Rudolf Sirge

Rudolf Sirge (30 December 1902 – 24 August 1970) was an Estonian writer.

Life and career

Rudolf Sirge was born in 1904 as the son of a sawmill worker and spent his childhood in various places in southern Estonia. His education was faltering. After four years of primary school, he was accepted into the teacher training college in Tartu on his second attempt in 1921, but he left after two and a half years without graduating. Sirge then spent a few years working in various places and in 1926 took a job as an errand boy for a publishing house in Tartu. There he received his high school diploma at evening school in 1928 and then enrolled at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Tartu. However, he only stayed at the university for one semester and did not study.

He began publishing in 1924. In 1927, two books of Sirge's stories were published (“Alien Power” and “On the Highway”). These publications were marked by the influence of naturalism and expressionism. The novel “Peace! Of bread! Earth!" of 1929, was about the events of the February and October revolutions in Russia. Critics called the novel still artistically immature but testifying to the writer's sympathy for the Bolsheviks. In his publications, he described the achievements of the USSR in “Modern Russia” in 1930, he exposed the vices of bourgeois society in “Modest Desires” (1935) and warned against the danger of fascism in “Black Summer”. He showed the tragedy of an honest person in conditions of social injustice in “Shame in the heart”.

In the following years, Sirge worked as a publishing employee and reporter and undertook several trips around the world. In 1932 he wanted to sail around the world, but this was cut short the following year on the west coast of African. From 1937 to 1940 he was the press officer in the Estonian Foreign Ministry.

After Estonia came under Soviet rule in June 1940, he was appointed director of the Estonian Telegraph Agency by the Soviet authorities. After Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union and the occupation of Estonia in the summer of 1941, Sirge was imprisoned by the Germans for eight months. He was then able to await the end of the war in seclusion in the countryside. Sirge's most important novel was published in 1956, the extensive historical picture Maa ja rahvas was initially distributed over six issues of Looming Magazine and then published as a book. It describes the events in the countryside in the first year of Soviet rule from a critical point of view. From 1946 he worked parttime for the magazine, Looming and as an official of the Estonian Writers' Union. Rudolf Sirge died in 1970 in an ambulance on the way from Paunküla to Tallinn