The writer Helga Pärli-Sillaots (1912–1939) was a prosaist with a promising beginning whose course of life was cut short early. She was one of the talented young Estonian female prosaists who emerged at the end of the 1930s. The war cut off the female prosaist tradition that had started emerging. After the establishment of the Soviet regime, the works of those female authors were no longer published and some of them also became victims of repressions. For that reason, the writings of those authors are not widely known.

The creative style of Helga Pärli-Sillaots fit in with the psychological urban novel that emerged at the end of the 1930s, differing from it by its feminist attitude, which was expressed by stressing women’s free self-realisation and in the demand that women and men should be equal in marriage relationships. Her three published novels, Improvisatsioon mängutoosis (Improvisation in a Music Box, 1939), Karjäär (Career, 1939), and Tee viib järveni (The Road Leads to the Lake, 1939), earned recognition, receiving several awards.

Correspondence and numerous manuscripts written by Helga Pärli-Sillaots are preserved in the Estonian Literary Museum Cultural History Archive. The letters from 1939 published here are part of the family correspondence of Helga Pärli-Sillaots to her mother Aliide Sillaots and her father Karl Sillaots. The letters are mostly typewritten, some are also handwritten. They are published in this publication without altering the author’s spelling, preserving the author’s linguistic usage and orthography.

The letters sent to her parents reflect everyday life, circumstances associated with her husband’s work, participation in social life, and much more. The author depicts details of everyday life in the letters, such as the hustle and bustle and everyday concerns connected with moving to a new place to live, and also problems associated with the sphere of the courts, of which the writer was well-informed. Her future child was also an important topic. Preparation for the advent of the child required quite a bit of exertion.

Pärli-Sillaots also writes about creative work in those letters. For instance, she writes about the publication of her books and the awards she had received for her works. She also writes about interviews that had been conducted with her in the press. She writes about the background of her works and explains that she uses incidents from everyday life in her writing. The letters also allude to the tensions of the times and the eve of the war, the presentiment of which is reflected in the letters.

The family’s subsequent fate was grim. Helga Pärli-Sillaots died of postpartum blood poisoning on 21 December 1939 three weeks after the birth of her son Andres. The NKVD arrested her husband Bruno Pärli on 14 June 1941. He was sent to the Sevurallag prison camp in Sverdlovsk oblast in the Russian Federation. Their son Andres was sent with Bruno Pärli’s new wife into banishment to Ust-Chizhapka in Kargasoksky district, Tomsk oblast. Their little son held up in exile for only a couple of months and died in August. Bruno died in Sevurallag on 12 February 1942. It goes without saying that the tragic fate of her husband and son is not mentioned in the discussion of Helga Pärli-Sillaots by Oskar Kruus that was published in the period of Soviet rule.