Опубликовано в журнале Дружба Народов, номер 4, 2009
WRITTEN IN ESTONIA
“Thank you, sirs, – said the Prince with such dignity that I asked myself: where we are – in the theater where an asylum is being showed? Or still in our customary Sevzeldorlag, in the most unreal but at the same time incontrovertibly existing corner of our rather real world where it suddenly turns out that the possibilities of this real world are inexpressibly wider than we might have imagined?”
This is from the long short story “The Prince” by the classic of the XX-century Estonian literature Yaan Kross, who – like so many people of his generation – hasn’t escaped the lot of being a prisoner of the Stalin’s camps. For him this theme was as bleeding as existential.
Along with this story of the famous writer who had been nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, this issue of “DN” presents some works of today’s Estonian authors: poets, prosaists, critics and essayists.