. According to global conditions the political resistance clearly expressed in poetic writings which was so important for the compilers of the 20th-century anthologies has transformed into the political-economic literary battlefield (the battle for publishing, translations, resistance against the dominant literary tendencies, establishment of individuality) marking a radically different political resistance.

One culture within a culture is the culture of LGBT people in Latvia or, to use a contemporary designation, queer culture. In Latvia, queer culture is still practically invisible. In this paper I will analyse two types of queer narratives: documentary life stories collected by Rita Rudusa in her book Forced Underground (2012) and the manuscript of a collection of 12 short stories by Klāvs Smilgzieds (2014), originally published serially during the 1990s in an under ground Latvian gay magazine. Both types of texts employ different emphasis talking about queers in Soviet and post-Soviet life. Rudusa’s interviews reflect on the situation of being in the closet and on fear and loneliness, while Smilgzieds’ stories celebrate the male body, casual sex, and unfulfilled loves. While Rudusa’s interlocutors (mostly gay men, more or less closeted) construct their narratives to seem acceptable to straight women, Smilgzieds, a closeted bisexual himself (or, as he calls himself in Latvian, divdabis ), uses various modes of narrative (parable, miniature, pornographic prose) to express both his experience and imagination. Both Rudusa and Smilgzieds reveal the slow changes in consciousness taking place in Latvia in its transition from a Soviet to a post- Soviet society that result in actions such as the decriminalization of male homosexuality, the existence of LGBT organizations and clubs, the use of queer issues as topics for tabloids and TV shows etc. The habitus of gay people is changing very slowly as a consequence. In this paper the construction of queer Latvian narratives is analysed in comparison to other queer narratives.

In the era of hyphenated identities, one’s identity may not be as clear as decades before; the same applies to culture and literature. Over the past years, there have been discussions about the exact definition of national literature. In Estonia there have been debates surrounding the definition of Estonian literature: is it a literature written in Estonian or is it a literature written in Estonia? One of the most interesting literary debates erupted in connection with the Estonian Russian writer Andrei Ivanov (born 1971), whose novels in many cases have been written in Russian but published first in Estonian. The first part of the article deals with the definition of Estonian literature and the position of the Estonian Russian-language literature. It may be noteworthy that only at the beginning of the 21st century did Estonian literary criticism start to deal with the Estonian Russian-language literature as part of Estonian literature. The authors of the younger generation (born in 1970 and later) or the so-called noughts-generation are the first credibly taken authors as part of Estonian literature. The position of Estonian Russian literature has shifted from rejection and periphery to the spotlight. The works by Andrei Ivanov have played an important role in that process. The second part of the article analyses the depiction of Estonian Russians in Ivanov’s A Handful of Dust and Ashes using the branch of comparative literature called imagology or image studies. The Estonian Russian background proves to be a useful tool for creating a character who is alienated, who is an existential outsider. The author deals with existential questions and depicts tendencies in the 21st century society. As many other Estonian Russian writers, Ivanov does not deal specifically with the issues of Estonian Russians and that is one of the reasons of his popularity and one of the reasons why Estonian Russian literature has attracted so much attention.

In the course of the 19th century, from one extreme to another, literary manifestations of nationalism have shown up in several different genres, and meaningfully in the epic genre, which is perceived, according to the Western literary canon, with its beginning in the Greek epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey , as a primary expression of the cosmogonic myths of an ethnic group in search of the national identity. This paper, through the analysis of the works of three major European poets, the Catalan Jacint Verdaguer, the Latvian Andrejs Pumpurs, and the Montenegrian Petar Petrovic Njegos, each one of them writing without knowing the other two, tries to state that despite the obvious social, historical, geographic and linguistic differences separating them (which are also the subject of research), there is one common spirit rooted in the Romantic Movement, connecting and providing them with similar motives and topics.

In the article I shall, on the example of the European poet and translator Alojz Gradnik (1882–1967), shed light on the impact of multiculturalism, multilingualism and ideological dichotomy on literary production and literary reception. Gradnik himself was in fact multicultural and multilingual, which was, however, unacceptable in his lifetime due to the specific social and political context. Gradnik thus gave up the multicultural and multilingual dimension. But due to this very element that he had denied himself, he was split within himself, which was reflected in his literary production; that is, in his poetry as well as in his translations of literary works. On the other hand, the image of Gradnik as a multicultural and multilingual author was exploited by the European totalitarianisms, therefore Gradnik as an author suffered a paradoxical fate.

