The Central European University Press has recently published as part of their CEU Classics, second series,
The Poet and the Idiot and other stories by Friedebert Tuglas, translated and with an introduction by Eric Dickens. Dickens has also translated Jaan Kross for the English audience.
The promotional material notes that as Estonia was part of the Russian Empire, then of the Soviet Union, it is something of a miracle that the powerful presence of the Baltic Germans, the periods of Russification, and other more subtle forms of cultural pressure, have not eradicated Estonian as a serious literary language. One of the central figures to credit for this was Friedebert Tuglas.
The nine stories, and the essay, featured here were written during the World War One, or in the first years of Estonian independence in the early 1920s. They reflect the troubled spirit of the times. The subject matter of Tuglas's stories represented here ranges from a starving prisoner, via a luckless pharmacist’s hallucinations from childhood, a wandering soldier who encounters weird spirits, to a young man sitting in a park, accosted by a devilish lunatic who wants to introduce a new brand of devil worship to the world.
For more information and order details visit
http://www.ceupress.com.
Details: Published June 30, 2007, ?360 pages Paperback 978-963-7326-88-2 $16.95
