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Informationen zum Autor Mati Unt (1944-2005) was an Estonian writer who began his writing career at the age of nineteen, with a "naive novel" entitled Good-bye, Yellow Cat. From this early beginning, Unt established a broad reputation in the artistic and intellectual circles of Estonia as a writer of fiction, plays, and criticism. His novels The Debt, On the Existence of Life in Outer Space, Murder in a Hotel, The Autumn Ball, and Things in the Night, among others, established Unt as one of the most prolific and well-regarded novelists in Estonia. In addition to his own writing, he was instrumental in bringing avant-garde theater to post-Soviet Estonia, and was well known as a director. Ants Eert is the translator of several Estonian novels, and is the author of a fantasy-adventure novel. He is a retired engineer. Klappentext In 1990, the same year as Things in the Night, Unt published a second novel, Diary of a Blood Donor, which displays the usual Untian mixture of fact and fiction, and takes one of the most sacred names in Estonian literature in vain. Lydia Koidula (1843-1886) is widely regarded as the first Estonian woman poet of significance, and also as the first poet to express an Estonian longing for independence. Here, Unt rather blasphemously weaves this national icon and her Latvian doctor husband into a postmodern tale of vampires and a mysterious trip to Leningrad. Zusammenfassung In this contemporary retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Estonian writer Mati Unt offers a playful yet unsettling mixture of fact and fiction, combining pieces of Estonian political history—in particular the figure of Lydia Koidula (1843-1886), widely regarded as the first Estonian woman to express an Estonian longing for independence—with portraits of life in contemporary Estonia, all set against a backdrop of vampirism and the Gothic novel.