The study aims to analyze two different conceptualizations of comparative literary studies – one by a Spanish scholar (Claudio Guillen) and the other by a Slovak one (Dionýz Ďurisin). It focuses on the circumstances of development of this discipline on the basis of particular sources and impulses with regard to the geographic limits of the study. In the first part, the notion of supra-nationality is characterized as an effort to free oneself from the narrow frame of national literary history. Guillen was very aware of the tension between the local and the universal, or the particular and the general, which, according to him, requires the scholar to transcend conventional approaches and respect the reader’s ordinary experience. Instead of a rigid critical frame, what is needed is a historical and critical horizon that does not exclude the individual dimension, nor a unifying perspective. At the same time, Guillen emphasizes the search for the universal dimension of literature. Guillen is sceptical about the focus on formal-linguistic approaches in studying literary development, which he observes at Spanish universities today. On the other hand, Slovak comparative literary studies had different points of departure. The Slovak comparatist Ďurisin took many impulses from the Russian formalists, who focused particularly on the issues of the national literary development. As an example, the study uses the term historical poetics, applied in the study of the development of Slovak verse (Mikulas Bakos). Instead of the prevalent genetic method used by Guillen, Ďurisin at the same time used a theoretical-developmental model in studying the relationship between national and world literature, with an emphasis on the role of the receiving literature.

The paper highlights the complex functioning of quotation in the context of Romanian postmodern poetry, focusing on a pragmasemantic approach, where the communicational dimension of the poetic process is underscored. A special place is granted to the theory of quotation, by reviewing various models, which range from the intertextual and dialogicpolyphonic account to the one grounded in the linguistics of enunciation as well as in language philosophy. The illustrations are taken from a corpus of contemporary poetry, starting with Cristian Popescu’s “All This Had to Bear a Name” , where the quotational paratext (the title) establishes a parodic relationship with a previous poem by Marin Sorescu. This “second-order” text does not refute the strict meaning of the original (in fact, it does not mention its theme, the Romantic poet Eminescu) but it directs its deconstructionist drive towards another cultural fetish, the ballad The Little Ewe , equally a part of the official vulgate, a cultural “monument”. Examples borrowed from Radu Andriescu or Letitia Ilea reveal the self-reflective use of language and also the close relationship that citation entertains with reported speech, represented discourse and the very complex phenomenon of polyphony as described by Bakhtin. Inside the texture of the postmodern poem, the grafting of alien discourses rarely reifies textual otherness and more often than not handles the quotation as manifestation of a particular voice, with which the poetic subject engages dialogically. Even so, the deconstruction of cliches and doxa or common opinion is crucial in this poetics. Along with the pervasive palimpsest, quotation in a poetic context also has important metalinguistic and metaliterary effects, by enhancing the literariness of literature.

Expressionist Drama has been an important phenomenon of Modernist Theatre. In China, however, not enough attention has been paid to it in the academic field. In the present article different trends in the reception of German expressionist drama in China from the Chinese May Fourth period to the 1940s will be discussed. Broadly, there have been two basic tendencies in the reception of German expressionist drama in Chinese drama. A part of Chinese authors mainly focused on the class struggle for political and revolutionary purposes, but did not absorb deeper features of the genre. Other Chinese playwrights interested in (German) Expressionist Drama discussed in their work problems of social reality touching on spiritual aspects of people’s individual lives. At the same time the Chinese reception of expressionist drama can also serve as an introduction to Chinese contemporary drama as a whole.

This paper provides a survey of the Estonian reception of Boccaccio’s oeuvre since its beginnings in the 18th century to the reception of the latest publication of the Estonian Decameron in 2004. As the translator of the second work by Boccaccio to be published in Estonian, The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta , I subsequently characterise a number of the major points of the reception of that particular book as well, both in the world and from the Estonian perspective. In the vein of expanding the understanding of and the Estonian reception of Boccaccio’s works as a whole, this article finally discusses and disputes a claim about the handling of tragic motifs in Boccaccio’s oeuvre in the chapter dedicated to Boccaccio of Erich Auerbach’s monograph Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature .

This paper aims to offer a postcolonial reading of an un published autobiography Grosmutters Erzahlung ( Grandmother’s Story , 1869) by Christine Jencken. The author was born into a family of Baltic-German old nobility. The text is rather unusual because of the critical comments on the Baltic-German way of life. It can be stated that Baltic-German life-writing is in its majority forms in many aspects a monolithic body of collective memory which supported the Baltic-German hegemonic identity. It is therefore difficult to find texts which do not follow the usual line of argument which includes the “historical right” of Baltic-Germans to the land and the praise of the traditional family values. However, in every society there are people who do not agree with certain traditions or models of behaviour but they are hardly represented in Baltic-German autobiographical writing. In my search for alternative voices I have found Christine Jencken’s unpublished autobiography, which offers a different insight into the Baltic-German everyday life compared to what we are used to in the autobiographies and literary texts written by the Baltic-Germans from that period.

