The activity of the Estonian poet, cultural critic, translator, and publicist Ilmar Laaban (11 December 1921 in Tallinn – 29 November 2000 in Stockholm) in the fields of literature, art, and music has been introduced from many angles. Laaban’s first collection of poetry entitled Ankruketi lõpp on laulu algus [The End of the Anchor Chain is the Start of Song] was published in Stockholm in 1946. It is considered to be the first intentionally surrealistic collection of poetry in Estonian literature.

Laaban’s manuscript legacy and library arrived at the Estonian Cultural History Archives of the Estonian Literary Museum from Stockholm starting in the year 2000. By now, his letters and manuscripts have been made available to users – these comprise about half of the materials in his personal archive, which is one of the largest collections at the Estonian Cultural History Archives and is exceptional in terms of the multiple languages in which his letters and manuscripts were written: we can find manuscripts there in Estonian, German, French, Swedish, Italian, English, Finnish, and Spanish. Yet we do not know all that much about Laaban’s life story, aside from information on his school years in Tallinn and how he fled in 1943 by way of Finland to Sweden, where he worked all his life as a freelancer.

The 9-page sketch of 1944 based on his memories, which is published in this article, is one of his few autobiographical texts. This writing documents that Laaban’s most famous poem, Elada vabana või surra [To Live as a Free Man or to Die] is a poetic paraphrase of Paul Éluard’s poem Liberté [Liberty]. Based on comparison to other documents found in the archive, the manuscript probably originates from the 1980s. This rough copy of the manuscript indicates that the work done on fine-tuning its wording was thorough, but its final formulation was not completed. The exceedingly abundant corrections that are at times almost illegible made it extremely difficult to decipher this text, yet that which emerged as a result of this work was a literarily consistent text that is altogether like a novella.