Toomas Hendrik Ilves: I want to commit to writing what I've long wanted to say

Ahead of the start of the Year of the Book, former President Toomas Hendrik Ilves appeared on the ETV2 show "Plekktrumm," to talk about how books and literature have shaped him personally.
Ilves, head of state from 2006–2016, recalled how Estonian poetry and music captivated him as an émigré Estonian, and also stressed how important the Enlightenment-era foundational texts he studied at college had been in shaping his worldview.
In 1988, Ilves compiled and edited the almanac Põrp!, which was dedicated to Estonian culture, language, and literature, and was published in Munich.
It begins with Juhan Liiv's (1864–1913) Viimsed inimesed ("The Last People"), whose opening line reads: "Viimsed inimesed olid välja suremas" ("The last people were dying out").
This text was not included in collections of Juhan Liiv's poetry, as the idea — that a small nation might become extinct — was considered taboo.
"I assembled a small group of people — Estonians born abroad — who could not only speak but also write and navigate Estonian culture, which was already quite rare at the time," Ilves said.
"We all knew each other because there were so few of us. The question then was, with Estonia occupied, does that make us the very last speakers of the Estonian language, outside Estonia itself?"
"Back then, there wasn't much cause for hope; by the fall of 1988, there already was some, but in 1986, when I came up with the idea, things still looked pretty bleak," he told "Plektrumm."
"It took two years to compile it all; this was editorial work before the online era — there were no emails. I even made the cover myself, fiddling with something on the computer."
"In general, these were texts that needed editing and assembling," Ilves said, adding that he ordered 1,000 copies of the publication.
"Five hundred copies were paid for out of my own pocket, while for the remainder, I got some small grants."
"I sent 500 or 600 as regular parcel post to Estonia. Some made it there; I assumed that losses would be significant. The rest I kept and gave to people — Estonians who had ended up in the West — or slipped them to someone to take back to Estonia. So these are now somewhere in Estonia, though I don't know where," the president said.

Ilves belongs to that generation of Estonians born abroad.
In that almanac, he stated that for these people, the local language was often stronger than Estonian.
While he graduated from some top universities, he chose not to assimilate but to follow what he called "a completely unpromising path."
"This has applied to all my professions," Ilves chuckled.
"After 1984, every position I've ever been offered has been one I didn't want to take, but then I would get this feeling that I probably should do it anyway."
"I got quite a strong sense, especially after meeting people who have done it themselves, that you ought to do it. Most of what I've done in life has thus been unpromising, or at least seemed so at the start," he added.
At the time, Estonian culture proved more captivating to Ilves than its contemporary equivalents.
"I had read quite a bit of English-language poetry, and I could admire it because the use of language was astonishing."
"But it lacked what I found in Estonian poetry — a deep, existential concern, which is also reflected in Juhan Liiv's poetry."
"And also in earlier works by [Jaan] Kaplinski, Paul-Eerik Rummo, and Hando Runnel, you can find this gravity. When you read English poetry, you find no one is worried about their entire nation or culture disappearing, so that made it far more compelling."
"The same applies to music," he went on.
"If you take Veljo Tormis' "Forgotten Peoples" cycle, it's that same theme.
"That is what captivated me," he said.
Ilves recalled when Lennart Meri, the first president of Estonia after the 1991 restoration of independence, asked him to be Estonian ambassador to the U.S., and after giving it much thought, he eventually accepted.
This involved, among other things, surrendering U.S. citizenship.

