Of Hard Joy: Half a Century of Viivi Luik’s Creations. Prose
Of Hard Joy: Half a Century of Viivi Luik’s Creations. Prose

Summary/Abstract: Viivi Luik has been active in Estonian literature for half a century: from the times of Soviet censorship to regained independence. Her renowned novels Seitsmes rahukevad (The Seventh Spring of Peace, 1985) and Ajaloo ilu (The Beauty of History, 1991) have been published in a number of foreign languages. Her first collection of poetry appeared in 1965. Since then ten more collections have followed. In addition, she has published three books of selected verse together with the volume of collected verse (2006), as well as four books of fiction, three volumes of essays, several children’s books and two dramas. Many Estonian songwriters have appreciated her lyrics. Marked by an occasionally controversial reception in literary criticism, Luik’s distinguished stereophonic, cool “neosymbolism” has developed from sincere nature lyrics towards a sombre urban modernism and firm social resistance, a kind of freedom of feeling and thought. Luik’s narratives started to appear since 1974: first Salamaja piir (The Border of the Secret House), and the children’s trilogy of Leopold. All her main characters, prone to pondering, are close to the author’s alter ego, contrasting her childhood and youth to maturity; she seems to write prose as if it was tense poetry. In the two volumes of elegant essays Inimese kapike (A Locker of One’s Own, 1998) and Kõne koolimaja haual (A Sermon at the Grave of the Schoolhouse, 2006), Luik shows herself on the border of two worlds and two eras, past and present, totalitarianism and postmodernism. Ice and blood dominate her writings full of childlike frankness, internal speech, prophecy and challenge. Two of her last books were released simultaneously in 2010: an essay Ma olen raamat (I am a Book; together with a co-author), and a novel about her melancholic déjà vu reflections in Rome, Varjuteater (The Shadow Play). Guided by a methodologically holistic perspective and moving towards a “unified theoretical field” of literary criticism, this contribution to Luik scholarship, for the first time makes available a biobibliographical comparative introduction to all of her works for the international audience. It illuminates the broadly representative character of her oeuvre and shows how Luik charts the course for an entire generation of “Soviet” writers of the Baltics as “border states”.

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