Were Ülo Sooster and Yuri Lotman personally acquainted? We do not have an answer to that question. But they certainly knew of one another.

They were almost the same age: Lotman was born in 1922 in Petrograd, Ülo in 1924 on Hiiumaa.

Despite his outstanding scholarly achievements, Yuri Lotman was denied an academic position at the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad University. His move to Tartu in 1950 saved him from hopelessness and antisemitic persecution. The University of Tartu became his beloved home - and the university was repaid a hundredfold: the works of this world-renowned scholar and cultural theorist have been translated into dozens of languages, and his theories are studied at universities around the world.

After seven years of imprisonment in Karlag, Ülo Sooster was rehabilitated and returned to Estonia in 1956. He had a diploma from the Tartu Art Institute (Pallas) in hand; all that remained was to join the Artists’ Union of Estonia and begin working professionally. Ülo created a series of portraits of miners and was refused: “for distorting the image of the Soviet person.” A refusal of the work he lived by - in every sense of the word…

The next 14 years Sooster would spend in Moscow, while continuing to visit Estonia and Tartu.

In the year of Ülo Sooster’s death, Lotman was head of a department and a professor at the University of Tartu. The university leadership defended him even before the KGB, whose officers searched the scholar’s apartment, suspecting samizdat and ties to dissidents.

In the late 1980s, film director Andrei Khrzhanovsky decided to make two films about his friend Ülo Sooster and approached Yuri Lotman to share his impressions of the artist’s work.

“To record Yuri Mikhailovich, I travelled to Tartu and brought with me the first film about Sooster - Landscape with Junipers - as well as a second film from the Pushkin cycle that I had long promised Lotman. First we screened the film about Sooster, and then the one about Pushkin. When the screening ended and the lights came on, I noticed Yuri Mikhailovich’s eyes were wet. I asked for his impression of the Pushkin film. ‘You may consider that I didn’t see it at all: throughout the Sooster film I cried, and for a long time I couldn’t stop my tears…’”

In October 2007, a monument to Yuri Lotman was unveiled in Tartu: a surrealist composition of 15-meter steel tubes. Yet from a certain angle, one can discern the recognizable image of the great scholar. Interestingly, sculptor Mati Karmin took as his point of departure a self-portrait Lotman had made in the form of a caricature.

Twenty years later, in October 2027, a monument to the genius artist Ülo Sooster will be unveiled on the island of Hiiumaa.

Such is this dialogue of destinies…