Jaan Kross (1920–2007)
Author of The Czar's Madman
About the Author
Image credit: Portrait by Zero
Series
Works by Jaan Kross
De kring van Mesmer : geromantiseerde memoires, zoals alle memoires en bijna iedere roman (1995) 29 copies
Kajalood : [jutustused] 6 copies
Ülesõidukohad 5 copies
Vihm teeb toredaid asju 4 copies
Voog ja kolmpii : luuletusi 3 copies
Kivist viiulid : [luuletused] 3 copies
Lauljad laevavööridel : luuletused 3 copies
Draama, Kogutud Teosed 18 3 copies
Vahelugemised. [1] 2 copies
Neli monoloogi Püha Jüri asjus 2 copies
Omaeluloolisus ja alltekst : 1998. aastal Tartu Ülikooli filosoofiateaduskonna vabade kunstide professorina peetud loengud (2003) 2 copies
Kogutud teosed. 4 : Taevakivi ; Kolmandad mäed ; Kahe kaotsiläinud paberi lugu ; Pöördtoolitund (1999) 2 copies
Luule, Kogutud Teosed 17 2 copies
Teosed 1 copy
Kejsarens galning 1 copy
Vastutuulelaev 1 copy
Järelehüüd : [jutustused] 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Kross, Jaan
- Birthdate
- 1920-02-19
- Date of death
- 2007-12-27
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Tartu
- Relationships
- Niit, Ellen (wife)
- Short biography
- Born in 1920 in Estonia, Jaan Kross was arrested by the Soviets in 1946 and spent nine years in exile and labor camps in the Soviet Union's eastern regions.
- Nationality
- Estonia
- Birthplace
- Tallinn, Estonia
- Places of residence
- Tallinn, Estonia (birth)
- Place of death
- Tallinn, Estonia
- Burial location
- Rahumäe Cemetery, Tallinn, Estonia
- Map Location
- Estonia
Members
Reviews
This is Jaan Kross' autobiographical, highly political and comic novel about how the first generation of Estonians gained independence after 1918. The brevity of this freedom, limited by the outbreak of the Second World War, is captured by Kross in all its tragedy and irony.
Tallinn, 1938: Jaak Sirkel attends the prestigious Wikman Gymnasium in the Estonian capital. For the young men, the years before the outbreak of the Second World War are characterised by a rare light-heartedness and a show more short-lived national consciousness. The pupils spend their days playing pranks on teachers, trying to avoid exams and meeting new girlfriends.
The Wikmansche Gymnasium is a school of ideals where strict principles prevail. Jaak Sirkel and his final year class adhere to these principles, but do everything they can to make everyday school life easier. They do everything they can to avoid unannounced exams or to get their grades up to ‘very good’ without much effort. Although everyday life at grammar school is strictly organised, ‘Wikman's Pupils’ plays out with plenty of comedy and mutual respect. The pupils are not supposed to break with discipline and order, but rather learn with them and thus grow into a new, strong generation for their homeland.
Jaak Sirkel and his classmates are about to graduate from grammar school. But what is supposed to be a transition to adult life also becomes a battle on the front line of the Second World War, where the pupils fight on different sides. Although the last two years of school determine a large part of the novel, the last short chapters are the highlights, when the former classmates meet again in 1943 - divided by different political views, connected by many different fates. Kross deliberately plays with a break in the story here when, having previously described everything in detail, he suddenly skips a few years and throws the reader in at the deep end.
‘Wikmans Zöglinge’ is a monumental work that focuses on a small country whose inhabitants have long had to fight for their own culture and history. The novel manages remarkably well to interweave elementary questions of identity with those of puberty in a seemingly harmless school story and to give a voice to an entire lost generation. show less
Tallinn, 1938: Jaak Sirkel attends the prestigious Wikman Gymnasium in the Estonian capital. For the young men, the years before the outbreak of the Second World War are characterised by a rare light-heartedness and a show more short-lived national consciousness. The pupils spend their days playing pranks on teachers, trying to avoid exams and meeting new girlfriends.
