Naisten mies ja aatteiden. Juhani Ahon elämäntaide

Of Juhani Aho (1861–1921) it is said that he created what have proved to be the most enduring descriptions of how traditional Finland began to be modernised; his most famous book is the novella Rautatie (‘The railway’, 1884) which portrays the arrival of the railway in the Finnish countryside. This new biography also shows once again how many international influences can be found in the work of Aho, who is often called a national author. Aho was active in student politics, and as a newspaper journalist. He was nominated for the Nobel Literature Prize twelve times, but for various reasons, some of them connected with language politics, lobbying on his behalf was not successful. Aho developed Finnish prose, bringing to it realism and impressionistic style. His experiences during a visit to Paris in 1889 form the basis of his novel Yksin (‘Alone’), which caused a stir in part because of its erotic flavour. This book by the author and literary scholar Panu Rajala provides a versatile insight into Aho’s personal story, the world of his ideas, his opinions on art, and his complex relationships.
Translated by David McDuff

Samuel, the creation of Tommi Musturi (featured in Books from Finland on 7 May, 2010, entitled ‘Song without words’)

Comics? The Finnish word for them, sarjakuva, means, literally, ‘serial picture’, and lacks any connotation with the ‘comic’. The genre, which now  also encompasses works called graphic novels, has been the subject of celebrations this year in Finland, where it has reached its hundredth birthday. Heikki Jokinen takes a look at this modern art form

Comics are an art form that combines image and word and functions according to its own grammatical rules. It has two mother tongues: word and image. Both of them carry the story in their own way. Images and sequences of images have been used since ancient times to tell stories, and stories, for their part, are the common language of humanity. The long dark nights of the stone age were no doubt enlivened by storytellers.

One of the pioneers of comics was the Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer. As early as 1837, he explained how his books, combinations of images and words, should be read: ‘This little booklet is complex by nature. It is made up of a series of my own line drawings, each accompanied by a couple of lines of text. Without text, the meaning of the drawings would remain obscure; without drawings, the text would remain without content. The whole gives birth to a sort of novel – but one which is in fact no more reminiscent of a novel than of any other work.’

Comics look extremely easy to read; their images and text seem readily understandable, sometimes even making a simple impression. They are easy to read superficially, and for the reader to have the impression that they have seen it all. But even the simplest comic strip demands of its readers a complex capacity to interpret and distinguish. They must be able to read both images and words. Visual codes are freer in form than textual codes. The grammar of images is not made up of firm rules, but is flexible and capable of innovation. In comics, form and content indeed interact very closely.

The language of comics has many equivalences with other modes of expression. It is most commonly compared with cinema, a contemporary of comics and, like comics, originally a mode of expression intended as innocent entertainment for the masses. Both proceed in time – unlike, for example, art or photography – and comics use photographic angles and close-up and distance shots, like film. Between the individual images of comics there arises a relationship that is more than the images themselves.

The centenary of comics in Finland is celebrated this year: 21 November 1911 saw the publication of the first Finnish comic-strip album, Professori Itikaisen tukimusretki (‘Professor Itikainen’s expedition’), drawn and written by Ilmari Vainio.

Comics began to interest Finnish makers particularly during the 1960s and 1970s: it was part of the radical Zeitgeist to question the old cultural hierarchies, and comics were considered part of popular culture, which was held in increasing value. Moreover, the developing copier technology enabled artists to produce their own magazines: comics became a popular hobby. In the 1990s, it became possible for comics makers to apply for government arts funding.

Fifty or more Finnish comics titles are published every year. Strip cartoons appear in most Finnish newspapers and periodicals; readers are interested in cartoons of many different genres and styles. Collected volumes of strip cartoons are sold in large numbers: Juba Tuomola’s Viivi & Wagner albums have sold more than a million copies. Finnish newspaper strips differ from the American mainstream, which often centre on harmless japes. The most popular Finnish strops are biting in their irony and even dare to speak of sex. Their world is not a hermetic universe of its own: society, politics and world events are often present. Comics books often feature among Finland’s best-selling titles.

