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A.H. Tammsaare's pentalogy Truth and Justice is considered a central text in Estonian culture, perceived virtually as a second national epic. The article analyzes it from the perspective of comparative genre studies. It is discussed as an idiosyncratic example of Bildungsroman, a genre narrativizing modernizing change focusing on the lives of everyday individuals, thus symbolically domesticating and humanizing the global developments of modernization. The emplotment of Tammsaare's novel is comparatively discussed against the background of the Western European Bildungsroman on the one hand and of non-European postcolonial Bildungsroman on the other. The analysis enables to gain new insight into the reception and cultural working-through of the belated rapid modernization in Estonia. It also helps to explain the canonical position of Tammsaare's novel in Estonian literature: The novel is a poetic tour de force that forges a both intra- and internationally acceptable model of modern Estonia.

The texts of Estonian literary classic A. H. Tammsaare (1878-1940) can be read as mediating contradictory fin de siècle discourses of modernity. The emergence of these discourses was the effect of an accelerated process of socioeconomic modernization. This article analyzes constructions of femininity in Tammsaare's literary texts through his women protagonists. The construction of these protagonists can meaningfully be traced to the increasingly insistent presence of women in the public sphere throughout Europe and in Estonia at the period of fin de siècle. Although Tammsaare's texts speak by means of feminist discourses, his constructions of femininity lean toward the negative, misogynistic pole of these reactions to emancipated and \"new\" women. His analysis of womanhood often refers to the misogynist theory of gender in Otto Weininger's popular treatise Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Sex and Character. An Investigation of Fundamental Principles), which came out 1903.