‘Here, the past has been so oppressive over a long period of time that now, right now - yesterday, today, tomorrow - men and women, ideas and deeds, must be born on which our greatness will one day be founded. And I want - and you must want - the Wikmansche Gymnasium to play an honourable part in this.’
The Wikmansche Gymnasium is a school of ideals where strict principles prevail. Jaak Sirkel and his final year class adhere to these principles, but do everything they can to make everyday school life easier. They do everything they can to avoid unannounced exams or to get their grades up to ‘very good’ without much effort. Although everyday life at grammar school is strictly organised, ‘Wikman's Pupils’ plays out with plenty of comedy and mutual respect. The pupils are not supposed to break with discipline and order, but rather learn with them and thus grow into a new, strong generation for their homeland.
Jaak Sirkel and his classmates are about to graduate from grammar school. But what is supposed to be a transition to adult life also becomes a battle on the front line of the Second World War, where the pupils fight on different sides. Although the last two years of school determine a large part of the novel, the last short chapters are the highlights, when the former classmates meet again in 1943 - divided by different political views, connected by many different fates. Kross deliberately plays with a break in the story here when, having previously described everything in detail, he suddenly skips a few years and throws the reader in at the deep end.
‘Wikmans Zöglinge’ is a monumental work that focuses on a small country whose inhabitants have long had to fight for their own culture and history. The novel manages remarkably well to interweave elementary questions of identity with those of puberty in a seemingly harmless school story and to give a voice to an entire lost generation. show less
This historical novel is based on the life of Timotheus von Bock (1787–1836), an aristocratic landowner in Estonia whose liberal ideals and excessive devotion to honesty led him in 1818 to send Czar Alexander I a sixty-page memorandum setting out what was wrong with absolutist rule in the Russian Empire and proposing a new constitution based on accountability and the rule of law. Possibly not a completely wise move. Alexander seems to have been fond of Timo, who had been his aide-de-camp show more as a young man, so instead of having him charged with treason he went for the milder option of declaring him insane and locking him up in solitary confinement in a gloomy fortress for nine years (but with a piano in his cell!). After Alexander's death, Timo is released into house-arrest on his own estate, but he remains officially insane and therefore legally incompetent.
Timo's liberalism is also manifested in his marriage to Eeva Mättik, an Estonian who was a serf in domestic service when he met her. He has bought the freedom of Eeva's whole family, and sent her and her elder brother Jakob to be educated by a clergyman friend before they marry. Eeva is a very strong character in the novel, resourceful and tireless in her campaigns to prevent Timo from being forgotten about and eventually getting him released.
It is the nosy and cynical Jakob who narrates the story through his secret diary of his life with Timo and Eeva during the period of house-arrest. He takes care to give us the necessary context for Timo's "radical" ideas, which he classes as being almost as progressive as Magna Carta. Timo, after all, is a proud member of a social class that traces its origins back to the Teutonic Knights, and has spent the last six hundred years treating the people of the Baltic region as little better than beasts of burden. (Kross notes in an afterword that in addition to that, Timo almost certainly knew the family tradition that his grandmother was an illegitimate daughter of Peter the Great, and that he would thus consider himself to have more genuine imperial blood in his veins than Alexander.)
Of course, this book was written in the 1970s, and what Jakob tells us about abuses of absolute power, foreign oppression of Estonians, and the misuse of the mental health system to silence dissidents is clearly also meant as covert criticism of the current situation in the Soviet Union, and the Baltic States in particular. What he tells us about Timo's experience of imprisonment and solitary confinement has a very strong sense of personal experience about it.
I found this slightly unsatisfying in narrative terms because Kross is rather reluctant to go beyond the things we have actual historical evidence for, so for instance Jakob's imaginative solution to the mystery of Timo's death is only put forward as a very tentative hypothesis, and not followed up in any way. But it is very strong in giving us a picture of the social situation in Baltic states in the early nineteenth century and in analysing the complicated intersections between protest against an oppressive regime and real or simulated madness. show less
Timo's liberalism is also manifested in his marriage to Eeva Mättik, an Estonian who was a serf in domestic service when he met her. He has bought the freedom of Eeva's whole family, and sent her and her elder brother Jakob to be educated by a clergyman friend before they marry. Eeva is a very strong character in the novel, resourceful and tireless in her campaigns to prevent Timo from being forgotten about and eventually getting him released.
