Poetry
Fire of Life
Elu tuli
Gustav Suits · 1905
Synopsis
Verses written between 1900 and 1904, in which the flame says what an existence is, the ardour that makes one toil, fight and invent, and that wears itself out as it goes. Around the title poem come calls to action, the men, the young blacksmiths, the end and the beginning, then the dream of an island of one's own, the time of youth, spring and autumn. Youth is a force here, and the one who writes asks it what it intends to do with itself.
Context
The collection, subtitled “songs 1900-1904”, appeared in Helsinki from Weilin, in the year when the country rises up and the manors burn. The title poem makes the flame life itself, the one that drives people to work, struggle and invention. One hears Nietzsche and the Finn Eino Leino in it as much as the national romanticism of the previous century, and the book owed part of its resonance to the surge of 1905. Its author would not publish the next one, Tuulemaa, until eight years later.
Who it is for
A short collection in Estonian; five pieces appeared in French in a 2002 anthology, and the title poem in English. It helps to know that its author was twenty-one and that the country was in revolution.
Prizes and reception
The most popular of his collections caused a stir on publication and opened twentieth-century Estonian poetry.