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…

The article examines the poetical works by August Pihlak (1903–1970), Estonian exile poet who fled from Estonia to the USA during World War II. Although, from a strictly objective point of view, his poetry’s contribution to the Estonian sonnet tradition is remarkable, he has practically been left out from Estonian literary history. Also, none of his seven poetry collections has ever been reviewed in any literary magazine. Among other poems Pihlak’s poetry collections include 229 sonnets, which makes him one of the most productive Estonian sonneteers. Furthermore, he is the only Estonian poet who has written six heroic crowns (sonnet…

A possible approach to the oeuvre of Mati Unt (1944–2005) has to do with psychoanalysis. Mati Unt’s interest in psychology and psychiatry developed during his student years at the University of Tartu, reaching its height during the theatre reform of the 1960s–1970s. A psychoanalytical substrate can be observed in both Unt’s prose and drama, as well as in his stage productions. The analysis is based on C. G. Jung’s theories and Unt’s creative interpretation of Jung’s views. Also, some light is thrown on how Unt’s interest in psychoanalysis was kindled by his sensitive nature and some facts of his personal…

The article addresses the results of the Estonian 2011 population and housing census which was the first census to record Estonian native-speaking residents’ self-reported capacities of Estonian dialects. While the census data cannot be perhaps interpreted as the comprehension or regular use of traditional Estonian dialects known from the end of XX century and earlier, the enumeration can still be a valuable source for investigating how the variation of Estonian is perceived in the new Millennium. Informed by perceptual dialectology (Preston 1989, 1999), our main focus is to observe the spread of less prominent dialects which are linguistically closer to…

Certain Estonian adpositions can occur either as prepositions or as postpositions (e.g. ümber maja, maja ümber ’round the house’). In this study, we refer to these as ambipositions and the goal of this study is to find the motivation for this positional variation in usage. The data come from the Estonian Dialect Corpus, which contains natural dialectal speech, allowing us to simultaneously include both linguistic as well as dialectal factors as part of the analysis. Here, we have included five ambipositions, läbi ’through’, mööda ’along’, vastu ’against’, üle ’over’ and ümber ’around’, that occurred with sufficient frequency in both positions.…

Triggered by the image suggested in Hamlet that even while bounded in a nutshell it is still possible to consider oneself the king of infinite space, the article attempts to chart the reach of the dimension of the far-away space in Jaan Kaplinski’s poetry. The point of departure is found in the chrestomatic works on space and place in humanistic geography that underscore the nature of space as „amorphous and intangible and not an entity that can be directly described and analysed” (Relph 1976: 8). Thus, while lacking stability and connoting with openness, freedom and mobility, space is made meaningful…