Annual exhibition ‘Tammsaare’s Travels and Wanderings’. On 30 January, the Tammsaare Museum at Vargamäe opened an exciting specially designed exhibition introducing eight places where writer Anton Hansen Tammsaare spent time, revealing his inner world and the background to the creation of his works. The exhibition was designed by Identity OÜ. What does a writer see when he arrives somewhere for the first time? What matters to him when he stays there longer? Writer Anton Hansen-Tammsaare lived for shorter or longer periods in many places across Estonia and also took summer trips. Many of these places are preserved in his works, allowing readers to travel to them in the time when he himself was there and to see what the writer noticed and experienced. At the same time, as he himself said, none of it should be taken entirely one-to-one, because although his writing is inspired by life, it is still literature. The exhibition title is borrowed from the rambling wordplay of the religious studies teacher at Maurus’s school in Part II of Tammsaare’s novel ‘Truth and Justice’: ‘And now we begin with Paul’s travels. Travel – travels, thigh – thighs… To travel would then mean to move the thigh, which means to go, to walk. You see. Leg – to walk, thigh – to travel. But perhaps better: thigh – to thigh about. Paul’s thighings.’ Many of Tammsaare’s contemporary writers and artists were great travellers, for example Vilde, Tuglas, and Gailit. Tammsaare was not one of them; he travelled farther than Estonia only once, to the Caucasus on the Black Sea coast, where he was treated for tuberculosis. He shared his travel impressions in several travel writings: ‘The Estonian Settlement of Punase Lageda’, ‘From the Black Sea Coast’, and ‘Some Lines from the War Roads of the Caucasus’. Even without undertaking long journeys himself, Tammsaare still wrote interesting articles about distant countries. He worked through what others had written, and so articles were born, for example for the newspaper Vaba Maa, about Japan and the Japanese, China and the Chinese. When Anton Hansen-Tammsaare was already a well-known and respected writer, he took a taxi ride in 1934 from Tallinn to his birthplace, Tammsaare-Põhja farm, to refresh his memories of the home farm. He was also offered a trip to Finland, which he declined, although his wife flew to Helsinki. In his novella ‘Italian Journey’, Anton Hansen-Tammsaare encourages the reader to pull themselves together and take the dream trip after all, rather than let life destroy their dreams. The exhibition is open during the museum’s opening hours.
