The Ropewalker

by Jaan Kross, Merike Lepasaar Beecher

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

The first part in an epic historical trilogy - The Estonian answer to Wolf Hall - by the nation's greatest modern writer Jaan Kross's trilogy dramatises the life of the renowned Livonian Chronicler Balthasar Russow, whose greatest work described the effects of the Livonian War on the peasantry of what is now Estonia. Like Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, Russow is a diamond in the rough, a thoroughly modern man in an Early Modern world, rising from humble origins to greatness through wit and learning alone. As Livonia is used as a political football by the warring powers of Russia, Sweden, Poland and Lithuania, he continues to climb the greasy pole of power and influence. Even as a boy, Russow has the happy knack of being in the right place and saying the right thing at the right time. He is equally at home acting as friend and confidante to his ambitious patron and as champion for his humble rural relatives. Can anything halt his vertiginous rise? Like most young men he is prey to temptations of the flesh . . .

Release date: July 28, 2016

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 544

Sample

Between Three Plagues was written and first published in Soviet Estonia in four volumes, appearing one volume at a time in the decade from 1970 to 1980. It was the first of Jaan Kross’ many historical novels and the most expansive and ambitious of them. Unlike anything previously written in Estonia, it is both a vivid tapestry of historical personages and events and a searching, engaging portrayal of an individual life – a novel in the grand tradition of nineteenth-century European and Russian novels, combined with a Bildungsroman. Its subtitle is The Story of Balthasar Russow. Russow (c.1536–1600) lived in Old Livonia (the territory of present-day Estonia and Latvia). He is the author of a remarkable work: the Chronicle of the Province of Livonia, in which he recounts the history of Old Livonia from 1156 to 1583. Russow wrote the Chronicle during the Livonian Wars, which spanned the years from 1558 to 1583, and this twenty-five year period is its focus. Old Livonia was a battleground for warring powers, with Russia, Sweden, Denmark and Poland–Lithuania scheming and battling for dominion of this small corner of northern Europe. It was a terrible, turbulent time. As armies besieged and bombarded towns and ravaged the countryside, repeated outbreaks of plague and periods of famine devastated the populace. Russow was witness to it all, taking notes on everything he observed and everything he heard as he gathered information for his Chronicle. Central to Kross’ narrative is the story of how Russow’s Chronicle of the Province of Livonia came to be written. Jaan Kross has described it as “the first classic of Estonian literature”.

Kross considered Between Three Plagues his major work, with the greatest degree of identification between the main character and himself. In the memoirs that he wrote near the end of his life, he quips that he has asked himself: “Would I have undertaken that work if I had not come from the same part of town as my main character?” Kross did in fact see Russow as a kindred spirit, due in part to a serendipitous overlap of geographical and biographical details: they both spent a quiet, idyllic childhood “on the same spot of earth”, in the fishing village of Kalamaja, outside Old Tallinn; both saw their worlds shattered by war in their twenties; both had peasant relatives in the countryside and experienced the rift between townspeople and countryfolk. And both were writers in a society where there were dangers for writers. Kross saw Russow as a man with a mission: to record the truth of the historical events in Livonia at a time when the people of that land knew very little about their history, when it was dangerous to talk about historical truth, as it was for Jaan Kross when Estonia was part of the Soviet Union. Kross spoke about his interest in Balthasar Russow thus:

I was moved by what he attempted to do: he sought to become an educated person, in the sense of that word in his time, a time when the sum total of educated Estonians could be counted on ten fingers. And another thing: he wanted to preserve the truth, as he saw it, of course. And this is something that no-one with his background had ever attempted in this land . . . Furthermore, I saw an obligation and an irresistible opportunity to learn more about our sixteenth century – which was not very familiar territory for us. And this, like all fictional works based on historical topics, promised another opportunity for me to test my skills, to experience the kind of thrill an athlete feels before a sporting event. Take, for example, that old Roman dance, which was executed among swords set upright, their hilts fastened to the floor. The imagination of a novelist writing historical fiction has to dance a similar dance among the swords of the facts set into the floor of history. And the author must perform his dance – be he Clio’s half-sister or half-brother – without getting bloodied by the swords . . .

