Layers of the Past in Tallinn Historical Fiction: Jaan Kross and The Case of Balthasar Russow
Keywords:
Literary urban studies, cultural memory, literary geographies, Jaan Kross, Balthasar RussowAbstract
A tetralogy called Kolme katku vahel (Between Three Plagues: The Story of Balthasar Russow) by the Estonian author Jaan Kross was published in the 1970s. Kross’s aim in this historical novel sequence was to educate his readers about the history of Tallinn and to activate their cultural memory. Kross was inspired by three texts about Tallinn: Balthasar Russow’s Chronika der Provintz Lyffland (‘Chronicle of the province of Livonia’, 1578), a short story entitled ‘Katsumus’ (‘An ordeal’, 1947) published by the exiled Estonian writer Gert Helbemäe in 1947 in Sweden, and a hypothesis by the historian Paul Johansen proposing that the author of the chronicle, Russow, might have been the son of an Estonian wagoner from the Tallinn Vorstadt of Kalamaja. This article discusses how Jaan Kross’s novel differs from earlier fictional treatments by major Estonian novelists of the Baltic German past of Tallinn. Through its comparisons between the varied sources of a modern historical novel sequence, the article’s aim is to show how and why the main character of Kross’s tetralogy changed existing spatial perceptions of Tallinn by unearthing buried elements of the city’s history.References
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