A soothing calm emanates from this book.

Its first-person narrator, the Estonian optician Bernhard Schmidt, whose ingenuity still determines astronomy today, is at peace with himself in a heartfelt, sometimes painfully honest, but always admirably clear way.

He sees his gifts and his handicaps, those of the body - the mutilation of his right hand - as well as those of his geographical and social origins;

he sees his longings as well as his impediments and failures, sees the horrors in the political history of Europe during the first half of the twentieth century and sees his own helpless fear in them.

And yet at the bottom of this book lies a sly, almost adventurous joke.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The author Jaan Kross describes the grinding of mirrors with photorealistic precision and yet begins with a polished owl mirroring in the foreword, which is an integral part of the conception of this novel.

While debating which genre his book might fit, the biography or the novel, he drops the remark that "historical fact and fiction are equally real between the covers."

And he specifies: "For example, my conversations with the people I met in the Federal Republic of Germany (where I spoke to them about Bernhard Schmidt) are just as real as my conversations with Erik Schmidt in Mallorca (where to travel seems too complicated pointed out, which is why I didn't go there at all)."

So talks have taken place

Kross interrupts Schmidt's fictional autobiography, which is now available in German for the first time 34 years after its publication, with reports of his conversations with contemporary witnesses such as the Rhineland entrepreneur Friedrich Kelter, Schmidt's temporary assistant and partner Johanna Brandt and Schmidt's nephew Erik.

In fact, in the mid-1980s, Kross had received an exit permit from Soviet Estonia to conduct research in the Federal Republic.

Conversations of whatever kind did take place – only their appearance as journalistic documentation, which in this book marks the counter-perspective to autobiographical fiction, is again only the result of literary work.

The extremely knowledgeable and stylish translator Cornelius Hasselblatt,

Bernhard Schmidt was born in 1879 on Naissaar, an island off the current Estonian capital of Tallinn.

As an adolescent he lost his right hand experimenting with gunpowder.

His disability must have been an incentive for him to develop into a virtuoso craftsman: After his studies at the technical center in Mittweida, Saxony, he manufactured - without the help of machines - hand-ground lenses and mirrors with a precision that was unparalleled in Europe.

Several companies for photographic and astronomical optics - the novel describes it vividly - wanted Schmidt;

but the latter refused his job out of a strong need, according to Kross, for independence.