Between Three Plagues was written at a dark time in Estonian – and Russian – history. In Russia, Khrushchev’s Thaw was beginning to congeal, but the loosening of censorship that had occurred during the Thaw seemed to be holding and, as Jaan Kross put it, was “asking to be tested”. The opening up of Soviet cultural life that was to be brought about by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s was not yet conceivable. Estonia was ruled by functionaries loyal to the Soviet system. Independent Estonia as a nation with a history of its own was only a memory. Its blue–black– white flag was banned from public places and prohibited in private homes. This was the context in which Between Three Plagues was first read. The novel was was enthusiastically received. There were print runs of 32,000 for each volume, followed in the mid-eighties by two more editions.

A review in 1980 by the Estonian literary scholar Mall Jõgi, entitled Jaan Kross, Chronicler of the World, provides a sense of the importance of Kross’ writings to his compatriots, and of what he had achieved in the 1970s with his historical fiction. In addition to this monumental novel, he had written short stories and novellas about other figures from Estonian history. Mall Jõgi writes:

In the span of ten years, Jaan Kross has added to our bookshelves an entire little library of Estonia’s past. He has significantly influenced the understanding of the history of his country and changed it in many ways: he has replaced the picture before him, of the greyness and dreariness of a long, dark night of serfdom, with a colourful carousel – replaced dry facts with intriguing events, dull sophistry with spirited thought, shadowy figures with living beings. And he has done it in a way that everyone reads him with pleasure: pupils and teachers, casual readers and the literati, engineers and historians. They read and begin to see history as a something living, fascinating, progressing.

Jaan Kross had opened a window onto Estonian history and introduced his readers to memorable characters from their collective past. Although the events recounted in Between Three Plagues would not have been familiar to all Estonian readers, they were played out on a stage known to virtually the entire populace. The streets and towers and walls of Tallinn, as well as the surrounding countryside, the locations of battles, castles and other towns – were all familiar territory. The story of Balthasar Russow’s life is a vividly told, compelling story about a boy of peasant background who becomes Estonia’s first historian. Moreover, he is depicted as one of them. Russow’s Chronicle was what first piqued Kross’ interest in him, but documentary information about its author was sparse, and “everyone at the time, in 1963–64, thought Russow was German, historians too, even though he was born in Tallinn and was considered somewhat strange by fellow Germans because of his gruff criticism of men in power and his strangely benign attitudes toward the town’s Greys”. It was the evidence of Russow’s Estonian roots unearthed by historian Paul Johansen that confirmed Kross’ decision to write Between Three Plagues. Readers delighted too in finding parallels with their own time and its tribulations in some of the events depicted in the novel, events “sufficiently disguised in 400-year-old costume”, as Kross put it, to elude detection by censors.

History and Fiction: Facts and Imagination

What intrigued and gratified Jaan Kross when writing historical fiction was the opportunity “to conjure the reality of the past – in a real sense, an imperishable reality – back to life”. He formulated rules about the relationship between facts and invention in an historical novel. 1. The details of the novel’s setting must be specific and accurate (including the details of daily life). 2. The coordinates of the great sweep of historical and political events must also be true to historical facts. 3. The writer is free to imagine plausible scenarios for his characters. In the case of Balthasar Russow’s life and times, Kross observed that there was “the right amount of concrete information and the right amount of space for the imagination to spread its wings”.

Much is unknown about the historical Balthasar Russow, but there is some documentation, and Kross used all available records. Balthasar Russow was probably born in 1536 and died in 1600. He graduated from Tallinn’s town school in 1558, studied in Stettin (1558–62) and Wittenberg (1562–63), paid a brief visit to Bremen in 1563, returning then to Tallinn, where he became the pastor of Holy Ghost Church and where he lived until his death in 1600. There are records of his three marriages, of an argument with his father–in-law, and of the houses he lived in. On record, too, are the denunciations of his Chronicle by German gentry objecting to what they called Russow’s “heinous lies and slanders” against the nobles and his “unacceptable” expressions of sympathy for the peasants and the Greys (town-dwellers of peasant extraction). Russow’s Chronicle was for Kross an invaluable source, compensating for the sparseness of other documentation, for “it had to be – as every work is – a hidden picture puzzle of its author”.

