Andrus Kivirähk
Author of The Man Who Spoke Snakish
About the Author
Works by Andrus Kivirähk
Õlle kõrvale 2 copies
A Brave Woman 1 copy
Sügise teistmoodi lood 1 copy
Cataldili Konusan Son Insan 1 copy
Looming 1/2016 — Contributor — 1 copy
Listopadowe porzeczki 1 copy
Talupojad tantsivad prillid ees : näidend kahes vaatuses viiele mees- ja kolmele naisnäitlejale (2021) 1 copy, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Kivirähk, Andrus
- Legal name
- Kivirähk, Andrus
- Birthdate
- 1970-08-17
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Estonia
- Associated Place (for map)
- Estonia
Members
Reviews
Talupojad tantsivad prillid ees : näidend kahes vaatuses viiele mees- ja kolmele naisnäitlejale by Andrus Kivirähk
Peasants Dance Wearing Glasses
Review of the original Estonian language edition published by Eesti Draamateater (2021)
Peasants Dance Wearing Glasses is a 2 Act / 9 Scene farce by the popular Estonian writer Andrus Kivirähk (author of the widely translated The Man Who Spoke Snakish (2007)) written for the Eesti Draamateater (Estonian Drama Theatre) company. During the course of the play, the 8 actors play different roles in each of the 9 scenes, so it is somewhat of a sketch comedy.
Each scene approaches the Estonian attitude to the history of its Baltic-German landowner class from a different angle and time period, not always in chronological order. The landowner class, even if some were of Nordic or Russian heritage, has become inextricably associated with the Germans, as they were the primary lords and landowners after the Teutonic Crusades in the 13th century, and persisted over centuries under various regimes such as the Danes, Swedes, Russian Tsars etc. The Estonian colloquialism "Saks" for the landowner gentry is therefore also the source of the Estonian words for German and Germany i.e. "Sakslane" and "Saksamaa".
Mild spoilers: I discuss the setups of each scene without too many specifics, but some may consider these to be spoilers, so I've blocked it accordingly.
Scene 1: Opens on (presumably, as no date is given) the 1905 attempted uprising against the landowners and Russian Tsar (part of the 1905 Revolution) when Baltic manor houses were torched and looted. An Estonian woman rescues a gentry baby to raise as her own.
Scene 2: A manor bailiff is teaching educated German words to the Estonian peasants on the manor which is resented by some farmworkers.
Scene 3: An Estonian family is visited by the Ghosts of the Future who rave about international cuisines, while the family grandmother tries to insist on the family eating peasant gruel.
Scene 4: A Estonian mouse (played by a human in a mouse costume) and a peasant savour the cheeses and the books available at the master's manor house and scoff at their friends and family who don't appreciate the finer things.
Scene 5: An Estonian peasant comes home to his family with the idea of building a toilet in the farmhouse just like there is in the master's manor. The family refuses to have a room dedicated to defecation inside their home, but acquiesces to a separate outhouse.
Scene 6: An Estonian dreams of becoming a "korporant" (a member of a German university fraternity organization) and is mocked by his family for it.
Scene 7: Estonian schoolkids mock a fellow student who doesn't have a father i.e. he is the bastard child of the landowner.
Scene 8: Set in the 1960s, an Estonian mother comes to babysit for her daughter & son-in-law and disparages their modern customs while extolling those of her own heritage during the Baltic German era.
Scene 9: Set in the present day. An Estonian woman returns with her son (who is a descendant of the baby in Scene 1) to visit her ancestral farm home. The son has no appreciation for the rustic life and is somewhat disturbed by it.
Peasants Dance Wearing Glasses was entertaining and definitely funny in its absurdity, which is a characteristic of Kivirähk. The paperback was illustrated with a generous (30+) number of Black & White photographs from the Eesti Draamateater production.
Theatre Reviews or Articles
Author: Everything good about Estonia has been taken from the Germans at ERR (Estonian Public Broadcasting), June 11, 2021.
