Narrative
The Avenger
Tasuja
Eduard Bornhöhe · 1880
Opening lines
Enam kui wiissada aastat seisawad meie ja selle aja wahel, kelles siin räägitawad juhtumised sündinud on.
More than five hundred years stand between us and the time in which the events told here took place.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
In the fourteenth century, near Tallinn, Jaanus is the son of a free peasant, a condition almost unknown then in a country of serfs. He grows up alongside the children of the lord of Lodijärve: the daughter, Emilia von Raupen, becomes the object of a hopeless love, while his childhood friendship with her brother turns to hatred. When the young master's violence falls on his family's farm, Jaanus joins the peasants of Harju, who are preparing to rise up against the lords.
Context
He wrote it in 1879, at seventeen, in the room under the roof of the parish school of Põltsamaa, where he was an assistant master, finished it in Tallinn and had it published there the following year by A. E. Brandt. The chronicles of Balthasar Russow and Christian Kelch supplied him with the historical material. The young lady of the manor is modelled on Emilie Beermann, daughter of the school's director, who sewed in 1884 the first blue, black and white flag. In 1893 the censors banned the publication of his historical narratives; this one was nonetheless reprinted some twenty times.
Who it is for
One hundred and forty-seven pages in Estonian, never translated into French; chapters exist in English. St George's Night here means 23 April 1343, the date of the uprising.
Prizes and reception
The first original historical narrative in Estonian literature, it made the uprising of 1343 a central moment of the national narrative.