ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with questions of multilingualism, transnationalism and the tenaciousness of linguistic borders in post-Soviet Russian Estonian literature, in particular in the work of the transnational Russian Estonian author Andrey Ivanov. Eneken Laanes discusses the ways in which Ivanov’s fiction, written in Russian and greatly lauded in both Estonia and Russia, has been extremely difficult to classify and has called into question the linguistically drawn borders of literary fields and national literatures. In discussing questions of exile and non-belonging in Ivanov’s texts, Laanes draws on Edward Said’s ideas on these topics, on the crisis of natural filiation and on the position of secular criticism arising from these conditions. She shows that Ivanov rejects the possibility of affiliation because of the ways in which affiliative communities reproduce filiation, instead seeking to carve out in his works of fiction a radical position that would make visible the ordering function of all borders.