It is the nosy and cynical Jakob who narrates the story through his secret diary of his life with Timo and Eeva during the period of house-arrest. He takes care to give us the necessary context for Timo's "radical" ideas, which he classes as being almost as progressive as Magna Carta. Timo, after all, is a proud member of a social class that traces its origins back to the Teutonic Knights, and has spent the last six hundred years treating the people of the Baltic region as little better than beasts of burden. (Kross notes in an afterword that in addition to that, Timo almost certainly knew the family tradition that his grandmother was an illegitimate daughter of Peter the Great, and that he would thus consider himself to have more genuine imperial blood in his veins than Alexander.)
Of course, this book was written in the 1970s, and what Jakob tells us about abuses of absolute power, foreign oppression of Estonians, and the misuse of the mental health system to silence dissidents is clearly also meant as covert criticism of the current situation in the Soviet Union, and the Baltic States in particular. What he tells us about Timo's experience of imprisonment and solitary confinement has a very strong sense of personal experience about it.
I found this slightly unsatisfying in narrative terms because Kross is rather reluctant to go beyond the things we have actual historical evidence for, so for instance Jakob's imaginative solution to the mystery of Timo's death is only put forward as a very tentative hypothesis, and not followed up in any way. But it is very strong in giving us a picture of the social situation in Baltic states in the early nineteenth century and in analysing the complicated intersections between protest against an oppressive regime and real or simulated madness. show less
The Lost Jaan Kross Verse-Novel
Review of the Loomingu Raamatukogu paperback (2020) edited from previously unpublished notebooks (c 1952-1954) and with an Afterword by Jaan Undusk
Tiit Pagu is the newly discovered verse-novel that Jaan Kross (1920-2017) worked on during his Siberian exile in Krasnoyarsk Krai during the years 1952-1954 after having already served 5 years from 1947-1951 in a prison labour camp in the Komi region for his anti-Soviet activities during the early 1940’s. Kross was show more able to return to Estonia in 1954 after Stalin’s death in 1953 had allowed for an amnesty. He became generally known as a poet in the late 1950’s with his solo debut of Söerikastaja (The Coal Concentrator) (1958) and throughout the 1960’s until his first major historical novel Kolme katku vahel. Balthasar Russowi romaan, I-IV (Between Three Plagues. A Novel about Balthasar Russow, I-IV) was released in stages from 1970 to 1980. From that point onwards, Kross’s major output were novels which usually featured protagonists associated with Estonian history and about their stresses and conflicts of living and working under autocratic regimes in prior historical eras. These works thus managed to avoid directly criticizing the Soviet Russian occupation of Estonia by disguising it in the problems of earlier occupations of which Estonia had a several hundred year history to draw upon.
Much of what we can now know about Tiit Pagu has been unearthed from Kross’s correspondence by Jaan Undusk, the editor and the writer of the Afterword in this newly published edition. Kross himself was entirely silent about the work in his own memoirs about his early years up to 1960 in Kallid kaasteelised I (Dear Companions, Volume 1) (2003). Even the reason for his disavowal of the work has to be speculated on, whether it was embarrassment about its youthful arrogance or about the work’s seeming sympathy to the communist proletariat.
Tiit Pagu can be seen as both an homage and an attempt to out-Onegin Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin (1833). Onegin consists of 389 fourteen-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme of "AbAbCCddEffEgg." Pagu, as we now have it, had a projected 267+ 18-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme of “a(3)Ba(3)BcDcDEEFgFghIIh” (I don’t know how to write subscripts in LibraryThing, so the (3)s after the lowercase a’s are to signify that the rhymes are 3 syllables in length). Otherwise the Capital letters signify 1 syllable rhymes and the lowercase letters signify 2 syllable rhymes in both Onegin and Pagu.
