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When I was three years old and my father took me to the kindergarten for the first time, he told me on the way, "They are going to tell you a lot of stuff about a guy called Lenin. Don't believe any of it. But don't tell them you don't." This must have been a familiar experience to the majority of people in my generation, and a few before, and a few after. Estonia in the 1960s was a frontier. On the one hand, the intellectuals were fascinated with everything that happened in the West, and information had gradually started to sneak in through the Finnish TV we were able to watch and understand better than the Russian channels because of the similarity of Estonian and Finnish, and when passenger traffic started, it brought also books, music and other things that the powers did not manage to control. On the other hand, the Soviet authorities were struggling in vain to convert the Estonian population to their ideological creed and make them to adopt a Russian-looking lifestyle, while even officials in Moscow secretly admired the more Western outlook of the Baltics and many of them came here for their vacations. This is the environment I grew up in. My parents, Eno Raud and Aino Pervik, were freelance writers since the time I can remember (they both wrote mainly for children, which made it possible), and we had a very free lifestyle at home, with people coming and going at different hours, and always talking and discussing and arguing about important things.

My grandfather, who had been a member of the "Arbujad" ("Soothsayers") neo-symbolist poetic group in the 1930s, became a red poet after the Soviet takeover in 1940 and moved to Russia with their army the next year, but he had already divorced my grandmother a few years earlier, and she in turn had re-married Rein Nurkse, after whom I was named - an intellectual in the true sense of the word, a philologist with a broad range of historical and philosophical interest. My step-grandfather was imprisoned and deported to Siberia subsequently, but he managed to get back and even meet me after Khrushchev pardoned many political prisoners, though I don't have any memories of him. But a large part of his huge library is still on my shelves, including early editions of Richard Wilhelm's translations from the classics of Chinese philosophy - the first incentive in my life that moved me to discover East Asia. This library was also one of the reasons why I picked up studying languages as a hobby rather early. But of course, I was convinced that I want to become a writer and live the kind of life my parents led during all these years and still think of myself as predominantly as a wrtier, even though that kind of life - entailing that you can live only from what you write - is not an option in the present society any longer, at least not if you have a family.

Ours was not small. My brother Mihkel was born in 1969 and sister Piret in 1971. Mihkel eventually became a rock musician and Piret a graphic artist, but now they have both turned into writers as well - Mihkel recently published his memoirs of the troubled 1980s without sparing any colour and has now moved on to novels, and Piret has already won prizes for her prose books - among us all, it is her who carries on the parents' good work of writing for children.

The school my parents prudently sent me to had an English bias, that is, our first foreign language was English, not Russian, and we had more of it during the whole school, even some subjects such as geography and history of English literature were taught in English. But my Russian was OK too, or so I thought when I decided to go to the university in St.Petersburg to study Asian languages. I could indeed read the poetry of symbolists and the plays of Leonid Andreyev, but my linguistic skills were woefully inadequate both for the bureaucratic jargon and the colloquial that my peers used when talking to each other. But I survived, and soon found some friends also in the literary circles.

It was also in St.Petersburg where I met my wife, Rosita. That is a story she likes to tell: students from the Baltic countries had a club where we came together approximately once a month, and also celebrated f.ex. Christmas together, which was not a holiday in the Soviet Union. So at one Christmas party she notices a young man speaking Lithuanian with an accent and gets terribly angry. Just a few years in Russia, imagine, and he already makes a few mistakes in grammar once in a while! And then he turns to some Estonians at the neighbouring table and talks to them in Estonian. How come? She decided to find out, and after a year and a half we were married. Our son Juhan was born in 1988, joined by Laura Liina, our daughter, in 1994.

When I returned to Estonia in 1985, the processes that led to freedom had already begun, quietly at first, and more intensively since 1987. My own activities were first directed at promoting the translation of hitherto forbidden texts of world literature into Estonian, and challenging the existing university system afterwards. The latter yielded the Estonian Institute of Humanities in 1988, and in a way brought about the Tallinn University in 2005. In due course, I started my own research activities, defended my dissertation in Helsinki in 1994 and was appointed the professor of Japanese Studies of the Helsinki University in 1995. I still have students on both sides of the Finnish Gulf, and try to keep up my research as well as my writing, although the university administration currently claims the bigger part of my working time.