Keywords: communication, fieldwork, letters, Siberian Estonians
The majority of Estonian settlements in Siberia were founded in the last decade of the 19th century and in the early 20th century by Estonian emigrants in search of their own land. Settlements that were established yet earlier were made up of people deported to Siberia by the Russian Tsar.
In the article I analyse the letters sent to me from Estonian villages in Siberia following my folkloristic fieldwork in the region in 1991–2010. In the late 20th century and the early 21st century, exhanging letters with Estonians in Siberia had an important function both for me and my correspondents.…

Keywords: spoken Estonian, everyday dialogue, questions, social action, wh-questions, conversation analysis
The purpose of the article is to research the social actions of wh-questions in Estonian everyday conversations and find out whether there is a connection between the form of the question and the social action. Wh-questions are formed with question words (mis ‘what’, kuidas ‘how’, kes ‘who’ etc.) and the question does not contain an answer. The material consists of 271 extracts collected from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of the University of Tartu. The extracts were analysed using the methodology of conversation analysis.
There were four social actionsperformed by the wh-questions analysed: Request for information (144), Rhetorical question (65),…

Keywords: exegesis, etymology, Goethe, Lotman, memory, translation
Here we define „philology” as a discipline studying how reality is transformed into text and vice versa. The question of philology is wording, while its object encompasses everything accessible to verbal reference.
Philology belongs to Culture, not to Civilisation. Civilisation consists of knowledge and skills, answering the question „How to do/make it?” Culture consists of norms, orders and prohibitions, of do’s and don’ts, answering in the end the question „How to understand it?” Civilisation is developed by sciences, Culture is developed by the humanities. Philology belongs to the humanities, perhaps even, considering its function of…

Keywords: transgressive literature, contemporary Estonian literature, transgression, postmodernism, event, abject, scandal, carnival, graphic description, reflexivity
 
Transgressive poetics is a genre-appropriate selection of devices to describe deviant behaviour and phenomena regulated by prohibitions. The article presents a two-level approach starting from the theoretical framework of transgressive literature, which is subsequently filled in with examples of transgression found in contemporary Estonian literature. At first, the general concept of transgression is discussed based on Georges Bataille, which is followed by the description of a transgressive work of literature as an event formatted by provocation and scandal. The transgressive nature of the conditions and phenomena…

Keywords: municipality names, municipality reform, Estonianisation of names
 
By changing place names, authorities have always had the chance to impose their ideology. Therefore, every power changed those names in their own way – some of them more extensively, some just slightly. The aim of this study was to find out which were the main aspects of changing municipality names in the 1930s and who had the most impact on the process that was especially related to the municipality reform finalised in 1939. The study is based on archive materials from the Estonian National Archives. Some additional information was found from newspapers…

Keywords: Estonian poetry, 21st century, antihumanism, ideology, humour, poetics, psychoanalysis
In keeping with Kivisildnik’s disposition of construing poetry, which opposes any socially or culturally dominant value or meaning, his poetry of the first half of the current decade – especially in the collections Liivlased ja saurused („Livonians and dinosaurs”, 2011), (:)soari evangeelium („The Gospel of (:)soar”, 2012) published in collaboration with Navitrolla, and Inimsööja taksojuht („The man-eating taxi-driver”, 2013), but also Enne sõda ja kõike seda („Before the war and all this”, 2012) – strikes the eye with some antihumanist traits. Although Kivisildnik’s palette of literary devices had always implicitly spoken of antihumanist ideas („machine poetry”), the above collections mark…

Stichwörter: deutschbaltisch, Genderforschung, Reisen, 18. Jahrhundert, Tagebücher, Romantik
1797–1799 führte eine Europareise Gustav und Sophie von Stackelberg, zwei Adlige aus Estland, nach Deutschland, Österreich und in die Schweiz. Das eigentliche Reiseziel – Italien – konnte wegen Besetzung durch napoleonische Truppen nicht besucht werden. Während der Reise haben beide Ehepartner separat ein Tagebuch geführt. Dies gibt Gelegenheit, dieselbe Reise aus zwei verschiedenen Blickwinkeln bzw. aus männlicher und weiblicher Perspektive zu beobachten. Das Tagebuch der Frau ist wesentlich umfangreicher. Es setzt schon fast am Anfang der Reise an, für die Frau war die Fahrt von Anbeginn bis zum Ende ein Abenteuer. Das Tagebuch…

Keywords: Marie Under, Boris Pasternak, Poems of Doctor Zhivago, poetics and strategies of translation
The present article is focused on the first Estonian translation of Doctor Zhivago’s last chapter „The Poems of Yuri Zhivago”. This translation was published in 1960 by the publishing house Vaba Maa in Stockholm shortly after Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature (1958). Artur Adson translated the prose, while „The Poems of Yuri Zhivago” were translated by Marie Under.
The article aims to reproduce a succession of some facts related to the translation process and the translation itself with the purpose of helping readers to…

