Keywords: curator, museum, researcher, museology, museum jobs
Different senses of the Estonian term kuraator are discussed, with a focus on its use in museum context. The traditional job title for a scholar working at an Estonian museum has been teadur ‘researcher’. Over the recent decade, however, the term has been receding in museum context before some other job titles such as kuraator ‘curator’, teadur-kuraator ‘researcher-curator’ and koguhoidja-kuraator ‘keeper-curator’, with some semantic confusion around the kuraator part. Since the 1990s the Estonian kuraator has been understood as ‘organiser of an exhibition and author of its conception’. In recent years museums have adopted another sense of the term, which is ‘organiser and administrator of a domain’, like…

Keywords: folk humour, joke, humorous tale, clergy, religion
Clergy jokes play with contradictions between normative and actual behaviour. The normative role of the clergy is to set an example and engage primarily with the spiritual world, but jokes hint at a potential of violating that role. The vices that the clergy display in humorous tales and jokes are exaggerated and mostly related to the material or bodily, which is something that they as carers for the mind and soul should be wary of.
The aim of this article is to describe the connection between humour and social reality, taking clergy jokes as…

Keywords: transgressive literature, contemporary Estonian literature, carnival 2.0, religion, jeremiad, rant, right-wing transgressiveness
Transgressiveness has always been one of the pivotal apects of Kivisildnik’s cre­ative project. Challenging taboos, a provocative attitude and the standpoint of an exceptional person are still essential for Kivisildnik’s recent poetry and publicist prose, but the changed political context and the impact of the new media now lends a different perspective to many of his themes, topics and tropes. The transgressive carnival trope described by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White has been replaced by a jeremiad announcing ruin, based on a depressive-realistic worldview conveyed by exhortational and…

Keywords: explicit addressee, the “you” character, autobiographical narrative, Jaan Kaplinski, Ülo Mattheus, Tõnu Õnnepalu
The article looks at how the storyteller’s self-expression is directed to the second-person addressee, using the example of three autobiographical works: these are Paradiis (Paradise, 2009) by Tõnu Õnnepalu, where the story of a fixed place and time is told to a young friend, Isale (To Father, 2003) by Jaan Kaplinski, seeking a dialogue with a father long dead and never met, and India armastus (The Love of India, 2006) by Ülo Mattheus, which consists of letters sent to the storyteller’s beloved during the several months spent in religious asylum. The comparison of…

Keywords: cultural transfer, repertoire, Finnish drama, Soviet Estonian theatre
The article deals with the reception of Finnish plays and adaptations of Finnish novels in the Soviet Estonian theatre (1944–1991), relying on the theory of cultural transfer. It first describes the mechanisms to form and control the theatre repertoire in Soviet Estonia. The productions of Finnish drama are then examined by different periods: Stalinism and the “thaw” – interruption and then the return of Finnish classics to the stage; the late 1960s and the 1970s – first stage productions of Finnish contemporary drama and productions of classics in a modern style; the…

Keywords: folk song, Estonian poetry, German lied, theory of poetry, J. G. Herder, lyrical poetry
In the same year with the second volume of J. G. Herder’s folklore collection addressed in Part 1 of the present article, the poetry almanac “Ehstländische poe­tische Blumenlese für das Jahr 1779” was published. Besides the German-language poetry of its three publishers – publisher Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht (1752–1814), his actress wife Sophie Albrecht (1756–1840) and Friedrich Gustav Arvelius (1753–1806) – the almanac presented three Estonian translations of popular German songs. In addition, musician Andreas Traugott Grahl, who had been tutoring in Estonia, published a collection…

Keywords: written language, conjuctives, interrogative-relative proadverbs, forced grammaticalization, Estonian
The article discusses the usage dynamics of complex interrogative-relative pro­adverbs (hereinafter relative adverbs) based on the corpora of 16th to 20th century written Estonian.
In a sentence, relative adverbs can function as interrogative markers, complement or relative clause subordinators and discourse particles. The grammaticalization cline of the studied elements from interrogative markers to headed relative clause subordinators (Heine, Kuteva 2006) and subsequently to discourse particles (Metslang et al. 2014) would be as follows: interrogative marker > also a complement clause subordinator > also a headed relative clause subordinator > also a relative clause referring to the whole…

