Conspiracy and Other Stories

For centuries, Estonia has been a shuttlecock thwacked back and forth between Germany and Russia. The Teutonic Knights and Hanseatic League gave way (after a Swedish interlude) to Russia's Peter I; the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) returned it to Germany; then, after a brief period of independence, it went back to Russia via Molotov-Ribbentrop; this was followed by German conquest and Russian re-conquest. The background is crucial because it illuminates the setting and the complicated--and not always admirable--characters of Kross's six stories set in Estonia during WWII and its aftermath. Although the tales usually end badly (a prisoner commits suicide; a man trying to escape dies; an injured girl perishes because the doctors have fled; another prisoner is shot)--they are less tragic than they are thoughtful and funny. Kross ascribes to one of his characters a certain ""tart irony,"" which rather neatly describes his own slightly removed style. His protagonist and alter ego, Peeter Mirk (who also appeared in the novel Excavations), is a basically decent person who finds himself in increasingly untenable positions. A student whose world is coming undone, he tries to escape but (like Kross) is captured by the Germans and later by the Soviets. Mirk is wryly critical of both sets of captors, of Estonians of German descent who answered Hitler's call for repatriation, to a lesser extent of ""true-blooded blue-black-and-white"" Estonian patriots and of his own cautious behavior. The tragicomic subtext lies in his keen awareness of the absurdity of his and his country's situation. (July)