Today, change in our material lives is a constant. Many now living have seen the advent not only of the mobile phone and the Internet, but also of space exploration, vaccines and even indoor plumbing. This in contrast to the world you now enter in The Railroad, where the diminutive Matti and Liisa are aging in a corner of the world in which peasant life has remained unaltered for centuries. When the iron rails reach the forests of Eastern Finland, however, that solitude and constancy are forever altered. The Railroad (1884) was prose writer, poet, translator and journalist Juhani Aho's first...