“I Am Nothing More than a Word in Human Form”. Viivi Luik’s Poetics of Identity

Résumé

This article offers a discussion of the work of Viivi Luik, one of the most well-known and well-loved contemporary authors and public intellectuals in Estonia, with a focus on her two autobiographical novels, the iconic Seitsmes rahukevad [The Seventh Spring of Peace] (1985) and Varjuteater [The Shadow Theater] (2010). Although recognizably self-representational, Luik’s work is generically ambivalent, particularly The Shadow Theater, where the desire to comprehend human existence emerges through the poetics of encounter and reciprocity of address, forming parallels with Adrina Cavarero’s philosophical paradigm of the narratable self. Identifying points of connection between Cavarero's relational paradigm of selfhood and modes of self-narration that characterize Luik’s literary oeuvre, the article focuses on Luik’s poetics of identity that shapes and ultimately comes to prevail over the politics of identity, resulting in processes of construction of subjectivity that resist the expectations of gendered, national and (Eastern) European categories of identity.