This second volume of A.H. Tammsaare's monumental pentalogy portrays the education of Indrek who emerges here as the protagonist and will remain so throughout the next three volumes. This is a story of moving to the polyglot city and abandoning the countryside which at that time was the heartland of the Estonian language. This new environment is a vortex of prejudices and national rivalries nevertheless held together in practice by a strange and very human tolerance. Here Tammsaare writes with his trademark wit and deep understanding of human nature, and we find ourselves in the company of a vast gallery of larger-than-life characters who jostle, scheme and argue over both trivialities and the great issues of the human condition. They may do the latter out of their own intellectual narcissism or simply for the joy of debate, but the ensuing dialogues rival those of the great Russian novelists. The boarding school is as dysfunctional as any Dickensian one, but it is a great deal more benevolent. Russians, Germans, Poles, Latvians and Caucasians mix with the Estonian majority, speaking in a mix of Russian, German and Estonian, and somehow compromises are nearly always arrived at in spite of, or possibly because of some extraordinary theatrics, in which Mr Maurus must outperform not only all the other characters in the book but very probably all other celebrated headmasters created by European literature over the centuries. Indrek not only has to come to terms with this world so utterly unsuited to his shy and innocent rural upbringing, but he also has to deal with his first encounters with love and death.

About the Author
A.H. Tammsaare was born Anton Hansen in 1878 into a poor farming family. His father Peeter was able to buy a farm, though the land was either stony or marshy. His dreamy nature was accompanied by an aptitude for study, and the family decided a little late in his teenage years to fund his education and he went to secondary education in Tartu from 1898 to 1903. And from 1903 to 1905, he worked as an editor at the Tallinn newspaper, Teataja. In Tallinn he was able to witness the Russian Revolution of 1905. While many Estonian writers supported it in part as a means for their own emancipation from the empire and German landowners, Tammsaare took a more cautious approach, supporting some of the aims but rejecting violence. In 1907 he enrolled as a law student at Tartu University, but in 1911 he was unable to sit his finals, as he became very ill with tuberculosis. He was moved to Sochi on the Black Sea and then to the nearby Caucasus Mountains, where his condition improved. On his return to Estonia, he lived for six years on his brother's farm where he was again affected by illness. Unable to work, he threw himself into his studies and mastered foreign languages: English, French, Finnish and Swedish. After his marriage in 1920 to Kathe Veltman, he moved to Tallinn and embarked on the most productive period of his life. His greatest influences were the Russian classics of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Gogol, but his work also shows the influence of Oscar Wilde, Knut Hamsun and Andre Gide. He occupies a central role in the development of the Estonian novel and is a figure of European significance. He died in 1940, in the midst of the Republic's most difficult times.


Book Information
ISBN 9781913212339
Author Anton Hansen Tammsaare
Format Paperback
Page Count 480
Imprint Vagabond Voices
Publisher Vagabond Voices
Dimensions(mm) 210mm * 140mm * 34mm