Frommes Elend

The fate of Jussi Toivola reflects the fate of peasant Finland. Frans Eemil Sillanpää tells of the hardships and efforts of Jussi, a simple farmer, to live a decent, dignified life. Tragic and sincere, stirring and meaningful, painful and beautiful. The son of poor farmers, Jussi Toivola is born in the autumn of 1857 in a time marked by great upheaval. Finland is striving to free itself from centuries of foreign domination, first by Sweden and then by Russia. In his homeland, where Jussi grows up and later tries to make a living as an agricultural worker and small tenant in a hut with his wife and numerous children, hunger and poverty complicate his existence. Peasant life is still strongly bound up in a hierarchical order of estates. Then, when the civil war breaks out in 1918,.