"It was a tremendous loss — my life had been lived in a completely different context, and I was accustomed to a comfortable life," he recalled.
"Yet that is beside the point — it didn't bother me. But I told my late mother that I was going to be the Estonian ambassador, in Washington. She asked me: 'What will you do with that? What will you do afterwards?' She had that practical first-generation refugee concern, as many did," Ilves noted.
His father had trained as an engineer. But many family friends who had studied law at the University of Tartu found their legal education useless outside Estonia.
"They went back and retrained as engineers or builders," Ilves explained.
"The second generation — people my age, I'm 71 now, but we were young then — mostly assimilated into their societies, perhaps more so than did some other ethnic groups, because we were so thin on the ground."
In the forthcoming biopic "Kikilipsuga mässajas" ("The Rebel in the Bow Tie"), Ilves also talked about how, in first grade, all the pupils had to show on a map of the world where they were from.
"America is a country of immigrants. There were Italians, Poles, a Japanese kid, and a Chinese kid, all in the one case. I went and pointed to Estonia, and the teacher told me, 'That's not Estonia; that's Russia, or the Soviet Union.'"
"I said, 'No, this is Estonia.' We didn't even deserve to be on the map; to exist," it seemed.
"This was a natural progression — to 'become' Swedish, American, Canadian, or German," Ilves noted, referring to four of the biggest free world destinations for Estonians who fled the occupying Soviet regime.
The appeal of Estonian literature
Authors like Kaplinski, Rummo, and Runnel, who emerged on this side of the Iron Curtain, reached Ilves thanks to the Metsaülikool, an apolitical organization founded in Canada in 1966 to disseminate objective information about Estonian culture, science, politics, and social issues, which he attended for the first time in 1971.
"There were some incredible, star lecturers there — Ivar Ivask, who was the editor-in-chief of World Literature Today and a poet in both the Estonian and Latvian languages."
"Rein Taagepera, who had quite radical ideas at the time, and Felix Oinas, a triple professor at Indiana University, in folklore, Finno-Ugric languages, and Slavonic languages."

"There were these intellectuals present, real stars, but then there was me. When Ivar Ivask and the late pastor Vello Salo, who was also somewhat of a literary scholar, started talking about Estonian poetry, it was simply awesome," Ilves recalled.
Ilves himself has also translated poetry, including some of contemporary poet Doris Kareva's verses, into English.
"Someone said, 'Hey, read Kareva.' I said, 'Okay, then, I will.' It was very good, so then I went on with it."
"I've translated all sorts of other pieces, too, but I haven't published them," he said, noting that these include Mati Unt's Räägivad ja vaikivad, though the manuscript for this has been lost."
When everything began to change, from 1988, translation work was set to one side as Ilves spent his days fully immersed with what was taking place in Estonia, namely the developments which eventually led to full independence.
Ilves said he is fascinated not only by language in and of itself but also by its creation and the invention of new words.
He often plays with puns and has written in a trilingual, macaronic verse.
For him, the inspiration behind Sõnaus, the word competition he initiated in 2010 while in office as president, lies in creating words and concepts that are simply absent in Estonian.
"There was a major period when Johannes Aavik created some new words which are now completely standard: hetk (moment), mõrv (murder), roim (crime), veenma (to convince)."
"He was quite brilliant in his lexical creation," the president remarked.
"These are all new words — before the word relv appearing (gun or weapon), we had 'tapariist' ('a tool for killing with')."
Ilves himself proposed the word taristu ("infrastructure") for the Sõnaus competition.
"The term infrastruktuur is a terrible word, and it disrupts the qualities of the Finno-Ugric languages."
Estonia's northern neighbor has managed to purge itself, or its lexicon, to a greater extent so far.
"The combinations of the letters 'f', 'r', 's', 't', 'r' — these consonant pairs can be impossible to pronounce," he noted.