Comics are a flexible genre which includes many different modes of graphic and narrative expression, and comics artists delight in exploiting this freedom. Content may be anything at all: information, humour, drama, human relationships, history…. Many comics are published on the internet, and this greatly increases audiences. With the exception of humorous strips, however, the Finnish comic rarely attracts mass audiences.

Since 2000, around one hundred Finnish comics books have been published in translation. This is a great deal bearing in mind both the volume of the genre and the number of Finnish translations published as a whole. Print runs, however, are often small, and funds limited. The best thing about it, however, is that it is not a question merely of a couple of stars, although the Moomin comic strip (1954–1975), drawn by Tove Jansson (1914–2001) and subsequently by her brother Lars Jansson (it was also published in the London Evening News and was syndicated to about 40 other countries) has enjoyed a vigorous second coming since the Canadian publication Drawn&Quarterly began, in 2006, successfully to republish the Moomin strips in bookform. All in all, translations have appeared of books by more than 20 Finnish comics artists.

This autumn’s most important work of the genre is Ville Tietäväinen’s Näkymättömät kädet (‘Invisible hands’). This graphic novel, an impressive volume in terms of both its size and itscontent, tells the story of Rashid, a paperless migrant from Morocco to Spain. Through the story of one person, Tietäväinen speaks of important matters: poverty, human value and what keeps us going, hope. The book was well received and sold in, in Finnish terms, large numbers. It is also to be published in France.

Näkymättömät kädet sparked considerable literary debate. Its publisher submitted it for the country’s leading literary prize, the Finlandia Prize for Fiction, but it was not accepted. A graphic novel still does not count as a novel for everyone.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

The following extract is from Ville Tietäväinen’s Näkymättömät kädet (‘Invisible hands’, WSOY, 2011):  click the pictures to make them appear enlarged on your screen (then click again for further enlargement). The main character, a Moroccan tailor called Rashid, is sacked from his job, which forces him to emigrate and live his life as an illegal alien in Spain.

Ville Tietäväinen (born 1970) is an architect by training, and now works as a graphic designer and illustrator. Näkymättömät kädet is his third graphic novel; it combines both fiction and facts he collected on his travels in Morocco and Spain. His previous book, the award-winning Linnut ja Meret (‘The birds, The oceans’, Tammi, 2003), is also published in France (2005).

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Romua rakkauden valtatiellä. Arto Mellerin elämä

Arto Melleri (1956–2005) has been called the last Finnish bohemian poet. At the age of 35, he received the Finlandia Prize for a collection of poetry entitled Elävien kirjoissa (‘In the books of the living’) as well as an invitation to the Independence Day celebrations at the Presidential Palace, from which he was thrown out. The literary editor Martti Anhava traces his friend’s life from his schooldays in Ostrobothnia to his turbulent life in Helsinki. There are interviews with family members, friends, writers, musicians, theatre-makers; Melleri wound up studying dramaturgy at the Theatre Academy. The year 1978 saw the presentation of Melleri, Jukka Asikainen and Heikki Vuento’s play Nuorallatanssijan kuolema eli kuinka Pete Q sai siivet (‘The death of a tightrope walker or how Pete Q got wings’). Breaking completely with the mainstream political theatre of the 1970s, it became a cult show. The last volume by this poet of bold, often cruelly romantic visions was Arpinen rakkauden soturi (‘The scarred soldier of love’, 2004).
Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Juhani Aho. Photo: SKS/Literary archives

Yksin is the tale of a fashionable, no-longer-young ‘decadent’, alienated from his bourgeois circle, and with his aesthetic stances and social duties in crisis. He flees from his disappointments and heartbreaks to Paris, the foremost metropolis at the end of the 19th century, where solitude could be experienced in the modern manner – among crowds of people. Yksin is the first portrayal of modern city life in the newly emerging Finnish prose, unique in its time.

Aho’s story has parallels in the contemporary European literature: Karl-Joris Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884), Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) and Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890).

The novella reflects the innovatory trends of the period. At the end of the 19th century the new prose was no longer interested in a story line that traced an individual’s course of life. The story was chopped, spatially and temporally, into sequences, which didn’t produce a connected narrative or create a well-constructed plot but sought recurrent situations, motifs, images and symbols, patterns and rhythm. Aho’s classic novel of 1884, Rautatie (‘Railway’) is still a product of realism; but the lyrical prose in Yksin is closer to the art of poetry than rapportage. This kind of artistry – which Aho himself discussed in the 1880s in his newspaper articles on Finnish prose – is connected to the pictorial art of the period. The facial profile of the adored Anna, who has rejected the narrator, is a recurrent, lyrical leitmotif.

