Jaan Kross

Jaan Kross (1920-2007), Estonia.

Jaan Kross, poet, novelist and translator, was born in Tallinn, Estonia, during that country’s period of interwar independence; he began to publish in magazines by the time he was 16. He studied law and lectured for two years (1944-1946) at the University of Tartu. Kross was arrested as an Estonian patriot by the German army in 1944; in 1946 he was arrested by the Soviet secret police and spent eight years “interned” in the Komi and Krasnoyarsk regions. He was mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and on at least one occasion was told to wait by the phone for a call that did not come (evidently this is an unpleasant experience that a surprising number writers have once they reach a certain age andperceived level of significance). Kross received numerous honorary degrees and prestigious literary prizes, especially after Estonia's independence was restored in 1991; the translations of his work (the historical novels) into English date from after 1991.

Professor Martens’ Departure can be read as a moral autobiography of its narrator and hero, the pre-Revolutionary Estonian professor, government functionary and international mediator Friedrich (or Fred, or Fyodor) Martens, whose memory ranges widely over his past and over that of his sort-of namesake and possible past-life incarnation, a German professor Martens who lived nearly a century before, during a train trip that lasts less than one day “in real time.” Loosely based on a real historical figure, Martens has alwyas lived a double life, and Kross delicately traces its axes and oppositions, beginning at a somewhat ponderous pace that feels almost archaic to a reader today, but bringing everything together in an ending that has come to feel inevitable.

Many of Kross’s works have yet to be translated into English.

Course book: Professor Martens’ Departure, translated by Anselm Hollo.

Questions for reading:

• How does the pace of the book, both in its narrative tempo and in its revelation of essential information (the hero’s original name, etc.), impact your entry into its world as a reader?
• How much does the book teach the North American (or Western European) reader about Estonia, within the frame of the ignorance of Russian imperial society about Estonia and its people?
• What is the role of various foreign countries and/or their residents in the narrative?
• The famous Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn considered the Estonian patriots and peasants he met in the GULag camps to be models of a dignified life and bearers of a palatably democratic political alternative to Soviet oppression. Do you see any traces of a political or cultural alternative to Russia in the book's pre- Revolutionary political and cultural atmosphere? How does Martens fit here?
• How is it possible to write convincingly about another person’s innermost thoughts and physical sensations? How is it possible to write convincingly, from within one character’s perceptions and consciousness, about the end of that consciousness? From these and other points of view, how does Kross win your trust as a reader?
• Trace, as you read, your gradual acquaintance with Martens: when do you begin to sympathize and identify with him (if you do at all)? When does he reveal important facts about his own past and behavior to the reader, and to what extent does the reader begin to function as his judge or conscience?
• What does the author do to interest the reader in this person in a long-gone society so unfamiliar even to the people living in the same areas today? Why might Kross have chosen a pre-Revolutionary setting? How do the Russians in the story look?

Other books by Kross:

• Keisri hull,1978. The Czar’s Madman, translated by Anselm Hollo, 1993, available in Tripod.
• Vandenõu, The Conspiracy and Other Stories, translated by Anselm Hollo, 1995.
• Paigallend, 2002. Treading Air, translated by Eris Dickens, 2003.

Works about Kross:

Still no monograph on Kross in English -— it's the the fate of writers from “small nations.”

World Wide Web links about Kross:

http://www.einst.ee/publications/culture/jaankross.html

information and pictures

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Jaan%20Kross

informative, though the text is irritatingly disrupted by cross-linking

http://www.vm.ee/estonia/kar_173/3918.html

information and pictures

http://www.estlit.ee/index.php?id=646

information and pictures

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaan_Kross

includes a list of works (titles in Estonian and English translations where they exist)