*tuule makett - Infopoint Estonian Culture

2 1 / These Songs and Stories
written language. Alien forms abounded, while nuances remained
unexpressed.
Against this background, arose the tragic and legendary
poet Juhan Liiv (1864–1913). His best poems were written
towards the end of his life, when Liiv was dogged by poverty
and periods of insanity. Even today, every Estonian knows several
of Juhan Liiv’s poems by heart. The fact that Liiv burnt
some of his poems while insane and that he pictured his poetry
as a bird with a broken wing say a good deal about the state
of Estonia at the time. Liiv’s poetic imagery hovers on the borderline
between realism and symbolism and his poems are
simple and sombre in tone. Apart from writing about nature
and love, Juhan Liiv made the occasional departure from these
themes, writing social verse and epigrams.
Another important figure from this period was Ernst Enno
(1875–1934). He was a poet of gentle longing and an almost
Buddhistic search for the self. A modest man and a quiet innovator,
he was one of the first Estonian poets to use free verse
and bring a non-dogmatic brand of religious thought into
Estonian poetry. Liiv and Enno started a trend whereby literary
texts were no longer imported from other cultures; they
were no longer decorative objects brought by the conveyor belt
of international culture. They resurrected a specifically Estonian
and integral world of poetry, a world manifest in folk song
and that had existed sporadically in the works of Kristjan Jaak
Peterson and had since disappeared. This poetry was original,
if rediscovered against a backdrop of foreign literature. Extensive
contact with cultures of a different, generally dominant,
mind-set (e.g. German, Slavonic, Swedish) inevitably led to
intermingling in literature.
The early poetic language of the runic verse was subtle
and worked as a unified whole. The literary language only
reached this level of subtlety and unity in the 1920s and 1930s.
One obscuring factor with the fact that the German nobility
and the Estonian country people were still sharply differentiated.
This brought out an excess of stubbornness, insecurity and
a defiant attitude in the members of the latter community as
it attempted to define itself. In their best work, both Liiv and
Enno are free from such trammels. Their textual worlds with
their inter-relations resemble living organisms inside which
language flows and the joy of song is conceived. As the 20th
century wore on, new syntheses of local and foreign began to
appear in the works of Uku Masing, Artur Alliksaar, Ivar Ivask