Naise ja jõe suhted Leida Kibuvitsa romaanis „Soomustüdruk“ / A Woman’s Riverine Relations in Leida Kibuvits’s Novel Armoured Girl

Abstract

Teesid: Artiklis küsin, kuidas Leida Kibuvits on romaanis „Soomustüdruk“ mõtestanud vee ja veekogu sidemeid inimestega, jõe kuulumist loomuliku osisena peategelase igapäevaellu, aga ka küündimist millegi enamani. Romaani ei ole varem käsitletud kui keskkonnasuhteid avavat, saati veel sinihumanitaariale huvi pakkuvat teksti. Teose loodud jõemaailma tugeva visuaalse mõõtme esiletoomiseks osutan valikule kirjutamisajaga haakuvatele kunstiteostele. Lühidalt võrdlen romaani ka Olev Remsu Supilinna-triloogiaga nooruki ja jõe suhetest. Teoreetiliste lähtekohtadena toetun peamiselt Astrida Neimanise ja John Ryani kirjutistele.

The year 1932 saw the publication of Armoured Girl, the first novel of Leida Kibuvits, one of the most prolific and interesting Estonian woman authors in the 1930s. In an expanded and reworked form, the novel was re-issued in 1957. Armoured Girl explores the roles of water and the Emajõgi River, as well as their connections with people, in the city of Tartu at the beginning of the 20th century. On the one hand the Emajõgi River is described as being part and parcel of the protagonists’s daily life as its natural component, yet on the other hand it is made considerably larger than a part of urban space is usually allowed to be. The main character Loona Tuisk grows up in a riverside slum that is continuously being affected by the river to a lesser or greater extent. Armoured Girl is a Bildungsroman that depicts the evolving of a young woman starting from birth until she reaches her mid-twenties and has direct biographical correspondences with the author’s life. The article also provides a brief comparison of the novel with the relations between the river and a young boy depicted in an autobiographical trilogy by Olev Remsu that is set in the run-down Supilinn neighbourhood approximately half a century later.

Kibuvits’s protagonist is engaged in artistic creativity, she studies at art school, and the novel is characterised by a distinct visually loaded language that partly appears in authorial speech and partly in character speech. As an artist, Loona Tuisk has a heightened awareness of the beauty of the river, she observes it changing throughout the year and attempts to mediate its various facets. To emphasise this quality, a selection of artworks depicting the Emajõgi, some of whose authors also were in touch with the writer, is mentioned in the article. Armoured Girl is also characterised by imagery tightly linked with water: throughout Kibuvits’s novel playful usage of water-related concepts and metaphors can be found, starting from the main character’s surname Tuisk, meaning ‘blizzard’ and denoting a powerful and thus insubordinate phenomenon connected with a state of water. In Estonian, also the title is polysemous, as it can also mean ‘a girl with scales’.

As a theoretical framework, the article mostly draws on the ideas of the cultural theoretician and phenomenologist Astrida Neimanis and the proponent of environmental humanities John Ryan. Neimanis has depicted the coastline as a specific type of membrane and borrowed the concept of ‘ecoton’ from ecology, that, for her, is the embodiment of an especially fertile and creative territory that is constantly changing and transforming itself. Living by the river has a direct influence on Loona who is shaped and inspired by its multispecies environment. To study the creative agency of bodies of water, Ryan suggested the concept of ‘hydropoetics’, a kind of river-centred thinking that blurs the boundaries between humans on the fast land and the wet non-human environment, interprets the river as a local being and looks for possible interminglings, contacts and elements in common that would help humans to think with the water. Loona feels a connection to the river and occasionally partly identifies with it: for instance, disruptive changes of its environment are reflected in her feelings. In the novel, several attempts are made forcibly to shape Loona Tuisk as a girl, a woman and an artist, yet she is not the only one to be submitted to control – also the river is being transformed into a canal. The boundaries between water and culture are not represented as rigid in the novel; rather, they have been deliberately blurred. On many occasions Loona’s thoughts are forwarded as if she were thinking together with the river. This sense is based on a many-faceted unmediated close contact: there are active ties with the neighbourhood immediately affected by the river, and vice versa, both aesthetic and sensory contacts with it are important in daily activities. In addition, the novel depicts various sensory experiences connected with water as such. 

There are no earlier treatments of the novel as a work revealing environmental relationships and it did not used to be seen as a text that might be of interest to the blue humanities. Kibuvits’s novel holds a salient place in Estonian literature as it has in its focus the telling of the tale of a body of water, while using and reviving relevant vocabulary.