Month: June 2022

The Child Prodigy, Poet, and Scholar Uku Masing

  • Amar Annus

JOURNAL OF GENIUS AND EMINENCE, 5 (2) 2022 Article 6 | pages 80-96
Issue Copyright © 2022 Tinkr
Article Copyright © 2022 Amar Annus

ISSN: 2334-1149 online
DOI: 10.18536/jge.2022.06.02

The Child Prodigy, Poet, and Scholar Uku Masing


Amar Annus

University of Tartu, Estonia

Abstract

The poet and scholar of Estonian origin Uku Masing (1909-1985) possessed prodigious level skills in multiple domains and superior eidetic memory. A body of recently published texts and documents, especially the personal letters from the age of 18 to 25 years, allows an analysis of Masing’s autistic traits and various forms of synaesthesia. The combination of these two conditions has been demonstrated to promote the potential talents of a given individual to the exceptional levels of savant syndrome. In retrospect, Masing can be shown to have been a child prodigy and prodigious savant who was capable of very fine artistic expression in poetry. He had a wide array of special interests that formed a unique assemblage. He displayed unusual ways of self-expression and language peculiarities that can be partly explained with his autistic traits. The scope of Masing’s special interests, his literary and scholarly activities and achievements are analysed as well as various aspects of his everyday life difficulties, such as coping with the social world, anxiety and depression.Drawing on social information-processing theory and the status-and-engagement perspective, a field study investigated the pathways through which team leader humility leads to employee creativity. Using a sample of 347 high-tech workers nested in 95 teams and their supervisors, this research theorized a multilevel model with data from multiple waves and sources. The results indicated that, at the individual level, leader humility perceived by individual employees boosted the employees’ self-perceived status, which then promoted employee creativity. At the team level, leader humility created a team voice safety climate, which then had a positive cross- level impact on team members’ creativity. This bridges the creativity and the leader humility literature by extending the social information-processing perspective of leader humility to integrate this perspective with research on individuals’ desire to develop and maintain a status and positive identity. Theoretical implications of these results and practical implications for management practices were discussed.


Amar Annus | University of Tartu, Estonia | School of Theology and Religious Studies
Correspondence: amar.annus@ut.ee | ORCID id – 0000-0002-8844-6597
Correspondence address: Ülikooli 18-310, Tartu 50090
Note: The author attests that there are no conflicts of interest, that the data reported here are not used in any other publications and there are no infringements on previous copyrights.