Espesura, La

Description :Structurally complicated and very poetic, biblically symbolic, The Thicket (Kõrboja peremees) by Anton H. Tammsaare is the strangest and one of the most intense and tragic love novels in Estonian literature. So deeply steeped in this feeling, yet no one ever mentions it throughout the book.



Tammsaare also uses this emotion to reveal to us the complex problems of village life in Estonia at the beginning of the 20th century. In Estonian society at that time, there was a vision of what the ideal republic could be like and, alongside it, there existed the substantially different reality.



Anna de Kõrboja emerges in this context as a distinctive figure, as a woman who "will have to wear skirts and pants at the same time." She is "a stranger" who gives new life to the town, for which she is admired and mocked at the same time: the town wants a change, but at the same time fears it. She and Villu de Katku represent the universality of the search for belonging to a place and the prejudices that this search generates, and show how, through love - a saving force and at the same time a curse - we can find redemption.