Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Uprising by Väinö Linna Under the North Star I-III. Väinö Linna’s magnum opus, the Under the North Star trilogy, reaches from earliest years of the 20 th century up until the 1950s. In its pages, a small village in southern Finland lives an earthy, primal existence through Finland’s largest transformations. Chronologically, the Under the North Star I falls between the decade preceding the February Manifesto and the eve of World War I. The fates of sharecroppers, landowners, the lord of the manor and the residents of the vicarage are interwoven with the flows of societal upheaval. In The Uprising – Under the North Star II , the tragedy of the sharecroppers rises to its apex. The chain of events starts from the outbreak of World War I and comes to a close in November 1919. The Finnish Civil War provides a thematic core for the work. Reconciliation – Under the North Star III records life under the North Star during the era of Finnish independence. The depiction begins in the early 1920s and continues to approximately 1950. This was to be Väinö Linna’s last novel, a multi-protagonist novel in the great realistic narrative tradition. The point of perspective is consistently low-keyed, the reader learns about paramount events and modern ideas through their impact on ordinary people. In this way, social and historical insights come across even stronger. Add to this Väinö Linna’s language, pervaded by sweat and poor, lean soil. Linna deftly wields the most powerful weapons in his arsenal from beginning to end: conciliatory or bitter or black humour, characters that grow more and more complex, dialogue snatched directly from the mouths of the nation’s people. Under the North Star is a work of art. And as such, it tells more about the life of Finns than dozens of works of history combined. Prizes, Awards. The Nordic Council Literature Prize (Under the North Star III) 1963. Praise for the Work. “The Nordic Council Literature Prize 1963 is awarded to Väinö Linna for the third part of his novel trilogy “ Täällä Pohjantähden alla ” ( Under the North Star ), a majestic vision of Finland’s recent history, rendered with powerful creation of characters in a tangible realistic portrayal. The account concludes a major epic work of significance for public debate in the Nordic countries.” – Statement of the Jury, The Nordic Council Literature Prize. The Uprising by Väinö Linna. by birthday from the calendar. TimeSearch for Books and Writers by Bamber Gascoigne. This is an archive of a dead website. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared; some links and images may no longer function. A .zip of the website is also available. Väinö (Valtteri) Linna (1920-1992) Novelist, essayist, one of the greatest writers of post-war Finland. Linna's major works, Tuntematon sotilas (1954, The Unknown Soldier), or the historical family saga Täällä Pohjantähden alla (1959-1963, Here Beneath the North Star), are nearly at every home in Finland. Väinö Linna was born into a working class family in Urjala in central Finland. He was the seventh child of a local slaughterman, Vihtori Linna, who died when Väinö was eight years old. His mother, Maija Linna, supported the family by working at Honkola manor. Linna attended public school for six years and left his studies in the mid-1930s. After working in odd jobs, including a farm-hand for the Honkola manor and lumberjack, he moved in 1938 to Tampere, where he was employed as a factory mechanic by the Finlayson textile mills. His spare time Linna spent in libraries. From 1940 to 1944 Linna served in the Finnish army at the eastern front, fighting as the squad leader of a machine-gun unit. During the Continuation War (1941-44) between Finland and the Soviet Union Linna wrote a story telling the regiments advance from the Russian border to the east, to Syväri. In the spring of 1943 he was posted back to Finland as an instructor. After the war he married Kerttu Seuri, the daughter of a farmer. Linna had first met her at a soldier's canteen, where she had volunteered. In the wedding ceremony she wore her sister's wedding dress and Linna used a borrowed suit. Linna returned to his work at the factory, but had long since decided to become a writer and even revealed his ambitious intention to his fellow workers. From the library he carried home works by such authors as Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky, Strindberg, Goethe, Carlyle, and Nietzsche. On Sundays he often read two books. Linna's first collection of poems did not interest the publisher and Linna abandoned this line of writing. In 1947 appeared Linna's first novel, a thinly disguised autobiography entitled Päämäärä (the goal). The book sold poorly. However, during this