Mati Unt: An Overview
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Prague Spring
12 min read
The article explicitly mentions the Prague Spring of 1968 and Dubček-style 'socialism with a human face' as a pivotal moment for Estonian intellectuals of Unt's generation. Understanding this historical event provides crucial context for the political and cultural atmosphere that shaped Unt's literary development.
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Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic
13 min read
The article discusses how Estonia maintained a unique cultural position within the Soviet system, allowing translations of Western literature and visits from figures like Sartre. This topic illuminates the specific political context in which Unt lived and worked his entire life.
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Jerzy Grotowski
12 min read
Grotowski is mentioned alongside Artaud and Peter Brook as theatrical innovators whose ideas reached Estonia through the Iron Curtain. Given Unt's significant career as a theater director and his experimental approach, understanding Grotowski's revolutionary 'poor theatre' concepts provides insight into the influences on Unt's stage work.
Before I get into today’s CONTEXT piece, I want to give a shout out to Edy Poppy, whom I finally had a chance to meet last week when she was in Minneapolis for the Twin Cities Book Fair.
Although we had been in touch about her book—I recommended reordering one of the stories in Coming. Apart., so that “The Last Short Story” actually opens the collection—and then on a podcast we did with May-Brit Akerholt (I also wrote about Anatomy. Monotony. in a piece about marriage alongside Nina Lykke’s Natural Causes), but we had never met in real life.
Edy’s an incredibly funny person—her account of a Kafka-esque experience with Border Control had everyone cracking up—with an eye for detail and ability to write about emotions and situations others might shy away from. Her work is sharp, uncomfortable (in the best way), provocative, and quite layered. Definitely worth checking out.
Anyway, hanging out with her—and seeing the first snowflakes of the season—has put me in the mood to read some cold-climate books, especially books from Estonia.
I’ll write more about John’s history with Estonian literature, our first trip there (which may have saved my life), some of the highlights from the backlist, etc., in a separate post about Rein Raud, but for now, I wanted to bring some attention to, arguably, Estonia’s greatest contemporary writer: Mati Unt.
Unt was a giant in Estonian letters, which might sound like the start of a bad joke, but only until you open up Things in the Night, his absolute masterpiece—and the first Estonian book Dalkey ever published.
This was one of my finds, which arrived from Eric Dickens, a translator from several languages (I forget them all, but I know Dutch was one), who had great literary taste and a lot of wit. He was also an independent scholar, and his piece on “Literary Translation in Britain and Selective Xenophobia” is an excellent look at the situation of literary translation in the early-2000s:
British publishers, usually themselves incapable of reading books in foreign languages, get around this serious cultural handicap by employing what are termed “publisher’s readers.” In theory, this means that the publisher consults a well-informed adviser to tell him or her what is being published in the world at large. But there are drawbacks. Firstly, there seems to be no clear process whereby a publisher’s
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