Academic literature on the topic 'Poets, Estonian'

The idea of Estonia’s cultural and national self-sufficiency emerged in the nineteenth century. The contribution of writers and poets was essential to this development. Literature anticipated not only cultural, linguistic, and artistic, but also the economic and political emancipation of Estonians. Cultural practices leading to this emancipation were largely based on Baltic German models; many key elements to the independent Estonian national identity are of foreign origin. On the one hand, the nineteenth-century nationbuilding could therefore be described as self-colonization. On the other hand, it rather created a new nation than transformed a preexisting one, since the very concept of national identity was introduced by this process. Through various political and cultural upheavals, the most influential authors from this seminal period of the Estonian modern culture have remained iconic to this day. The traditional identification with them is so strong that the tentative origins of the nation and the identitary struggles of the national poets themselves may often be forgotten and the personal and individual nature of their contribution downplayed.

This paper is part of a project aimed to analyse the rhythm of Estonian binary verse metres. It is the first complex analysis of Estonian syllabic-accentual iamb. The analysis is comprised of poetry by 20 prominent authors from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and, all in all, more than 9000 verse lines. In order to find out which regularities are specific to poetry in general or to a particular poet, these data were compared with pseudoiambic segments extracted from prose. Differently from the earlier studies, stress is treated as a phenomenon of gradation, with altogether five different degrees of stress distinguished. The performed study showed that the rhythmical structure of iambic poems allows the clear distinction between two groups of poets, whom we conditionally call Traditionalists and Modernists.

The article begins by explaining the background of sea motifs, which can be understood as sublime in the classical theory of arts, beginning with Pseudo-Longinus and continuing with Boileau and Burke, and the re-visitation of Aristotelian theory by the latter. This part of the article focuses on the observations of grandeur, dramatic change and danger in nature, which were defined as sublime in antiquity (based on examples from Homer and Genesis in Longinus or the Gigantomachy motifs in ancient art), as well as on the role of emotion (pathos) in the Sublime. The Renaissance and Early Modern Sublime reveal the continuation of these trends in Burke’s theories and the landscape descriptions of Radcliffe in the Mysteries of Udolpho. In the latter, we also see a quotation from Beattie’s Minstrel, whose motif of a sea-wrecked mariner represents the same type of sublime as Wordsworth’s Peele Castle (which, in its turn, was inspired by a painting by Sir George Beaumont). This sublimity is felt by human beings before mortal danger and nature’s untamed and excessive forces. In German poetry and art such sublimity can be seen in the works of Hölderlin or Caspar David Friedrich. However, 16th and 17th century poetry and painting rarely focused on such sublimity and preferred the more classical harmonia discors, in which ruins or the sea were just a slight accent underlining general harmony.The article continues, focusing on the sea motifs in Estonian art and poetry. In Estonian art (initially created by Baltic Germans), the reflections of the magnificent Sublime in the paintings by August Matthias Hagen can be seen as the influence of Caspar David. In poetry, we see sublime grandeur in the ode called Singer by the first Estonian poet, Kristjan Jaak Peterson, who compared the might of the words of future Estonian poets to stormy torrents during a thunderstorm, in contrast to the Estonian poetry of his day, which he compared to a quiet stream under the moonlight. The grandeur, might and yearning for sublimity is reflected in the prose poem Sea (1905) by Friedebert Tuglas, who belonged to the Young Estonia movement. This movement was more interested in modernity and city life than in romantically dangerous or idyllic landscapes. However, the main trends of Estonian poetry seem to dwell on idyllic landscapes and quietly sparkling seas, as for example, in a poem by Villem Ridala or sea landscape by Konrad Mägi. We also see this type of sublimity at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries in the soundscapes of the sea by Ester Mägi or paintings by Aili Vint.After World War II, the influence of the romantic ode genre and sublime can be seen in a translation of Byron’s Stanzas for Music (1815) by Minni Nurme (1950). In Byron’s gentle, sweet and serene picture of a lulled and charmed ocean, the underlying dimension of the divine, and the grandeur and power of the music is not expressed explicitly. Nurme tries to bring the translation into accord with the ode genre, thereby causing a shift from the serene to the grand sublime, by focusing on the depth of water and feelings, the greatness of the ocean, and most of all, the rupture of the soul, which has been the most important factor in the sublime theory of Pseudo-Longinus. Her translation also seems influenced by her era of post-war Soviet Estonia (so that Byron’s allusions to the divine word have been replaced by the might of nature). In the same period, Estonia’s most vivid description of the romantic sublime appears in the choral poem Northern Coast (1958) composed by Gustav Ernesaks, with lyrics by another Estonian poet, Kersti Merilaas.Coastline in a leap, on the spur of attacking; each other tightly the sea and the land here are holding The rocky banks, breast open to winds, are hurling downwards the pebbles and chunks. Its adversary’s waves now grasp for its feet, gnawing and biting into the shores. Stop now! No further from here, neither of you can proceed any more! Full of might is the sea, more powerful is the land.

