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Finnish and Estonian cultural background books

I always try to read a book from whichever country is the "host country" for the person to whom I am delivering intercultural training.

At the end of last year I was working with a Japanese engineer in Finland, so I read The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (of Moomin fame), which gives a good picture of the Finnish love of being on isolated islands during the summer.

I also read The Czar's Madman: A Novel, by Jaan Kross. The central character, Timo von Bock, is a fictional 19th century baron, and the story is narrated by his brother-in-law as a journal. It is set in Estonia, but is still relevant to Finland, not only because they are neighbouring countries but also because both were ruled by the Russian Empire at the time.

The book is clearly a metaphor for Kross's own experiences of imprisonment in Soviet labour camps. Beyond this, as a historical insight, as with Tolstoy, it alerts you to how multilingual educated upper class people were expected to be in Europe. Timo has his wife and her brother learn Latin, French and Russian in addition to their native Estonian. They only speak Estonian amongst themselves, in order to exclude Russian eavesdropping, and it is seen as the language of peasants.

Kross makes it seem like the journal really existed, but I have not been able to verify this. However my mother's maiden name is Bock, and her uncle traced back our Danish family to Kurland in Estonia, to Raadsherre (lord of the manor?) Paul von Bock, born in 1510. So if Timo did exist, he was almost certainly a relative of mine.

There is also a Bock House in Helsinki, built in 1763 by the merchant and magistrate Gustav Johan Bock, which I couldn't resist photographing with my cameraphone during my visit.