During the past 150 years historical fiction has been one of the key „memory forms” contributing to the making and consolidation of Estonian cultural memory and national history. Nevertheless, it has rarely been studied from that perspective. The introductory article to the special issue on the Estonian historical novel and cultural memory firstly gives an overview of the concept of cultural memory and discusses the perspectives it opens up for the study of the Estonian historical novel. It also suggests some new ways to explore the relationship of historical fiction with other media of cultural memory such as historiography, politics…

Different material aspects of the book have observable influence on reading practices and the resulting reading customs reflect on the intellectual activities and priorities of different periods. In antiquity scrolls and continuous writing resulted in social and listener-orientated reading practices, while the use of scribes contributed to the somewhat detached character of the text. The spread of the codex format of the book and especially of word-separated writing, which appeared in the medieval period, gave rise to a silent reading tradition, which was more of a meditative character. Silent reading enables the reader to absorb text more quickly and in…

For Johannes Semper the 1920s were a prolific period full of diverse activities, all contributing to his maturation as poet and author. These were also his most prolific years of translating French poetry, while the authors, epochs and text types chosen display wide diversity. Several of his translations of that period have become part and parcel of the Estonian canon of French poetry. Towards the end of the decade Semper published a self-compiled collection of his favourite Verhaeren.
During the intense translating process Semper delved deeply into the problems of poetic form. In his prefaces to his more substantial translations (Hugo’s…

The recently published Estonian Etymological Dictionary (EED) summarizes the research done on the origin of the word stems used in standard Estonian. The basis of the EED entry list are the stems found in the Estonian Orthological Dictionary “ÕS 2006”, with the exclusion of recent foreign stems. The given statistical overview of the stems of standard Estonian is based on the EED. In the article, a stem is defined in a narrower sense, also considering  the language-historical aspect: a stem is a root morpheme carrying a lexical meaning, which does not contain any historical derivational suffixes and cannot be identified…

The article is focused on the press debate of 1893–1895, triggered by Jakob Hurt’s criticism of Matthias Johann Eisen’s methods of folklore collecting. Besides the invaluable role played by the press in the success of the collecting campaigns, one should also consider the multi-pronged nature of the local press sphere of the late 19th century. While the collectors used the press for their own purposes, the journalists felt free to make use of folklore topics in various other discussions and mutual disputes. Analysing the positions of four newspapers – Postimees, Olevik, Virmaline and Valgus – the article attempts to capture…

 
The Estonian etymological dictionary by Iris Metsmägi (chief-editor), Meeli Sedrik and Sven-Erik Soosaar is welcomed as it fills a gap in the system of  Estonian dictionaries. Most of the review is concentrated on technical problems of the presentation of  etymologies, as well as on spelling problems and on the  interrelations of primary and contemporary meanings. The reviewers recommend that, in future, a more exact spelling should be used and references to the authors of certain etymologies be added.

 
The present attempt to answer the question, What is poetry? has (a) delivered a minimal definition, (b) supplemented it with some prototypical features, and (c) called for historical articulation of the resulting complex. The first part of the essay reached an external and formal definition: a poem is a short text in verse. Following Werner Wolf’s attempt to distil prototypical features from a variety of earlier definitions, we concluded that besides textuality, brevity and verse, the characteristic features of lyric include a possibility of oral performance, deviation from everyday usage, a presence of unmediated consciousness, a subjective perspective, a foregrounding…