Almost all the characters in Between Three Plagues are historical figures – whether cited in the Chronicle, in history books, or in archives. For some there is ample documentation, others are no more than a name in a registry. The only significant figure in the novel who is entirely fictional is Epp, Balthasar’s first and enduring love, a peasant girl who works on his aunt and uncle’s farm. Kross created her, he said, “to embody the nostalgic pull of the ancestral past – something so strong in Bal’s consciousness and subconscious, that it had to be represented by a concrete figure”. A recurrent theme in Jaan Kross’ fiction is that of divided loyalties and the struggle to define one’s identity – to determine where one belongs. Balthasar is torn between loyalty to his country relatives – whom he sees as part of himself, yet whose way of life he cannot embrace – and his desire to take advantage of the opportunities afforded in town: an education, a chance to achieve something, to become someone – opportunities not open to his relatives. It distresses him to realise, when still a scholar at the town school, that he has begun to look upon his country kin and their lives with a sense of pity and to view the life of the prominent, wealthy doctor in whose town house he lives with a kind of envy. In his heart he remains conflicted. But what he is ultimately able to give to his people, whom he has had to leave behind, is their history.

As for the setting of the novel, “the sixteenth-century context of Tallinn was right there and sufficiently colorful”. And Kross made the most of it. Tallinn is a commanding presence and so vividly delineated that critics have identified it as a “main character”. A longtime resident of Tallinn told me of seeing Jaan Kross’ tall, lanky figure roaming the streets in the 1960s and 1970s, head thrown back, stopping here and there to peer at the buildings of his hometown, seeming to fix in his mind the details of its roof-lines and doorways, its steeples and towers rising above its medieval walls, perhaps peopling the streets with figures of that earlier time in order to conjure onto the pages of his book the scenes that he saw in his mind’s eye. A traveller to Tallinn today could walk into the town of the novel. The buildings and streets of Balthasar Russow’s time are largely still there. The house Russow lived in – the Bishop’s House, identifiable by the fresco of the bishop high on its peaked façade – still stands at the edge of the Old Market. The Town Hall, where the councilmen debate the fate of Russow’s Chronicle, commands the marketplace as it has since the beginning of the fifteenth century. Looking across Town Hall Square, one can see the steeple of Holy Ghost Church, where Russow was pastor. And not far away, still standing, is St Olaf’s Church, believed to have been built in the twelfth century. From its steeple stretched the long rope on which the visiting Italian acrobats performed the heart-stopping, spellbinding feats described in the opening pages of the novel.

Narrative Devices and Prose Style

In both subject matter and prose style Between Three Plagues was a revelation and a new literary experience for its first readers. Kross’ prose is idiosyncratic – inventive, ruminative, highly descriptive – varied and vivid in both narration and representation. It is in some respects a realist novel, yet Kross employs several modernist literary devices – interior monologues, dream sequences and hallucinations, and alternating narrative voices and perspectives – which serve to reveal and dramatise the inner lives, the observations and judgements of his characters. Kross subscribed to the concept of “emotional memory” that informs Konstantin Stanislavski’s method of training actors to summon in themselves the emotional responses and behaviours of the characters they portray. “My main effort,” he said, “has been to get as close as possible to my characters, to inhabit their skin, and to act as they would have acted. As I imagine it, of course . . .” Kross’ descriptions of the scenes his characters inhabit are realistic and striking in their concrete detail. His powers of visualisation are extraordinary, and his goal is to enable the reader to “see” what he sees, to enter the setting that his words create. His careful attention to detail stems from a sense of what for him was an “obligation” to the reader: “If an historical novel is to summon a reader into the world of the past, it should be credible – as concretely imaginable and immediate as possible.”

