31 Facts About Karl Ristikivi

Karl Ristikivi is known as one of the best Estonian writers for his historical novels.

Karl Ristikivi 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.

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.

Karl Ristikivi spent his childhood on various farms where his mother found employment.

In 1920, Karl Ristikivi began studying at a local primary school where he would suffer from humiliation because of his illegitimacy and frail physique.

Karl Ristikivi 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 1927, a rich relative offered an opportunity to continue his studies, and Karl Ristikivi then attended the Tallinn Commercial School and the Tallinn College; he graduated from the latter in 1932.

Karl 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, The Blue Butterfly, Pals, and Chums.

Karl Ristikivi ended up working in the Estonian Bureau in Helsinki, capital of neighbouring Finland.

Karl Ristikivi began writing articles for the exile Estonian press in Sweden.

Karl Ristikivi did not complete the trilogy but instead started work on what has become his most famous novel The Night of Souls.

Nevertheless, Karl 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, Karl Ristikivi continued to write many reviews and critical essays, mostly about Estonian literature, for the exile Estonian press and helped his friend Bernard Kangro, 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 Ristikivi remains untranslated into any other language.

Karl Ristikivi is estimated to have died on 19 July 1977 in his flat on Ostervagen, Solna, near Stockholm, Sweden.

Karl Ristikivi's body was found a little while later and he is assumed to have died instantly of a brain haemorrhage.

Karl Ristikivi was buried in Stockholm a few days later.

In Sweden, Karl Ristikivi was buried in the Orthodox part of the Skogskyrkogarden cemetery.

On 15 September 2017, an urn with Karl Ristikivi's ashes reached the Estonian Writers' Union.

In 1938 Karl Ristikivi published his first novel, Fire and Iron.

One of the consequences of the Communist occupation was that when the next novel in Karl Ristikivi's trilogy was published in December 1940, its title was changed by the authorities from the author's The Abode of a Righteous Man to In a Strange House because the original title was thought to be too biblical.

Karl Ristikivi's wife has not forgiven him for the greedy and fraudulent maneuver that led to their union and has never loved him.

Karl Ristikivi flees in his mind to an folkloric idyll, taking his urge towards freedom from German and Greek classics.

Also sketched out while Karl Ristikivi was still living in Estonia were the two novels of the Unfinished Trilogy, which appeared in Swedish exile in 1946 and 1947, respectively.

Karl Ristikivi himself was now in exile in Sweden with no hope of ever returning to Estonia.

Housman, Oscar Wilde, and the Finnish poet Uuno Kailas, which is a hint at what Karl Ristikivi was reading at the time.

Karl Ristikivi has documented some of the impulses that led to this novel.

Karl Ristikivi then conceived of a short-story where a young man enters a completely unknown building, and it is not the people in there that are embarrassed at the fact that he is a stranger, but the young man himself.

Karl Ristikivi changed his style completely for this trilogy whose novels are set during the period of the Crusades between 1266 and 1311.

Karl Ristikivi finds himself caught between the exigencies of science and church dogma.

Karl Ristikivi uses this book to examine the politics of his day by way of analogy.