Like Carl Robert Jakobson and Jaan Tõnisson's Tartu Renaissance group, he believed that Estonian culture was best served by farmers and intellectuals from rural backgrounds.

His work was influenced at various stages by Oscar Wilde, Knut Hamsun and André Gide, but, above all, the Russian realists.

3 contains a description about the Russian Revolution of 1905, which is not informed by ideology but by an existential attention to individual suffering, it was often combined with vol.

Even today, the third volume is sometimes called "artistically inferior", although the description of the revolution is on par with similar scenes in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.

1 as the strongest overall; it is a classical peasant novel reminiscent of Hamsun which is also generally held to be the most telling one about "the Estonian character", embodied especially in two antagonistic farmer figures Andres and Pearu.

Tammsaare himself said later that the different volumes deal with the relation of Man (i.e., the human person) to (1) the land, (2) God, (3) State and society, (4) him- or herself and (5) resignation.

Truth and Justice was not translated into English until 2014, when Haute Culture Books published the first volume of the saga under the name "Andres and Pearu".