Meek Heritage by Frans Eemil Sillanpää

• FIRST PUBLISHED: Hurskas kurjuus, 1919 (English translation, 1938)
• TYPE OF WORK: Novel
• TYPE OF PLOT: Impressionistic realism
• TIME OF WORK: 1857-1917
• LOCALE: Finland

The Story

Benjamin was an older man who had already buried two wives. His overtures to the servant girl, Maja, were matter-of-fact, but somehow, Maja saw in this tobacco-dribbling tyrant an opportunity for improvement. She had borne one child out of wedlock and longed for position. When they were married, the parson was at some pains to refer to Maja as a maidservant.

As she awaited Jussi’s birth, she thought that now she might be like other farm wives. Benjamin drank far too much and quarreled incessantly. The night her labor started, he went to drink with Ollila, a neighbor. Maja was left with only Lovisa, the cupper woman, to look after her. Lovisa was sharp-tongued but competent; before Maja came to the farm as mistress, she herself had enjoyed Benjamin’s favors. In fact, when Benjamin stumbled home long after his son was born, he called for Lovisa.

While Jussi was little, he stayed in his cradle and fretted at the lice. As he grew older, he sometimes drank coffee. He learned at an early age to avoid his father, who, for fun, would poke plug tobacco into his protesting mouth. He played with poorer children on top of Pig Hill and was initiated into many mysteries. He looked forward to his confirmation, for he believed it was the dividing line between childhood and man’s estate.

A period of drought seriously impaired the family fortunes. Maja was no longer afraid of Benjamin. Too old and weak to beat her, he continued to drink with Ollila and to borrow money from him. When things got too bad, he took his deeds to Ollila and returned bearing food and money. The sheriff came to take possession of Benjamin’s farm the night the old man died. Maja and Jussi set out for her brother’s farm on foot. Maja left Jussi at Tuorila with her reluctant brother while she looked for work; she, too, died soon afterward.

While he lived with his uncle, Jussi was confused. For one thing, the house was so big and clean, and he was neither servant nor family. Although he received many orders, he understood few of them. He would have liked to run errands for his aunt, but he could never find things. He finally became a herdsman, a job he could do fairly well.

After his first confirmation, Jussi was disappointed because people still treated him like a child. Little by little, however, his uncle gave him more responsibility. One fall evening, he was sent to round up crofters for the harvest. Luckily, he found most of them at a harvest celebration. At the merriment, Jussi was treated like everyone else: He was given ale to drink, and he danced with a boy his age. Later he was in a group that escorted Manda, a farm girl, back to Tuorila. The men made so much noise trying to follow Manda up to her loft that they awoke Jussi’s uncle. The master came with a stick and beat the revelers.

Tuorila prospered, and the family decided to invite the gentry to a social gathering. Jussi had the job of looking after the horses and carriages. A comrade, Gustav Toivola, loosened the wheel nuts on the guests’ rigs. Jussi’s uncle blamed him for the accidents and cast him out. Jussi found a temporary home at Toivola with Gustav’s parents.

At Toivola, Jussi was not exactly welcome, but he stayed on, helping where he could. A kind of liberation came with the arrival of the timber cutters. The foreman, Keinonen, hired Jussi and helped him keep his wages away from the Toivola family. When the timber cutters left, Jussi went with them. For years, working on the lakes and shores, he earned a little money but not enough to save. Sometimes, although he was too shy to pursue women, he went on sprees with the other men.

After a time, the logging slacked off. The best Jussi could do was to go back to his native countryside and take a job as a farmhand at Pirjola. Rina, the maid, slept on the other side of the fireplace. She was a slack girl and loose-natured. Jussi often thought of going over to her bed, but he lacked the courage. One Sunday in July, however, he drank some liquor he had bought and slept in Rina’s bed. She was willing enough, for she was pregnant, and it would be better if her child had a father.

Jussi and Rina were given an old cabin in the swamp. Although they were not regular crofters, for they had no contract, they could raise what they wished on an acre of ground allowed them. Jussi worked for his rent when the master of Pirjola needed him. Rina’s first child was born soon afterward. From the beginning, Kalle did not seem to belong to the family. Then Jussi’s children, Hilda and Ville, came, and much later, Lempi and Marti. Jussi was once prosperous enough to have a horse and cow, but after the horse died, he never had enough money to buy another. Rina was not a good manager and often sold the bread Jussi brought home.