Jaan Kross’ prose is not spare. Critics have remarked on his long – sometimes very long – sentences, written in a kind of ornate, baroque style, with their many subordinate clauses, elaborate descriptions and historical and literary allusions. Kross explains: “The historical subject matter of my novels demands longer sentences in order for my language to be more in tune with the modes of speech from the past . . . Some examples of the style of the Chronicle are reflected in the novel.” Furthermore, the interior monologues are in effect a “flow of thoughts, and best represented by a flow of words” that do not necessarily form complete sentences, but wander, with the pauses and breaks and changes of direction characteristic of the process of thinking.

A narrative device that Kross adapted from old chronicles and some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction is the synoptic heading that introduces each chapter. Most of them are written as a single long sentence, approximately like this: In somewhat archaic, quaint, metaphorical language, the all-knowing, sometimes coy, narrator gives a cryptic account of events to come, as he muses on politics and history, eternity and fate, and moralises, philosophises, makes judgements on characters, pronounces verdicts on outcomes, and comments upon the process of narration and the rules of drama (even remarking, at times, on what he had intended, but was unable, to describe in the chapter).

Censorship and Compromise

“The conflict between literature and power is a reality of life in a repressive society,” according to Kross, and “was the inescapable atmosphere in which people lived during the Soviet period . . . writers of course were more aware of it than most others . . . The very existence of it presupposes an unequal power relationship: there are those who control and those who are controlled . . . In such societies there have always been people who resist in order to define, at least for themselves, an identity, and to assert some measure of autonomy.”

The central theme in Kross’ historical novels was identified early by the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski: “Kross brought the new theme of moral compromise to Estonia’s historical novel. Under six centuries of foreign domination, benign or otherwise, we simply sought strategies of survival and tried to remain decent, to maintain our identity. Compromise is the great Krossian theme and this is true to our historical reality.” To those who viewed compromise as lack of principle and criticised it as capitulation, Kross responded: “Dear comrades, it is also a compromise that we write any books at all, given that we know censorship exists . . . I have never written in order to show how to make compromises, but always about how, despite the circumstances, to survive with one’s integrity and identity intact.” Later he added: “Actually, I would very much like to see someone examine my texts for the theme of compromise-as-weapon.”

Kross found ways to speak the truth without incurring repercussions, and ways to compromise without damaging his integrity. He has described how he and his wife, Ellen Niit, a prolific and beloved poet, attempted to define for themselves the parameters of the possible:

Ellen and I represented the possibilities of what we could write in the 1960s by drawing two circles. One circle contained things that should be written. The other, those things that could be (were permitted to be) written. Examining these circles, it became clear that they weren’t entirely opposed, and with some effort, they could be brought closer until they touched – at first at one point, and as they began to overlap slightly, the area of overlap became larger . . . so that there was room to place quite a few things in it. This, at a time when conditions of censorship were such that one final consequence could have been to give up writing entirely.

The censor’s shadow loomed over every creative mind and original work in Soviet Estonia. Jaan Kross has voiced his ideas in essays and interviews on the subject. The question was not whether to make compromises but how to determine the limits of compromise and how to avoid compromising oneself. Although Kross spoke with admiration for those fellow writers who, in order to avoid having to shape their writing to appease the censors, abandoned original work entirely during the Soviet period, he chose a different path. Censorship played a role in determining his career as a writer. He was a celebrated poet before becoming a novelist. Having been arrested in 1946 for “bourgeoise recidivism”, he wrote poetry and translated Russian and German poets in Gulag camps and Siberian exile while serving his sentence. After his release and return to Estonia in 1954, he inspired many young poets with his innovative, highly original themes and free verse. By 1969 five collections of his poetry had been published to great acclaim. But when Moscow censors pressured a local cultural periodical in Estonia to denounce Kross’ poetry as “decadent” and “insufficiently Bolshevik”, he made a decision. Faced with the prospect of having to comply with the prescriptions and proscriptions of censorship, he abandoned poetry and turned his attention to the historical novel. “History would allow me to write obliquely of the present and play with paradox and ambiguity.” He described his relationship with the censors as a game of hide-and-seek. “I have, like every other writer who wrote during the time of Soviet rule, done half the work for the censors myself.” Kross later remarked that he had done some of his best writing under the constraints of censorship. In writing about the sixteenth century, he admitted, he tried “to write about its intellectual atmosphere and conditions in a way that that some kind of parallels with the present would shine through . . . though nothing too stark or obvious”.

