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The Unknown Soldier (novel)
''The Unknown Soldier'' (Tuntematon sotilas) is author Väinö Linna's first major novel and his other major work besides ''Under the North Star''. Published in 1954, it is a story about the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union as told from the viewpoint of ordinary Finnish soldiers. Gritty and realistic, it was partly intended to shatter the myth of the noble, obedient Finnish soldier. In Linna's own words, he wished to give the Finnish soldier a brain, an organ lacking in earlier depictions — this was a barb directed at Johan Runeberg's ''The Tales of Ensign Stål'', which admiringly portrays Finnish soldiers with big hearts and little independent intellect. The novel is based on Linna's own experiences, but is more or less fictional. In its structure and style, it may be compared to the war novels of James Jones.
Penguin Books published a new English translation of the book in 2015 with the title ''Unknown Soldiers''.〔(Unknown Soldiers ) Penguin Classics.〕
==Plot==
The novel has no single central character (it both begins and ends with an ironic play on the narrator's omniscience), and its focus is on different responses to the experience of war. It tells the story of a machine gun company in the war from mobilisation to armistice. A picture of the whole nation in microcosm, the men come from all over the country (a result of Linna's unusual patchwork regiment〔''Tuntematon Sotilas'', 1977 special edition, appendix "Väinö Linna ja Tuntematon Sotilas" by Matti Kurjensaari〕 - units were normally made up of men from the same region.) The men have widely varying social backgrounds and political attitudes, and they all have their own ways of coping, but the general picture is one of a quite relaxedly businesslike attitude, and the men's disrespect for formalities and discipline is a source of frustration for some of the officers. They are all there just to get the job done, and official propaganda, both their own and that of the enemy, is to them a source of amusement or outright offensive. Linna's own description of the men in the novel's final sentence is "aika velikultia" — something like "good old boys". The main officer characters are three lieutenants who embody different attitudes: one strict and aloof, one relaxed and fraternal, one idealistic and later disillusioned but brave and loyal to his men.
Linna excels in describing the psychology of his characters. He paints realistic yet deeply sympathetic portraits of a score of very different men: cowards and heroes, the initially naive, eventually brave upper-class idealist Kariluoto, the down-to-earth Koskela, the hardened and cynical working-class grunt Lehto, the platoon comedian Vanhala and the preternaturally strong-nerved Rokka, the politically indifferent Hietanen and the communist Lahtinen. It is only for the sternest officers of the Prussian school for whom he has little love. Many of his characters have come to be seen as archetypes of Finnish men, household names to whom reference can be made without explanation.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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