![]() ![]() (This is all the more surprising to me when I read most Finnish postings on this forum, where any kind of criticism is normally swept aside completely.) However, you only have to look at the first few pages of the novel to see that it is really much broader in its criticism - so broad, in fact, it makes you wonder how it has managed to gain such huge popularity in Finland. The novel has been seen as a critique aimed at the ruling classes of Finland at the time. The novel seems to be the type of fiction which can communicate a kind of truth that historians can rarely achieve, and there seems to be good reason to use Linna's novel as way to really penetrate into the Finnish army at the time and get a deeper understanding of what went on. The huge popularity of Linna's novel in Finland seems to confirm this, and many men that fought in that war have been praising it for it's realism. I also noticed that Pipping, in his preface to one of the reprints, praises Linna's work and says that though it is a piece of fiction, it can serve entirely as a sociological study as well. ![]() ![]() Reading Knut Pipping's "Infantry Company as a Society" it struck me how close his observations of sociological and psychological mechanisms in the Finnish Army at the time are to the observations delivered by Väinö Linna in his famous novel "Unknown soldier". ![]()
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