"In Finnish, they don't even say 'Stockholm'; they say 'Tukholma.' And Proua ('Madam'), which is a loan word from the German 'Frau,' has dropped the 'p' (in Finnish) to become 'Rouva,'" Ilves explained.
Ilves also advocates for differentiating the Estonian meanings of policy and politics, since both are currently translated as poliitika."
"When people ask why we should differentiate them, I ask them to translate this sentence into Estonian: 'Policy was ruined by politics.' This is a very common issue — you have a way of managing things, policy or poliitika in Estonian, but it is ruined by politics, also poliitika."
"It is impossible to accurately translate, and this occurs quite frequently — it's a problem in Estonia as well," Ilves said.
Deep respect for classical texts
Toomas Hendrik Ilves has often reminisced about his studies at Columbia University, where the first-year courses required reading the foundational texts from the canon of Western thought.
The most vital courses in this respect were philosophy, world literature, music history, and art history.
"The philosophy course influenced me the most, especially when I think about the later years. We started with Plato, then moved on to Aristotle and continued throughout the year — it was a four-credit course," he recalled.
"We started with Plato and finished, at that time, with Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'," Ilves added.
There was a strong emphasis on Enlightenment-era philosophers, who are the cornerstone of modern democracy.
"Only ten years later did I realize I had thought about these things before, and so I then revisited those texts. And since then, whenever I hear or read about something, or someone presents a new idea, I still feel like there is nothing new under the sun. Foundational texts are foundational simply because they have already articulated all these things," he added.
This philosophy course had been mandatory for all, regardless of their major — engineers, doctors, chemists, biologists, and others all took it.
"It came from the post-World War I period when many men who had served in the war returned and wanted to get an education. This was already made viable, and apparently, a collaboration emerged between three universities — Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago — to give these young men a proper understanding of how this society came to be. The dividing line on which America went to war in World War I was to defend or to save democracy," he continued.
"Had you been there, in the mud and trenches, and endured all of that, you will be asked why you went. Your answer: 'To defend democracy'."
"But then you're asked what democracy is, and from that point, this concept grew."

"It remained very widespread until about the 1970s, when I started there," Ilves said, maintaining that everyone should read the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
According to Ilves, the romantic approach to Western Enlightenment thought originated in Riga and was based on the Estonian and Latvian peasant songs collected by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803).
"He was a pastor who later became a German nationalist, opposing Frederick the Great's fondness for French culture. His idea, like that of Estonians later, was that my language is my language. The fundamental difference, when we look at later developments from the early 19th or late 18th century, is that for Herder, the smallest meaningful subdivision of society — the element or atom as it were — was the nation, defined by a common tongue," Ilves continued.
"In the Enlightenment era, this atom was the individual. According to Enlightenment thinking, the individual has rights, which in turn grew out of Lutheranism, and other influences. But the nation as an atom, upon which everything else is built, developed precisely in places where Anglo-French Enlightenment influence was minimal. And we still see this today. This conflict exists in our society as well — which is more important, national rights, or individual human rights?"
"Our emphasis on freedom of speech comes from the French and English influence. But our emphasis on national self-determination, which was very important in 1917–1918, is not, contrary to some rallying cries, an inherent right. It was invented by a few philosophers in the early 20th century."
"We have this freedom of speech and the fundamental right of nationality, and so the conflict lies there. In the negative column, the nationalism that grew out of Herder became quite unseemly, especially in the 20th century," Ilves said.
"The texts of Enlightenment philosophers in any case will not become an irrelevance, even though they may seem as if they belong to a bygone era," Ilves added.
According to Ilves, it is absurd to study philosophy and to start, for example, with Foucault.
"If you haven't got a good grounding in reading the foundational texts, how can you understand the rest?"
"Someone said that all of Western philosophy can be summed up as a debate between Plato and Aristotle," the president stated.
Ilves said he also sees material in the foundational texts for analyzing the actions of Donald Trump during his new and second presidency.
"If you look at the Melian Dialogue from Thucydides' Siege of Melos, it culminates with the Athenians delivering their ultimatum to the inhabitants of a small island. Then when the islanders appeal to what was then international law or at least to justice, that means nothing to the Athenians. They kill all the men and enslave the women and children. So when I see someone go up to the Danish government and say, 'Now you're going to give us Greenland,' it can be summed up with one line from Thucydides: 'The powerful do what they want, and the weak do what they must.'"
To avoid a recurrence of such situations, UN member states signed the UN Charter, in 1945, but which, according to Ilves, has been almost destroyed in light of current events.
"It states, and all UN members have agreed, that aggression and altering borders under the threat of force are not permissible," Ilves said.
"This mostly held true — with some unpleasant exceptions, of course — for the last 80 years, yet it no longer does."
This is not only due to Trump.
"What worries me, when talking about Trump, is that until last week, it was Russia who was breaking these rules. But we are the West, partly because we have these agreements that we don't break, and we've all agreed to them."
"When suddenly someone says, 'We're big and rich, give us Greenland, you're small, you can't do anything about it,' then that lies completely in tatters."

