ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, however, a new and refreshing aesthetic turbulence stirred the realm of Estonian socialist realism, leaving a pronounced impact especially on the drama. The first decade of postwar Soviet rule in Estonia, from 1944 until the death of Stalin in 1953, produced no drama of artistic merit. The dramas of A. Jakobson and his literary comrades of the Stalinist period, such as Johannes Semper, Aadu Hint and Mart Raud, are crudely constructed didactic melodramas. The antirealistic revolution in European drama that began with the symbolists and included the expressionists as well as the surrealists produced the theater of the absurd in the 1940s and early 1950s. The most illustrious example of the Soviet Estonian theater of the absurd is Paul-Eerik Rummo's Tuhkatriinumang, which opened at Theater Vanemuine on February 19, 1969. The reappearance of the Germans in Soviet Estonia, like the second coming of Christ, would clearly be a doomsday event.
