This yearʼs first book in the Library of the magazine Looming Series has been published in collaboration with the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre!

1–3 | 2020 | Jaan Kross Tiit Pagu

Edited for publication and with a foreword by Jaan Undusk.

In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jaan Kross, his verse novel Tiit Pagu is being published for the first time. Kross most probably began writing the novel at the beginning of the 1940s, and worked on it in Siberian exile in 1951–1954, thereafter in Tallinn. This technically masterful work, consisting of almost 3700 lines of verse remained unfinished, and later Kross no longer remembered it.

The novel provides a colourful view of university student life at the end of the 1930s, as well as the milieux of the Tallinn middle and working classes. The eponymous hero Tiit Pagu is a member of a university student corporation who due to life circumstances adjusts his worldview to Marxism. The work breaks off with the events of June 1940.

Jaan Unduskʼs foreword explains Krossʼ literary activities while in Siberia, which has remained in the shadow of other aspects of his life, and sheds light on events related to the birth of Tiit Pagu.