The article explores ecocritically nature-culture interactions in contemporary British and Estonian literature: Monique Roffey’s and Andrus Kivirahk’s writing. I start by elucidating the portrayal of nature, the way in which the writers under discussion reconsider anthropocentrism and established boundaries. Both novelists turn a delicate eye to nature, portraying a posthuman world where nature and culture are no longer dichotomous but perpetually entangled, challenging anthropocentrism and indicating a different, more envirocentric approach to literature. I will focus first on human-nonhuman interactions, analysing next how the normative human and nonhuman beings are transformed beyond recognition, shattering the anthropocentric core of the concept of agency and voice. In line with material ecocriticism, the currently emerging ecocritical branch that re-conceptualises nature as an active agent, the writers mingle the nonhuman with the human as a Subject, posing a threat to anthropo-normativity and envisioning an uncannily different reality. The article’s final section explores the way how nature and culture are inextricably merged, not only their voices but also bodies, indicating the key new materialist idea of trans-corporeality – both culture and nature as tangled corporealities. In line with new materialism, the writers importantly revision the dominant dichotomous anthropocentric world, laying out a future that is naturalcultural.

The Second World War cleft Estonian literature into two halves for half a century: the literature of the homeland and the literature of the diaspora. Bernard Kangro (1910–1994), who fled Estonia in 1944, was a prolific writer, the editor of the magazine Tulimuld and the head of the main diaspora publishing house Eesti Kirjanike Kooperatiiv. Kuus paeva ( Six Days , 1980) and Seitsmes paev ( The Seventh Day , 1984) are Kangro’s last novels. Kangro began drawing up plans for these two novels at the beginning of the 1970s, when western scholars were taking a deeper interest in life writing. From the perspective of form, Kangro’s novels have a special status in Estonian literature; in Kuus paeva , Kangro uses the diary form to create a meta-level in the novel with the goal of analyzing the specificity of autobiographical writing; in Seitsmes paev this meta-level is achieved through the imaginary diary of the biographer-protagonist, which consists of his reflections and experiences while writing a biography. These reflections and experiences derive from Kangro’s own preliminary research for the historical novel Kuus paeva . Seitsmes paev thus becomes the metatext for Kuus paeva . The main theme of the first novel of the dilogy is the writing of autobiography as such. Through the protagonist Andreas Sunesen, a historical figure, questions are raised concerning the concept of truth in autobiographical writing, the relations between autobiographical writing and historical writing and the function of confessionality in autobiographical narrative. The second focus of this article is on the issues connected to the writing of biography, as thematized in Seitsmes paev . In Kuus paeva , three meanings of the concept of truth can be differentiated: the truth expressed by the autobiographer (which the protagonist also refers to as “eternal truth“); the truth of historical events, which is expressed in their claim to authenticity, their correspondence or harmony with reality; and the truth about the existence of the autobiographer, which should appear as a result of the verbalization of his self-examination and memory work. The story of the mission to the eastern Baltic Sea region contained in Andreas’ autobiographical narrative points rather to the inseparability of the first two dimensions of truth, at least to the extent that the narrator of these historical events is also their witness and participant. Thus, it is unavoidable that he would relay what has happened from the vantage point of his present needs and purposes. Kangro’s novel seems to support the Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s claim about self-narration: the autobiographical narrative can only answer the question of what a person was, not the question of his or her existence. In Seitsmes paev , the second novel of the dilogy, a philosophical question is foregrounded – the question of the task of the biographer. As far as the poetics of this novel is concerned, the answer to this question remains ambivalent.

