Indrek Ojam’s and Tiina Abel’s seminar about Jaan Oks on the 22nd of March 2022

Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of Estonian Academy of Sciences cordially invites you to join the seminar on the Estonian fin de siècle writer Jaan Oks (1884–1918) as part of the project The Emergence of a Civilised Nation: Decadence and Transition 1905–1940 funded by the Estonian Research Council. Jaan Oks was a radical moderniser of Estonian culture whose innovative work – in its embodied descriptions of (male) sexuality and unique, highly unusual use of language – was admired by several members of the grouping Young Estonia (1905–1915) and Siuru (1917–1919). Oks’ aesthetics is a complex mixture of various threads of naturalism, decadence, and modernism. The first seminar on Jaan Oks will take place on the 22nd of March.

Indrek Ojam is a doctoral student at the University of Tartu. He will give a talk about Jaan Oks and the affective poetics of his oeuvre in comparison with the prose works of Reed Morn (1898–1978) and Leo Anvelt (1908–1983).

Tiina Abel is a lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Her paper will mainly concentrate on the decadent-modernist aesthetics of the visual artist Ado Vabbe (1892–1961) but she will also introduce examples of Eduard Wiiralt’s (1898–1954) work. Both of those artists can be fruitfully compared with the decadent aesthetics of Jaan Oks’ texts.