Topic summary
The Seven Brothers
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Seitsemän veljestä.
Seitsemän veljestä (Finnish pronunciation:; literally translated The Seven Brothers, or The Brothers Seven in Douglas Robinson's 2017 translation) is the first and only novel by Aleksis Kivi, the national author of Finland. It is widely regarded as the first significant novel written in Finnish and by a Finnish-speaking author, and is considered a real pioneer of Finnish realistic folklore. Some people still regard it as the greatest Finnish novel ever written, and in time it has even gained the status of a "national novel of Finland". The deep significance of the work for Finnish culture has even been quoted internationally, and in a BBC article by Lizzie Enfield, for example, which describes Kivi's Seitsemän veljestä as "the book that shaped a Nordic identity."