The fate of Jussi Toivola reflects the fate of rural Finland. Frans Eemil Sillanpää tells the story of the hardships and struggles of the simple farmer Jussi in his quest for a dignified and decent life. Tragic and sincere, stirring and significant, painful and beautiful. Born in the autumn of 1857 to poor farmers, Jussi Toivola enters a time marked by great upheaval. Finland strives to free itself from centuries of foreign rule first by Sweden and then by Russia. In his homeland, where Jussi grows up and later tries to make a living as a laborer and smallholder in a hut with his wife and numerous children, hunger and poverty complicate his existence. Rural life is still strongly tied to a hierarchical class system. Then, in 1918, the civil war breaks out.