Part of Series
Satan has a problem: God has come to the conclusion that it is unfair to send souls to hell if they are fundamentally incapable of living a decent life on earth. If this is the case, then hell will be shut down, and the human race written off as an unfortunate mistake. Satan is given the chance to prove that human beings are capable of salvation - thus ensuring the survival of hell - if he agrees to live as a human being and demonstrate that it is possible to live a righteous life. St Peter suggests that life as a farmer might offer Satan the best chance of success, because of the catalogue of privations he will be forced to endure. And so Satan ends up back on earth, living as Jürka, a great bear of a man, the put-upon tenant of a run-down Estonian farm. His patience and good nature are sorely tested by the machinations of his scheming, unscrupulous landlord and the social and religious hypocrisy he encounters. The Misadventures of the New Satan is the last novel by Estonia’s greatest twentieth-century writer, Anton Tammsaare (1878-1940), and it constitutes a fitting summation of the themes that occupied him throughout his writing: the search for truth and social justice, and the struggle against corruption and greed. Tammsaare combines a satire on the inequalities of rural life and absurdly rigid social attitudes with biblical themes, mythology, and bawdy folklore. The novel has proved to be an enduring classic of European literature.
Author
A.H. Tammsaare, born Anton Hansen, was an Estonian writer whose pentalogy Truth and Justice (Tõde ja õigus; 1926 – 1933) is considered one of the major works of Estonian literature and "The Estonian Novel". Tammsaare was born in 1878 into a farming family. He attended secondary school in Tartu from 1898 to 1903 and from 1903 to 1905 he worked as an editor at the Tallinn newspaper, Teataja. In Tallinn he was able to witness the Russian Revolution of 1905. In 1907 he enrolled as a law student at Tartu University, but in 1911 he was unable to sit his finals, as he became very ill with tuberculosis. He was moved to Sochi on the Black Sea and then to the Caucasus Mountains, where his condition improved. On his return to Estonia, he lived for six years on his brother's farm where he was again affected by illness. Unable to work, he threw himself into his studies and mastered English, French, Finnish and Swedish. After his marriage in 1920 he moved to Tallinn and embarked on the most productive period of his life. His greatest influences were the Russian classics of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Gogol, butt his work also shows the influence of Oscar Wilde, Knut Hamsun and Andre Gide. He occupies a central place in the development of the Estonian novel and is a figure of European significance.
