Tahtamaa

Tahtamaa is the title of a novel by the Estonian writer Jaan Kross , published in 2001 .

novel

Tahtamaa is a (fictional) place name in the book. It means in German about "desire for land". In the novel, Tahtamaa stands for contemporary Estonia .

The novel was published in Estonian in 2001 . In the Estonian original of the first edition, it comprises 355 pages.

action

A local Estonian, Aabel Haljand, was given back a homestead in the early 1990s that had been expropriated from his family during the Soviet occupation of Estonia. An exile from Sweden , Lingo Luuk, tries to cheat the Estonians. He wants to buy the valuable piece of land from him for a ridiculous sum, since medicinal mud can be extracted from it.

Literary criticism

Tahtamaa was Jaan Kross' last novel. At the same time, it was the first novel by Kross to be set in the immediate present.

The plot begins in 1993. Estonia has broken away from the Soviet Union and has become a free and democratic state again. The book is about the difficult restructuring of the economic system and the return of the land to the previous owners. Much advice comes, whether asked or not, from most exiles who are now returning to their homeland. While other powers had previously occupied Estonia, the “capitalist” foreigners from the west are now coming back to occupy the country. In doing so, they take advantage of the native Estonians who survived the deportations and the Sovietization of Estonia, and they are economically ripped off.

In contrast to his earlier, historical works, Kross' novel was received rather cautiously by literary criticism and little appreciated by the Estonian public.

The novel has so far only been translated into Finnish (with the same title Tahtamaa , Vantaa: Moreeni 2012. Translated by Jouko Vanhanen).

literature

• Cornelius Hasselblatt: History of Estonian Literature . Berlin, New York 2006, ISBN 3-11-018025-1 , p. 694

Web links

• Review ( Eesti Päevaleht , December 7, 2001)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ tallinn.ester.ee/search  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from March 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.