Enn Vetemaa

Enn Vetemaa (June 20, 1936 – March 28, 2017) was an Estonian writer sometimes referred as a "forgotten classic" as well as "the unofficial master of the Estonian Modernist short novel".

Vetemaa was born in Tallinn to a family of an architect. He graduated from Tallinn Polytechnic Institute in 1959 with a degree in Chemical Engineering. His choice of the subject was influenced by his grandfather, a pioneer photographer and radio-engineer, who started photography in 19th century and experimented with radio-transmitting two years after Alexander Popov.

Without working out the required three years Vetemaa abandoned his engineering career and entered Tallinn Conservatoire that he graduated from in 1965. Despite being a very successful student of music Vetemaa decided that he is not as strong as his classmates: now famous Arvo Pärt and Jaan Rääts. Vetemaa abandoned music and returned to writing poetry.

First publications of Vetemaa's poetry were in 1958. He published books of poetry Critical Age (Russian: Переломный Возраст ) in 1962 and Game of snowballs (Russian: Игра в Снежки) in 1966. He became a notable figure among the young poets of Estonia but his ironic and rational intellect forces to switch into prose.

In 1964 he finished and in 1966 published his arguably most famous novel Monument. The novel already does something that is unusual in the context of Estonian literature: the narrator is a negative character. In this way Vetemaa makes his readers enter the mind of a character for whom they feel no empathy. The narrator, a young successful sculptor kandidat of architecture Sven Voore, returns from Moscow to Tallinn to work on a memorial to fallen Soviet soldiers. He is supposed to decorate the pedestal for the work of a young talented sculptor Ain Saarema, the problem is that the monument eventually designed by Ain does not need any pedestals: it shows only arms that the dead soldiers rise from their graves through the ground. The narrator's intrigues eventually lead to the monument eventually done by a Stalinist Magnus Tee, the narrator getting the job of the pedestal, promotion in the Estonian art unions and the wife of Ain Sarema. The resulting monument is done in the traditions of the socialist realism but has ghostly long arms (inherited from the project of Ain).

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