Marta Sillaots
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marta Sillaots, born Marta Reichenbach (12 May 1887 – 15 July 1969) was an Estonian writer, translator, and literary critic.
Marta Adolfine Reichenbach was born in Rakke into a family of eleven, the daughter of postal clerk Hindrik Reichenbach. After a short time in primary school, which was interrupted due to illness, Marta Reichenbach was enrolled in the Tallinn High School for Girls, where she studied from 1895 to 1904.[1] In 1905, Sillaots passed the exams at the Tallinn Nikolai Gymnasium and received an invitation to be a home teacher.
Career
From 1907 to 1912, Reichenbach worked as a teacher in several primary schools in Tallinn.[2] She was a keen Esperantist. In 1907, Reichenbach founded the first Estonian Esperanto society with the young journalist Johannes Adolf Rahamägi. The first printed article of Reichenbach was in Esperanto. It appeared in 1908 in the magazine Estlanda Esperantisto. Reichenbach wrote under the pen name Marta Sillaots.
From 1909 Sillaots wrote newspaper articles.[3] She emerged in 1912 as a literary critic in the magazines Eesti Kirjandus and Looming and wrote novels and children's books. Recurring themes in her prose are marriage, women's emancipation, and love.
In 1916, Sillaots chose the profession of a postal clerk and worked at the Tallinn post office until 1919. From 1920 to 1922, she was the foreign news editor at Tallinna Teataja. From 1922 Sillaots lived in Tallinn as a freelance writer and translator.
From 1923 to 1936, she changed her name to Marta Gerland. In 1936, her surname was estonianized as Rannat.
In 1938, Sillaots was admitted to the Union of Estonian Writers.
After the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Sillaots was arrested in 1950. From 1952 to 1955, she lived in exile in the Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals. Only in 1955, Sillaots was allowed to return to Tallinn.[4]
Sillaots translated the works from over 60 great writers from their native language; German (Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg), French (Henri Barbusse, Gustave Flaubert, Anatole France, Roger Martin du Gard, Guy de Maupassant, Romain Rolland), English (Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, John Galsworthy) and Russian (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Maxim Gorky, Lev Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev).[1]
Marta Sillaots died on 15 July 1969 in Tallinn and was buried in the Tallinn Forest Cemetery.