I call it “projected” for Pagu as there are several dozen stanzas missing in the recovered work including a supposed 8th Chapter of stanzas 220-250 which is entirely missing. Whether this is an aspect to the homage to Pushkin’s missing original 8th chapter of “Onegin’s Journey” or whether that part of Pagu is truly lost is unknown.
It is the masterful and inventive rhyming of Pagu that is its chief delight. Kross expands his source rhyming vocabulary considerably by also drawing on several foreign languages such as English, French, Greek, German, Latin and Russian. It is rather a joy to read it out loud. All of that combined with Undusk’s very thorough Afterword made this a real discovery and an easy 5 rating.
For the curiosity of non-Estonian readers, I have translated Undusk’s plot summary below:
Trivia and Links
* A member of an Estonian fraternal student organization, derived from the German Student Corps.
** Viktor Kingissepp (1888-1922) was an early Estonian communist leader.
The Loomingu Raamatukogu (The Creation Library) is a modestly priced one-time Estonian literary weekly paperback (from 1957 to 1994) which now publishes 40 issues a year as of 1995. It is a great source for discovery as its relatively cheap prices (currently 3 to 5€ per issue) allow for access to a multitude of international writers in Estonian translation and of shorter works by Estonian authors themselves. These include poetry, theatre, essays, short stories, novellas and novels (the lengthier works are usually parcelled out over several issues).
For a complete listing of all works issued to date by Loomingu Raamatukogu see Estonian Wikipedia at: https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loomingu_Raamatukogus_ilmunud_teoste_loend_aastak%... show less
Review of the Loomingu Raamatukogu paperback (2020) edited from previously unpublished notebooks (c 1952-1954) and with an Afterword by Jaan Undusk
Tiit Pagu is the newly discovered verse-novel that Jaan Kross (1920-2017) worked on during his Siberian exile in Krasnoyarsk Krai during the years 1952-1954 after having already served 5 years from 1947-1951 in a prison labour camp in the Komi region for his anti-Soviet activities during the early 1940’s. Kross was show more able to return to Estonia in 1954 after Stalin’s death in 1953 had allowed for an amnesty. He became generally known as a poet in the late 1950’s with his solo debut of Söerikastaja (The Coal Concentrator) (1958) and throughout the 1960’s until his first major historical novel Kolme katku vahel. Balthasar Russowi romaan, I-IV (Between Three Plagues. A Novel about Balthasar Russow, I-IV) was released in stages from 1970 to 1980. From that point onwards, Kross’s major output were novels which usually featured protagonists associated with Estonian history and about their stresses and conflicts of living and working under autocratic regimes in prior historical eras. These works thus managed to avoid directly criticizing the Soviet Russian occupation of Estonia by disguising it in the problems of earlier occupations of which Estonia had a several hundred year history to draw upon.
Much of what we can now know about Tiit Pagu has been unearthed from Kross’s correspondence by Jaan Undusk, the editor and the writer of the Afterword in this newly published edition. Kross himself was entirely silent about the work in his own memoirs about his early years up to 1960 in Kallid kaasteelised I (Dear Companions, Volume 1) (2003). Even the reason for his disavowal of the work has to be speculated on, whether it was embarrassment about its youthful arrogance or about the work’s seeming sympathy to the communist proletariat.
Tiit Pagu can be seen as both an homage and an attempt to out-Onegin Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin (1833). Onegin consists of 389 fourteen-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme of "AbAbCCddEffEgg." Pagu, as we now have it, had a projected 267+ 18-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme of “a(3)Ba(3)BcDcDEEFgFghIIh” (I don’t know how to write subscripts in LibraryThing, so the (3)s after the lowercase a’s are to signify that the rhymes are 3 syllables in length). Otherwise the Capital letters signify 1 syllable rhymes and the lowercase letters signify 2 syllable rhymes in both Onegin and Pagu.
I call it “projected” for Pagu as there are several dozen stanzas missing in the recovered work including a supposed 8th Chapter of stanzas 220-250 which is entirely missing. Whether this is an aspect to the homage to Pushkin’s missing original 8th chapter of “Onegin’s Journey” or whether that part of Pagu is truly lost is unknown.
