Research seminar information
Time: 29.11.2024, 13:00 - 14:00 (UTC +2)
Place: Room 247 (2nd floor), Unioninkatu 33 (inner courtyard), you can also join in by Zoom https://helsinki.zoom.us/j/69500818366?pwd=X1PRkUT7Dtrh5mRp2ZEB7BBdnw0dkF.1
Self-Colonizing Translations? The Language Renewal Project of the Young Estonia Movement (1905-1915) and Its Afterlives
Abstract:
My talk explores the Young Estonia case, placing it in the international dynamics of aesthetic avant-gardes and sociopolitical modernization. The movement emerged when Estonia was part of Czarist Russia. Symbolically and not quite coincidently, they published their first journal in 1905, the year of the so-called first Russian revolution. It was a time nexus when a number of empires were collapsing or tried to define themselves anew, and when many of their colonies were creating their counter parts – their own new visions of historical change and of new cultural formations that would go with them.
I will particularly focus on the Young Estonians’ radical project of linguistic renewal which they considered crucial for their literary innovation, but also took its radicalism beyond aesthetic texts. In the 1905 journal the later most prominent language renewal activist, Johannes Aavik asserts: “it should be clear to anyone that the future of our nation depends on the future of our language”, and in the same gist: “a language can only be victorious, if it borrows from others”. The same issue contains Aavik’s prefaced translation of Baudelaire’s poems. Young Estonia closely engaged with their contemporary Finnish and other Nordic cultures, but, to the shock of many of their contemporaries, were most fascinated by fin de siècle French decadents.
It is still topical in Estonia how to judge the significance of Young Estonia in the present globalized world. What did their project of renewal that borrowed from other cultures mean – bold modernization or slavish ‘self-colonization’? What did the project do to or for its native culture? I agree with Ástráður Eysteinsson, the Icelandic modernism scholar, that the continuing highly-charged debates over aesthetic modernism in many places of the world signal concerns over what counts as proper modernization in a wider sense. What is the relationship between the avant-garde drive to ‘make it new’ compared to the preceding traditions? between the customary national and varying international impulses?