Trivia and Link
Eesti Draamateater staged Talupojad tantsivad prillid ees in the summer of 2021 and they posted a trailer for the production on YouTube here. show less
Review of the original Estonian language edition published by Eesti Draamateater (2021)
Everyone knows the lines of the song ‘the manors are burning, the gentry are dying, we get the woods and the land’, but a somewhat different and more polysemantic version has also been recorded from the sayings of the people – ‘the manors are burning, the gentry are dying, the peasants dance wearing glasses’.show more
On the one hand, of course, it expressly describes looting
– when the gentry have been despoiled or bumped off, the victorious peasant takes the gentry’s eye glasses from his nose and makes off with them to his abode together with the rest of his booty. On the other hand, eye glasses also symbolise culture and eruditeness – in other words, the lines of the song imply that the peasants become the heirs of the gentry and thereafter pass on the gentry’s values.
And that is indeed how things have gone. We have borrowed words and food recipes from the gentry, learned manners and polite behaviour from them, read their books, and copied them in the lives of our students and in how we maintain our households. We are admittedly Estonians, the descendants of peasants, but we wear glasses that we have pinched from the gentry and we look at the world through them without actually noticing that ourselves anymore. - translation of the Estonian language synopsis. (English translation sourced from Eesti Draamateater)
Peasants Dance Wearing Glasses is a 2 Act / 9 Scene farce by the popular Estonian writer Andrus Kivirähk (author of the widely translated The Man Who Spoke Snakish (2007)) written for the Eesti Draamateater (Estonian Drama Theatre) company. During the course of the play, the 8 actors play different roles in each of the 9 scenes, so it is somewhat of a sketch comedy.
Each scene approaches the Estonian attitude to the history of its Baltic-German landowner class from a different angle and time period, not always in chronological order. The landowner class, even if some were of Nordic or Russian heritage, has become inextricably associated with the Germans, as they were the primary lords and landowners after the Teutonic Crusades in the 13th century, and persisted over centuries under various regimes such as the Danes, Swedes, Russian Tsars etc. The Estonian colloquialism "Saks" for the landowner gentry is therefore also the source of the Estonian words for German and Germany i.e. "Sakslane" and "Saksamaa".
Mild spoilers: I discuss the setups of each scene without too many specifics, but some may consider these to be spoilers, so I've blocked it accordingly.
Scene 1: Opens on (presumably, as no date is given) the 1905 attempted uprising against the landowners and Russian Tsar (part of the 1905 Revolution) when Baltic manor houses were torched and looted. An Estonian woman rescues a gentry baby to raise as her own.
Scene 2: A manor bailiff is teaching educated German words to the Estonian peasants on the manor which is resented by some farmworkers.
Scene 3: An Estonian family is visited by the Ghosts of the Future who rave about international cuisines, while the family grandmother tries to insist on the family eating peasant gruel.
Scene 4: A Estonian mouse (played by a human in a mouse costume) and a peasant savour the cheeses and the books available at the master's manor house and scoff at their friends and family who don't appreciate the finer things.
Scene 5: An Estonian peasant comes home to his family with the idea of building a toilet in the farmhouse just like there is in the master's manor. The family refuses to have a room dedicated to defecation inside their home, but acquiesces to a separate outhouse.
Scene 6: An Estonian dreams of becoming a "korporant" (a member of a German university fraternity organization) and is mocked by his family for it.
Scene 7: Estonian schoolkids mock a fellow student who doesn't have a father i.e. he is the bastard child of the landowner.
Scene 8: Set in the 1960s, an Estonian mother comes to babysit for her daughter & son-in-law and disparages their modern customs while extolling those of her own heritage during the Baltic German era.
Scene 9: Set in the present day. An Estonian woman returns with her son (who is a descendant of the baby in Scene 1) to visit her ancestral farm home. The son has no appreciation for the rustic life and is somewhat disturbed by it.
Peasants Dance Wearing Glasses was entertaining and definitely funny in its absurdity, which is a characteristic of Kivirähk. The paperback was illustrated with a generous (30+) number of Black & White photographs from the Eesti Draamateater production.
Theatre Reviews or Articles
Author: Everything good about Estonia has been taken from the Germans at ERR (Estonian Public Broadcasting), June 11, 2021.
Trivia and Link
Eesti Draamateater staged Talupojad tantsivad prillid ees in the summer of 2021 and they posted a trailer for the production on YouTube here. show less
Real Rating: 4.75* of five
The Publisher Says: The runaway Estonian bestseller tells the imaginative and moving story of a boy tasked with preserving ancient traditions in the face of modernity.