Aho was personally but unrequitedly enamoured of the young upper-class beauty Aino Järnefelt. When her future husband, the composer Jean Sibelius, read Yksin in Vienna in 1890, he was so enraged he swore to write a letter challenging Aho to a duel. The letter was never posted.

The critics of the day were mostly confounded by the novella’s structural and stylistic innovation. Particularly indigestible was the climax, where the narrator spends Christmas Eve at Le Moulin Rouge in the company of a prostitute.

Aho’s bold Parisian sojourner stirred up public contention, precisely as the writer had hoped. In 1891, discussing literary prizes, the Finnish parliament had a vigorous debate on whether government bursaries were at all necessary. Yksin was soon published in Swedish as well. Observing the furore from Sweden, the Aftonbladet newspaper critic commented aptly: ‘It was a description of the kind of goings-on qui se font, mais qui ne se disent point (‘things that do happen but are not spoken about’).’

Aho also recognised the importance, from the beginning, of the translation of his works, which demonstrates his clear understanding of literature as a market-area that transcended national boundaries. Leafing through Juhani Ahon kirjallinen tuotanto (‘Juhani Aho’s literary oeuvre’, edited by N.P. Virtanen, 1961), one is amazed how much, and into how many languages, Aho has been translated.

There is, of course, a wide range in the languages in which Aho’s work has appeared. As generators of cultural production, Paris and London decided literary standards. Access to the markets of the metropolises meant not only the opportunity to reach the broad Anglo- and Francophone readerships, but was also a trump card that had its uses on the home market. The centres of the time remained cool toward Aho: he has been translated only a little into English and French. The German literary world, on the other hand, embraced Aho warmly. Many translations were published, representing the best of the writer’s work.

His most important market, however, was Sweden, where translations of Aho’s work were issued immediately, right up to his last book, Muistatko –? (‘Do you remember – ?’,1921). Aho’s reputation in Sweden became considerable as early as the 1880s and 1890s. It is difficult to say whether his fame rested only on its literary merits, or on the sympathy toward Finnish literature that Swedes felt toward little Finland during a period of intense Russification in the Grand Duchy. This big-brother attitude may well explain Aho’s later succes in Stockholm, when the Swedish Academy began, at the beginning of the new century, to give the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has become the world’s premier literary award.

The status of the prize is uncontested today, and there is perhaps no greater proof of the international convergence of literary standards than the global attention the prize receives every year. The prize is awarded on the basis of a long-term study of the writer’s work and literary statements from independent experts.

Aho had been a candidate for the Nobel Prize for the first time as early as 1902. From 1910, he was suggested regularly right up to 1921. Aho’s candidacy was at first marked by a benevolently positive attitude, which was felt, in particular, toward the aspects of his work which were felt to be idealistic.

In 1913 the history professor Harald Hjärne was appointed chairman of the award committee. Hjärne had a particular view of Finland’s cultural position, and in his literary summaries he repeatedly quashed the idea of awarding Aho the prize on the grounds that Finnish-language literature could not be thus recognised without simultaneously giving an award to Finland’s Swedish-language literature. When no individual named writers were proposed, the chairman himself suggested the Finland-Swedish poet Bertel Gripenberg. Since, on the other hand, no independent expert had suggested Gripenberg, it was logical, in terms of this masterly piece of prestidigitation, that the prize could not be awarded to Aho either.

Hjärne had no knowledge of the development of Finnish society; neither did he understand the increasing linguistic overlap that was developing in Finland despite the minor skirmishes of day-to-day politics. The Swedish-language writers Runeberg and Topelius had become part of Finnish-language literature, just as the Kalevala had become part of Swedish-language literature. Juhani Aho’s generation had also started a development in which Finnish- and Swedish-language literature were increasingly regarded as Finnish literature that was written in two languages.

