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Profile Mihkel Mutt


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HERE IS SOMETHING of the wizard about Mihkel Mut, something of Shakespeare’s Fool too. One of Estonia’s best-known writers—he has a regular opinion column in the newspaper Postimees (Postman)— he enjoys siting at one remove from the societ around him, commenting on it, questioning it, being provoca- tive, oſten with a faint smile.


The author of some 40 books, including seven novels and several volumes of memoirs, he describes writ- ing as “an obligation, a dut, a burden”, and laughs at how bleak that sounds. Dalkey Archive Press publishes his Cavemen Chronicle and Inner Immigrant: the former deals with a group of bohemian figures—writers, artists, musicians—who meet at an underground (in both senses of the word) bar called The Cave, where they escape from the Soviet drudgery above with vodka and intellectual discussion. Inner Immigrant is a series of short stories set in newly independent Estonia. In them Mut’s alter ego Fabian comments on what has been both lost and found—indeed, if there is a theme to his work, it is in tracing this change from Soviet rule to independence, and exploring what has been gained—as well as asking at what price. Estonia achieved its independence in 1991 and while it would be wrong to say that Mut wants Soviet rule to return, his remarks are tinged with a slight mix of nostalgia and regret. “During Soviet times, writers were the spiritual leaders,” he says. “They were more than writers. They set values. What are writers now? They are entertainers.”


He says that during Soviet times, writers were “the engineers of conservation—we were put in a fridge for half a century”, and while he welcomes the change—the thaw, if you like—he adds: “I feel it’s a pit that human beings are so weak that they can’t resist the temptations of being an entertainer.” He doesn’t just question the free market, “but the whole market economy, this feeling that we have to have more and more all the time. I don’t like it when the market economy is applied to truth. Truth can’t be subject to fashion”. Is free, independent Estonia good for writers? “It depends what tpe of writer you are. You can write about anything, but you can’t be sure there is a reader. I am working on a novel now, but for whom? The audi- ence is declining; the generation who read serious


Mihkel at LBF


Mihkel Mutt is one of today’s three Baltic Countries Authors of the Day, alongside Lithuanian writer and art historian Kristina Sabaliauskaitė and Latvian novelist and essayist Nora Ikstena. He will appear at two events during today’s fair. In Sinking Europe? Euro- pean Narratives in Times of


fiction are geting older. The younger generation read different things, not serious fiction.” He doesn’t want a return to the old days, but he does point out that “nothing is as black and white as it is painted”. He notes that during the struggle for inde- pendence, “people said they would eat potato skins if only they could have freedom. Then when they got freedom, they wanted ketchup. [In Soviet times] people used to read like mad. There were more bookshops and although there were fewer titles than today, we still had Kafa, Joyce, Fowles. The truth was only found in litera- ture and art, and people were longing for it”.


A nomadic career


Born in 1953, the son of an English philologist and translator, Mut studied philology and journalism at the Universit of Tartu in southern Estonia, and then worked as an editor for a publishing house and various literary journals. He was a dramatist at a youth theatre for two years, and from 1990 to 1991 Mut was head of the Information Department at the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He went on to work for newspapers and was also a member of the literary co-operative Kupar (a botanical term meaning seed pod) that formed the first non-state publishing house in the former Soviet Union. From 1992 to 1999 he was president of PEN Estonia, and since 2005 he has been editor-in-chief of Estonia’s most prestigious literary magazine, Looming. Home is split between a house in the countryside and


an apartment in the Writers’ House, a 1960s develop- ment in the centre of Tallinn built specifically for writers or literary journalists who are allowed to live there for a vastly reduced rent. “Most of the apartments are now privately owned,” he observes. “I am one of the last of the original residents.” He likes to write early in the morning and names Thomas Mann, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Esto- nian novelist of the 1920s and ’30s, Anton Hansen Tammsaare, among his favourites. “There are writers in every language who will never be published in English,” he says, and notes with pleasure that Glasgow-based Vagabond Voices is to publish Tammsaare’s Truth and Justice in two volumes, this year and next. That deal, of course, is precisely the sort of outcome London Book Fair’s Market Focus initiative is all about, and Mut says he hopes to see more of that at Olympia—and beyond.


Change (Cross-Cultural Hub, 11 a.m.), Mutt joins Sabaliauskaitė; her fellow Lithuanian Tomas Venclova, a poet; and writer and journalist Sathnam Sanghera, in an event chaired by journalist Peter Pomerantsev, to discuss how contemporary writers can engage with an evolving Europe. Mihkel Mutt in Conversa-


tion with D J Taylor will see the author interviewed by Whitbread Biography Award- winner Taylor at the English PEN Literary Salon (2 p.m.) in a British Council-backed event.


www.thebookseller.com


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