Professor Martens' Departure - Jaan Kross
The setting is a train trip from Pärnu, Estonia to St. Petersburg. The time is
1909, near the end of the road for Czarist Russia. Professor Martens, diplomat
and expert in international law, is doing what thinking people do on long dull
train trips: ruminating about personal and professional topics.
In complex yet accessible stream of consciousness, Martens remembers his humble
beginnings, struggling student days in law school, and his success as a legal
expert and writer of treaties. However, in their arrogance and stupidity about
his Estonian origins, his superiors who are Russian aristocrats treat him like
the hired help and claim his contributions as their own. He is even disdained
when he persuades the West to bail out Russia with the loan and so he wonders
about the merit of enabling a brutal, stupid regime to hold on to power.
In monologues addressed to his wife Kati, he confesses infidelities but asserts
he always loved his wife. Reading
the chapter about the love affair with an art student, I found it incredible
how Jaan Kross could write in such detail from the protagonist’s point of view.
The narrator seems self-serving, hypocritical, conservative, and defensive, but
overall he’s easy to spend 300 pages with, since his story is the story of many
people in the 20th century, people who had to weigh the claims of their
conscience and integrity with the service to the state, especially when the
state is run by people who have the integrity of gangsters. It was a question
especially hard for non-Russian people serving Mean Mother Russia.
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