“Die Redlichkeit des Betrugs” – Poetic Remembrance and Totalitarianism at Herta Muller and Vladimir Vertlib. The article deals with poetic remembrance of totalitarianism, taking a closer look at two contemporary authors from the German speaking literature, Herta Muller (born 1953) and Vladimir Vertlib (born 1966). Both authors’ concepts of memory re-pose the question of remembrance as related to historical facts and literary fiction as they try to overcome both the congealed memory and the primacy of experience, understood as a one-to-one translation into memory and literary speech. Herta Muller and Vladimir Vertlib do not approach the reality of totalitarianism using psychological realism but through strategies of poetic fiction. Although the term “fiction of truths” may sound paradoxical, both poetic concepts, however, prove adequate for poetic remembrance of the past as linked to fiction in narratives. By evoking and irritating the readers’ expectations with the help of the construction of his novels, the shifts of perspective and disruptions, Vladimir Vertlib writes against preformed stereotypes of memory, be they subjective or collective. Herta Muller develops a poetic language of abbreviated comparisons, in which words, objects and gestures, on the one hand, are abstracted from being self-evident and, on the other hand, are able to express the destruction of people and to refuse obedience against totalitarianism that extends into our language. The article shows on the example of two novels, Herta Muller’s Atemschaukel (2008) and Vladimir Vertlib’s Das besondere Gedachtnis der Rosa Masur (2001) how these concepts of memory are realized and how they detach themselves from the victim-perpetrator-scheme. Both novels prove that psychic damages cause people to become mute, but do not deprive them of language.

European Readings beyond Europe: World Literature, Literary Canon and Education in Europe. The present essay discusses the concepts “literary canon”, “world literature”, “classic authors”, and “literary masterworks”. Moreover, it summarises their origins and describes the usage of these concepts. The aim is to update these terms to current validity and to suggest an appropriate use of them in the educational and academic realm. For this purpose, some major works of European literature are contrasted with modern bestseller books (e.g. “high literature” as for instance “Bildungsroman” with “amusement novels”, fantasy, etc.). In addition to that, the article contrasts private with educational and academic readings (literary works read by students at universities and schools). Merging the conclusions together with the pertinent anthropological criteria, the essay suggests a programme of European readings that does not refuse to take into account the concepts of classic authors (Calvino) and of Bildung (Schwanitz). At the same time, it responds to the social reality of our time and of our European cities. Overall, this approach mediates between Italo Calvino’s justification of reading classic authors and Harold Bloom’s idea of reading as a lonely, quiet, and profound exercise, at the same time emotional as well as existential, carried out with a certain dose of (self-)irony. On his part, Calvino refused aesthetic criteria, such as outstanding unity and exemplary harmony, to characterise a reading as an extreme experience and process of initiation at the interfaces where classic authors, canon, and ‘Weltliteratur’ connect with the reader’s individual experience. In doing so, Calvino sticks to the individual practice of reading and provides 15 arguments in favour of books that are, on the one hand, sustainably present in the collective memory as well as in the individual subconscious and, on the other hand, contribute to individual and collective self-determination. They assign a fund of readings with permanent validity because of their constant renewal and enduring effect over the centuries, in combination with their impact on the individual biographies of single persons. In this sense, the article argues in favour of establishing humanistic canons at universities and schools that can make use of the performative impulses a reference system like this offers, in order to contribute to more complex ideas than those texts that are produced by the consumer society and the mass media day by day. Getting to know oneself and the others, deepening the mutual understanding – this could be supported by a canon of European literature.

The Poetics and Reception of Hidden Resistance: the Estonian Game of Totalitarianism. Where, with whom or with what does totalitarianism begin? An answer in the spirit of Hannah Arendt would be: at the moment when people stop thinking; at the moment when they allow themselves to be turned into instruments of a totalitarian regime. By what means does a totalitarian society achieve that moment? What means does a person have to fight against such an instrumentalization at that moment? What are the means of writers, whose essential nature should be that they never stop thinking? How does a writer working in a totalitarian society manage to create a free space, a place to think, in a situation governed by a single way of thinking that can only be expressed in one language: that of totalitarianism? How does a reader create his or her free space for thinking? What do reading and writing mean in a society that prohibits or hinders free expression and thought for authors and readers? Totalitarianism does not work everywhere in the same way. European history alone has seen different forms of totalitarian power, its ways of ruling depend on the socio-historical development of the society. Literary reactions to totalitarian power are also different: totalitarianism in Nazi Germany was different from that of DDR, which, in turn, was different from practices in Soviet Estonia. In my article, I approach these questions from a very personal perspective, remembering my own reading experiences in the totalitarian society of Soviet Estonia. I can only discuss the years from 1983 to 1985, because earlier I read children’s literature, and afterwards the Soviet regime was already falling apart. I will study communication between readers and authors in the totalitarian society and thereby determine the main difference between the factors that shaped the reading situation in Estonia and the DDR. In Estonia, readers and authors were able to outsmart the totalitarian rule thanks to the cultural continuity based on a symbolic language (rooted in cultural memory), which owes its existence to the fact that totalitarianism was perceived as something foreign, something speaking another language. In the DDR, the poetics of resistance had to be built on a different foundation, since the national culture of the past as a source of identity had been devalued by recent history and was not a suitable basis.

