Windows, entryways to infinity

Kristiina Rebane

doi:https://doi.org/10.54013/kk799a3

Keywords: comparative literature, 20^th and 21^st century Estonian literature, 19^th century Italian literature, imagination, ”Border State”, ”View”

The literary works of the 19^th-century Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1836) have been available in Estonian for years. Less familiar, however, is the poetics of the vague and indefinite (Italian: poetica del vago e dell’indefinito) developed in his notebook “Zibaldone”. This concept forms the philosophical core and essence of his artistic creation. By centring his poetics around the conflict between the finiteness of the physical world and the human yearning for infinity, Leopardi proposes substituting the non-existent physical infinity with indefiniteness. By limiting sensory perception, indefiniteness – or vagueness – stimulates the imagination and creates the illusion of infinity, satisfying human desires for pleasure and leading people through delightful mental journeys to a state of mind in whose description Leopardi sees one of the most crucial functions of literature and art.

The theoretical explanatory potential of Leopardi’s poetics extends beyond his own works and era, providing a framework that can broaden the interpretive possibilities of contemporary Estonian literature. Using a comparative approach, this article examines the motif of windows through Leopardi’s poetics in Tõnu Õnnepalu’s / Emil Tode’s novel “Border State” (Piiririik, 1993) and Jan Kaus’s notebook “View” (Vaade, 2022). In these works, windows are depicted as memory images that embody poetic elements of indefiniteness, such as frames, duskiness, night, silence, roads disappearing into the distance, the sky, the horizon, and so on. As central elements in the narrators’ self-definition, these windows play a crucial role both in content and composition, structuring the fragmented, introspective narrative without a stable timeline in “Border State” and linking the self-narrative thread in “View”. The appearance of similar windows in other works allows the observations made in the article to be applied to other texts by Õnnepalu and Kaus, facilitating a broader discussion of indefiniteness in their poetics.

Kristiina Rebane (b. 1974), PhD, Associate Professor of Italian and French language, Tallinn University, School of Humanities (Narva mnt 25, 10120 Tallinn); kristiina.rebane@tlu.ee

Windows, entryways to infinity

Parallelisms in the works of Giacomo Leopardi, Tõnu Õnnepalu, and Jan Kaus

Kirjandus