Set in a fantastical version of medieval Estonia, The Man Who Spoke Snakish follows a young boy, Leemet, who lives with his hunter-gatherer family in the forest and is the last speaker of the ancient tongue of snakish, a language that allows its speakers to command all animals. But the forest is show more gradually emptying as more and more people leave to settle in villages, where they break their backs tilling the land to grow wheat for their "bread" (which Leemet has been told tastes horrible) and where they pray to a god very different from the spirits worshipped in the forest's sacred grove.
With lothario bears who wordlessly seduce women, a giant louse with a penchant for swimming, a legendary flying frog, and a young charismatic viper named Ints, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is a totally inventive novel for readers of David Mitchell, Sjón, and Terry Pratchett.
I RECEIVED A COPY FROM MY SISTER AS A GIFT. THANK YOU!
My Review: Look at that list of comps! Those're huge shoes to fill. They were even huger ten years ago when this talky, slow-paced book came out.
Ten years on, how does the read hold up? I have to get rid of a lot of my books now that I'm unable to hold tree-books open any longer, and the tech aids to doing that are not usable in the tiny space I live in. So I'm revisiting a few I liked and then letting them go to new lovers.
My sister blew my mind by telling me, after I got this book from her, that our ancestry is part Estonian! I'm still in slight shock. I wonder if that's the reason I resonated on some core level to this fantastical, almost allegorical, tale of the end of the world and the birth of modernity. I'll never know but I'm leaning that way...the pace of the story is slow, builds on itself as characters...maybe the best ones not even human...sinuously glide, powerfully stomp, and ethereally appear at various times during Leemet's long defense of his doomed paradise.
In the best tradition of the fairy tale, the origin myth, Leemet's life is either impossibly long or Time isn't what we experience in our limited lives. As the relentless Germans, The Hansa in our terms, bring their crosses, their monasteries, and their god to Leemet's pagan world of bears that seduce the human women with the greatest of ease and our brother hominins who're blessed with tails. The retreating pagan world is beaten back deeper and deeper into the firest while humans chop it down to farm wheat for the Germans' awful-tasting "bread" that they feed to their monks. Leemet can't really understand the idea of "monks"—why would his fellow humabs long to be castrati to sing beautiful music for monks when snakish commands all nature to bend to Man's will? Why abandon the beautiful Ints, their viper-selves have been with humankind forever? But the pagans lose battles, endure slaughter (ethnic cleansing we'd call it if it happened now, with a side order of jihad) as their ways fall before the new world order.
Told in well-honed, pointedly crafted words, there's a sad miasma of regret in Kivirähk's tale of the essential human conflict: conquest, supplantation, genocidal destruction. There is no doubt that Kivirähk is not in favor of the new world being born, and is satirically critical of those who accept the yoke of becoming farmers for the foreigners. He satirizes the "but this is how we've always done things" crowd just as harshly, just as facetiously; the target is human nature in each snarky aside, each minatory judgment. (I'm a little anachronistic in using the sixteenth-century "minatory" but I don't know an older word for "threatening, scolding, accusing.")
I ate this story up, like the entire nation of Estonia did...it's their bestselling novel ever, there's a board game based on it, this is their country's Lord of the Rings only not so tedious. If there's anything I know about publishing, though, the failure to catch fire in the US market means it will be ten more years before we can even hope to see another Kivirähk title in translation. Too bad...this would make an *a*maz*ing* animated feature that would take Estonia and France, where its success was greater than the Anglophone world, by storm. That would've made a wide, smooth road for other works by this intense, inventive, talented world-builder.
Don't hesitate to get a copy of whatever edition you can best afford. show less
The Publisher Says: The runaway Estonian bestseller tells the imaginative and moving story of a boy tasked with preserving ancient traditions in the face of modernity.
Set in a fantastical version of medieval Estonia, The Man Who Spoke Snakish follows a young boy, Leemet, who lives with his hunter-gatherer family in the forest and is the last speaker of the ancient tongue of snakish, a language that allows its speakers to command all animals. But the forest is show more gradually emptying as more and more people leave to settle in villages, where they break their backs tilling the land to grow wheat for their "bread" (which Leemet has been told tastes horrible) and where they pray to a god very different from the spirits worshipped in the forest's sacred grove.
