Novel
Meek Heritage
Hurskas kurjuus
Frans Emil Sillanpää · 1919
Synopsis
The life of Juha Toivola, born in 1857, son of a landowner in north-eastern Satakunta. His father Penjamin drinks the farm into ruin, his mother dies, and the poor, slow and docile child passes from one misery to another; he falls in love with Riina, a nonchalant maidservant, becomes a tenant farmer, and sees his family die one after another. In 1918, without having chosen anything, he follows the Reds on their expeditions, so as no longer to eat each week a potato soup thinner than the last.
Context
It appeared in 1919, only a year after the war, and its objective gaze caused a scandal: the book seeks the causes of the civil war in a poor man's existence, seen from the side of the vanquished. The narrative goes back through flashbacks over the whole life of the character, and one chapter piles up the deaths in his family. France translated it as early as 1928, at Rieder, by Jean-Louis Perret, and reissued it in 1963 in the Nobel Prize collection; English published it in 1938 under the title Meek Heritage.
Who it is for
A short novel, in Finnish, available in French since 1928. It is worth knowing what the civil war of 1918 was and which side the landless tenant farmers were on.
Prizes and reception
His most substantial novel, the one that made him known abroad, twenty years before the Nobel Prize.