period Linna became a member of a literary ciorcle, run by the director of the Tampere City Library, Mikko Mäkelä. Among its other members was Alex Matson, whose work Romaanitaide (1947) became essantial guide for aspiring writers. Linna's next novel, Musta rakkaus , was a triangular drama, a tale of love, jealousy, and murder set in Tampere. Linna then started a new novel, variously called "The Messiah" or "The Lonely One" about a tubercular factory clerk. The project was interrupted by an emotional crisis, from which he recovered with the help of his psychiatrist friend. Linna continued working on the novel, but he never finished it. Linna's breakthrough work, The Unknown Soldier (1954), created a fierce debate. "Linna is the writer of aggression," declared Timo Tiusanen in Helsingin Sanomat . In spite of the reviews, the novel sold 50,000 copies in its first three months. Linna's image of officers and the political leadership was far from flattering to the educated elite. Toini Havu, in her famous review ( Helsingin Sanomat , December 19, 1954), criticized the novel especially for its naturalism and perspective from below. Linna did not present his characters in a grand historical and ethical context, Havu argued, like Jussi Talvi did in his war novel Ystäviä ja vihollisia (1954). Also modernist writers were not happy with the "antiquated" realism of the novel, its interest in the characters and situations. Linna tried to see the war from the viewpoint of the enlisted man, using dialect, humour, and portraying soldiers without unostentatious heroism, or standing above the events he narrated. The well-known figures who sided with Linna included Martti Haavio, a folklorist and poet, and Arvi Korhonen, a military historian. Linna's Tolstoyan philosophy of history went mostly unnoticed, beginning from the opening of the novel which established Linna's ironical stand in relation to historical determinism: "As everyone knows, God is all-powerful, all-knowing and farseeing. So it was that He once let a forest fire devour several hundred acres of state forest on a sandy heath near the town of Joensuu." The Unknown Soldier gained a great success and was translated into several languages. Up to 1990 it had sold more than half million copies. Linna's novel was adapted to screen first time in 1955. This version, directed by Edvin Laine, is among the most popular movies in Finland. The second version, directed by Rauli Mollberg, was made in 1985. An open-air theater production in Tampere, where real trucks and tanks were used, was perfomed for several years. The Unknown Soldier was also made into an opera by Tauno Pylkkänen in 1967, directed by Edvin Laine. The original � uncensored � edition of Tuntematon sotilas , entitled Sotaromaani , was published in 2000, and revealed that especially Linna's critical views of officers and commanders at headquarters were removed, and the coarse language of the soldiers was occasionally straightened. The Unknown Soldier follows the war of a group of men, a single platoon, from the summer offensive of 1941 to the bloody retreat from the eastern Finland, Carelia, in 1944. Much of its events were based on Linna's own experiences in the front, and the characters had their more or less real-life representatives. Using the conversations and experiences of a collective of men, Linna creates colorful portraits of different human types and demonstrates the ability of the Finnish soldier without glorifying the war itself. At the end one of the characters, Priha, laughs that "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics won but the small and gutsy Finland finished a good second." The characters from the book (and from the film), Rokka, Hietanen, Lahtinen and Koskela, became known as models of national heroes, loved like characters from J.L. Runeberg's (1804-1877) patriotic poem cycle The Songs of Ensign Stål about the Russo-Swedish war of 1808-09. In public debate often the names of the soldiers are used as slogans � an insubordinate but brilliant soldier is referred to as "Rokka." During the years 1955 and 1964 Linna lived in Hämeenkyrö as a farmer, but he sold the farm in 1964 and moved back to Tampere. The success of Tuntematon sotilas has enabled Linna to devote himself entirely to writing. In 1959 appeared the first volume of his trilogy Here Beneath the North Star. Its title was taken from a popular song by Johan Freadrik Granlund. The novel depicted the development Finnish society from the end of the 19th century to the period after the World War II. The objective of the book was to explain the background of the Civil War (1917-18), the bitter conflict between Reds and Whites, the following traumatic division of the society, and the national reconciliation after World War II.