Estonians believe their greatest writer to be the prolific novelist and translator A.H. Tammsaare whose most famous work is his famous pentalogy, Truth and Justice, which traces Estonia's dramatic history from the 1860s to the 1930s. Vagabond Voices is publishing the third volume of the pentalogy, After the Storm Fell Silent, following on from Volume I, Vargamae in which deals with the peasantry and at the end introduces the protagonist Indrek, and Volume II whose title is simply Indrek and recounts his education in the city. Both those volumes have already been published by Vagabond Voices, and has sold well in spite of their considerable bulk. In Volume III Indrek finds himself unemployed and alone in a hostile world that is beginning to fall apart. The 1905 Revolution, which would be overshadowed later by the one in 1917, is just starting and the pentalogy is shifting from the personal and the familial to the public and societal. Ideas are driving events, and the consequences are tragic. Tammsaare entirely ignores 1917 in this pentalogy possibly because Volume III has already dealt with this subject. This volume is very much shorter than the others, and only about 70,000 words, but it is the dense and significant core of the pentalogy. It can stand on its own, but is also an integral part of the whole.
A.H. Tammsaare was born Anton Hansen in 1878 into a poor farming family. His father Peeter was to buy a fram, though the land was eighter stony or marshy. Tammsaare's nature was accompanied by an aptitude for study, and the family decided a little late in his teenage years to fund his education and he went to secondary school in Tartu from 1898 to 1903. And from 1903 to 1905, he worked as an editor at the Tallinn newspaper, Teataja. In Tallinn he was able to witness the Russian Revolution of 1905. While many Estonian writers supported it, in part as a means for their own emancipation from the empire and German landowners, Tammsaare took a more cautious approach, supporting some of the aims but rejecting violence. In 1907 he enrolled as a law student at Tartu University, but in 1911 he was unable to sit his finals, as he became very ill with tuberculosis. He was moved to Sochi on the Black Sea and then to the nearby Caucasus Mountains, where his condition improved. On his return to Estonia, he lived for six years on his brother's farm where he was again affected by illness. Unable to work, he threw himself into his studies and mastered foreign languages: English, French, Finnish and Swedish. After his marriage in 1920 to Kathe Veltman, he moved to Tallinn and embarked on the most productive period of his life. His greatest influences were the Russian classics of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Gogol, but his work also shows the influence of Oscar Wilde, Knut Hamsun and Andre Gide. He occupies a central role in the development of the Estonian novel and is a figure of European significance. He died in 1940, in the midst of the Republic's most difficult times.
