Situating Oneself Within the Estonian Language and World Literature: Ivar Ivask’s Relational Ways of Self-Understanding
Situating Oneself Within the Estonian Language and World Literature: Ivar Ivask’s Relational Ways of Self-Understanding

Summary/Abstract: The paper explores the relational ways in how the identity of a creative person is constructed in exile, in dialogue with the relational environments and proximate others. The case study for the article is the writer and literary scholar of Estonian and Latvian heritage, Ivar Ivask (1927–1992), who fled Latvia during World War II, spent some years in displaced persons’ camps in Germany, later on studied German literature and art history in Marburg (Germany), and starting from 1950 lived and worked in the United States. Ivask’s journey suggests that at points in his life he could have been a Latvian, an Estonian, a Baltic-German or even an English-speaking American.The paper attempts to demonstrate the reasons why Ivask became, despite everything, an Estonian writer and how this had a great deal to do with the relational understanding of himself: his sensorial childhood experiences in southern Estonia and his mentors and other writers he admired (e.g. Bernard Kangro), who played a crucial role in his choosing Estonian to be the language of his poetry as well as his diaries. We further contend that by engaging himself with different literatures and authors from around the world in different languages, Ivask was constantly looking for new poetic and literary discoveries and perhaps therefore insights into himself. Reading other authors’ work and relating himself to their writings meant he was therefore also engaging with his own identity. In this light, we contend that Ivask’s literary criticism of other authors’ work as well as his literary correspondences with them provides a model of how the social and literary self can be constructed in exile, in dialogue with the relational environments and influences of proximate others, including respected authors, some of whom served as role models and mentors.

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