Kalle, always a strange child, hit Ville with a rail and paralyzed his younger half-brother. Medicine for Ville took all of Jussi’s money until the child died. Kalle was sent away to work as soon as he was big enough. Hilda, a quiet girl, went into service in a distant town. She drowned herself when only the son of the house was at home. Rina, always tired from farm work and weak after the birth of her last child died of a mysterious feminine complaint.

As he grew old and bald, Jussi’s teeth crumbled. Working less and less, he spent more time in the village. Lempi and Marti brought themselves up as best they could. Only on sufferance did Jussi keep his land. Kalle, now a cab driver in the city, sent home newspapers, which Jussi had someone read to him. The unrest caused by the war resulted in changes. The working day was now only twelve hours instead of sixteen, and there was agitation for more reforms. Because he had become garrulous, Jussi gained a reputation for frank speaking. When the Socialists began to rule that section of Finland, he was even a member of a delegation.

During the strikes, the Socialists posted armed guards and requisitioned what they needed from the farms. Jussi was made a sentry at Paitula and given a rifle. Everyone else knew the strike was ending, but Jussi stayed on, faithful to his assignment. When Paitula was looted, the fleeing Socialists killed a landowner. At last, suspecting something, Jussi threw down his rifle and went home.

Government officials came to the farm for Jussi. In the house, they found only the two crying children, but in the barn, they captured the cowering Jussi. There was a trial, which Jussi did not understand very well, and the judge was in a hurry to restore order. Jussi was one of fourteen led out to an open grave and shot.

Critical Evaluation

Meet Heritage conveys the atmosphere of a brooding folk epic. Jussi, the protagonist, symbolizes the lower-class Finn who is jostled and led by fate. The harsh climate, the grubbing toil, the cruel class cleavages are his natural lot. Even the birth and death cycles are indifferent to him. His redeeming virtue is his ability to work hard under direction. Over the whole novel lies a tone of melancholy. The style is discursive and penetrating.

The novel begins and ends with the death of Jussi Toivola. His death is caused by men to whom he means nothing more than another body. Jussi Toivola’s insignificance is underlined throughout the novel by the way his name keeps changing. When he is young, he is called Jussi; as an adult making his own way in the world, he becomes Juha. When he begins to rise a little, the people around him take to calling him Janne, but when his status again declines, he once more becomes Juha. He is nothing more than the social status he possesses, and that is usually lowly.

Jussi grows up feeling that he has no control over his own life. The events in his existence are like acts of God: They happen without reason, and he must endure them. It never occurs to him that he might be able to shape his own destiny. Fatalistic and absentminded, Jussi accepts what comes, as do most of the peasants in the novel. Passively, they wait for life to decide what it will do with them. The primitive world of Jussi’s childhood marks him for life. The peasants he is reared among might be living in the Middle Ages rather than during the end of the nineteenth century. To the child Jussi, grownups are a mysterious problem of nature, to be feared and avoided. His father, old Benjamin, possesses nothing but contempt for either women or children. All a boy can do is wait for the time when he will be a man and can torment women and children as his father did. Meanwhile, everyone struggles on, from week to week, month to month, aware of nothing beyond their tight little world. They do not even think of the country they live in; the term “Finnish nation” means nothing to them. In the depths of their souls, these rough, ignorant beings nurse a bitter mysterious melancholy.

The author points out that from the distance of time, this primitive world might seem interesting or even attractive in its simplicity, but it was nothing but drab misery to those who had to live in it. Particularly to the women, the dominant color of life was a permanent gray. If one survived, however, there would be a turning point, someplace at the beginning of adulthood, when life might almost seem desirable. For a brief moment, a spark of hope might burn in one’s breast. A few individuals did manage to go up in the world, to find a bit of happiness. Usually, however, a new grayness settled over the remainder of one’s life. In the last report, one found oneself alone: This was the chief lesson that life taught Jussi. Dreams were futile. Survival was all.

