The Czar’s Madman has been widely recognised as one of the finest historical novels ever written. It tells the story of a Baltic nobleman, Timo von Bock, a contemporary of Beethoven and Goethe, who on account of his radically egalitarian beliefs scandalises his fellow aristocrats as well as one of his supposedly good friends – the Russian Czar Alexander I.

Inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, which are spreading across northern Europe, von Bock seems to take leave of his senses when he marries a peasant girl and proclaims the need for a revolution from above: he asks the czar to rule not by regal decree but by institutionalised law. For this political heresy, von Bock is incarcerated in a castle for nine years and then placed under house arrest within his own estate.

The relationship between von Bock and his spirited wife Eeva – who is in every sense the equal of her husband – is the centre-point of this Tolstoyan masterpiece. By its immersion in the social lives and political conversations of town and countryside, Jaan Kross’ novel captures post-Napoleonic ferment in the Russian and German borderlands more poignantly and magnificently than almost any other.

Jaan Kross (1920–2007) was born in Tallinn. Like countless Estonians, he was deported to Siberia by the Russians, who occupied his country in 1940. He returned from imprisonment in the Gulag after nine years to became a professional writer. During the 1990s he was often nominated for the Nobel Prize. The Czar’s Madman won France’s Best Foreign Book Award on its appearance in French. Kross’ trilogy, Between Three Plagues, has also been translated into English and several European languages.