J. Randvere’s “Ruth” (1909) as an Example of Literary Decadence and the Quintessence of Young Estonia’s (1905–1915) Modern Ideology

Abstract

This article is based on the interpretation of a segment of the reception of J. Randvere’s provocative, short essay-novella “Ruth” (1909), which was written by Johannes Aavik, a well-known Young Estonian and one of the principal modernizers of the Estonian language. This segment of reception regards “Ruth” as the quintessence of Young Estonia’s ideology, but does not offer a full explanation of how this ideology in “Ruth” is associated, on the one hand, with Young Estonians’ ambitions in modernizing Estonian literature and, on the other, with the broader fin de siècle European culture. I shall ask through which discourses does this ideology, which is innovative in the context of Estonian culture at the beginning of the 20th century, express itself in “Ruth”? What imaginations, representations and associations appear in “Ruth” in relation to the Young Estonian program, which interweaves tradition and/ or Estonian national-mindedness on the one hand, and Europeannes and/or modern ideas on the other. Or who are these Europeans and Estonians with whom Young Estonians wish to identify? Although Young Estonian ideology in “Ruth” has mostly been associated with connotations of decadence like “a culture of individuality”, “artificiality” and “aestheticism”, I will argue that in “Ruth” counter-discourses also come to the forefront. In other words, “Ruth” becomes the quintessence of the Young Estonia ideology, because it serves as a metaphoric counterpart to the Young Estonians’ program: “let us be Estonians, but let us become Europeans”. Through the reproduction of decadent discourse, which is in this text in the dominant position, “Ruth” oscillates between the ambivalent valorizations of signs of health (norms) and disease or decadence (deviation from the norms), accompanied, on the one hand, and among other things by opposition to the national discourse and, on the other hand, to the signs of decadence, that is the neutralization of the symptoms of decadence.