Sirge, Rudolf

(Rudolf Sirge). Born Dec. 17 (30), 1904, in Tartu; died Aug. 24, 1970, in Tallinn. Soviet Estonian writer. Honored Writer of the Estonian SSR (1957).

Sirge began publishing in 1924. He graduated from a Gymnasium in Tartu in 1928 and worked as a journalist from 1929 to 1937. His short-story collections Alien Power and On the Highway (both 1927) revealed the influence of naturalism and expressionism. Sirge’s novel Peace! Bread! Land! (1929) bore witness to his partiality for the Bolsheviks; Contemporary Russia (1930; jointly with A. Antson) attempted to tell the truth about the land of the Soviets.

In the 1930’s, Sirge wrote the antifascist and antibourgeois novels Black Summer (1936) and Shame in the Heart (1938). In the late 1940’s and during the 1950’s he dealt with the struggle against the fascist occupation and with socialist construction in the short-story collections On the Eve of a New Day (1947) and Beckoning Roads (1954). The novel The Land and the People (1956; Russian translation, 1957) depicted the radical breakup of the way of life in rural Estonia in 1940 and 1941.

In the 1960’s, Sirge published the short-story collection Slashed by the Winds (1965; Russian translation, 1968), the novel Three at the Table (1969), travel essays, and critical articles. Sirge was awarded two orders and several medals.