The Aho internationalisation project demonstrates the strength of the period’s centre-periphery links as well as the inequality that was hidden in these structures. In order to achieve international fame outside the centres, it was necessary to seek the approval of markets in Paris and London. With any luck, the next stop was Stockholm. Successful tours were made later by many writers, such as the American William Faulkner, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, and the Chinese Qao Xinjian.

Juhani Aho stepped forward from a very young literary tradition. He achieved critical success in his local environment, but never really made an international breakthrough. This is visible in the international canons of the period. They include, incontrovertibly, Ibsen (from Norway) and Strindberg (from Sweden), but not a single Finnish writer.

Aho’s internationalisation project, however, was the starting shot for a lengthy development after which now, a hundred years later, looks as if Finnish-language literature has attained international significance which is not limited to sales figures and film deals, important as they are.

Last year the young writer Sofi Oksanen received, in Paris, recognition that no other Finnish writer had earlier achieved. Having first garnered every possible Finnish literary award, then the Nordic Literature Prize, her third novel, Puhdistus (Purge, 2008) won, in the autumn of 2011, the important French literary award, the Prix Femina.

Puhdistus achieved the most important prize of all: it became accepted, recognised and admired by the Parisian literary establishment – like Aki Kaurismäki in film and Kaija Saariaho in music. The years to come will show whether Oksanen’s unprecedented success will be crowned by the hundred-year project begun by Juhani Aho and his generation, whose aim was to place Finnish literature and culture in the European time zone.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Kirjallinen kulttuuri keskiajan Suomessa

The literary material from Finland’s medieval period is both more extensive and more interesting than previously thought. A team of scholars has gone through almost all of the material that survives, from the eleventh to the sixteenth century: missals, merchants’ correspondence, vernacular writings and state papers. Literary culture arrived in Finland with Christianity. During the Middle Ages the language of theologians and scholars on Finnish territory was Latin, the principal language of trade was Low German, and affairs of state were conducted in Swedish. This book examines how, when and where the texts were written and what their distribution says about Finnish literary tastes of earliest times. The scholars have done detective work, tracing and connecting parchment missals which ended up as the bindings of bailiffs’ ledgers. The book takes as its main source the National Library’s Fragmenta Membranea, one of the world’s largest collections of medieval parchment fragments. It is planned to digitise the collection and make the fragments freely accessible to both scholars and the general public.
Translated by David McDuff

Parnasso 1951–2011. Kirjallisuuslehden kuusi vuosikymmentä.

The 60-year history of Parnasso, Finland’s longest-running literary journal, is a chronicle of the assimilation of ‘the modern’ into Finnish literature. Matti Suurpää – a long-time contributor, and former head of the SKS publishing house – singles out the 1958–1965 period under the editorship of Kai Laitinen (professor of literature, Editor-in-Chief of Books from Finland from 1976 to 1990) as the era with the broadest editorial scope. Finnish modernist literature, developed during the 1950s, had by then staked out its territory, and the journal consolidated its power to promote it. Laitinen published an excellent themed issue on Finland-Swedish literature to rehabilitate and reintegrate writing by Swedish-speaking authors into the field of Finnish literature. Subsequent editors considered it important to include translations of foreign literature in Parnasso. As the archives of the journal have been lost, Suurpää carried out a close reading of the annual volumes. The result is an eminently clear and readable work in which a wealth of extracts of writing and discussions illuminate the story of the modernisation of Finnish literature.
Translated by Ruth Urbom

Kirja tienhaarassa vuonna 2020

This book looks at Finnish book publishing and its likely rate and direction of change. The future of the Finnish industry looks slightly more favourable than similar international forecasts have made out, although there have been some shake-ups in the Finnish book world too. The authors point out that while the decrease of reading as a leisure pursuit appears to be part of a long-term international trend, many feared for the future of the book in previous centuries as well. Book production and distribution, as well as changes undergone by various genres, are illustrated through a variety of statistics. They also go a long way towards explaining whether the publishing industry’s current difficulties are intrinsic or extrinsic in origin. The authors strive to find new perspectives to get away from a fear of the online world. The renewable publishing and reading culture envisioned by the authors will benefit from the novelty and efficiency of electronic publishing and will reinforce traditional knowledge. Professor Kai Ekholm is the Director of the National Library of Finland; Yrjö Repo is a researcher and statistician.

