Jaan Kross. Ragione e dissidenza nella Livonia dell’‘800

[Autom. eng. transl.] And what can we say today, in a Europe with open borders, of the literature that blooms beyond the Gulf of Riga? The words that the Estonian writer Jaan Kross (1920-2007) puts in the mouth of the protagonist of his most translated novel in the world, "Il pazzo dello zar" of 1978, are perhaps emblematic even when it is really of himself that he intends to speak. Because, although he is not yet an author known as many European classics of his era, Kross's merit is not inferior for this. A novel that with its laid and solid writing elegance has all the stature of a classic and undoubtedly deserves, like any self-respecting classic, to become a timeless long seller. A historical novel - Jaan Kross is the undisputed master of the genre in his country - which, though describing in detail an era, that of the then Livonia (now an integral part of Latvia) under the rule of the Russian Empire of Tsar Alexander I, manages to maintain a universal spirit such that its reading can illuminate even the present time. If in the seventies Kross overshadowed in the struggles between Estonians, Germans or Baltic Russians in that "block of amber shattered by history" which are the Baltic countries - the definition is by Jan Brokken - the intolerance towards the Soviet occupation by of Estonia, today it is possible to read in his novels a metaphor of the contemporary political spirit, of the intellectual's conflict with power and his own conscience.