Keywords: policy of Russification in the Russian Empire, repressions and resistance, public city school of Tartu, memorial evenings for Koidula and Veske, Friedebert Tuglas, Gustav Suits
The article describes some remarkable events that took place in Tartu in 1902 and 1903, when young students under the leadership of Gustav  Suits and Friedebert Tuglas assisted by the local Estonian societies Vanemuine, Taara, and Karskuse sõber /Friend of Abstinence/ organised special literary evenings to celebrate the memory of Lydia Koidula and Mihkel Veske, the great figures of the Estonian people. This was a protest of youth against the policy of Russification, an action marking the beginning of a…

Keywords: homelessness, phenomenology, existential feelings, Peeter Sauter
The article analyses a feeling of being homeless in one’s own home, a feeling experienced without a clear problem or compelling reason. The study rests on a phenomenological approach to homelessness. Part One of the article describes such experience of homelessness as depicted by Peeter Sauter by using his protagonists’s inner voice, which is followed by an analysis of the spatial, intersubjective and operational aspects of the experience. Part Two deals with a homeless, estranged subjectivity and how such a subject defines its position in the universe. Part Three discusses the strategies used by…

Keywords: folk song, Estonian poetry, German lied, theory of poetry, J. G. Herder, lyrical poetry
The year 1779 could well go down in history as the year of Estonian poetry, as this is when two seminal works were published. Those two differed in their understanding of the mission of poetry, thus anticipating two competing possibilities for the development of Estonian written poetry. One of them was Part Two of the collection of folk songs called Volkslieder, which wascompiled by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and contained some Estonian folk songs as treated by Herder, while the other was the poetry almanac Ehstländische poetische Blumenlese für…

Keywords: travel literature, Spain, imagology, Black Legend, Friedebert Tuglas
The article discusses the image of Spain in Estonian travel literature, taking the axis at the travelogue Teekond Hispaania (“Journey to Spain”) by Friedebert Tuglas (1918) and basing on the popular imagological view that literary texts, in particular those written by prestigious authors, can have a significant and long-standing effect on one’s idea of a certain country and its people, even to the extent that the brightness of vision gained from the texts can surpass that of personal experience.
The article surveys, on the one hand, the historical image of Spain in Europe…

Keywords: history of Estonian folklore studies, folklore text studies, folk singer, early Estonian folk song
Since the late 18th century, early Estonian folk song has been discussed with the focus either on its text or on its performing situation. In the 19th and early 20th centuries folk song was mostly understood as poetry (“oral literature”). This can only be expected as the recitative singing style was combined with a richly figurative text. In the 1930s, two trends could be discerned in professional Estonian folkloristics: one philological (comparative analysis of song texts) and the other ethnological (an approach based on the living…

Keywords: proverbs, truth, lie, proverbial wisdom
The Estonian Folklore Archives at the Estonian Literary Museum contains 105 recordings of proverbs of the type “The egg is teaching the hen” (EV 6901) and only 11 of the type “The egg cannot teach the hen” (EV 6902). Still, the relative proportions need not imply actual predominance of the former view in the proverbial wisdom: although some of the proverbs of the former type have been recorded all in earnest, some have been registered in an ironic sense, but for a number of the latter kind no such specification is available. This proves that…

Keywords: philology, philosophy, stasis, conceptual history
On the borderline of philology and philosophy, it often happens that the two approaches collide, claiming both to be true, whatever ‘true’ may mean. A distinction can be made between the Platonic qualitative movement towards truth and the quantitative approach to truth inherent in modern philology. At the same time, both perspectives are culture-specific, closely related to the dominant discourse, selection principles and hierarchy. This creates obstacles, for example, in the study of conceptual history but also in philology in general. The solution is to let go of the truth to some extent, accepting its…

Keywords: philosophy of physics, theories of physics, physical world-view
The essay reviews briefly relation of contemporary theoretical physics to the truth and describes various philosophical approaches to physical knowledge.
Piret Kuusk (b. 1947), PhD, University of Tartu, Department of Theoretical Physics, Senior Research Fellow (W. Ostwaldi 1, 50411 Tartu), piret.kuusk@ut.ee