Chair of Estonian Studies Lecture at U of T – Dr. Epp Annus

Wednesday, November 9th at 10am-12pm Dr. Epp Annus from the Estonian Literary Museum and Ohio State University will be giving a lecture on the topic: What is home? The experience of Soviet Estonian home-life in the 1970s and 1980s. The lecture will take place at the University of Toronto Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George Street, Room 1071.

In English. No admission fee.

Abstract

This presentation considers the dynamics of Soviet everyday home life in the Baltic states as a dialectics of the tangible and the imaginary: home is at once the tangible experience of the everyday and, at the same time, it is also an imperfect actualization of an imaginary place. In the Baltics, local ethnicities tended to live within the phere of a comparative home-life – that is, theu split and shared their time and energy between different home-spheres: (1) a tiny, standardized Soviet-era apartment in the city (a phenomenon of the 1960s-1980s); (2) a wornout farmsite or a small-town home an hour or more away with aging relatives and an imagined sense of origins; and (3) from the mid-1960s, perhaps also a never-quite-finished summer cottage on the outskirts of the modern city. These three homescapes were acknowledged as three dominants within the culturally accepted homing model.