Väinö Linna

Väinö Valtteri Linna was born on December 20, 1920, in Urjala, in the Pirkanmaa region of Finland, the seventh of ten children of Vihtori Linna, a butcher from a tenant-farming family, and Maija Nyman. His father died of rheumatic fever when the boy was seven, leaving the family in debt, and his mother kept the household going by working at the local manor; three of his brothers died of tuberculosis. He could read at five, finished six years of the village school, and worked as a farmhand and lumberjack before moving at seventeen to Tampere, where relatives found him a job in the Finlayson cotton mill. Conscripted in 1940, he trained as a non-commissioned officer and served as a squad leader in the machine-gun company of Infantry Regiment 8, through the 1941 advance and the long trench war on the Svir. Back at Finlayson after the war, he married Kerttu Seurin in 1945 and wrote in his spare hours; his first novels, Päämäärä (1947) and Musta rakkaus (1948), drew little notice, and an abandoned third book took him to a psychiatrist in 1952. He turned instead to his own war. The Unknown Soldier, published by WSOY in December 1954, followed a machine-gun company of profane, unheroic, entirely ordinary men through the Continuation War, and set off a national argument about what the Finnish soldier had really been. It sold 175,000 copies in six months, and the royalties let him leave the mill and buy a farm at Hämeenkyrö. His trilogy Under the North Star (1959 to 1962), built on interviews with the old people of Urjala, followed a crofter family from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, and its second volume, which told the 1918 Civil War from the side of the defeated Reds, provoked a fierce debate of its own. In 1963 he became the first Finn to win the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and in 1980 he was named an academician. A stroke in 1984 took away his speech, and he died of lung cancer in April 1992, aged seventy-one.

In the summer of 1942, in a quiet spell on the Svir front, a twenty-one-year-old lance sergeant wrote up his regiment's advance and sent it to WSOY. The publisher turned it down as undeveloped and clumsy, and Linna burned his notes. Twelve years later the same regiment marched through The Unknown Soldier, and WSOY published it.