The Horned Blue Beast is a grotesque artist’s novel in which Estonian mythology is transformed into an untethered element of quotidian life. Dr. Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald published the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg first in German, then in Estonian, in the mid-19^th century. Kalevipoeg is something of a cornerstone work in the Estonian fine arts – its motifs echo in literature, art, and musical composition, and it laid the groundwork for the formation of national consciousness. In the 1910s, the young and talented Estonian artist Oskar Kallis, whose works blend art nouveaux and national romanticism, became the first to illustrate the epic. Kallis’s art brought about Kalevipoeg’s second coming and was a vividly-colored visual triumph for its hero of giant proportions.

Kivirähk’s novel is a spellbinding interpretation of the creation of Kallis’s radiant illustrations. Written in diary format, the young artist conveys his semi-psychedelic encounters on the path to understanding Kalevipoeg. The protagonist doesn’t simply imagine the characters, but journeys alongside them in a mythological world while simultaneously growing distant from the real one – the streets of a harbor town preparing for a grim war. The epic’s oftentimes outrageous characters and their intrepid adventures literally clamor to be drawn and called into being for readers and appreciators of art. The ordinary world seems to stifle and fail to understand this, staying indifferent to the artist’s attempts to communicate the joys and spectrum of colors he finds in the mythological world. The artist’s wild, enchanting, and ultimately tragic story – one akin to a sensitive participatory experiment – poses the questions of how a person in the arts perceives the world and where the lines between the real world and their reality are drawn. By his final entries, the mirthful young man has turned into a full-fledged, bone-weary man whose last works of art are woven into topics far beyond his original absurd escapades – love and the quest for peace beyond the grave. Kallis died in early 1918 at the age of 25 on the Crimean Peninsula, where his teacher and romantic partner had him taken to recover from tuberculosis. Kallis had never left his hometown of Tallinn before arriving in Yalta, but his works – the creation of which Kivirähk has depicted in a clever and masterful way – were in close discourse with the finest artistic traditions of Europe and Scandinavia. Kivirähk’s powerful use of language brings the artist’s inner landscapes to life. The Horned Blue Beast is an uproarious tale which strums the deepest heartstrings – just as the author frequently does – and amazes the reader by how such a heartbreaking book can still be so cheerful.