Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

Lasinkirkas, hullunrohkea. Aila Meriluodon elämästä ja runoudesta
[Glass-clear, daredevil]
Helsinki: WSOY, 2010. 417 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-0-35488-9
€39, hardback

Aila Meriluoto (born 1924) is a poet, author and translator whose first collection of poems, entitled Lasimaalaus (‘Stained glass’), sold  more than 25,000 copies in 1946. She became a celebrity of her time, as her young, fresh voice expressed post-symbolist visions and, after the long, cruel years of the war, spoke defiantly about the death of God. Hailed as a youthful prodigy, she was favoured by the dominant poet and professor of literature, V.A. Koskenniemi. Meriluoto has published ten collections of poems, as well as novels, children’s books, diaries, memoirs, and a book about her first husband, the poet and author Lauri Viita (1916–1965). She has translated works by Rainer Maria Rilke, Harry Martinson and Astrid Lindgren. This biography tends to concentrate on the writer’s personal history rather than on her works. The author and scholar Panu Rajala and Meriluoto became acquainted in the 1970s, and he calls his biography  ‘a subjective testimonial’. Rajala has written plays, novels and film scripts as well as biographies, among them one of the classic author Mika Waltari (1908–1979).

Helvi Juvonen

The work of Helvi Juvonen is beguilingly strange; intense, eccentric, askew, it sees the world afresh. It charms by means of fairy-tale motifs and apparent nonsense; but it also offers piercing insights into suffering, loneliness, and alienation.

It combines the haunting, elliptical quality of the verse of Emily Dickinson, the nineteenth-century American poet-recluse, with the sharp, fresh imagery of the Finnish 1950s modernist Eeva-Liisa Manner. Its religiosity is complex and unsettling, its humour sly and bizarre. Hard to categorise, Juvonen is both traditional and modern: a sceptical believer, a quiet transgressor.

Juvonen (1919–1959) was known as ‘Nalle’ (teddy) as a child, and her fondness for and identification with animals emerges often her poems:

The mole sleeps,
spade-paw,
velvet-fur,
dreaming a dream, darkly soft

The poetry is also characterised by a fairy-tale logic and a kind of childlike anarchy; a goblin shares her joy with a bumblebee, a tapir talks to a stone. There is a mischievous, surreal streak in the work. The world is anthropomorphised, as in a fairy tale; the poet addresses a singing kettle.

Juvonen in fact wrote fairy tales, not published in her lifetime, like that of Little Bear dreaming as she hibernates. ‘Bon bons, bon bons,’ she says repeatedly, this stream of sound constituting joyous nonsense, an acknowledgement of the miraculous freshness of the world. More…

Satukuningatar Anni Swan. Elämä ja teokset
[Anni Swan, the queen of storytelling. Her life and works]
Jyväskylä: Atena, 2009. 275 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-796-561-3
€ 32, hardback

Anni Swan (1875–1958) was a writer, translator and editor of children’s magazines. Her symbolic tales utilise her highly original language of sensory imagery. Swan’s symbolism is rooted in the golden age of Finnish arts at the end of the 19th century. The pre-eminent setting for Swan’s stories is the Finnish forest. Her ‘eco-criticism’ of practices that exploited the natural environment can be seen as radical for her time. Swan is also considered to be the first true writer of books for young people in Finland. Her stories about upper-class characters who overcome obstacles emphasise the class conflicts and other injustices of their day, yet they have remained popular into the 21st century. This book, based on Sirpa Kivilaakso’s doctoral thesis on Swan’s fairy-tale symbolism, presents a biography of the author, with supporting extracts from her books, diary entries and letters.

Jolly good! Young women celebrating the First of May in Helsinki in 1912. Photo: Ivan Timiryasev

How was city life for the single woman a hundred years ago in Helsinki?

She could ride a bike, for example, provided it was equipped with an ‘alarm system’ and the speed was not high. Socially she could have fun as long as she obeyed the rules. No admittance to restaurants without male company, for example.

Some young women in those days had to make a living by teaching or by working in an office – before they got married, of course.

A new exhibition (25 March–29 August) at Helsinki’s Ateneum art museum, entitled Kaupungin naiset (‘Women of the city’), focuses on the cultural life of young women in Helsinki in the 1910s through the eyes of the writer and critic L. Onerva (aka Hilja Onerva Lehtinen, 1882–1972). More…

Yrjö Jylhä, talvisodan runoilija
[Yrjö Jylhä, poet of the Winter War]
Helsinki: Otava, 2009. 351 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-1-23840-9
€ 35, hardback

Yrjö Jylhä (1903–1957) was a poet and translator whose collection of poems entitled Kiirastuli (‘Purgatory’), published in 1941 after the Winter War, is one of the most popular works of Finnish verse. Jylhä served as commander of a Karelian army company during the Winter War. A certain sternness, melancholy and pessimism about life are considered to be characteristic of Jylhä’s writing. The author of this book, the first biography of Jylhä, had access to new source materials including letters written from the front. The war meant not only great change for Jylhä as a writer, but also a test of his own limits as a leader and a soldier among other men. After the war, Jylhä’s reputation began to wane – partly for political reasons, as people took a more dismissive attitude towards war poetry about the Finnish fatherland. Jylhä suffered from a serious illness and artistic frustration in his middle age, which led him to take his own life.

Impivaaran kaski. Aleksis Kivi kirjallisuutemme tienraivaajana
The burnt clearing at Impivaara. Aleksis Kivi as trailblazer of Finnish literature.
Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2009. 270 p., ill.
ISBN 978-952-222-107-0
€ 29, hardback

This year marks the 175th anniversary of the birth of Finnish national author Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872). His work as a creator and cultivator of the Finnish language and literature was truly pioneering. Impivaaran kaski (the title refers to his major work, the novel Seitsemän veljestä, Seven Brothers, 1870) deals with the social conditions surrounding the creation of his works and examines their critical reception. Divisive literary disputes raged, and it was not until the second decade of the 20th century that Kivi’s status came to be acknowledged more widely. Esko Rahikainen – a librarian at the National Library and the author of several books on the life and works of Kivi – has utilised new sources to investigate the criticism and marketing of Kivi, as well as readers’ experiences and the use of his works in Finnish education.