[erelvenewmeva]

As I translate Estonian literature myself, I thought that I'd review "The Beauty of History" by Viivi Luik. This is one of the very few Estonian novels to have been published in in translation in Britain since the Second World War.

What is interesting about this novel is that it touches upon various themes such as the Prague Spring in 1968, which was an attempt to foster Communism with a human face in what was then Czechoslovakia, A country girl from Estonia meets a sophisticated Jew from Riga, someone who wants to travel to Moscow to obtain papers to get him out of the army. He, like most Balts, wasn't too excited about shooting Czechs while he was conscripted into the Soviet occupation army, when in fact the Balts harboured the same thoughts of shrugging off Soviet domination as did Czechs and Slovaks (Alexander Dubček was a Slovak).

The style is poetic and from the point of view of a young woman, the Estonian country girl, the alter ego of Viivi Luik herself, who was brought up in the countryside, but ended up the wife of an ambassador who has served terms in, for instance, Italy.

This combination of hard historical facts and a slightly dreamy poetic style makes this quite an unusual novel. Viivi Luik (born 1946) started out as a poet during her teens in the 1960s. Her first novel, "The Seventh Summer of Peace" (i.e. after 1945), described the Estonian countryside after many farmers had been deported to Russia in 1949, and was a masterpiece of allusion and indirect criticism of Soviet reality. As with her compatriot Jaan Kross, the aim was to evade censorship - in her case, by poetry, not samizdat.

Full review of "The Beauty of History" at:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/tra...dex.php?id=110

The Beauty of History
by Viivi Luik
Translator: Hildi Hawkins
Afterword: Richard C.M. Mole
Original language: Estonian
Length: 152 pages
Publisher: The Norvik Press, UEA, Norwich
Year of publication: 2007
ISBN 978-1-870041-73-7