Meelis Friedenthal. Melanconie secentesche di uno studente di Tartu

[Autom. eng. transl.] The form is the key to everything: according to Aristotle the soul is precisely the shape of the body, and Laurentius Hylas - the protagonist of the novel "The bees" by the young Estonian Meelis Friedenthal, is an Aristotelian. An Aristotelian counter-current, so we can say, since the University of Tartu, where it has recently become a student - Estonia is still under the glorious Swedish rule -, at the end of the seventeenth century it is an important and very modern cultural and linguistic crossroads: the Rector, mathematician Sven Dimberg, even teaches Newtonian theory even before it spreads in England, as Daniele Monticelli explains in great detail in the afterword to the novel. Meelis Friedenthal, as a theologian and a careful secentist scholar, is able to penetrate with certainty the cultural atmosphere of the last decade of the century, successfully sketching the figure of a young intellectual torn between the tradition and the mechanism of new science. The story of Hylas has the exact duration of a week, the week following his arrival in Tartu after the abandonment of the University of Leiden. A week of uninterrupted rain in which the ticking of the drops of water acts as a continuous bass to the dreamlike flow of blurred images, almost water-like. The characteristic of water is precisely that of having no form, and therefore an end, just like the clouds of the sky that wander and intertwine without meaning.