If Jussi could have been said to possess any philosophy, it was a kind of fatalism. His parents died while he was young, and other events tossed him here and there, eventually returning him to the place of his birth. Coincidences piled on top of one another until they resembled fate. He did not protest. He accepted everything. Jussi did not understand his own emotions, his attitudes, fears, and hopes. He occasionally wondered how his emotions came to possess him and what they had to do with the events in his life; he was happiest when he did not have time or energy to think.

Jussi’s relations with Rina and their subsequent marriage temporarily seem to transform the bleakness of his life, but the illusion is only fleeting. He is soon overwhelmed by a greater emptiness than ever before. His life is a series of jerks, little jolts along the path from birth to death. After each jerk, he submits to wherever he finds himself. What good would it do him to dwell on what has happened? Life is life, whatever form it takes, and the only absolute is that life must be lived. There is no religion in this primitive existence, except a few meaningless rituals undertaken with no understanding.

An unusual evenness of tone pervades the book. Whatever happens, the prose flows on, even and steady, like life itself. The narrative is constructed in such a way as to suggest the tree-filled spaces, the wildness and oppression of this land to the far north, and the relentless, unyielding nature of life a century ago in Finland. Frans Eemil Sillanpää found a precise and fluid prose to describe the world of his principal character and to convey the hopelessness of his existence. There is a beauty to Sillanpää’s art, but little to Jussi’s existence.

In the background, throughout the novel, hovers the theme of the growing Finnish national movement, meaningless to Jussi and the people around him, but soon to catch the population’s attention. The burden of responsibilities (children and wife) give life what meaning it has for Jussi. When he loses his burden, he discovers that he has nothing. His untrained mind is left in a vacuum, prey for thoughts that he cannot control. Changes happen in the world beyond, but he is only vaguely aware of them. Almost accidentally, now old, he is drawn into the turmoil of the times. No one would have suspected that Jussi would turn into a rebel; he always had been so docile and meek, so accepting of his fate. It is as if history determines that it will have its way, regardless of the desires or interest of the individual.

Once Jussi begins to think, to question his lot and the lot of the peasant laborers like himself, there is no stopping him. Without responsibilities, he becomes more outspoken, joins the movement, even assumes some responsibility. He does not hate the laborers, he insists; he only wants them to stop living on another man’s sweat. He does not understand the meaning of what is happening, but he knows that it is revolution, and he rather likes the idea. Yet, when everything collapses around him, he longs for the past, an idealized version of a past that never was. The author attempts to end on an optimistic note, but the prevailing sensation at the end of the book is gloom. Jussi was shot, hardly knowing why. Was he condemned because he suffered all of his life? Must he pay for the decades of misery?

Sillanpää was the son, himself, of a Finnish farmer. Most of his work deals with the lives of the peasants in western Finland. At first, his novels were known only in Scandinavia, where they were very popular, but later, they were translated into other languages and were admired for their unsparing, if poetic, realism. In 1939, when Sillanpää went to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature, Russia was already invading Finland; he took his family with him across the border to escape the invading Russian forces. Later, he returned to Finland and died in Helsinki in June 1964. His work has a special meaning to the Scandinavian reader, but people everywhere can appreciate the richness of his prose and the ultimate meanings of his books and their vision of the hard realities of life.

Principal Characters

• Jussi Toivolaa mild peasant
• Rinahis wife
• Benjaminhis father
• KalleRina’s son

Bibliography

"Frans Eemil Sillanpää – Biographical." Nobel Prize, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1939/sillanpaa/biographical. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Hardwig, Florian. "Meek Heritage (1938) by Frans Eemil Sillanpää and Sardinian Brigade (1939) by Emilio Lussu." Fonts in Use, 11 May 2024, fontsinuse.com/uses/60654/meek-heritage-1938-by-frans-eemil-sillanpaeae. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Nanu, Paul. "Images of Finland in Interwar Romania." Philologica Jassyensia, vol. 12, no. 2, 2016, pp. 251-61, www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=526003. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Reed, Beatrice M.G. "Chapter 7: From Anthropomorphism to Ecomorphism." Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment: Ecocritical Approaches to Northern European Literatures and Cultures, 2020, p. 117. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Rossi, Riikka. Nordic Literature of Decadence. Routledge, 2019.