In a scene from the third volume of Between Three Plagues, which, Kross later noted, was “merely a scene from the present cloaked in four-hundred-year-old costume”, the Town Council debates the question of approving the ideological stance of Russow’s Chronicle – and thus, whether to permit its distribution in Tallinn. Kross describes the scene:

The attempt was made – perhaps devolving into caricature – to concentrate in one scene a fundamentally ignorant group of men lacking any interest in the matter at hand, but charged with the responsibility of passing judgement on something about which they know nothing. I also attempted to indicate, as clearly as possible, that today [in the 1970s], everything was just as it was in Russow’s day. It was required, at that time, that the Chronicle represent the doctrine of the Augsburg Confession, and, in our day, that works conform to the tenets of Marxism–Leninism. There is basically no difference: each is a confession of beliefs. In other words, the parallel between the council members and the comrades of the Central Committee was presented as comedy – at least that is what I attempted. By the way, the tragedy of the ignorant deciders is not represented in the novel. For that, the author was not yet mature enough at the time. And those with power still had too much power.

When Kross was asked by Soviet journalists why he wrote only about historical subjects instead of the current topics that readers would be most interested in, he would equivocate, invoking his love of history, his interest in the past, his regret that he had not studied history at university. And he dismissed suggestions that perhaps history was a “refuge” for him. After Estonia had become an independent republic again, he explained:

In spite of my love of history, a parallel reason, and sometimes my main reason, was the attempt to withdraw from the present to the extent of becoming invisible – to elude the present and those who represented it. The more current the subject matter, the larger the cadre of advisers who would typically surround those writers . . . to ensure that the text corresponded in content and form and spirit to the standards and goals of the Party. The ranks of these advisers thinned considerably when one’s topic was an historical one . . . it was liberating somehow.

* * * * *

Kross assumed the responsibility of reviving and preserving his country’s historical and cultural memory. His description of Balthasar Russow’s mission as a writer also defines his own: “to preserve the truth of the things that have happened here”, to give his compatriots knowledge of their history and thus a sense of national identity. He “felt called to fill the gaps in Estonian literature in the historical-personage genre of fiction . . . to give life in literature to personages in the historical and cultural history of Estonia”. His whole oeuvre, he said, is about how a people arrive at self-awareness. Jaan Kross wrote ten historical novels, as well as many novellas and stories, centring on figures from different historical periods, from the six-teenth century through the twentieth, who have managed by dint of effort and determination to overcome the constraints imposed by their background and accomplish remarkable things. “My gallery of characters consists primarily of those who have contributed to our cultural history.” His hope was that his works would inspire and encourage other Estonian authors to undertake the writing of biographical–historical fiction.

An even broader goal for Jaan Kross was to bring Estonia to the awareness of the world as a nation with its own culture and character, “but always in the larger context of Europe and the rest of the world”. And while he focused his writings on the history and literature of his own country, he was emphatic about the importance of all small nations and their cultures: “Literature is not defined only by the literary classics and bestsellers of the largest nations . . . The literature of smaller peoples plays a role, and often a more significant role than is generally recognised. And furthermore, the literatures of even very small nations are vital in the great whole, and indispensable.”

Merike Lepasaar Beecher

in which a town witnesses a number of miraculous feats, and a little scamp believes he has discovered the secret behind them, in which conviction he is perhaps less mistaken than people nowadays are prone to think.

“Worthy craftsmen, upstart swells, yokels! Honoured lords and ladies of the nobility! Esteemed and gracious burghers! Hurry, hurry, hurry! You will see wonders you have never seen before, and will never, in your lifetime, see again!”

The crier, a fuzz of down on his chin and sweat on his nose, was a young fellow, no longer a child, not yet a man. Opening his pale eyes wide, he swooped the bright red, gold-banded hat from his head, and in that same motion his frayed sleeve brushed the beads of sweat off his nose, and the red-and-gold hat described a splendid arc across the blue sky.