This article uses as a case study the historical-biographical drama film Hamsun (1996) in order to discuss the complications that arise when considering biographical films as adaptations of biographical and/or autobiographical works of literature. Hamsun by the Swedish director Jan Troell is an adaptation of the Danish author Thorkild Hansen’s documentary novel Processen mod Hamsun ( The Trial of Hamsun , 1978), which in turn draws most extensively on the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun’s own writings, primarily his autobiographical novel Paa gjengrodde Stier ( On Overgrown Paths , 1949). Hansen, in telling the story of Hamsun’s life, concentrates on the events surrounding the Second World War and its aftermath in Norway. The focus is set on the court trial of 1945–1948 when Hamsun was accused of being a quisling and his mental state was seriously questioned not only by the court, but also the general public. Hansen in his novel interprets his extensive source material with a very clear intention of rehabilitating Hamsun as a great writer with a brilliant mind instead of considering him a traitor. It is Hamsun’s own perspective in Paa gjengrodde Stier that clearly lays the groundwork for Hansen’s portrait of the writer. However, Hamsun’s account of events is most selective: his often sharp and ironic descriptions of the present are combined with lyrical and philosophical reminiscences of the past, hardly providing the reader with any answers or explanations. The character Hamsun in Paa gjengrodde Stier seems to be a rather carefully constructed figure whose primary intent is to evoke the reader’s sympathy and to remind us of his status as a writer, an artist. The director Troell has said in several interviews that it was very important for him to use Hansen’s book as source material, but that he and his screenwriter Per Olov Enquist have included many other sources, among them Hamsun’s own Paa gjengrodde Stier . Viewing the film as an adaptation of Hansen’s book, one easily recognizes the connections to Hamsun’s own writings. An interesting question is whether or how the main character differs in each above-mentioned text. Naturally, the longer the period of time that separates the source material from the film adaptation, the more significant a role the changes that have occurred over time in social, political and ethical values play in our interpretation of depicted events. Hansen’s portrayal of Hamsun was very original and controversial in its time. However, the release of the film Hamsun to an international audience in 1996 reopened the debate of “Hamsun’s guilt”. Troell chose to focus on the drama of Hamsun’s personal life through the war and its after-effects. The image of an artist instead of a collaborator – similar to what Hamsun created of himself on the pages of Paa gjengrodde Stier – prevails in both the novel and its film adaptation.

Viivi Luik has been active in Estonian literature for half a century: from the times of Soviet censorship to regained independence. Her renowned novels Seitsmes rahukevad ( The Seventh Spring of Peace , 1985) and Ajaloo ilu ( The Beauty of History , 1991) have been published in a number of foreign languages. Her first collection of poetry appeared in 1965. Since then ten more collections have followed. In addition, she has published three books of selected verse together with the volume of collected verse (2006), as well as four books of fiction, three volumes of essays, several children’s books and two dramas. Many Estonian songwriters have appreciated her lyrics. Marked by an occasionally controversial reception in literary criticism, Luik’s distinguished stereophonic, cool “neosymbolism” has developed from sincere nature lyrics towards a sombre urban modernism and firm social resistance, a kind of freedom of feeling and thought. Luik’s narratives started to appear since 1974: first Salamaja piir ( The Border of the Secret House ), and the children’s trilogy of Leopold. All her main characters, prone to pondering, are close to the author’s alter ego, contrasting her childhood and youth to maturity; she seems to write prose as if it was tense poetry. In the two volumes of elegant essays Inimese kapike ( A Locker of One’s Own , 1998) and Kone koolimaja haual ( A Sermon at the Grave of the Schoolhouse , 2006), Luik shows herself on the border of two worlds and two eras, past and present, totalitarianism and postmodernism. Ice and blood dominate her writings full of childlike frankness, internal speech, prophecy and challenge. Two of her last books were released simultaneously in 2010: an essay Ma olen raamat ( I am a Book ; together with a co-author), and a novel about her melancholic deja vu reflections in Rome, Varjuteater ( The Shadow Play ). Guided by a methodologically holistic perspective and moving towards a “unified theoretical field” of literary criticism, this contribution to Luik scholarship, for the first time makes available a biobibliographical comparative introduction to all of her works for the international audience. It illuminates the broadly representative character of her oeuvre and shows how Luik charts the course for an entire generation of “Soviet” writers of the Baltics as “border states”.