With lothario bears who wordlessly seduce women, a giant louse with a penchant for swimming, a legendary flying frog, and a young charismatic viper named Ints, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is a totally inventive novel for readers of David Mitchell, Sjón, and Terry Pratchett.
I RECEIVED A COPY FROM MY SISTER AS A GIFT. THANK YOU!
My Review: Look at that list of comps! Those're huge shoes to fill. They were even huger ten years ago when this talky, slow-paced book came out.
Ten years on, how does the read hold up? I have to get rid of a lot of my books now that I'm unable to hold tree-books open any longer, and the tech aids to doing that are not usable in the tiny space I live in. So I'm revisiting a few I liked and then letting them go to new lovers.
My sister blew my mind by telling me, after I got this book from her, that our ancestry is part Estonian! I'm still in slight shock. I wonder if that's the reason I resonated on some core level to this fantastical, almost allegorical, tale of the end of the world and the birth of modernity. I'll never know but I'm leaning that way...the pace of the story is slow, builds on itself as characters...maybe the best ones not even human...sinuously glide, powerfully stomp, and ethereally appear at various times during Leemet's long defense of his doomed paradise.
In the best tradition of the fairy tale, the origin myth, Leemet's life is either impossibly long or Time isn't what we experience in our limited lives. As the relentless Germans, The Hansa in our terms, bring their crosses, their monasteries, and their god to Leemet's pagan world of bears that seduce the human women with the greatest of ease and our brother hominins who're blessed with tails. The retreating pagan world is beaten back deeper and deeper into the firest while humans chop it down to farm wheat for the Germans' awful-tasting "bread" that they feed to their monks. Leemet can't really understand the idea of "monks"—why would his fellow humabs long to be castrati to sing beautiful music for monks when snakish commands all nature to bend to Man's will? Why abandon the beautiful Ints, their viper-selves have been with humankind forever? But the pagans lose battles, endure slaughter (ethnic cleansing we'd call it if it happened now, with a side order of jihad) as their ways fall before the new world order.
Told in well-honed, pointedly crafted words, there's a sad miasma of regret in Kivirähk's tale of the essential human conflict: conquest, supplantation, genocidal destruction. There is no doubt that Kivirähk is not in favor of the new world being born, and is satirically critical of those who accept the yoke of becoming farmers for the foreigners. He satirizes the "but this is how we've always done things" crowd just as harshly, just as facetiously; the target is human nature in each snarky aside, each minatory judgment. (I'm a little anachronistic in using the sixteenth-century "minatory" but I don't know an older word for "threatening, scolding, accusing.")
I ate this story up, like the entire nation of Estonia did...it's their bestselling novel ever, there's a board game based on it, this is their country's Lord of the Rings only not so tedious. If there's anything I know about publishing, though, the failure to catch fire in the US market means it will be ten more years before we can even hope to see another Kivirähk title in translation. Too bad...this would make an *a*maz*ing* animated feature that would take Estonia and France, where its success was greater than the Anglophone world, by storm. That would've made a wide, smooth road for other works by this intense, inventive, talented world-builder.
Don't hesitate to get a copy of whatever edition you can best afford. show less
This book is unlike anything else I've ever read. It is a vividly painted, grotesque, and tactile tale that skewers and parallels the nostalgic traps of blind tradition it portrays. I enjoyed most of it immensely, and I'm curious how much was the author's own creation, and how much is rooted in Estonian folklore. I would be interested in reading more translations of Kivarahk's work.
Every time the irresistibly seductive nature of bears came up, I giggled aloud.
Every time the irresistibly seductive nature of bears came up, I giggled aloud.
This book is unlike anything I have ever read. Beneath a phantasmagoric story, a critique of organized religion and a herd-like behavior of people, you have a representation of life as a sequence of losses and attempts to deal with them. Some losses are purely individual in character and some are collapses of entire traditions, wiping out of collective memory, tectonic social adjustments. I felt like we, those who still read and attempt to discover a deeper sense behind the crawling symbols show more on paper, are the last survivors of such a tradition, we are speaking snakish, there are fewer of us every year and soon there will be no one left. show less
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- Works
- 66
- Members
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- Rating
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