Lennart Meri’s ‘Silverwhite’ which Put Estonia in the Center of His Nation’s Mental Map Finally to Appear in English

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Mar.  17 – When I first visited Estonia, it was still under Soviet occupation; and the maps on the walls of Estonian officials showed Estonia at the extreme left edge of maps that put Russia at the center. When I returned to Estonia shortly after independence was recovered, there were new maps: Estonia was at the extreme right with Europe at the center.
    The idea that this numerically and geographically small nation was at the margins of history is one that many other such peoples have. But one man and one book more than anything else changed that sense of Estonia being at the margins of the map and of world geography and history: Lennart Meri and his Silver White which will appear in English in May.  
    Meri, an Estonian filmmaker and travel writer who served as his country’s foreign minister and president and whom I am proud to call my fried, published Silverwhite in 1976 which was later translated into Russian. It tells the story of the role of Estonians in trade between Scandinavia and the Middle East centuries ago.
    It has now been translated into English (with an introduction by Edward Lucas) and will be released in May. For background on that and to pre-order, see news.err.ee/1609547350/lennart-meri-s-silverwhite-to-be-published-in-english-in-2025 and hurstpublishers.com/book/silverwhite/).
    This event is leading Estonians to comment on how transformative Meri’s book has been. One commentator described it as “life-changing” (mariuver.com/2025/03/17/kak-kniga-pomogajet-ponjat-finnougorskij-mir/ and kultuur.err.ee/1609610162/minu-elu-muutnud-raamat-edith-sepp-ja-hobevalge).
    As someone who struggled through the Estonian original with a dictionary and read the Russian one more easily but with some doubts about how it rendered Meri’s ideas, I await this translation with bated breath and urge all those who have an interest in Estonia, Finno-Ugric peoples, and the role of mental maps to order a copy.
    In my opinion, which of course is in no way definitive, Silverwhite in its importance and power compares with the far better and much banned book Az i Ya by Kazakh writer Olzhas Suleymenov. On the influence of that remarkable volume and of Suleymenov more generally, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2023/12/olzhas-suleymenov-publishes-his-memoirs.html.