Truth and Justice IV: Karin

Karin is Volume IV of A.H. Tammsaare’s monumental Truth and Justice pentalogy which “chronicles Estonia’s evolution from a serf economy of imperial Russia to an independent nation state, and remains a cornerstone of European literature” (Times Literary Supplement). It examines different public and private themes in each volume.

Karin is the story of marital conflict and therefore could not be more different from Volume III’s account of the 1905 Revolution – a social conflict. Nevertheless it still has that mix of satire and pathos, of which Tammsaare is a master. The volumes are not short and reflect many aspects of societies everywhere and not just in interwar Estonia. Karin depicts various couples and how they deal with their marital problems, but it also observes the new Estonian middle class, which previously had been German.

Although a rational novelist, Tammsaare is extraordinarily skilful at writing dialogues brimming with irrationalism, presumably because he considered it an innate feature of human behaviour. This often generates his subtle humour, which is to be found in all his literary works. Karin is married to Indrek, the protagonist of all the volumes except the first in which he only comes to the foreground towards the end. She has not appeared in the previous volumes, and the reader only hears about the early part of their marriage in a few flashbacks. It was probably inevitable that his passive and undemonstrative nature would clash with Karin’s emotional and unpredictable one. What they do have in common, however, is that neither of them behave as would be expected of their sex in that time and place.