Keywords: complement clauses, sequence of tenses, indirect speech, indirect perception, discourse vs. narrative, deictic points of orientation, absolute and relative tense, translation theory
Testing Adrian Barentsen’s insights regarding tense in Russian complement sentences on Estonian material, the article examines the use of the present and preterite tenses in Estonian complement clauses if the main clause verb is in the preterite. The starting point is the well-known observation that some languages show a shift in verb tense (sequence of tenses) in indirect speech, while some others do not. Estonian, while not having tense shift in indirect speech, has it in sentences embedded…

Keywords: August Kitzberg, Jaan Lattik, Ernst Enno, Hermann Julius Schmalz, Estonian prose, South Estonian, dialects, language in literature Although the turn of the 20th century marked a retreat of the South Estonian literary language, also called Tartu language, from the printed word, the period brought some new ways to use dialects in fiction. The most prominent users of South Estonian dialects in the prose of the time were August Kitzberg, Jaan Lattik, Ernst Enno and Hermann Julius Schmalz, which makes the four authors responsible for bringing South Estonian back to literature.
Kitzberg, who was the first of the four to start…

Keywords: Estonian philology, figurative language, Lutheran hymns, Pietist hymnal, translation, old Literary Estonian
In the development of Estonian philology, two phases can be distinguished: the phase of the so-called external view, when the meta-language of philological discussions was German, and the phase of the internal view, when since the 19th century, Estonian began to be used as the meta-language for speaking and writing about the Estonian language and folklore as well as about the emerging literature. The emergence of Estonian authors’ literature and literary criticism presupposed a literary language expressive enough to describe the emotional life and trains of thought of…

Keywords: deixis, indexicality, emotional/modal deixis, deictic network, deictic plot, pragmapoetics, close reading, poetry
The article suggests, inspired from practical didactics, the use of pragmapoetic deixis analysis as an approach to enrich close reading of poetry. When applying the pragmalinguistic theory of deixis and the analytic philosophical theory of indexicals to poetic texts one will soon notice that beside the traditional spatial, temporal and personal deixis it is necessary to speak of emotional, or modal, deixis. The latter functions on the scale of positive and negative connotations, or of subjective distance, which is the mental counterpart of spatial relations. In addition, poetry…

Keywords: philology, national identity, discovery and invention, theory and technology, measurements, deduction
The academic discipline of philology may have a different content in different cultures, but obviously philology as research of language (mother tongue), folklore, and national literature is important for national identity and the self-concept of a nation, even more so for small nations. In Estonia the scope of Estonian philology took shape in connection with the national movement in the second half of the 19th century, and more clearly at the beginning of the 20th century. Since the early 1920s Estonian Philology has been a subject taught at Tartu…

Keywords: history of folkloristics, folklore theory and methodology, philology of the vernacular
It has become customary in Estonian research tradition to consider folkloristics as a philological discipline, while the scholarship has had a retrospective and archival orientation. Presupposing the existence of a primeval cultural unity, now lost, and considering folklore as part of the Finno-Ugric heritage has certainly contributed to the philological thought. However, interest in the social environment of folklore and research of its non-verbal forms already appeared before the Second World War, manifested in the works of several scholars, such as Oskar Loorits, Rudolf Põldmäe, Richard Viidalepp, and Herbert…

Keywords: philology, identity, normativity, research methodology, Friedrich Nietzsche
For about a century, philology as a discipline has been eroding. This has largely been due to the emancipation of some of its subdisciplines, but a marginalisation of the humanities in the contemporary society has catalysed the process, too. This essay attempts to analyse the nature of philology relying on the vision outlined by Friedrich Nietzsche in his inaugural lecture „Homer and classical philology”. According to Nietzsche, philology consists of three subdisciplines: history, language science, and aesthetics, all mixed together in a rather unsystematic way. For Nietzsche, philology has always had pedagogical aims,…

Keywords: linguistics, literary studies, conversation analysis, analysis of literary dialogue
The first half of the article provides a survey of the main directions of the 20th century divergence of linguistics and literary studies.
In the first half of the 20th century, mainstream studies took a synchronic approach to language and literature, addressing language as a system and focusing on individual literary works, their language and style.
The mid-century brought a great divergence. Linguistics changed to embrace functionalism, empiricism and objective analysis. Literary studies, however, fell for the postmodern critical theory, which basically questions the quest for objective knowledge. Literary studies focused on modernism…