Novel
Vehklemõisa aednik
Not translated into English
Pedro Krusten · 1936
Synopsis
At the manor of Vehklemõisa, in the years leading up to the Great War and at the moment it breaks out, the gardener Jaak serves a master he still reveres, with all the traditions of the estate, even the humiliating ones. His resourcefulness and humour get him out of many difficulties, but he brings up his sons harshly, and they grow up differently: they no longer doff their caps to the gentlemen of the manor, refuse the Christmas tree of the festivity and even go so far as to help a thief of the estate's timber.
Context
The novel appeared in Tartu in 1936, from Noor-Eesti. Krusten draws on his childhood at the Muraste manor, where his father Jaan was a gardener, and gives the gardener Jaak his father's traits; according to the critic Bernard Sööt, the owner of the estate, Baron von Veymarn, resembled for the most part the master in the novel. In exile, the author took up the same material again, at greater length, in the so-called Kaldametsa trilogy, published in Lund from 1959 to 1963.
Who it is for
A little over two hundred pages in Estonian, never translated into French or English. It helps to know that Vehklemõisa is the thinly veiled mask of Muraste, near Tallinn.
Prizes and reception
It was with this novel, and not with his early work, that its author gained wider attention.