The Great Estonian Novel has not yet been written

*Nobody can fret over literature like Europeans. I defy you to find a single article among the many in here where any European litterateur is having a good time.

http://www.eurozine.com/comp/literaryperspectives.html

*Surely SOMEBODY is gonna really worry about that Estonian problem…. Yeah, three hundred guys:

“…the debate was more telling than that. First, it attested to the fact that the authority of the Estonian Writers’ Union is still intact ...

. Literary life in Estonia revolves around this organization of three hundred members. True, not all are poets, novelists, or playwrights, since members include also translators, critics, scholars, and other men and women of letters.

” Established in 1923 in the newborn Republic of Estonia in order to promote literature and authors’ interest, in the postwar period of Sovietization the Writers’ Union was incorporated into the Stalinist system of artists’ unions. During this time it served as a proxy or buffer between individual writers and the Communist regime, keeping the authors in line while according them certain privileges.

“During the 1960s and 1970s, most eastern European countries developed a double system of culture: official culture and underground culture, whose respective hierarchies often mirrored each other. Not so in Estonia. Perhaps due to the sheer smallness of the population, the Estonians could not afford to have separate cultures, and the Writers’ Union in Soviet Estonia included communists and collaborators as well as nonconformists and dissidents. In many post-communist countries, the Writers’ Unions split or dissolved after the Velvet Revolutions. However, the Estonian Writers’ Union is still in a good shape – probably in a better shape than Estonian writing itself. (((Sounds ironic but is probably some kind of general bureaucratic principle.)))

“Sociologically speaking, literature and culture in general had a threefold role under the Soviet regime. They functioned as a substitute for consumerism, as an expression of collective identity, and as a safety valve, enabling public discontent to be channelled into certain controlled directions. (((Same as in the West, except that consumerism served as a substitute for everything else.)))

“In a wider historical perspective, eastern European nationalism can be seen as a quasi-literary enterprise, in which writers played at least as big a role as politicians. In the mid-1990s, under regained independence and market capitalism, the number of novels published annually dropped dramatically and literature underwent a brief identity crisis. During the Cold War, Philip Roth quipped that in the West everything goes and nothing matters, while in the East nothing goes and everything matters. (((A, Philip Roth is a no-kidding major novelist and B, that accurate assessment is not a “quip.”))) Estonia’s recent history has verified this (Jaan Kaplinski’s 1992 allegory of transition, From Harem to Brothel, makes a similar point). (((Y’know, I really and sincerely want to read an allegory of transition called “From Harem to Brothel.” Sounds really enlightening and useful.)))

(((Oh wait, here it is: it’s a brief essay. I just read it. Clearly it should have been a major novel.)))

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-06-30-kaplinski-en.html

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