Why is the Unknown Soldier so popular among Finns? Journalist Toivo Haimi says that it filled a deep need for reflection and reminiscing in post-war Finland.
"The important thing to understand is that it established the story of the Second World war and the Continuation War from 1941 to 1944 from the perspective of ordinary soldiers at the front line," said Haimi. "Even though it's not a work of history, it's a novel, it offered relatable characters that the generation of war veterans could relate to.
Väinö Linna's novel was originally published in 1954, becoming an instant classic with its beloved characters taking the reader through an uncompromising, realistic and unsentimental portrayal of the brutalities of war.
But it is also a tale of Finnish unity and renewal after the horrors of the 1917-18 civil war — and that is why it has become a fixture in the Finnish cultural iconography of Independence Day.
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We also talked to Liesl Yamaguchi about her 2015 translation, which she named "Unknown Soldiers" to avoid confusion with the English symbolism of the memorial for an unknown soldier — that is, a soldier who dies but who remains unknown.
That would run counter to Linna's vision, according to Yamaguchi.
"Tuntematon Sotilas is not singular," said Yamaguchi. "I mean, it's singular grammatically, but it's not a singular body that's unidentified. No one in this book is unidentified. They're all identified. They all have personalities. They're specific people. They're unsung. They're uncelebrated."
Correcting that lack of recognition is one of the work's key achievements, and it also helped to reunite the nation after the bitter conflicts of the early 20th century.
"I think it is about Finnish unity and about the coming together of the two sides that were split during the civil war," said Yamaguchi. "And so that's why we see this displacement of the moment of independence being shifted from 1917 to the Continuation War and why we have it on loop on Independence Day."
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Egan Richardson presented this episode of All Points North. The sound engineer was Tuomas Vauhkanen.
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