Eluread In English
Fourteen Estonians. Fourteen life’s works.
The hub is a single bilingual page: Estonian and English stand side by side on it, so there is no separate English copy to send you to. Every portrait, though, has an English edition of its own — 149 chapters in all, built from 1 403 sources.
Eluread on üks kakskeelne leht: eesti ja inglise keel seisavad seal kõrvuti. Igal portreel on lisaks oma ingliskeelne väljaanne.
The 14 portraits, in English
- Karl Ernst von Baer 1792 — 1876 The naturalist who found the egg and argued about rivers.
- Lydia Koidula 1843 — 1886 Poet, the voice of the awakening, the nightingale of the Emajõgi.
- Miina Härma 1864 — 1941 Composer, organist and choir conductor, whose song is still being danced.
- Anne Vabarna 1877 — 1964 The Seto song-mother who could neither read nor write.
- A. H. Tammsaare 1878 — 1940 The novelist every Estonian can quote and few have finished.
- Bernhard Schmidt 1879 — 1935 An optician, one-handed, who made the sky photographable.
- Johannes Letzmann 1885 — 1971 The meteorologist who read a storm out of a flattened forest.
- Ernst Öpik 1893 — 1985 Astronomer, who worked out by hand the distances nobody could yet measure.
- August Komendant 1906 — 1992 The engineer who made Louis Kahn’s buildings stand — and quarrelled over the credit.
- Paul Keres 1916 — 1975 Chess grandmaster, the eternal second, a nation’s favourite.
- Ilse Lehiste 1922 — 2010 The phonetician who measured what separates two words Estonian spells the same way.
- Lennart Meri 1929 — 2006 Explorer, filmmaker, historian, president.
- Endel Lippmaa 1930 — 2015 The chemical physicist who built his own instrument — and carried a document into the Kremlin.
- Arvo Pärt 1935 — Composer, master of silence and the bell.