Recollections of a Clearing
	Aare Pilv

	I arrived in the Annelinn residential district in autumn 1994 when I started my university studies in Tartu and managed to rent one room in a three-room flat in Mõisavahe Street. The previous 18 years I had lived in the small town of Viljandi, in an area behind the bus station at the border of the town centre and Uueveski urban district. That is where the town had expanded to in the early 1920s and got its final appearance during the era of the 1960s boom in private houses. The focus of my life so far had been a three-storey apartment building with a large garden and a high gable roof designed by A. Perna. After we moved into a house of our own in the same neighbourhood, I could still see it from my window. And then suddenly Annelinn - something totally different. A dense cluster of five-storey box-like buildings along the meadow by the Emajõgi River, the structure of which cannot be perceived at ground level, and where the individuality of each building is at first glance concealed. I remember being fascinated with Annelinn, with the idea of larger-than-life anonymous functionality. Annelinn revealed the urban modernist in me, perhaps enhanced by a huge, 1960s-1970s radio standing on legs in one corner of the room, or the picture albums of Tartu from the same period. I often leafed through the latter in order to grasp the spirit of the town.
	A few recollections. I am standing in the living-room of the flat on a hot August day, staring out of the window. The room is cool. My glance moves to the depths of the labyrinth of buildings: the houses sit at right angles to one another, and more distant buildings can be seen between the angles, and these too seem to be somehow arranged in relation to one another. A feeling that Annelinn is something essentially infinite, an inwardly coiling system where it is easy to get lost, although it would not really matter as each place in this system resembles any other - you are always 'present, placed' somewhere. And another related feeling is that you nevertheless have an individual place, a specific window, and you can put your coffee cup on its sill. The room itself is quiet, and it seems quiet outside as well, but the labyrinth still exudes some kind of visual rustle (not noise); the sublime music of systematic dynamics. It possesses a special freedom, as if everything is open.
	Second recollection. September, very windy, but sunny. I am hungry and keep nibbling crisps from a packet I have just bought, while walking from the main street of Annelinn towards houses a bit further off. I sit on a large stone and, although surrounded on each side by a wall of houses, I feel as if I were in a clearing because the buildings do not halt wind and are completely silent. Their façades do not 'tell' me anything; they constitute a landscape of angles and straight lines. I am a traveller who has paused for a snack in a clearing in the middle of Annelinn. Somewhere in that landscape is my cave, but I am not directed there by the landscape, but by some motion-logistic knowledge of the corners of buildings where I have to make a turn, and other corners where I don't. I am not moving in space, I am moving in the knowledge about space. Annelinn is a physically constructed spatial abstraction, and there is something lofty and sublime about it.
	And of course the windowless sides of the buildings where you can go very close and then look up - a built void, bare wall smoothly reaching upwards. And the façades with their dozens of windows, concealing hundreds of unknown others, contains something that liberates you from the heaviness of the fact of being. Another totally new experience in Annelinn is the daily bus. First the bus stops, places not meant for staying but waiting, to be abandoned very soon - and nevertheless people spend at least a quarter of an hour there every day. I regard the bus stop on the basis of my previous experience - every place is for staying - and hold similar views about the bus itself, which for me is not merely something temporary between home and town, but a separate space with moving and changing views on the other side of the windows, repeated every day. The bus ride with its repetitive nature is in fact the highlight of my Annelinn ecstasy; its very repetitiveness makes it almost a ritual. I am there in the bus, stay, am open to its temporality and ephemera. I have not developed the indifference with which most locals regard the bus ride - for them it is a kind of gap in the day, never remembered, when your thoughts are in the past or future. I, however, am here, and see the whole constant temporality, virtuality of Annelinn. My fascination is that of a small boy entrapped by a realistic computer game.
	All this naturally vanished in the course of the four years I lived there - virtuality, after all, cannot sustain you for long. For me, too, Annelinn became a kind of unnoticeable gap between the town centre and my flat. Later I lived two years in 'Chinatown' (Hiinalinn), a grey residential area built by the Soviet military right next to Annelinn. This was something totally different - a journey in time and space, although it took barely 5-10 minutes from Chinatown to reach the labyrinths of Annelinn. Chinatown gave an idea of the original essence of a Soviet-style residential area. In comparison, Annelinn was a functional location of life 'outside work', Nordic and individualistic, whereas Chinatown seemed a place where you really live, are present, notify others of your existence by placing a tape-recorder on the window sill or have your morning cigarette on the balcony; people sit on the benches in front of the houses or gather around the nearby beer kiosks. This is, however, not a very 'cosy' environment. The flats as small 'boxes for living' set on top of one another induce a feeling of something temporary and anonymous, but unlike Annelinn, this was something you were destined to be and stay in. Chinatown was a whole, a dense lump of temporary life that aspired to become a permanent home; Annelinn was sparsity put together of discreet components of the system, and its temporality, like pointless wind, was left to blow between the walls of the houses, while people hid in their caves. The difference does not derive only from the nationality of the inhabitants, because both places have Russians and Estonians. The difference rather arises from the fact that Annelinn was built as an 'extra pocket' of the town for new inhabitants who would disperse into town during the day; Chinatown, on the other hand, was built as a closed military urban district, separated from the rest of the town. The purpose of Annelinn was to accommodate people 'for the night' (discretion, sparsity in people's pattern of life), while that of Chinatown was to 'settle' people there, 'plant' them (density, entirety). My wife and I left the area, found a flat in a house completed shortly after Stalin's death in the 1950s where nearly all elements of 'stalinist' style were abandoned during the building; with a view of trees and a church and the distant observatory; this was almost like moving into another town. This was indeed moving from an urban SETTLEMENT to TOWN, from a 'space between the houses' into a street. Aare Pilv (1976), MA in Estonian literature at University of Tartu in 2002, currently doing his PhD. Works at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre. Has written criticism and articles about literature and theatre, now focuses on the relations between subjection and literary text on the basis of several contemporary Estonian writers. Since 1996 member of literary group Erakkond, has published four collections of poetry.
	| Estonian Art 1/06 (18) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2006 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |