In his movie, Tanel Toom retells A. H. Tammsaare’s story about life in Vargamäe using Hollywood film language. This combination of distant cultural contexts addresses the contemporary Estonian audience on different levels. On the one hand, the novel Truth and Justice understood as one of the most canonical representations of the Estonian national character, a work deeply rooted in the local context. On the other hand, the format chosen to tell the story by the director successfully merges it with global culture.

In present day culture these kinds of hybrid forms reflect an important tendency in modern identity formation. Most people in the world now develop a bicultural identity where part of their identity is rooted in their local culture, and another part is adapted to the global situation. Or they may develop a hybrid identity, successfully combining elements of global and local situations in a mix. (Arnett 2002, Hermans and Dimaggio 2007).

Communication with a text is a complicated process. The understanding of a text is based on the analysis of its inner structure, its historical context, and its relations to other texts. However, reading cannot be equated to a simple decoding, as many texts do not only transmit information from an author to a receiver, but also invite a reader to respond, listen to him- or herself, and to be creative.

Thus, in Truth and Justice the Bible plays a significant role, and connections to the Holy Scripture are recognizable on different levels of Tammsaare’s work. While reading the novel, considering biblical motifs may help us to reach a deeper meaning of the text and understand better its poetics and its author’s ideas. From the other side, we may also read Truth and Justice or watch its adaptation more subjectively, connecting the text to contemporary cultural contexts or personal experiences. Both types of reading may turn out to be enthralling.

In the 19th century, social hierarchies were extremely important, and everything from gender, age, marital status, class, profession, and so on, could play a role. Men had last word in everything; sons were more wanted than daughters; the young had to obey the elders. Social borders were not easy to transcend and people did not have much to choose from. Yet, even some characters of Truth and Justice challenged their prescribed identities and strove for something else. How has the situation changed throughout history?

What we consider valuable in life is connected to the value system of the society in which we live.  However, the way we understand different values or the importance we assign to them can vary greatly depending on each individual person. For example, we can assume that many people would consider both freedom and security as important values of our society. But if we were to  begin a discussion about which of these two is more significant, or how to even define what “freedom” and “security” mean, reaching a consensus would appear to be a very difficult task.

Disputes about values can lead to conflicts not only between neighbours but also between entire social groups. Humans are willing to fight relentlessly for having their understanding of values acknowledged as “truthful” or “correct.” Value systems serve as compasses to help us navigate our way in life. And it is natural that all of us need to feel assurance in a frightening and chaotic world, to feel that we are moving in the right direction. No wonder, then, that the landlords of Vargamäe were so stubborn in their quarrels about truth and justice.

Communication between people is a complicated process. We appeal to each other not only through words, but also through gestures, intonation, and facial expressions. Look at the row of pictures, what aspects can help you understand your interlocutor?

On the one hand there are many features of communication such as tone, sight, laughter, or tears that help us understand each other. Whereas, on the other hand, there is no surprise that with the variety of possibilities we sometimes misunderstand each other. For instance, the behaviour of an interlocutor may be very misleading: sometimes it happens that people express what they do not mean to express, or do not know what it is that they even want to express.

In the third quarter of the 19th century, most objects in rural households were handmade, as opposed to bought. Regardless, people possessed at least a few things with symbolic value, that had been cherished and passed down from generation to generation. These are things that could have been created for special occasions, such as weddings, or rare objects brought from elsewhere. For example, the most valuable thing for Krõõt, one of the main characters of the novel, was the white chest that she brought from her parents’ house. It is interesting that these valuable and rare things often become museum exhibits. People used to take care of their inheritances and stored them with more care, in comparison with those daily household items that were used often. It is thus more likely for us to see a holiday dress in some museum exhibition, and not an everyday one.

When hearing the word “landscape” we usually imagine an area with distinctive characteristics. Landscape can be either prairie or forest, sea or deserted, urban or never touched by human. People change landscapes by turning deserts into cities, swamps into fields and arable lands, like people from Vargamäe did. Landscape, such as our home area that plays a crucial role in our identity. We can also find footprints of different times in landscapes - ditches and hills, ruins of buildings, fields and plants, fossils, roads and pathways, but also objects related to legends and personal memories. Landscape reminds of a palimpsest or of walls of an old building that was repaired for several times where some layers of letters or paint have been peeled off, revealing older layers. The better we know a landscape, the better literate we are in reading such footprints.

To survive in the harsh environment of a 19th-century village, people needed to be able to do a lot of things. They needed to know how to build houses, cultivate crops, breed cattle, dewater bogs, and make things from scratch with their own hands. Skills played a crucial role in understanding the place of a person in the social hierarchy. For instance, even a poor person like Andres from Vargamäe could gain respect and love for being strong and hardworking, or a farmhand such as Jaagup for playing the harmonica, or an individual such as Hundipalu Tiit for being fluent and literate in German.

Biosemiotician Kalevi Kull has pointed out that in addition to humans, the land of Estonia is home for more than 30,000 species of living creatures - birds and animals, fish and amphibians, vascular plants and mosses, algae, insects etc. Estonia looks the way we know it exactly because all these species cohabit this land and their wellbeing in this environment is mutually interrelated. We might ask, though, why is it important to recognize and one's colanders and know which ways of life and which habitats suit them? The answer is - in order to preserve our home and in order to be able to resolve conflicts that potentially take place between different species.