Suchergebnisse

The primary argument of this article is that the Estonian "cultural turn" to modernity was already occurring prior to World War I, which had the effect of sharpening its contours and intensifying viewpoints. A complex, many-faceted conjunction of changes, the cultural turn was articulated and carried by the Young Estonia movement of writers and intellectuals, whose birth years clustered around the years 1883 and 1889. Around 1905, Young Estonia's clarion call for "more culture, more European culture" was issued by poet Gustav Suits in a context of accelerating social changes, including widespread urbanization, and a shift of orientation from German to French and Finnish cultural models. Young Estonia, which explicitly stressed the value of "the young", issued a protest against limited notions of folk culture, and – as also argued in this article – opened the horizons for more probing public engagement with connections between culture and nation. Young Estonia's infl uence included a critical problematic around the renewal of the Estonian language, as well as an emphasis on the aesthetics of the book. Particular emphasis is placed in this article on the analysis of the corpus of texts in the short-lived publication Vaba Sõna (The Free Word,1914–1916), where there was intense discussion of culture and nationalism, and where one of the most important fi gures was historian Hans Kruus; these exchanges were one of the preparatory factors for moving the question of autonomy into the centre of Estonian politics. As distinct from the welter of meanings att ached in recent years to the umbrella term "cultural turn", to the point where the term 75 means all and nothing, this article redefi nes the term as a new quality in culture, a discursive change that results from the summation of a series of innovations; in Estonia this process culminated in the years between Young Estonia's maturity and 1917. While the consequences of World War I for European culture have been analyzed in terms of destruction, catastrophe, and ...