Unforced Flourishing
Understanding Jaan Kaplinski
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.
Reviews
"Thomas Salumets’s profound psychoanalytical biography of Jaan Kaplinski […] presents the Estonian poet on an international scale as an original thinker and master of language." Sirje Kiin, Postimees
“Unforced Flourishing is a major advance in world literature research. Salumets’s discussion of ‘dissent’ and the poet’s relation to Soviet power is fresh and enlightening.” Guntis Šmidchens, Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Washington
“Unforced Flourishing investigates Kaplinski from various angles, revealing previously inaccessible depths of a significant cultural figure. It is a major contribution and should appeal to academic specialists in Baltic history, politics, and culture as w