When Prose and Poetry Fall in Love
If we can interpret literature as a symbol of our feelings it would be fair to say that Viivi Luik has managed to craft it as a rich poetic exploration of self-expression. Her poetic prose is profoundly evocative. Perhaps she is somebody who feels older in the forest than in the city, just like her character—the young Estonian woman who agrees to pose as a model for a famous sculptor named Lion, who is trying to evade military service— feels in the novel, The Beauty of History. Through the pages of this work, the written voice of Viivi Luik sounds unique, almost hypnotic, very feminine and calculated. It is almost like a meditation on time, on how the power of history weighs on the individual. This novel was published by Eesti Raamat in 1991, the year when Estonia regained its independence. Certainly one needs to understand a bit of the historical background of the Soviet Union in the Baltics where this fictional story unfolds.
Here is an excerpt of the novel where the might of history can be grasped:
“…That the taste of lilac is bitter is also known by the entire people of Estonia. Every year, as lilacs flower beside sheds and potato stores like emissaries from strange worlds, it feels as if a deathly silence, the silence described by survivors in their memoirs, is descending over Tallinn and Tartu. The sweeter the smell of the lilac and the bluer the glimmer of the sky, the more perilous it feels to remain in the Baltic republics…”
The story in this novel constantly mixes descriptive narratives about places, times and people who parade through its pages. The prose gives you sensations of being in different moments in time; sometimes it is even confusing, but always magnificently written. The story unfolds slowly—as if in a dream or in a timeless world. After I finished this reading, I had this sensation that it was a long poem where echoes of war and fear were mixed with images of nature and beauty.
The young woman in the story—whose name is never mentioned, by the way—claims she is politically illiterate. She only knows words like peace and war and she is only interested in the aesthetics and poetry of things. Yet she cannot ignore her life’s political context either. The reader can feel how dark and murky things were for a normal person in the Baltics back then in 1968, when news about the Prague Spring spread across Europe causing waves on both sides behind Iron Curtain walls. The vibe of the background is composed by suspicious comments overhead in the train or in the street and exchanges between people’s glances while memories weigh heavily during those hard political times under Soviet occupation. There are horrors interspersed alongside innocence and ignorance along sentences filled up equally with well-balanced beauty, too. How could a writer manage such contrasts? Yet somehow—with Viivi Luik—all becomes possible.
Through the novel’s narrative journey, the feeling of the oppressive and desolated atmosphere of 1968 in the Baltics is well depicted, while the writer takes the reader into an emotional and pictural voyage:
“…Something is happening. Secret commands pass along cables, through air, water, and earth…What is Brezhnev doing? Does he feast on butter and honey, and at night does he sleep between furs? No one utters a sound. Silence stretches from the coat of the Artic Sea right down to the river Danube. Only newspapers rustle…walls have ears…”
Viivi Luik is widely regarded as one of the most significant and internationally recognized authors in Estonian literature. Her literary journey began in the mid-60s, when she published her poetry in the well-known Estonian literary magazine, Looming, when she was just eighteen. Her most known work, The Seventh Spring of Peace was published in 1985 and became a major success from the beginning. This piece is a marvelous story about the post-war generation during the occupation times in Estonia. Another notable work includes The Shadow Theater which reflects about the writer’s life experiences while in Rome. In this text she describes memorable encounters of people she has met or known. On the other hand, her essays are also wonderful pieces to read. In 2024 Ilmamaa publishers printed her essays titled Pühaduse purunemine (Breaking With the Saint) in their series of Eesti mõttelugu (Stories of Estonian thoughts).
I thoroughly enjoyed the fantastic translation to English of this novel; it is a great work. A part of the text lingers still vividly in my mind, when sculptor Lion explains to his model that when an artist creates a sculpture in stone, the artist has the difficult task of creating a death sculpture from a living body where its shadow must become alive. Then, there are three elements: the body that is alive, the stone without life and the shadow that will come alive once the stone will take the desired shape of the body, and that is the magic that the artist must achieve. This part of the text reminded me of the style of Jon Fosse, the Norwegian writer who wrote Septology. His novel is written in seven parts and tells the story of a hermit painter who lives in the fjords. For him, a painting is never finished but until he stops seeing the images of what he should paint in his head. He paints to liberate himself of those images and he can tell when a painting is good only when there is a certain light, a sort of bright obscurity, an invisible light that talks in silence and that says the truth, that is, when it becomes alive, just as for Lion when the shadow of his sculptures become alive. That is precisely, I presume, the essence of the creation of beauty in art: give life to something.
The main themes in the narrative are around the quest for finding the meaning of life and identity in a world of oppression, the wish to regain freedom, the strength of memory and roots and the appreciation of beauty in all its forms, and these are universal; these are undying topics relevant to human nature. The Beauty of History is a story about how fragile life is, how harsh is to find freedom in the art for artists under Soviet occupation and how the beauty persists despite it all.
At times the evocative power of the vivid descriptions transfigures into something nostalgic, something forgotten, perhaps, and although my personal past or my people’s has nothing to do with the writer’s past neither with the Baltics past, somehow this brief novel made me feel, that we, the Latin Americans, and the Estonians share historical tragedies where it was possible to see the awful but also the beautiful; that some people decided to ignore, some preferred to forget but also, some wanted to remember with terrifying beauty. I will end up this piece quoting the words of the American writer Paul Auster: “A book will not end war nor feed a hundred people, but it can feed minds and sometimes transform them.”
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Written by Stephanie Rendón
This book review was published in Aksolotl Literary Magazine #3, 2024, ISSN 2806-3465
Check availability of the book in Tallinn Libraries: “The Beauty of History” in e-catalogue ESTER