Listening to more classical music now
Many people also know Ilves as a great music enthusiast and lover of music.
As for his present musical tastes, instead of contemporary rock, Ilves said he now prefers classical music.
He said that he listens to music less now than he used to, but his taste has also changed as noted.
"I've realized that I don't listen to music as much as I used to, and I've also read that this is something that happens as you get older — it seems no longer as important as it had been.
"The most important and emotional relationship with music you find when you're a teenager, but that lingered with me longer. Anyway, tastes also change. I now listen to much more classical music than contemporary rock," he added.
In addition to 2025 being the Year of the Book in Estonia, this year also marks Arvo Pärt's 90th birthday.
Ilves recalled how, in 1984, he happened to hear the great composer's music for the first time, while driving.
"I used to listen every day at home, or in the car, to new album introductions on Canadian public radio. So I was in the car, listening to this music — which was utterly captivating and elusive. I questioned what it was and even stopped to listen all the way through, so I wouldn't forget. When it came to an end, the announcer said, 'You've been listening to a new album, just released, by ECM, and the composer is Arvo Pärt.' He even pronounced the 'ä' in the German way. As it soon appeared in record stores, I soon went out and bought it," he recalled.
Ilves was also the initiator of the idea for the Arvo Pärt Center, in Laulasmaa, west of Tallinn.
"Arvo and Nora [Pärt] came to me — they wanted something small, which perhaps the state could support. Shortly after that, I ended up at the [Polish composer] Krzysztof Penderecki Center, as we had become friends by then. And then I looked at his center, which is quite different from Pärt's center, and I thought, 'You are much better known than Penderecki.' So you need something powerful, not something resembling a small house museum."
"That's how it got started, and it was a lengthy process: Even just acquiring the land. At one time, [conductor] Tõnu Kaljuste, [former foreign minister] Rein Lang and I were sitting in the sauna and discussed at length how we could make it happen, since this was municipal land," the president recalled.
Ilves' meeting with Penderecki is also a story in itself.
"I was sitting on a plane, and across the aisle was this bearded man, reading a book about trees. I'm also an arboriculture enthusiast, so we started talking about trees. I asked what the book was. I said that I had planted my own arboretum, and he said he had also planted a park. It ended up being a great, two-hour conversation."
"Then we parted ways, but that evening there was a concert at the Estonia Theater, where I went, and [early music ensemble] Hortus Musicus gave what was, at least, an Estonian premiere of one of Penderecki's pieces. I went into the concert hall, sat in the front row, and saw that the same old man was there. We waved at each other, and then we sat back and listened."
"After the piece ended, the audience demanded he come on stage. And that's when I understood."
Arvo Pärt has also dedicated a small musical miniature to Ilves — he combined notes from the president's initials.

Ilves has not played out those notes on the piano himself, though his daughter has.
Finally, the former president has long been a prominent advocate for the digital society and is an active Twitter user.
He sees tweets as almost like Haiku, the famous, traditional Japanese short verse; as a way of composing something concise and striking.
"My favorite topic being tweeted was about how for about 32 years the Finns had been great experts on Russia, and there were some pretty crazy cases. But only after 2022 did [former Finnish prime minister] Sanna Marin say that they should have listened to the Estonians all along.
Then it occurred to me that it could be summed up as 'in Viro veritas'," he went on. This is a word play on the original In Vino Veritas aphorism — Viro being the Finnish name for Estonia.
"There's a bit more to it than simply scolding someone," Ilves added with a smile.
The president admitted that he is now trying to write much more instead of reading.
"I have the choice of either reading other people's works or finally writing down what I've long wanted to say," he concluded.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte