The Reception of World Literature in Estonia. Some Preliminary Remarks
The Reception of World Literature in Estonia. Some Preliminary Remarks

Summary/Abstract: Although culture as such can be understood in a number of ways, there are no signs that any culture would voluntarily give up an ideal of vitality. Our post-modern culture would like to differ from all previous types of culture, but it still identifies itself as culture and, thus, conceives itself as part of a longer tradition, through notions that have been established a long time ago. Even though the culture of totalitarian political systems, observed from outside, could rather appear as cultural anaemia, these systems themselves, without any doubt, have always imagined themselves as the sustainers of “authentic” culture. When speaking about the adaptation and domesticating of a foreign culture, or the culture of the “other”, it is not so easy to launch judgements about its values. Soviet cultural ideology, the traces of which have not yet been completely effaced from contemporary Estonian culture, refuted firmly Western mass literature and at the same time favoured the publication of classical and older world literature. Was it good or bad to Estonian culture?

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