Over the past two years, I have found myself in a new role — as the volunteer producer of the summer production "Now I Study" in Mustamäe. It all began when Andra Teede had the idea to tell the history of the technical university. Two summers ago, I fortunately had no idea that this meant a mega‑project involving a total of 123 people, most of them volunteers.

Andra's idea was delightfully crazy, because who would even be interested in the past, Mustamäe, and a university whose wonderful inner courtyard is known only to its members and alumni? Dance and song are of course lovely, but why should today's digital youth want to come outdoors with their grandmothers and grandfathers to share a common experience? Yet I immediately felt that something in this idea spoke to me deeply: in its DNA were questions I had pondered privately for many years.

"Mom, you don't understand anything"

My teenage daughters have used that sentence from time to time. The last time, I replied: "Why do you think that? In fact, it's exactly the opposite — I have been fifteen, I remember that time, and I know what you feel. You are the one who has never been forty‑five. It would be much more accurate to say that you don't understand me."

But I also remember that same feeling — that my mother didn't understand me. She was born in 1941, and at exactly the same time the summer production takes place, she too was studying at the university. Although my mother has been in the ground for seventeen years, I still remember how confused she was by a simple word like fashion. She wasn't a city girl; she grew up on a farm deep in the forest. "What difference does it make what you wear?" she often said when I begged for another piece of clothing from the store. "In our time, everything was sewn at home; everyone made things as they could and wanted." She never truly understood my longing for toys either: she had the forest and the meadow, birds and butterflies, horses and dogs. She never understood the phenomenon of plastic Barbie dolls.

I have often felt that same lack of shared background in Estonia. The feeling is so deep: in the bone marrow, beneath all experience and wisdom. As a child of 1981, I remember the Soviet Union well — red stars, parades, street names written in Cyrillic. The patronymic Antoevna given by the state, awkward because my father's name resisted Russian grammar.

And of course it is also true that I do not understand today's youth, cannot imagine growing up on the internet, constantly watched and commented on, in a world of endlessly altered images where no one is as they appear in their virtual form. In this almost schizophrenically two‑faced world, where everyone looks happy in pictures but more and more people secretly suffer from depression — a daily normality for many and a social stigma at the same time — because everyone must be equally successful, wealthy and famous.

May we even talk about history — and when?

As a child of the early 1980s, I did not grow up only in Estonia, but at least half mentally in Germany, ever since satellite television arrived. So although I lived in the Soviet Union, I do not truly know what that time meant. No one bothered to explain to a child where we came from or where we were going. I remember hearing warnings about tanks on the radio and standing in the Baltic Way, but I had no deeper understanding of why I was there.

Because even for us, children of the 80s, not everything was spoken aloud. I knew one grandfather was a kulak and the other died in a concentration camp, but what those life paths meant and why things happened that way — no one discussed it. Perhaps even at home, around kitchen tables, people feared trusting a child with the whole truth, just as the protagonist in Andra Teede's play asks her mother: "But why have you never told me about my father?"

More than that, I have sensed all my life a strange social pressure that we should think about everything that happened in one particular way. That one may always sing Estonian songs and wear folk costumes, but asking why the neighbor denounced my grandfather still seems almost forbidden. Or what was the name of the German whom my other grandfather hid in the forest for fifteen years? That this history — which my generation will one day also become part of — may be remembered only partially: only the chosen, clear side of it, heroic survivors or even more heroic fallen ones, without all the complexity of individuals, society, identity and relationships that actually existed.

Perhaps it is my birth year: that we are the generation with enough comfort and too little fear to no longer understand why the past should be told through only one simplified narrative. That we, accustomed to freedom, can no longer fully grasp why we should not dive into all those parallel and deeply contradictory worlds where everyone is right and no one is right. Even if the societal picture served to us through old photos and books seemed monotonous, real life must have been extraordinarily rich. I am glad Andra dared to reveal those layers; one can only hope the time is ripe for speaking about the past.

To strive harder than necessary

On stage before us is an even bigger question than the nature of one era. It is the question of life choices, a true Heracles dilemma: whether to choose the easy and comfortable path, or the path over stones and stumps for a greater goal. Whether to choose one's own comfort or dare to take responsibility for something larger. In this play, no one has easy choices; only hard and even harder struggles.

Why should anyone, in any era, choose a life in science? I remember my father talking about defending his candidate degree. "Imagine — the day before the defense, my supervisor said I had to make changes to my written work. My thesis was over a hundred pages, typed on a typewriter; rewriting it would have taken more than a whole night, and I had already retyped it several times. What he demanded was impossible! So I simply told him: 'Go to hell!'" My father defended his degree nonetheless.

About twenty years later, I stood as a student in a gene technology lab, marveling at the patience of people who conduct experiments day after day, year after year, where perhaps the ten‑year work of a hundred people leads to one breakthrough, one news item. I did not have that patience, which is why I think with reverence of all scientists. Yes, everyone has everyday worries — families, children, mortgages — but many of us are free from responsibility for the future. No one expects an ordinary person to solve climate problems, the energy crisis or society's governance model. Scientists carry all those heavy expectations. Can people who are not scientists ever truly understand what it feels like to live with such responsibility?

Art is easy — it has no clear direction, it does not have to arrive anywhere. Art may endlessly ask questions without offering answers. Science cannot do that; science must provide solutions: discover cancer treatments, create more sustainable materials, faster and smaller technology.

But art can do something for science: lift scientists onto a pedestal in all their humanity and struggle, facing difficult choices in any era. Art can bow to science: express gratitude to all those people thanks to whom we have reached this world of possibilities. Because it is the work of scientists that is not only on the stage, but above it, beside it and beneath it: all those powerful stage constructions, sound and lighting technology, video footage. It is a special experience to see that art can be part of science and science part of art — both can inspire, advance, interpret and empower each other.

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