Jaan Kross

Jaan Kross was born in Tallinn on 19 February 1920, the son of a factory foreman, and studied law at the University of Tartu from 1938 to 1944. Arrested by the Germans in 1944, then by the Soviet security service in 1946, he went through the camps of the Komi republic, where he worked in the coal mine, then internal exile in Krasnoyarsk krai, before returning to Tallinn in 1954. A poet first, then a novelist, proposed several times for the Nobel Prize, he was a Social Democrat member of parliament from 1992 to 1993, married the poet Ellen Niit as his third wife and died on 27 December 2007.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelThe Czar's MadmanKeisri hullJaan Kross · 1978Literature