The Estonian poet, physician and politician Johannes Vares-Barbarus (1890–1946) is a contradictory figure in Estonian history and culture. He was a well-known and acknowledged doctor named Vares, but also a poet named Barbarus who was notable for his modernistic poems in the 1920s and 1930s. His actions in the 1940s as one of the leading figures in the Sovietization of Estonia have complicated the reception of his poetry. His opposition to the Republic of Estonia and his left-wing views are nearly always under observation when he or his poems are discussed. Predominantly his poetry has been discussed; his other works have received much less attention. This article analyses his travelogue Matkavisandeid & mõtisklusi (Travel Sketches and Contemplations) based on his trip to the Soviet Union. It was published in the literary magazine Looming in 1935 and reprinted in 1950 in his collected works. Travelogues have proven to be valuable materials when discussing the author and his mentality. The article analyses the image of the Soviet Union in his travelogue published in 1935 and discusses notable changes that were made in the reprint some of which have significantly altered the meaning, so that the text fits perfectly into the Soviet canon.

There is hardly any doubt that most turning points in the history of small and minor literatures have been provoked from the outside, in the first place under direct influence of some new current engendered and spread from “centers”, traditionally identified with major nations and linguistic communities. As compared with small nations, creative cultures of “centers” have historically enjoyed much more freedom, because (more than often) under the coverage of political-economic and military might they have been able to develop without looming existential threats from the outside. At the same time, no culture is inherently homogeneous. Especially since the Modern Age conformist and rebellious creativity have been in a constant state of confrontation as well as mutual interactivity. Therefore, the history of cultural creativity is full of paradoxes and surprises, both in “centers” and “peripheries”. Creative culture has nearly always retained at least a relative independence, in regard to the official society with its material power and business structures. I would like to show that beyond a huge number of intertextualities extending from “centers” to “peripheries” (the physical and mental locus of small and minor cultures), easily traceable in formal and external signs of literary works, there exists in parallel a phenomenon which could be tentatively defined as “transgeniality”. I will try to reveal some of such transgenialities comparing the poetics and philosophy of (mainly) three poets, the Spaniard Antonio Gamoneda (born in 1931), the Yi-Chinese poet Jidi Majia (born in 1961) and the Estonian poet Juhan Liiv (1864–1913).

Kirjandusteadlaste ja arvutilingvistide koostöös katseprojektina valminud Johannes Semperi ja Johannes Barbaruse kirjavahetuse korpus on nii kirjanduslooliselt kui tekstilingvistiliselt huvipakkuv digitaalandmestik. Kirjandusteadlastele avab kaasaegsete digitaalsete meetodite kasutuselevõtt huvitavaid uurimisperspektiive ja vanade uurimistulemuste ülekontrollimise võimalusi arvutuslike meetoditega. Korpuslingvistidele on aga väljakutseks ajaloolise ja isikupärase keelekasutusega, erinevatest keeltest kubiseva ja rohkete koha-, aja- ja isikuviidetega tekstimaterjali ettevalmistamine rikkalikult märgendatud korpuseks. Artikkel peatub üksikasjalikumalt nii käsikirjalise materjali digitaalseks tekstiandmestikuks ettevalmistamise kui ka analüüsi- ja märgendamisprotsessi probleemidel ja nende võimalikel lahendustel. Kasutajatele tutvustatakse ka korpuste päringusüsteemi KORP võimalusi sarnaste tekstide uurimiseks. Abstract. Marin Laak, Kaarel Veskis, Kadri Vider, Neeme Kahusk, and Olga Gerassimenko: Turning from digital document to text corpus: conversion of correspondence between Semper and Barbarus to a machine-readable unit in KORP. The article describes a joined pilot project of literary scholars and language technologists that resulted in a correspondence corpus of Estonian avant-garde poets Johannes Semper and Johannes Barbarus. The corpus is an inspiring digital dataset both for literary and linguistic researches. Contemporary digital methods allow literary scholars to find new interesting research perspectives and to revise the old research results with computational methods. Corpus linguists can find interesting challenges in historically and personally unique language use of the correspondents, in multiple languages used for citations and language play, in multiple references to places, events and persons in the textual material that was transformed to an annotated corpus. The article describes the preparation of typed-in manuscript material for a digital dataset in detail, problems of annotation and analysis and their possible solutions. The reader will get an insight to the possibilities that corpus query system KORP offers for the research of similar textual material.

