When The Storm Fell Silent

When the Storm Fell Silent is an ironic, tragic and contradictory work which reflects the author's ambivalent attitude to the 1905 Revolution in Tsarist Russia, which Estonia was then a part of. He sympathised with the policies but disagreed with the random violence. This however does not do justice to the complexity of this great work which comprehends the difficult truth that the majority's altruism, humanity and desire to improve other people's lives can end in so much suffering without any durable gains. What appears simple becomes entangled in a web of mendacity, double-speak and false promises. Indrek, the central character, clearly represents Tammsaare's own convictions, but not exactly. The author can approach any subject and stun the reader with his novel interpretations, and also gives the reader the opportunity to read his words and infer varied understandings and appreciations. Every actor in a revolution is represented here: from left to right and back again, every striking worker, every shopkeeper, every landowner, every policeman, every spy, every worker's wife, every outsider and every starry-eyed teenager. Few people are who they first seem to be, and the shifting trends of the crowd are followed and carefully examined - a force of nature that ultimately is spent. When the Storm Fell Silent is Volume III in the Truth and Justice pentalogy, a monumental work which has been translated into many European languages, but only now being published in English for the first time by Vagabond Voices. The first two volumes, Vargamae and Indrek deal with the personal and the familial and this third volume with the public and societal, but always both elements are present: one in foreground and one in the background, because Tammsaare is as much a holistic writer and he is an extraordinarily imaginative one. Author Biography: A.H. Tammsaare was born Anton Hansen in 1878 into a poor farming family. His father Peeter was able to buy a farm, though the land was either stony or marshy. His dreamy 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 education 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 to Kathe Veltman 1920, 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.