Jaan Kross (1920–2007)

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 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.… (mer)

Reason read: Reading 1001, Estonian literature, historical fiction.
The background for the story; 1909 is the year four years after the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty, after the Russo-Japanese War in which at one blow the Japanese defeated Russia's navy. Professor Friedrich Fromhold Martens, an Estonian native. Martens became a professor of international law. Shortly after his career began, he was asked to serve the Czarist regime as an expert in treaties -- asked to put together a complete history of every treaty Russia and the Empire has ever been involved with -- all of this to aid in the decisions to be made in creating a treaty with the Japanese after Russia's defeat at their hands.

So this novel based on a real life individual explores the inner thought life the man. It also has flashbacks a century back to another Martens almost as if in parallel worlds.
This part made it hard to stay oriented to the story. All of the story occurs during a train ride from the professors home town to St. Petersburg but while the time is short, the story is very dense and hard to stay engaged. I think it was good to read it at this time when Russia is back in the news, has probably violated treaties and the US has violated treaties and wonder if we had a negotiator worth their weight, could we resolve this current event and are we at risk of taking on what other countries have previously failed.… (mer)

Estland -in de zestiende eeuw Lijfland genoemd- en met name haar hoofdstad Tallinn nemen in het leven van de hoofdpersoon van deze roman een belangrijke plaats in.
Rond deze Balthasar Russow - een chroniqueur en predikant die ook echt heeft bestaan-heeft de schrijver een imponerende historische roman gecomponeerd. Een omvangrijk werk van meer dan duizend bladzijden, geschreven in een prachtig proza met een verslavend lange verhaallijn. En inderdaad, al lezend vergeet je dat de roman speelt in een wereld van eeuwen geleden en raak je onder de indruk van de vertelkunst van de schrijver.

Een majestueus boek !

NB: ik had het als e-boek moeten kopen; door een gewicht van krap anderhalve kilo is deze pocket moeilijk hanteerbaar.… (mer)