The history of the existing canon of WL provides vastest imaginable opportunities to discuss interrelations between “Self” and “other”. Quite surely one could speculate and reason about different “selves” as well as varying “others”. Thus, Francesco Petrarch in his treatise Secretum (mid-14th century), written in the form of an intense dispute between Franciscus and Augustinus, exposed a conflict of his interior “self”, driven at the same time by divine love and love to an earthy young noblewoman. Michel de Montaigne in his essays written in the final phase of the European Renaissance demonstrated eloquently that a human person’s reason-based “self” is nothing definite, as it changes under the impact of varying circumstances and depends fundamentally on habits and traditions of different places and stages of age. Baltasar Gracián in his Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (the mid-17th century, or the mature European Baroque) – a collection of philosophic miniatures – exposed in an admirable psychological detail different male logics clashing in power rivalry, something that has never been absent from the world of politics, West or East, past and present. And so on.
Yet my purpose in the following is to center on the relationship between “self” and “other” in the most radical sense, in which the former (“self”) appears as a historical derivate of predominantly male reasoning, representing political-economical-military power structures, vastly relying on the advances of science and technology, while the latter (“other”), represents the generic otherness (womankind), the ethnical-linguistic “other” (the world’s peripheral and minority nations and nationalities), as well as the racially or socially oppressed and deprived “other”. The common feature of this traditional “other”, with all its sub-species, is that it has not been capable or willing to adapt to the historical “progress” envisaged and planned first and foremost by the Western power centers. Instead and on the contrary, that “other” has been a natural ally in resisting the kind of “progress” of which the essence would be to destroy the natural basis of life on the earth, in the name of power ambitions and materialistic greed.
The changing and continuous “other” of literary creation in the past and present
A lot has changed in the world since the times when most infamous humiliation of the traditional “other” was a norm. Western centers, with its writers, philosophers, intellectuals and culturally creative people in the vanguard, have definitely contributed to the painful but gradually expanding process of democratization. Let me provide some examples of the (cultural) history of Estonia, my own native country, a minority and peripheral nation par excellence.
The father of Kristian Jaak Peterson (1801-1822), whom we in Estonia celebrate as the first autochthonous poet of a major significance, by a happy miracle managed to escape serfdom, to which our forefathers were fettered during long centuries by Baltic-German landlords, with the benediction and approval of the Russian tsarist empire. Peterson thus grew up in the first generation of the Estonians liberated from serfdom. He was among the first autochthonous students of the University of Tartu, excelling in linguistics, philosophy and poetry. During his unjustly short lifespan he managed to publish only fruits of his linguistic research. His poetry started to be published posthumously a hundred years after his birth. For the first time it was collected in a book in 1922, thus on Peterson’s death centenary.
Although totally belated and irreparably fallen out of the “Western canon”, now at the start of the 21st century we have become to understand that Peterson was actually a forerunner to Walt Whitman, as he wrote his poetry exclusively without end-rhymes, in free verse. He prophetically defended the diversity of culture as an extension of nature’s diversity and praised the beauty and poetic capacity of his native Estonian language. In his pastoral odes and eclogues, he showed friendship and love that transcended gender barriers and taboos, of simple Estonian shepherd boys and girls. (Undusk 2012: 11-29, 103-122, Talvet 2015: 7-22)