Karl Ristikivi (16 October [O.S. 3 October] 1912 – 19 July 1977) was an Estonian writer. He is known as one of the best Estonian writers for his historical novels.
Ristikivi was one of the first Estonian writers to create a comprehensive panorama of his country's urbanization. Once in Swedish exile, he also wrote the first Estonian surrealist novel, a work that is strongly influenced by existentialist philosophy. He orchestrated an impressive cycle of seventeen novels plus other books into a polyphonic unity with a time scale that embraces European history over two millennia. His invention and use of a complicated system of myths and symbols could be compared to the approach of the school of semiotic writers. Humanism, Christian religion, and traditional ethics are considered the chief legacy of his works.
Early life and education in Estonia
Karl Ristikivi was born on 16 October 1912 in Varbla in western Estonia to an unmarried maidservant, Liiso Ristikivi, and was baptized Karp Ristikivi in the Eastern Orthodox congregation to which his mother belonged. He spent his childhood on various farms where his mother found employment. In 1920, Ristikivi began studying at a local primary school where he would suffer from humiliation because of his illegitimacy and frail physique.
He obtained some knowledge of literature and history by reading old German books that he found in the attic of a local manor house; although he did not know the language at first, he enjoyed looking at the pictures and asked grown-ups about the meaning of the texts. In the process he shaped his own imaginary world of medieval knights and Christian ideals.
His interest in history and talent for learning languages made Ristikivi an academic success at the village school. In 1927, a rich relative offered an opportunity to continue his studies, and Ristikivi then attended the Tallinn Commercial School and the Tallinn College; he graduated from the latter in 1932. The reminiscences of older residents of the city sparked Ristikivi's interest in the first period of urbanization in Estonia at the end of the nineteenth century.
Ristikivi began his literary career writing stories for family magazines, and in the 1930s he published a series of children's books with animal characters: The Flying World ("Lendav maailm", 1935), The Blue Butterfly ("Sinine liblikas", 1936), Pals ("Semud", 1936), and Chums ("Sellid", 1938). The money he received for these works enabled him to enroll in the department of geography in the faculty of mathematics and natural sciences of the University of Tartu in 1936, where he chose sociology as his main subject.
While at the university he was active in the left-wing Estonian Students' Society Veljesto. Ristikivi graduated Tartu University cum laude in 1941.
Much of this section is based on the only longer book dealing with Karl Ristikivi's life, i.e. Nirk, op. cit.
The Nazi-German occupation of Estonia in 1941 formed a watershed in Karl Ristikivi's life. Ristikivi was mobilised into the German army. As the German occupation weakened, Estonians began to worry what would happen if the Russians returned. For those who had been mobilised into the German army, risked deportation to the GULAG or being executed in the event of the Soviet Russian troops reoccupying Estonia. Ristikivi ended up working in the Estonian Bureau in Helsinki, capital of neighbouring Finland. But at some point during 1944, Ristikivi decided to cross over to neutral Sweden, quite legally as he even obtained a visa. But he would never see Estonia again. He would live for the rest of his life, a further 33 years, in the Stockholm area and Uppsala.
Ristikivi began writing articles for the exile Estonian press in Sweden. But in the end, to make ends meet, he started work at a health insurance office. This meant that all his writing from then onwards would have to be done in his spare time. The first two novels he wrote in exile were those of the Unfinished Trilogy. These were still about Estonia, but by the early 1950s, Ristikivi must have undergone some kind of crisis. He did not complete the trilogy but instead started work on what has become his most famous novel The Night of Souls ("Hingede öö"; 1953; synopsis below).
Around the time that Ristikivi was writing his historical novel about Saint Catherine of Siena (The Bridal Veil op. cit.), he was interviewed by Vello Salo for Vatican Radio about his previous work. But he appears not to have been a very public figure, devoting much of his spare time to writing his novels and other works, and mostly mixing with other exile Estonians in his social life. Nevertheless, Ristikivi travelled quite a lot, often to southern Europe to look at some of the settings for his later novels.
Apart from writing the other novels described in the synopses section below, Ristikivi continued to write many reviews and critical essays, mostly about Estonian literature, for the exile Estonian press and helped his friend Bernard Kangro, also a poet and novelist to run the publishing house Estonian Writers' Co-operative, housed in a suburb of Lund in southern Sweden, and which published exile Estonian literature.
Apart from two translations of his early novels into Finnish, a couple of his short-stories in Swedish, and a few recent Russian translations of his key novels, Karl Ristikívi remains untranslated into any other language.
Karl Ristikivi is estimated to have died on 19 July 1977 in his flat on Östervägen, Solna, near Stockholm, Sweden. His body was found a little while later and he is assumed to have died instantly of a brain haemorrhage. He was buried in Stockholm a few days later. A monument to Karl Ristikivi was unveiled at his birthplace in Estonia to commemorate what would have been his 75th birthday in 1987. In Sweden, Karl Ristikivi was buried in the Orthodox part of the Skogskyrkogården cemetery. On 15 September 2017, an urn with Karl Ristikivi's ashes reached the Estonian Writers' Union. It was buried on 28 October 2017 on Paadrema cemetery.
The trilogies, novels, and short-stories – synopses and descriptions
A large part of what is written in this section is drawn from Neithal (op. cit.) and occasionally Nirk (op. cit.) There are simply no English-language sources or, for that matter, Swedish-language ones, although Ristikivi spent that last 33 years of his life living in Sweden.
The Tallinn Trilogy - Fire and Iron ("Tuli ja raud"; 1938); The Abode of a Righteous Man / In a Strange House ("Õige mehe koda" / "Võõras majas"; 1940); The Herb Garden ("Rohtaed"; 1942)