Novel
The Beauty of History
Ajaloo ilu
Viivi Luik · 1991
Synopsis
Riga, August 1968: the news of the crushing of the Prague Spring crosses Europe. A twenty-one-year-old Estonian girl, whose name is not known, has agreed to pose for a famous sculptor, of Jewish, Latvian and Russian descent, who is trying to escape military service and cross to the West. She loves him, stays alone for whole days in his apartment, is interested in little but poetry, and yet the politics of the present and of the past keep reminding her of themselves, between Riga, Tallinn and Tartu.
Context
The novel appeared in Tallinn in 1991 from Eesti Raamat, the year the country regained its independence, and was reissued in 2002 and then, revised, in 2011. Together with the childhood novel that preceded it, it helped to set the tone of Estonian prose of the nineties: an introspective, poetic language, attentive to history. It has been translated into some fifteen languages, including French, by Antoine Chalvin, at Christian Bourgois in 2001, and English, by Hildi Hawkins.
Who it is for
A short novel, one hundred and twenty pages, which can be read in French and in English. It should be known that everything in it passes through a poetic consciousness, and that history surfaces in flashes rather than being told.
Prizes and reception
National Culture Prize in 1992, and one of the two novels that made its author known outside Estonia.