Artists mark Tammsaare classic with 100 unique editions

Anton Hansen Tammsaare’s novel Truth and Justice is exceptional even by world standards, literary scholar Maarja Vaino told ERR’s programme Ringvaade, as Estonia marks 100 years since the book’s first volume was published.

Vaino, director of the Tammsaare Museum in Tallinn, said classics endure because readers find new layers in them, study and interpret them, and debate their meaning. Each generation, she said, discovers the books anew. Foreign researchers who have studied Tammsaare’s work have described it as among the top ten in world literature, Vaino said.

She added that people in Latvia and Finland have said they do not have an author who wrote a book like Truth and Justice. Estonians may be so used to the novel, and so often hear it discussed, that they tire of the subject, she said, but there is something very special about it.

To mark the centenary, the Tammsaare Museum invited 100 living artists to read the novel and create an artwork that captured it for them. The works were shown at Kastellaanimaja Gallery in the spring, and an exhibition of the artworks and the books made from them is due to open at Vaal Gallery on October 20.

The artworks and books will be auctioned. Each book has the same text but a different cover, with only one copy of each, making them bibliophile rarities, Vaino said. She said the project was intended to mark the novel’s uniqueness and leave a special trace of its first 100 years.