Release date is 2025-07-28

Tapio Riikonen

"Taiston tiellä : Runoja vaino- ja kumousvuosilta" by Larin-Kyösti is a poetry collection written in the early 20th century. It gathers fervent patriotic, spiritual, and elegiac poems born of Finland’s independence struggle and civil turmoil, interweaving frontline scenes with mythic, biblical, and historical allusions. Voices shift from sentries, soldiers, and mothers to martyrs and personified forces, denouncing oppression and betrayal while exalting honor, work, and a free homeland. The opening of the collection moves from rallying calls to arms and sentry alarms into a New Year’s lament for a blighted time, expands to a revolutionary courtroom vignette from France to frame tyranny, and then turns to Christmas prayers and an Easter hunter’s vision that swells into an apocalyptic battle between light and darkness. It conjures historical guilt and haunting (the Viapori betrayal), satirizes a slumbering empire in a “Chinese dream,” and alternates battlefield dirges with metaphysical dialogues and invectives against treachery. Hymns to home and labor stand beside biblical and Kalevala retellings (Simson and Delila, Kyllikki) and a defiant Prometheus, followed by omens and patriotic songs proclaiming a free Finland. The sequence also denounces leaders seen as betrayers, sketches the cruelty of civil conflict, mixes march rhythms with a burlesque of a swaggering invader, and closes this opening stretch by pivoting from war reportage and martyrdom to the resolve of rebuilding and the calm of midsummer. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Hämeenlinna: Arvi A. Karisto Oy, 1918