At the end of the World: text, motif, culture

"At the End of the World," a short story by the Estonian writer Friedebert Tuglas from the year 1917, is in a sense an epitome of the struggle for modernist ideals undergone by Estonian literature in the first decades of the 20th century. Inspired initially by the motif of searching for the end of the world from the Estonian epic Kalev's Son, the short story combines the neo-romantic pursuit of immediate sensation with symbolistically charged diction. In fact, the mythic trip to the edge of the world has been cast in the form of humankind's irresistible but hopeless longing for the non-mediated language beyond signs, evoking a range of parallels from contemporary as well as earlier literary history. The present book comprises the Tuglas’ short story together with nine essays analyzing both the story and the problem of language from various national, cultural, and stylistic viewpoints.