Why Estonian writer Jan Kross's historical fiction is worth reading in India today

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20-05-2025

To Eastern readers of European history the Baltic states seem like tiny, almost invisible threads in the larger historical and intellectual tapestry of that continent. This is because their notion of Europe is overwhelmingly of big powers such as France and Germany, with Russia – because of its influence and size – as the only 'eastern' country in it. The histories of the smaller states, though, show that they have obstinately refused to be pushed into the backwaters, becoming nations in their own right. The struggles of Estonia, for instance, show an indigenous people subjugated at different times by Germans, Danes, Swedes, and Russians, making the whole swathe of Livonia (as it was once called) almost a playground for colonial powers killing each other in an internecine effort to enslave Estonians. The writers of the Baltic region, mostly unfamiliar to readers in Asia, have recorded the histories of such struggles in enthralling epics, powerful poetry, and unputdownable novels. Without doubt one of their greatest poet-writers is Jaan Kross (1920–2007), whose epic trilogy Between Three Plagues has recently been magnificently translated into English by Merike Lepasaar Beecher.
Kross's work is a torrent of stories that convey cultural traditions which pre-dated, resisted, and ultimately refused integration into hegemonic European moulds. He wrote many of his novels when Estonia was part of the Soviet Union, and his own life was fashioned by the tyranny of that occupation. Having survived the Nazis over the early 1940s, he was deported to Russian labour camps in 1946 and only returned to Estonia's capital, Tallinn, in 1954. So his stories of totalitarian regimes and colonial oppression were close to the skin of his own experiences. After his return from incarceration, he wrote historical novels, using the past as a vehicle to communicate its continuity as contemporary reality. The shadow of some oppressive regime or the other was never really absent from Kross' life, save for his last fifteen years or so.
In India, this kind of gloomy shadow continues to grow at an alarming pace. We have, in fact, reached a point where the fear of action against us and our institutions has forced many of us to self-censor our writings and public interventions. What has just happened to Ali Khan Mahmudabad will deepen that fear. Yet, even while Kross may not have used his pen in the way that Ali has used his Facebook page, he would surely have applauded his courage in communicating his heartfelt concerns about contemporary reality. The epic trilogy Between Three Plagues.
If Kross is one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, his most widely read work is The Czar's Madman, which appeared in 1978. It has been translated from Estonian into many languages and first appeared in English in 1992. Set in his native Estonia, the novel interweaves its history with, on the one hand, that of Tsarist Russia of which it was a part, and on the other with Western Europe, where the French Revolution had resulted in movements and personalities pitted against many varieties of social tyranny. Kross' hero in this novel, Timotheus von Bock (called Timo), is one such personality, an eccentrically modern nobleman keen on transforming his country estate, and beyond that his region, into an egalitarian, enlightened space. Timo's valiant struggle to prove himself a model of the ideal of equality, both domestically and politically, is a story told by his brother-in-law Jakob Mattick, whose narration takes the form of a journal in which history and literature are blurred. Sprinkled through the journal are untranslated German, Latin, and French words and phrases, consolidating the impression of a fictional idiom in which the past and present are made to mingle.
Timo seeks to transcend social barriers by marrying a peasant girl, Eeva. But he also wants her transformed socially upwards, to which end he has her educated via an internship with a scholarly cleric to acquire 'good manners, foreign languages and book learning'. Notwithstanding the scepticism with which his marriage is greeted by his aristocratic peers as well as her peasant family, it is a relationship that Timo sees as one of equals cemented by the sharing of books, music, and ideas. He asks her, for instance, to go to the university library and get Thomas More's Utopia – but the German edition, so that she too is able to read it. The 'peasant question' figures also go beyond just educating and marrying a peasant girl. Trips to Tartu involve evening congregations of aristocrats and literati, and the condition of peasants in Livonia dominates male conversations. During one such conversation, Timo turns the light inwards and points to how the most terrible things have been done to peasants, even by those gathered. The argument is Tolstoyan and biblical: 'We are, in corpore , grinding Christ's face into the dirt every day, every moment every minute. By what are we doing to our peasantry …'
And that is not all; far from it, in fact. As a highly decorated army officer and personal friend of Tsar Alexander I – who has asked Timo to distinguish himself from the sycophants at court by being unflinchingly honest – Timo takes the monarch at his word and writes a furious critique of the horrors of the tsar's rule. He then sends his tract to the tsar. Timo's tract, worded with a candour unheard of when addressing a king, is in its impulse bitingly Voltairean, more demand than appeal. It argues the need for a constitutional monarchy, the replacement of imperial decrees with laws.
But the implementation of noble ideals involves having to confront difficult ground realities that resist change – as Timo discovers to his cost, both politically and domestically. His idealism estranges him radically from the tsar and his own son, and in less wrenching ways from his wife and brother-in-law who are often thrown by his insistent notions of what is socially just and virtuous, and all that must be done to make their world a less unequal place. His determination verges on obstinacy and makes him uncompromisingly courageous as well as flawed. His wife emerges from her humble origins to show herself in every way his equal, and by her Stoic endurance of his incarceration and the care she takes to rehabilitate him after it, his superior. The intelligence, the passion, and the energy with which the couple together face their impossible circumstances make the many larger social and political struggles in the novel seem tragically and devastatingly human.
The tale of hapless and heroic Estonians in the time of Russian occupation during the early 19th century could well serve as a 20th-century commentary on the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union. But Kross tells his story by oscillating between the confidential and personal tone of his diarist-narrator on the one hand, and the incendiary-proclamatory rage of his impassioned revolutionary hero on the other. The technique works powerfully and may well be a reason for this novel – set in the romantically revolutionary age of Goethe and Beethoven and written in the age of Stalinist repression – to seem as much a part of those times as ours. Kross writes of the 'fate of a human being, and perhaps even the fate of the whole world (should that exist separately from human fate), all of it depends on small motions in space – on a stroke of the pen – a resounding word, a turn of the key, the swoosh of an axe blade, the flight of a bullet – ', the elliptical dashes of his long sentences inviting readers to insert their own experiences into the things left unsaid.
Closer home, the arrest of Ali Khan is one such experience in the life of Ashoka University, one which reveals what results from a 'small motion in space'. That is what makes this spectacular novel about life in and around one country estate in a little country prophetic and surprisingly relevant within a huge nation such as India. For, in our country, no less than in Estonia, the accretion of small moves by people in power can sweep aside the human rage against inequality and set aside the struggle of entire communities against oppressive regimes.
We're in luck to have a novel as good as this showing us where we may be headed.
Nayanjot Lahiri is Professor of History at Ashoka University. The views expressed here are the personal views of the author.