The position of Johannes Vares-Barbarus (1890–1946) in Estonian history and culture is contradictory. On the one hand, he was a remarkable doctor of the name of Vares, on the other hand, a poet named Barbarus, whose modernistic poems were not always appreciated. Moreover, the reception of his works has been complicated by his actions in the 1940s, when he was one of the leading figures in the Sovietization of Estonia. His left-wing views are hardly overlooked whenever himself or his works are discussed. His poetry having received so much more attention than the rest of his works, this article analyzes…

In most of the available descriptions of Estonian, action nominals regularly derived from verbs via mine-suffixation have been classified among nouns, thus being typically addressed from their word class perspective, with the main focus on intraphrasal aspects. However, according to some studies of literary Estonian, certain semantic properties as well as the syntactic distribution of action nominals suggest describing them via the constructions in which they appear. This article investigates one of such hitherto little discussed constructions, namely, a combination of a finite verb olema ‘tobe’ and an action nominal in the nominative or partitive case, based on spontaneous dialect…

The article compares the prose oeuvre of Jaan Oks with certain death camp memoirs with a documentary background, based on the concept of ‘bare life’ borrowed from the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. The hypothesis is that Jaan Oks’s short stories of village life keep consistently outlining the contours of bare life. Bare life means a life emptied from normal human desire for happiness and for a future. The article compares the peasants depicted in Oks’s short stories with the camp residents called ‘Muselmänner’, who had given up fighting for their lives, thus finding themselves halfway between life and death. In…

The article addresses the influences of migration on the size of the major language groups in Estonia, the linguistic composition of the population, and the use of Estonian as a second language from the end of the 1980s to 2011, based on the last three censuses.
As for different language groups, demographic and linguistic change has affected them to a different extent. The most marked decrease can be observed in smaller language groups, which is due to language shift. In Estonia the language changed to by minor language groups is mostly Russian, and this process has not ceased since the restoration…

The article addresses the afterlife images occurring in memorates. The focus is on the extent to which such experiential descriptions contain elements of traditional legends and what is genre specific in the ways and functions of imagining afterlife. It is found that although first-person narratives of personal experience do contain elements of traditional folk beliefs and legends, they hardly ever dominate, which is due to the difference in the communicative functions of the two genres. The conclusion of the study is that in memorates the choice of motifs depends on the theme of the narrative complex as well as on…

The article explores one possible source of the verisimilitude of literary realism – its prominent detailed descriptions of material and social reality. Our aim is to relate this poetically autonomous descriptive faculty to the alleged representational objectivity of literary realism, and explain how descriptions function as a source of realist verisimilitude from a philosophical as well as poetic point of view. We use Madis Kõiv’s phenomenological explanation of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity from his little-known text „On the Objectivity of Subjectivity” to see how it reflects upon Fredric Jameson’s recent elaboration of literary realism as a poetic balance…

Der Artikel beruht auf den entsprechenden Kapiteln der Monographie des Autors (2011) über die Rezeption der estnischen Literatur im deutschsprachigen Raum, ist aber stellenweise gekürzt, bearbeitet und weiterentwickelt. Da von Jaan Kross vergleichsweise viele Bücher auf Deutsch vorliegen, bietet sich sein Werk für eine eingehendere Rezeptionsanalyse an. Im Vordergrund stand dabei die Frage, warum die zwischenzeitlich sehr lebhafte Rezeption zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts erlahmt ist. Hierzu wird die Theorie des literarischen Feldes von Pierre Bourdieu angewendet, anhand deren untersucht wird, welche Rolle die jeweiligen Akteure auf dem Rezeptionsfeld gespielt haben. In erster Linie werden Verlage und Kritiker in Abhängigkeit…