Karl Ristikivi - Later Life in Swedish Exile

Later Life in Swedish Exile

Much of this section is based on the only longer book dealing with Karl Ristikivi's life, i.e. Nirk, op. cit.

The Nazi-German occupation of Estonia in 1941 formed a watershed in Karl Ristikivi's life. Ristikivi was mobilised into the German army. As the German occupation weakened, Estonians began to worry what would happen if the Russians returned. For instance, those who had been in the German army - would they get sent to Siberia? Or worse? Ristikivi ended up working in the Estonian Bureau in Helsinki, capital of neighbouring Finland. But at some point during 1944, Ristikivi decided to cross over to neutral Sweden, quite legally as he even obtained a visa. But he would never see Estonia again. He would live for the rest of his life, a further 33 years, in the Stockholm area and Uppsala.

Ristikivi began writing articles for the exile Estonian press in Sweden. But in the end, to make ends meet, he started work at a health insurance office. This meant that all his writing from then onwards would have to be done in his spare time. The first two novels he wrote in exile were those of the Unfinished Trilogy. These were still about Estonia, but by the early 1950s, Ristikivi must have undergone some kind of crisis. He did not complete the trilogy but instead started work on what has become his most famous novel The Night of Souls ("Hingede öö"; 1953; synopsis below).

Around the time that Ristikivi was writing his historical novel about Saint Catherine of Siena (The Bridal Veil op. cit.), he was interviewed by Vello Salo for Vatican Radio about his previous work. But he appears not to have been a very public figure, devoting much of his spare time to writing his novels and other works, and mostly mixing with other exile Estonians in his social life. Nevetheless, 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, Ristikivi continued to write many reviews and critical essays, mostly about Estonian literature, for the exile Estonian press and helped his friend Bernard Kangro, also 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 Ristikívi remains untranslated into any other language.

Karl Ristikivi is estimated to have died on 19 July 1977 in his flat on Östervägen, Solna, near Stockholm, Sweden. His body was found a little while later and he is assumed to have died instantly of a brain haemorrhage. He was buried in Stockholm a few days later. A monument to Karl Ristikivi was unveiled at his birthplace in Estonia to commemorate what would have been his 75th birthday in 1987.