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Literary Criticism Russian & Former Soviet Union

Unforced Flourishing

Understanding Jaan Kaplinski

by (author) Thomas Salumets

Publisher
McGill-Queen's University Press
Initial publish date
Jun 2014
Category
Russian & Former Soviet Union
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780773592179
    Publish Date
    Jun 2014
    List Price
    $29.95
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780773543720
    Publish Date
    Jul 2014
    List Price
    $34.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780773543713
    Publish Date
    Jul 2014
    List Price
    $110.00

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Description

Are we ill-suited for this world? Among Europe's major contemporary poets, Estonia's Jaan Kaplinski offers a rare vision of human advancement and fulfillment: the less we intervene the more we flourish. But how then can we remain involved in what evolves of its own accord? How can we move away from a life forged by human design towards a quietly attentive yet spontaneous responsiveness?

In Unforced Flourishing, Thomas Salumets seeks access to Kaplinski's life and work and finds a path to the signature of his thinking. He uncovers a man who craves human closeness that few, if any, can provide, a writer drawn towards wordless communication in a world of words, signs, and symbols, who yearns for the sacred in secular times, and who detects more richness in nature than in the human imagination. Salumets describes Kaplinski as an intellectual attracted to a contrarian sense of self, art, and culture, who searches for his homeland's mystical connections at a time when Estonia firmly aligns with values and modes of thought vastly different from his own. What emerges is a mentality firmly rooted in the belief that the greatest risk to human fulfillment results from human beings themselves.

The first major study in English of one of Eastern Europe's most important literary figures, Unforced Flourishing details Kaplinski’s embrace of that which is undifferentiated, intuitive, non-calculative, and natural in the modern world.

About the author

Thomas Salumets is associate professor of central, eastern, and northern European studies at the University of British Columbia and the editor of Norbert Elias and Human Interdependencies.

Thomas Salumets' profile page

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