Valdur Mikita

Mikita, who was born in 1970 and grew up in the countryside, is one of Estonia’s most unique thinkers. He studied biology at the University of Tartu and defended a doctoral degree at his alma mater in the fields of semiotics and cultural theory. He began his career mixing genres, jumbling essays and poetry in the same basket. He published essayistic books that probe the unique dispositions of Nordic, and especially Finnic, peoples. Mikita’s literary series, which he has called a “trilogy of howling threshers”, became a number-one bestseller in Estonia. It opened with Metsik lingvistika (Wild Linguistics, 2008), followed by Lingvistiline mets (The Linguistic Forest: The Wagtail Paradigm, Accelerator of Consciousness, 2013), and ended with Lindvistika ehk metsa see lingvistika (Birdistics, or To the Woods with Linguistics, 2015). Reviewers find Mikita shamanistic in nature. He delves into the magic of mythology in an entirely unusual manner; into the importance of experiencing nature first-hand and the landscapes that define the Finno-Ugric spirit. The Linguistic Forest won the open category of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s Award for Literature in 2014. He was made a visiting professor of liberal arts at the University of Tartu in 2016.
In Kukeseene kuulamise kunst (The Art of Listening to Chanterelles, 2017), he claims that if a person is practicing that particular art, then they most definitely have Finnic forest roots. Mikita lives in the forest in Tartu County.

Foto: Jaan Tootsen