The Poet and the Idiot

"The nine stories, and essay, featured here were written during World War One, or in the first years of Estonian independence in the early 1920s. Reflecting the troubled spirit of the times, their subject matter ranges from a starving prisoner, via a luckless pharmacist's hallucinations of childhood, a wandering soldier who encounters weird spirits, to a young man sitting in a park, accosted by a devilish lunatic who wants to introduce a new brand of devil worship to the world. Written in a style that can be termed Gothic Symbolist, Tuglas' interest in the visual arts can also be sensed from the stories containing vivid, even garish, colors and descriptions of moods and landscapes that are sometimes heightened and distorted, as seen in paintings from that epoch. The mentality of Friedebert Tuglas, as reflected in his works, has something of both the short story writer Poe and the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Both of these artists oscillate between a pronounced morbidity and wacky, burlesque humor."--BOOK JACKET.