Novel
Truth and Justice
Tõde ja õigus
Anton Hansen Tammsaare · 1926
Opening lines
See oli läinud aastasaja kolmanda veerandi lõpul. Päike lähenes silmapiirile, seistes sedavõrd madalas, et enam ei ulatunud valgustama ei mäkke ronivat hobust, kes puutelgedega vankrit vedas, ei vankril istuvat noort naist ega ka ligi kolmekümnelist meest, kes kõndis vankri kõrval.
It was towards the end of the third quarter of the last century. The sun was nearing the horizon, standing so low that it no longer reached the horse climbing the hill with a wooden-axled cart, nor the young woman sitting on the cart, nor the man of nearly thirty walking beside it.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
Andres and his young wife Krõõt come to settle on the Mäe farm, at Vargamäe, bought on credit: a marshland that must be wrested from the bog, and a neighbour, Pearu, cunning and quarrelsome, who wages a war of lawsuits and dirty tricks against him. Then the narrative follows Indrek, the son, who leaves the farm for the school in Tartu, lives through the troubles of 1905, and seeks peace in marriage to Karin and in the bourgeois society of the young republic. Each pursues a truth and a justice that do not meet.
Context
The five volumes appeared in Tartu from Noor-Eesti from 1926 to 1933. According to Tammsaare, the first shows man's struggle with the land, the second with God, the third with society, the fourth with himself, and the last ends in resignation. The cycle spans some fifty years, from the last third of the nineteenth century, from the countryside to the town. Tanel Toom brought the first volume to the screen in 2019, and the complete French translation appeared from Gaïa in 2009 and 2010.
Who it is for
More than two thousand pages in five volumes, translated in full into French; only the first has been translated into English. It helps to know that Vargamäe is the author's birthplace farm, now a museum.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the masterwork of Estonian letters, the Estonian novel par excellence.