Screams of Fatherland and On the Vitality of Estonianness
The second decade of the new millennium has witnessed an interesting trend – remarkable texts that highlight the everyday forms of the Estonian language. In 2010, Indrek Koff’s On the Vitality of Estonianness (Eestluse elujõust) was published, a work of ambiguous genre and fascinating because no sentence in this work came from the author himself – his skill was to collect standard phrases rotating in Estonian and to work them into a literary whole. The book won the Estonian Cultural Endowment poetry award. The same kind of literary whole from a collage of texts was created by Eero Epner, Hendrik Kaljujärv and Kaarel Oja with their drama Screams of Fatherland (Kodumaa karjed). The text was nominated for the Estonian Cultural Endowment drama prize and was produced as a solo piece starring Jaak Prints, who won the best actor award at the Estonian Theatre Awards. Whereas Koff uses colloquial phrases in his ‘hysterical tract’, Epner, Kaljujärv and Oja use the oral and written forms of public language, from sports commentaries and readers’ letters to ads, interviews and political speeches.
In co-operation with Theatre NO99, the festival will offer an intense evening where in addition to the two performances, there will also be a panel discussion on the role of Estonian fiction in preserving national memory. The event takes place at Theatre NO99.
The event is in Estonian.
Additional reading: