The cultural theorist and writer Rein Raud, who published his new novel “The Plague Train” in the autumn, told Vikerradio that in addition to functional and archival literature, he also reads classics while writing the work, which helps him to keep fit as a writer.
The “plague” in the book’s title refers to an epidemic that occurred in Manchuria more than a hundred years ago, but is still relevant as a key word today. “Currently there has once again been a pandemic, which is spreading throughout the world and actually threatening people’s lives. In the meantime it seemed that all terrible diseases had been defeated and now there is calm, but perhaps not that’s how it is. Of course I’m more interested in the human psyche and how it affects us as people, our being human, what these diseases do to us around us,” Raud explained in Vikerraadio’s “Read and Write” program.
In the book, a group of kids deal with the aftermath of the Manchurian Plague. Although the situation is serious, during the journey the boys drink together and make stops to quench their thirst and also look for women. “Young people are young. It doesn’t matter how serious or scary their mission is. Fortunately, a lot of historical material has been preserved. This is also one of the reasons why I put off writing this story for so long,” Raud said , adding that if this idea came up many years ago, then the nature of the story was very different and it had to be a locked room drama.
After extensive research Raud obtained a complete overview of the historical material. “In the end, I found a long, thick history of the plague with all kinds of things, even long documents and pictures of what the protective suits looked like and a very detailed story about the Manchurian plague,” said Raud, who believes the book it turned out to be quite accurate to the time.
“For example, I often wondered whether doctors had rubber gloves at that time, because I know they had been introduced to America relatively recently before, but from there I made sure that their equipment included rubber gloves and all kinds of protective glasses. Then I looked at the photos and the men had still pulled down the hood covering the button of the protective suit and were wearing their uniform caps to look bolder. All these little details that make the era more alive,” he said Raud.
The main character of the novel, Jakob Sarapik, is based on Raua’s grandfather, Joosep Alfred Pervik, but in the end Sarapik, the one who entered the book, is a completely different person from Pervik in terms of character and life attitudes. “But the life span of Jakob Sarapik, who was accepted into the tsarist army, had to go to Manchuria to face the consequences of the plague after graduating from the Welsh school, later lost his home in Rakvere and had to go to prison in Patarei as a resident Welsh scholar, these are common traits and moments with my grandfather, in fact,” Raud said.
Raud did not meet his grandfather. Although he found some documents relating to his grandfather in the family home, he was unable to find the very large archive of Raud family materials, but fortunately he found other sources.
Although the main character is a doctor and tuberculosis and syphilis are present in the play in addition to the plague, Raud did not read separate medical textbooks while writing it. However, the history of medicine had to be considered carefully, because medical knowledge has developed a lot since both 1911 and 1933. “Other times you had to keep track of which medicine was discovered and in which year. What could that have been prescribed, for example, for diarrhea, and what hospital refrigerators could have been like, for example. Fortunately, there is the Internet: nowadays almost everything important can be found there,” explains Raud. .
According to Raua, one of the central ideas of the book is the moment in which deviations or folds become pathologies. “Maybe we get used to some deviations, and then maybe we deviate a little more, and then at some point we find that it has become completely normal, for example, not to curse other people in a public space or on social media. / .. ./ Ten years ago this would have been relatively unimaginable. Some thoughts can even be thoughts at first and then turn into small tendencies and then into norms of behavior. This is how fascism and Putinism are born,” Raud said.
As well as informative books such as “100 Years of Estonian Medicine” and “100 Years of Estonian Railways”, which according to Raua are a great read and help to remember how much life in Estonia has developed in a very short time on a large scale of world history, Rau also read Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Faulnker. “If you read great masters, they keep your literary nerves sharp enough. /…/ Just like a chess player analyzes good games or an athlete watches someone else’s successful game on video,” Raud explained.
2023-12-11 10:14:00
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