“Honourable Council! Beautiful women! Modest maidens! Stonecutters and shoemakers! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”

By now the crier’s urgent summons and sky-sweeping gestures were no longer needed. For the throngs surging through the Great Coast Gate and streaming towards Köismäe Hill were already squinting up into the cloudless spring sky.

Hurrying through the gate came Councilman Vegesack, face red, dignity abandoned in his haste. Even his wife, exceedingly gaunt and usually pale, had colour in her cheeks on this day. There were other councilmen and their wives in the jostling crowd, along with merchants and shopkeepers, beer-bellied master craftsmen and freckled journeymen, prominent burgher matrons with their giddy daughters, underfed servant girls, militiamen in blue coats and the grey ranks of labourers. And they were all peering up-up-up and craning their necks towards St Olaf’s steeple.

In the distance, to the right, droves of sailors from Lübeck came running, the pier rumbling under their pounding feet. Even they had never seen anything like the spectacle they were about to behold. To the left, groups of villagers from the hamlet of Kalamaja were hurrying up Lontmaaker Rise, raising clouds of dust in their wake.

When the townspeople had gone through the gate and across the drawbridge and were far enough to see the rooftops of the outermost houses above the town walls, they could make out round eyes peering at the sky from the open shutters of every attic storeroom. Three houseboys had climbed out through one merchant’s roof hatch onto the pulley beam. They were sitting in a row, like village lads on horseback, staring up into thin air and swinging their legs over empty space, a sight that would have alarmed passers-by at any other time. Even on the Poxhouse walls surrounded by ditches and wooden barricades there were curious spectators – the inmates had climbed onto the walls and sat there gaping at the sky, their upturned faces disfigured by purple blotches and missing noses.

“Honoured knights and ladies! And villagers who happen to be in town with your ol’ ladies! Hurry! Hurry! Hur—”

The crier felt someone tug at his coat-tail. Clapping his red hat back onto his head, he turned around on his seal-oil barrel and looked down behind him. A boy of about ten or twelve was pulling his coat.

“What is it, Bal?”

“I’m going to go see how they do it!”

“You can watch from right here.”

“I can’t work it out from here.”

“Where’re you going then?”

“Up the steeple.”

“Oh, forget it! They’ll never let you up there!”

But the little scamp had already disappeared into the crowd.

His progress to the gate against the flow of the crowd was slow. He was not particularly deft or nimble in making his way through. He did manage to duck to one side and slip past a few people – Fie, you little devil . . . – and make himself small enough to squeeze between others – What’s the rush? Blasted ruffian! . . . – Even so, he was not slim or slight, nor especially agile; in fact, he was a rather sturdy boy and somewhat ungainly in his movements. His broad shoulders under a nondescript sparrow-grey coat were a little hunched; the ash-blond mop of hair on his round head stood on end in spite of frequent combing, like a clump of carelessly cut stalks of rye. His round eyes were the same grey as the town’s stone walls on a day like this, with the sky lending them a touch of blue; and his gaze, though alert, was somewhat preoccupied.

“I’m going to find out about this thing,” he muttered to himself, and pushed his way under the vaulted gate, where the sound of tramping feet was greatly magnified. “I’m going to find out . . .”

Here there was a bit more room – enough for an angry sentry to take a swipe at his backside with the long shaft of his halberd, directly under the gaze of the Crucified One suspended on the wall.

“Where ya’ goin, Sacrament!”

Bal smiled absently, without resentment. He murmured, “I’m going to find out . . .” and ducked off Lai Street into the blind alley alongside the town walls.

Here he encountered only the occasional straggler. By rights he should have greeted them all, but this rule of etiquette was taken seriously only in the preparatory class of the Trivium School. Being a proper quarta-level pupil, on the street he was obliged to greet only councilmen and clergymen. Recovering his dignity after the sentry’s blow, he hurried cheerfully round the corner and raised his eyes two hundred and fifty cubits to the gilded cockerel atop the steeple of St Olaf’s Church. There, like a silver strand of hair, stretching from the steeple to somewhere far beyond the town walls, sloped the magic rope of the aerialists, the never-before-seen wonder that the whole town was talking about.

Bal hurried on, head thrown back