Novel
Graves Without Crosses
Ristideta hauad
Arved Viirlaid · 1952
Synopsis
Autumn 1944: the Red Army returns, and many Estonians take to the forests to resist with arms. Among these forest brothers, Taavi learns that Soviet security has taken his wife, their newborn daughter and their eight-year-old son, to force him out of the woods. Between Tallinn and the countryside, among heroes, traitors and chance companions, he tries to find them, in the hopeless struggle of an occupied people who still want to free themselves.
Context
The novel appeared in Lund in 1952, in two volumes, from the cooperative of Estonian writers; its author had himself lived through part of what he recounts. Banned in Soviet Estonia, it was published there in 1991, then reissued in 2009 and in 2015. It has been translated into seven languages, including Finnish, Swedish and Chinese; it appeared in French from Albin Michel in 1962, and in English in Toronto in 1972, in a translation by Ilse Lehiste with a preface by the former Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker.
Who it is for
More than seven hundred pages in two volumes; the book exists in French and in English. You need to know that the narrative, of heroic pathos, carries an openly nationalist point of view.
Prizes and reception
The author's masterwork, and the great epic of armed resistance in Estonian literature.