The antic disposition of a Finno-Ugric novelist

Abstract

Of the cultural achievements of the three major Finno-Ugric peoples of Europe, that of the Estonians (on the northeastern shore of the Baltic Sea) is the least known in North America. This is particularly true of literature, which remained veritable terra incognita , at least in the United States, until New York Times Book Review carried, in January of 1993, highly favorable notice of novel by Jaan Kross called Czar's Madman (translated by Anselm Hollo and published by Pantheon Books of Random House). Times reviewer, W. S. Kuniczak, expresses sense of exhilaration at discovering new literature and calls the skillful, witty, disciplined and absorbing novel by Kross a major work of modern Eastern European fiction. Positive reviews appeared also in the London Times Literary Supplement and the Toronto Globe and Mail (Hollo's translation was published in England and in Canada as well as in the U. S.), but it was Kuniczak who, as if in passing, touched on what could conceivably be the underlying reason why the critics fell in love with this work. The plot of 'The Czar's Madman', writes Times reviewer, seems like something we have always known...; thus there is joy in the reading of this book that is like homecoming after long journey.1 task of discovering and mapping the Urheimat or archetypical literary homeland to which Kuniczak refers will undoubtedly provide work for future scholars. All that can be said at this time ( and notwithstanding the seemingly deliberate attempt by Kross to cover his tracks, as it were) is that certain internal structural patterns of Czar's Madman suggest parallels with Shakespeare's Hamlet. Like his protagonist in Czar's Madman , the real-life Baron Timotheus von Bock who visited England in 18 13, 2 Jaan Kross is proficient in English. Unlike the fictional Timo, whose collection of cookbooks includes several volumes in English but whose knowledge of imaginative literature is limited to Sir Thomas More's Utopia (which was originally published in Latin), Kross is very much at home in English letters. According to the official literary history of Estonia, he read Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe as boy. Later he translated Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as well as four plays by Shakespeare: Othello, Macbeth , Teinpest and Pericles ? Czar's Madman contains numerous references to things English. For example, the local social elite drink English punch, which had been introduced..., together with