With Jaan Undusk (born 1958) one can only wonder at the inverse proportionality of the size of his work and its importance. There are a number of good writers in Estonia who have published as many as twenty or thirty books, but there is no one on a par with Jaan Undusk. His first and only novel to date was enough to make literary history.

The fact is that not only is Jaan Undusk one of the literary milestones of the past decade but he is also an eminent interpreter of Estonian literature, a creator of meta-literature. He has analysed exile literature, Baltic German literature, the language of Stalinism, and so forth. In an article in 1988 he formulated the main task of Estonian literature as “the creation and recreation of the Estonian national and cultural identity.” This is how Jaan Undusk has become one of the most important writers and literary theorists of the 1990s.

1990 is considered a watershed in Estonian literature. One of three causes of this watershed is Jaan Undusk’s novel Kuum. Lugu noorest armastust (Hot: A Story of Young Love) The importance of the novel lies in the fact that it does not (just) describe the world but it concentrates on describing itself. ‘Hot’ is a remarkably self-conscious attempt to write in an intertextual manner and on as broad a basis as possible. ‘Hot’ is a book where words, which are generally used as a means of describing the world, become something like characters in the book – in so far as this is possible. The literary theorist Epp Annus says, “In Undusk’s ‘Hot’ the joy of words, every sentence, the perfectly polished quality of expression and the pleasure of its very existence causes the reader pause rather than move on.”

As an interpreter of literature, Jaan Undusk created a landmark with the publiaction of his collection of essays Maagilane müstiline keel (Magical and Mystical Language) in 1998. Thus two books – a novel and a collection of essays – mark Undusk’s brilliant trajectory over the last decade of the twentieth century.

Undusk’s mind takes unexpected turns – in 1999 the journal Vikerkaar published his play Goodbye, Vienna which received a lively response, culminating in a stage performance in 2002.