Release date is 2026-01-18

Gretan päiväkirjasta -- Kymmenestä markasta -- Tänä iltana -- Reino Vilkkari -- Viha -- Näin piti käydä -- Köyhä leski -- Kaksi mansikkaa -- Vieraina toisilleen -- Vanhalan sukutarinoita -- Runoja.

Tuula Temonen

"Tulta ja tuhkaa" by Iris Uurto is a collection of short stories and poems written in the early 20th century. It centers on urban Finnish life—especially Helsinki—through intimate, psychologically acute portraits of women and other restless souls wrestling with desire, loneliness, class pressure, and moral fatigue. The tone moves between lyrical introspection and stark realism, following characters like Greta, Ridi, impoverished artists, and workers as they search for meaning and connection in a glittering but indifferent city.

The opening of this collection presents four contrasting vignettes. In “From Greta’s Diary,” a young woman wanders rain‑slick Helsinki, sick with emptiness and flirting with self‑destruction, until a former lover’s steady proposal offers her a sudden sense of safety and purpose. “For Ten Marks” follows a freezing day’s walk that triggers a bitter memory: the narrator recalls a cousin who “sold” his fiancée’s love for a trivial sum, a story that sharpens themes of class envy, cruelty, and degraded intimacy. “Tonight” portrays Ridi, a kept woman cushioned by luxury yet starved of warmth, who is brusquely rejected by a younger man and drifts through a humiliating nocturnal ordeal before being helped home by a policeman. Finally, the fragment “Reino Vilkkari” shifts to a cramped workers’ room and a boy’s indelible memory of a father departing by ship and a mother turning to others, sketching the roots of hard living and solitude. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Helsinki: Otava, 1930