Johannes Vares-Barbarus

Johannes Vares, who signed his poems Barbarus, was born on 12 January 1890 in Kiisa, in Viljandimaa, the son of a farmer. After secondary school in Pärnu, he studied medicine in Kiev from 1910 to 1914, was a military doctor during the Great War and the War of Independence, refused the Cross of Liberty, then practised in Pärnu until 1939. Head of the government installed by the Soviets in June 1940, then chairman of the presidium of the republic, he spent the war in Leningrad. Suspected by the Soviet political police, he was found dead in Tallinn on 29 November 1946; it is usually accepted that he had taken his own life.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryGeomeetriline inimeneJohannes Vares-Barbarus · 1924not translated into EnglishLiterature