Narrative
Ühe härja elulugu
Not translated into English
Ernst Peterson-Särgava · 1899
Synopsis
Biography of an ox: on a poor farm, a calf is raised with care. The whole household looks after it, it is called Punu, and hopes for a better year are placed in it, for a beast is worth money. Then comes the time of the yoke. It pulls, it is barely fed, and the man who holds the goad is told to live as it does: toil, pull, day after day, year after year. Then it grows old, and one must decide what to do with a beast that no longer pulls.
Context
Written in 1898, the text appeared the following year in Rakvere, at the head of the first of the three booklets of a series its author called the Abscesses, with a second story under the same cover. The whole series showed debt, drunkenness and the power of the pulpit over the countryside, and it caused a scandal: its author was taken for a demolisher of the old world. Jaan Tõnisson, who then led the national camp, noted in his diary that there was poison in it, dry and bitter as consumption. The series has been reprinted continually since, its author adding three pieces until the year of his death.
Who it is for
A short story in Estonian, never published in French or in English. It helps to know that the word in the title is ordinarily used for a person's life, and that the whole force of the text rests on this.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the flower of Estonian naturalism, it belongs to the foundation of the country's critical realism and remains a school classic.