It is the masterful and inventive rhyming of Pagu that is its chief delight. Kross expands his source rhyming vocabulary considerably by also drawing on several foreign languages such as English, French, Greek, German, Latin and Russian. It is rather a joy to read it out loud. All of that combined with Undusk’s very thorough Afterword made this a real discovery and an easy 5 rating.
For the curiosity of non-Estonian readers, I have translated Undusk’s plot summary below:
Let's briefly summarize the plot of the piece. Korporant* Tiit Pagu is attracted to Lo Tarvel, an medical student, who gives him an odd operational task one day: Tiit is to go on a 50-kilometer ski trip from Tartu to the nearby Taadi farm to secretly deliver a letter to someone named Enn Karrus. On his return to Tartu, Tiit accidentally kills Ott Rammul, an agent of the political police (aka The PolPol) who has followed him. Tiit realizes that Lo is associated with the underground communist movement, and, as an involuntary murderer, he must now escape. Lo secures a place of refuge for him in Tallinn with an old revolutionary worker named Jaan Raud. Thanks to Raud, Tiit learns the works of Marx, Lenin and Kingissepp** in his spare time and develops a practical proletarian worldview while also doing basic work in a metal factory. Under the pseudonym of Ants Tamm, he returns to public life in June 1940, when both the blue-black-and-white flag of the Republic of Estonia and the blood-red flag of the Soviet Union are hanging on the wall of the Tartu town hall. It is time for a decisive choice. And this is where the novel ends. - excerpt translated from pgs. 154-155 in Jaan Undusk’s Afterword to Tiit Pagu.
Trivia and Links
* A member of an Estonian fraternal student organization, derived from the German Student Corps.
** Viktor Kingissepp (1888-1922) was an early Estonian communist leader.
The Loomingu Raamatukogu (The Creation Library) is a modestly priced one-time Estonian literary weekly paperback (from 1957 to 1994) which now publishes 40 issues a year as of 1995. It is a great source for discovery as its relatively cheap prices (currently 3 to 5€ per issue) allow for access to a multitude of international writers in Estonian translation and of shorter works by Estonian authors themselves. These include poetry, theatre, essays, short stories, novellas and novels (the lengthier works are usually parcelled out over several issues).
For a complete listing of all works issued to date by Loomingu Raamatukogu see Estonian Wikipedia at: https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loomingu_Raamatukogus_ilmunud_teoste_loend_aastak%... show less
In an effort to widen the geographical spread of my reading, I picked a bunch of writers from random countries to try. One of them was Jaan Kross from Estonia. I’ll admit to knowing nothing about Kross, or indeed Estonian literature, when buying the book; and, to be honest, I’m not a great deal wiser now. Kross apparently specialised in historical fiction set in Estonia’s past, and his best-known work is the Between Three Plagues trilogy set in the sixteenth century. The stories in The show more Conspiracy, however, are set shortly before, and during World War 2, in German-occupied Estonia, and are told in the first person by Peeter Mirk, a stand-in for Kross himself. The stories are rich in period and place detail (so much so, each stories has end-notes… even though some of the glossed terms are later explained in the narrative). In one story, Mirk persuades an old university friend to desert the German not-so-voluntary Hilfswilliger levy corps, only for Mirk’s plans to see his friend off to Finland fall apart, but so putting his friend in his debt that the friend takes a stupidly risky route of his own choosing and dies in the attempt. In another, Mirk is attempting his own escape from Nazi-occupied Estonia, but the boat he is aboard is caught by a German patrol boat. Mirk has with him the manuscript of his first novel, which is highly critical of the Nazis. He throws his suitcase overboard, but the Germans manage to retrieve it. But there’s nothing in the suitcase to identify the owner (not even a name on the manuscript), except for… a collectible book given to him by a friend in lieu of payment for a debt moments before they boarded the boat to Finland which has an ex libris sticker giving that friend’s name. If Mirk says nothing, then his friend will be executed… There are half a dozen stories in the collection, and they’re well-written and interesting. I doubt I’ll dash out and buy something else by Kross to read – have you seen the size of my TBR? – but at some later date I might give something else by him a go. show less
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