The article investigates questions concerning home and domestication in Johannes Semper’s and Tõnu Õnnepalu’s work. Both authors have participated in „domesticating” Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu in Estonian. Semper is known to be the first ever Estonian translator of Proust. His translation of the infamous excerpt of madeleine cake introduced Proust’s work to Estonian readers already in 1923. Tõnu Õnnepalu’s translation of Le Temps retrouvé (2004) is up until now the last published translation from the Recherche and also the only part of the novel completely translated into Estonian.
Both authors-translators have rather opposing approaches to the relations of foreign and domestic, which…

 
In 1917 two great female sonneteers published their debut poetry collections: Marie Under in Estonia and Edna St. Vincent Millay in US. Both poets gave voice to the desiring and self-conscious New Woman in their sonnets: their sonnet series are openly erotic and sensual, their female personas do not believe in eternal love and desire sensuous pleasure now and here.
The first part of the article gives an short overview of Petrarchism and female sonneteers, who have given voice to the woman in this primarily masculine discourse. It also points out the different cultural contexts of Millay’s and Under’s desiring sonnet…

The article discusses the chances of elucidating the underlying mechanisms of the emergence of modern Estonian culture, based on a linguistic comparison of the runo verse and the old translations of Lutheran hymns, and presents a few preliminary results of this approach. Modern Estonian-language culture emerged in the 19th century as a hybrid combining the old genuine traditional oral culture and the newer European written culture mediated by Germans. In the mind of a 18th-century Estonian peasant those two cultures still led a relatively independent existence. The old genuine culture was, among other things, represented by the runo songs (regilaul)…

The labelling of the adversary in the propaganda war is a process of two steps. To exchange a personal name for a befitting nickname you have, first, to introduce and inculcate a – mostly implicit, covert – by-name which is apposite thanks to not only external features of the adversary or his actual behaviour (NN ‹ caligula; in Estonian the personal character name is spelled with a minuscule). A surficial nickname will not stick in the face of a possible change of appearance or occupation. Secondly, you have to generalize the character name to a type name (caligula ‹ Tyrant;…

Jan Kaus’s approach to Tallinn in his prose is analysed. Using mapping, description, history, memory and memories of the place Kaus depicts the town through the views of different characters, while the motifs are often the same. The article examines whether the author prefers to describe the town or rather concentrates on the feelings and sense of identity of its inhabitants and on how it manifests in their interpretation of their town. As to the ways used to bring Tallinn home to the reader Kaus often chooses to convey a subtle cognitive milieu or atmosphere, connecting peoples’ fates with the…

This study proves, more than ever, that in addition to Joosep Freimann’s and Gustav Malts’ manuscripts as well as articles critical of Maltsevism, which appeared in the newspaper „Perno Postimees”, important material for constructing Maltsevism was acquired by borrowing the term „re-born” from Free Church and Baptist spirituality. Eduard Vilde investigated the spirituality of the Free and Baptist congregations born in Estonia in the 1880s, trying to discover the basic pattern of spirituality of the Maltsevians formed in the late 1850s. However, the construction of a picture of Maltsevism with „re-birth”, practice of rebaptism and an independent practice of the…

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”. Still, in his novels, we can detect a deliberate use of rhythmic motion also 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 thesis-antithesis-synthesis parataxis whose core words are the adversative and coordinating conjunction aga (‘but’) and the integrative ometi…

The article explores and analyses the musical development of an infant from birth to the beginning of her third year of life. Detailed analysis addresses the months 20–25. The object of analysis is Marie, daughter of the first author, whose development has been recorded by her parents in the form of diary entries as well as video and sound recordings used in the analysis. Marie began to speak at 19 months and to sing at 20 months. The development of singing skills is illustrated by an analysis of her presentations of children’s song („The big old deer”) and two improvised…