The article is based on manuscripts as well as sound and video recordings on folk medicine collected during fieldwork conducted by the researchers of the Estonian Folklore Archives in 1991–2013 from Estonians born and raised in different Siberian Estonian communities. The ancestors of the visited Estonians had either left their homeland in search of land in the last decades of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries or were descendants of those deported and exiled by the Russian tsarist authorities in the first half of the 19th century. Fieldwork at Siberian Estonians in the last decade of the 20th century enriched the Estonian Folklore Archives with invaluable lore material, including the material related to folk medicine. Although the advance of the state medicine system with small hospitals and first aid posts had reached Siberian villages half a century before, and the activity of healers had been banned for decades, the collectors were surprised by the number of healers in villages and the extent of the practical use of folk medicine. The folk medicine tradition was upheld mostly by older women (as was the case also with other fields of lore), which resulted, on the one hand, from the demographic situation, and, on the other hand, from women’s leading position in the preservation of communal traditions. In the older Siberian Estonian communities, which had been established by the deportees (e.g. Ülem(Upper)-Suetuk, Ryzhkovo), it was believed that healing words and skills were available and could be learned by anyone; they were often compared to God’s word. Some people thought that knowledge and skills could only be shared with those younger than yourself. In the villages established by exiles people were considerably more cautious about passing on healing words and the like. In most villages with southern Estonian background, healing charms were kept in secret, as it was believed that when sharing their knowledge, the healers would lose their abilities. It was only at their death’s door that the healers selected their successor. Not all the people who were offered to learn the healing skills were ready to accept the responsibility. The first or last child in the family was thought to have more prerequisites for becoming a good healer. In the first decade of the 21st century, the situation with passing on the healing words and skills had changed considerably in older Siberian villages. Many of the healers had passed away, and there were not enough young people who were interested in continuing the tradition. So the healing skills inevitably concentrated into the hands of a few wise women. Currently, the folk healing tradition in Siberian Estonian communities is fading away, above all, due to the fast aging and diminishing of the communities.

Abstract We describe the use of secure multi-party computation for performing a large-scale privacy-preserving statistical study on real government data. In 2015, statisticians from the Estonian Center of Applied Research (CentAR) conducted a big data study to look for correlations between working during university studies and failing to graduate in time. The study was conducted by linking the database of individual tax payments from the Estonian Tax and Customs Board and the database of higher education events from the Ministry of Education and Research. Data collection, preparation and analysis were conducted using the Share-mind secure multi-party computation system that provided end-to-end cryptographic protection to the analysis. Using ten million tax records and half a million education records in the analysis, this is the largest cryptographically private statistical study ever conducted on real data.

The report features the letters of «the King of Poets» Igor Severjanin (written in 1941) and his wife Vera Korendi (written in 1956) to the poet Vsevolod Rozhdestvenskij, sent from Estonia to Leningrad and stored in his archive. They highlight certain circumstances from the last year of Igor Severjanin’s life.

Syftet med den här studien har varit att presentera ett underlag till konstruktion av en bogvisirmodell som skall kunna gå att styras med en PLC-enhet och som kan användas i undervisningssyfte för PLC-programmering. Underlaget förankrades i verkligheten genom en fältstudie och en litteraturstudie. Fältstudien inspirerade utformandet av bogvisirmodellen och bidrog med värdefull insikt i hur bogvisir fungerar. Litteraturstudien har bestått av två delar där en del har fokuserat på att undersöka regelverk som berör konstruktion av bogvisir och den andra delen har studerat hur två katastrofer, som involverade bogöppningar, har påverkat reglerna som rör bogvisir i SOLAS-konventionen. Litteraturstudien resulterade i två sammanställningar. En sammanställning av de regler ifrån SOLAS-konventionen, Transportstyrelsen och DNV-GL som reglerar konstruktion av bogvisir och en sammanställning av hur två katastrofer som involverar bogöppningar har påverkat reglerna i SOLAS-konventionen. Materialet ifrån fältstudien och litteraturstudien har använts till att utveckla ett underlag för hur en bogvisirmodell som styrs av en PLC-enhet, och som skall gå att använda i undervisningssyfte, kan konstrueras.
The purpose of this paper is to present design material that can be used to build a bow visor model which is controlled by a PLC unit and can be utilized as a tool when educating students in PLC programming. A field study and a literature study have been conducted to make the bow visor model realistic. The field study has inspired the design of the bow visor model and contributed valuable insight into the workings of a bow visor. The literature study consists of two parts where one part focused on studying regulations that regulates the design of a bow visor and the other part focused on studying how two disasters that involve bow doors have impacted the regulation in the SOLAS Convention. The literature study resulted in two compilations. One compilation consists of regulations from the SOLAS Convention, the Swedish Transportation Agency and DNV-GL regulating the design of bow visors and the other compilation consists of changes in the SOLAS Conventions regulations that are a direct result of two disasters that involve bow doors. The result of the field study and the literature study have been used to develop the design material for how a bow visor model, that is controlled by a PLC unit and can be used for educational purposes, can be built.