ABSTRACT
Soviet Estonian poetry can be divided into three distinct periods: the wartime and postwar period from 1940 to 1955, the "thaw," beginning in 1956, which had all but ended by 1959 and the remarkable fluorescence of new, vital, and aesthetically satisfying verse during the 1960s. An important Estonian poet who made his debut in the 1930s, endured the years of Stalinist terror in silence, and then reemerged in the 1960s, was August Sang. Since the history of the Soviet Estonian novel is patterned somewhat differently from that of poetry, it is too early even at this writing to consider the Estonian long-prose genre as having reached maturity. A final word remains to be said about the proliferation of Soviet Estonian literature outside the Estonian Soviet socialist republics. E. Ants Saar was responding to the challenge posed by the younger Estonian literati and to the ever-convenient "bourgeois" element. Among foreign literatures, the one most in evidence has of course been Russian.
