Jaan Kross, _The Czar's Madman_, tr. Anselm Hollo

IT SO FELL out that I recently participated in a whirlwind two-week course on Estonian literature, and this was one of our novels. I had not so much as even heard of this writer before, but this is an astonishingly good book, a revelation for me.

The Estonian original was published in 1978, translated into English (twice) in the 1990s. It seems to be out of print at the moment -- I got a copy for, I think, one dollar plus shipping through abe.com.

It's an historical novel, and its main character is an actual historical figure, Timotheus von Bock, an Estonian nobleman who breathes in the winds of change of the early Napoleonic era and pledges his life to enlightenment and reform. He marries the woman he loves, even though she is a serf -- he has to purchase her first, in order to emancipate, then educate and wed her. Being one of Czar Alexander's most trusted companions, he hammers at the Czar to accept a constitution, create a legislature, and bring the institution of serfdom to an end. Alexander at length is mortally offended, and Timotheus is imprisoned. He is at first treated gently, to get him to recant, then brutally, with the same end in view, but he holds out, and is finally released on the grounds that he is insane. He comes home, under house arrest, obliged to do his best to maintain the pretense he is insane, for fear of being sent back to prison. Elaborate plans are made for him, his wife, and son to escape the country...

...well, I won't give away the whole thing. What's great about this book? For one thing, the evocation of the early 19th century. Timotheus before his imprisonment carries with him the electric air of Beethoven's Eroica and Shelley's Revolt of Islam, the idealism of characters like Tolstoy's Pierre and Calvino's baron in the trees.

The traumatized Timotheus is diminished but keeps his dignity, even reveals a steel core we might not have thought he had in the face of a monolithic, literal-minded authority that recognizes no acknowledgement short of perfect submission. In these parts of the novel, we're in the world of Darkness at Noon or The Joke, Timotheus reminding us of Nabokov's Krug or Malamud's Yakov Bok, but would either of those two have weighed the sweets of freedom against the taste of rowanberries, as Timotheus does in the novel's most wrenching scene?

And I haven't even mentioned the character Eeva, whose sufferings as the wife of the "madman" Kross neither conceals nor romanticizes, nor the sheer ingenuity of Kross's telling Timotheus's story through the diary of Eeva's brother.

This book really deserves to be better known. Do yourself a favor and find a copy.