Novel
The Czar's Madman
Keisri hull
Jaan Kross · 1978
Synopsis
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, at the Livonian manor of Võisiku, Jakob Mättik keeps a diary. His sister Eeva, born a serf, has married the master of the house, Timotheus von Bock, an officer of great bravery and a familiar of Tsar Alexander I, who gave up a brilliant match for her. For a memorandum calling for the end of serfdom and for reforms, Bock spent nine years in the fortress of Schlüsselburg; he returned declared mad and confined to his estates, among spies. Jakob tries to understand whether he really is mad, and why he was shut away.
Context
The novel appeared in Tallinn in 1978. Its hero really lived, from 1787 to 1836, and most of the persons and facts he reports have been confirmed in the sources; only the diarist is invented. Under the cover of history, the book said about power what could not be written about a contemporary subject in Soviet Estonia, and its readers read it that way. It appeared in French with Robert Laffont in 1989, in the translation of Jean-Luc Moreau, in English in 1992, and counted in 2017 twenty-two languages of translation.
Who it is for
About four hundred pages in French, in the form of a diary. One should know that an afterword by the author separates history from invention.
Prizes and reception
Prize for the best foreign book in France in 1990; regarded as one of the best-known Estonian novels in the world.