The essays on Estonian music are particularly noteworthy, giving a background not only to the latest avant-garde and pop expressions, but also to the more traditional symphonic, choral and chamber music that still continues to emerge from this intensely European nation, not least from the country’s Russian-speaking community, with its Narva Symphony Orchestra and Russian Philharmonic Society.
Indeed, the survey of Russian culture in Estonia makes fascinating reading. The encyclopedia notes that
On 14 March 2002 the Cultural Endowment of Estonia issued for the first time a literature award to an author writing in Russian. The first award winner was Larissa Vaneyeva (1955). Various other Russian writers live or work in Estonia, e.g. prose writer Mikhail Veller (1948), an Estonian citizen who lives in St Petersburg, Tallinn and Israel and whose works appear in Russia in hundreds of thousands of copies; Yelena Skulskaya (1950), poet and prosaist whose poems have been considerably influenced by the Estonian poetry of the 1960s; Svetlan Semenenko (1939) poet and an eminent translator of Estonian literature; and some others.
The output of Russian writers is mainly published in three literary and cultural magazines: ‘Vyshgorod’ (Toompea Hill), ‘Raduga’ (Rainbow) and ‘Tallinn’, although they contain a fair number of translations from Estonian authors as well. Quite a few books by both Russian and Estonian authors have recently been published in the Russian language, with the most active period falling in the early 1990s. Today, a few publishing houses specialising in Russian literature have remained: ‘Antek’, ‘Avenarius’, ‘Ingri’, ‘KPD’. Besides fiction, they also issue, to a lesser extent, scientific and popular scientific books by Russian authors.
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