Skrifter. Band 1: Studieåren och resan till Alexandria

This is the first volume of a planned six-volume critical edition of the writings of Finnish Arabic scholar Georg August Wallin (1811–1852). The main material for the first volume consists of full text of Wallin’s travel diaries and letters from the years 1831–1843. The Arabic texts are accompanied by parallel Swedish translations. The preface contains an overview of the phases of Wallin’s life and the schools of Orientalism and Rousseau which influenced his work. Wallin’s seven-year research journey to the Middle East, and particularly his crossing of the northern Arabian peninsula as the first Western researcher to do so, brought Wallin great international acclaim. Wallin was the first researcher to record the poetry and study the dialects of the desert Bedouin. He is particularly well known for his visits to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, forbidden to non-Muslims, and to the women’s quarters in their harems.

Kalevala Guide

This book is a brief but comprehensive English-language guide to the Finnish national epic, which was based on the archaic oral, sung folk poetry of Karelia, but collected and personally compiled by the scholar and writer Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884). The epic (first edition 1839, complemented in 1849) is set in a mythic past; technically speaking, the metre is an unrhymed, non-strophic trochaic tetrametre, characterised by alliteration. Contents, characters, places and themes are explained in the Guide, which also explores myths of origin and the significance of the epic. On his eleven trips to Archangel and North Karelia, Lönnrot met some 70 singers. The Kalevala, now translated, at least in part, into more than 60 languages, has inspired artists the world over (J.R.R. Tolkien was a fan, while Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha imitates the metre and style of the Kalevala). The composer Jean Sibelius and the artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela are perhaps the best known Finnish Kalevala artists. And the inspiration continues: for instance, rock musicians and visual artists make use of Kalevala themes, stories and characters in their work. The book includes a list of relevant websites and a select bibliography.

Lasinkirkas, hullunrohkea. Aila Meriluodon elämästä ja runoudesta

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 (1950s). Photo: WSOY

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.

And yet, Juvonen’s poetry is sometimes seen in Finland as a poetry of suffering and of intense, even forbidding, religiosity. There is indeed a prayerful longing in much of the work, and the poems feature frequent repetition, which creates a hypnotic, liturgical effect. But God is depicted here as an intimate, to whom the poet makes suggestions:

Then I will say it to Him,
then I will say it:
Let’s play that new game now,
the one in which we are happy
and everywhere.

(‘A new game’, 1952)

God is a potential playmate, with whom one can negotiate – although the playfulness of the poem is mitigated by a wistful, mournful note; it is only in a make-believe world that God and the speaker can be ‘happy / and everywhere’. Juvonen’s unorthodox faith can perhaps best be viewed in pantheistic terms, since it is through nature that God is perceived in the poems; ‘heaven’s weeping’ appears as glints on leaves. Nature is a manifestation of the divine, and a source of wonder: ‘But think that in early April someone will find the first blue anemone of the spring. Is that not wonderful?’ The poet appeals to the here and now; in ‘In this life’ (as opposed to the next), she rejects a far-off hereafter and suggests that paradise could be earthly:

In that land, the land of which I sing,
ravens fly, bringing food.
In that land, the land of which I sing,
there is always a hand for a human hand.

In an article entitled ‘Images of isolation’ by Soila Lehtonen published in Books from Finland 1/1992, Juvonen’s work is likened to that of Emily Dickinson. The comparison is not unfounded, for the poets have in common a controlled yet intense quality, and they combine spiritual concerns with a sharp focus on the natural and the everyday. Juvonen admired Dickinson and translated some of her poems; in an essay of 1958 she termed Dickinson’s poetry tender, humorous, intense, calm, matter-of-fact, and analytical. As in Dickinson’s work, in Juvonen, small details appear magnified and acquire a vast symbolic significance. Juvonen’s most famous poem is a prime example:

The lichen raised its fragile cup,
and rain filled it, and in the drop
the sky glittered, holding back the wind.

The lichen raised its fragile cup:
Now let’s toast the richness of our lives.

(‘Cup lichen’, 1952)

Such stark, marvelling poems were written in the context of a difficult life. According to ‘Images of isolation’, Juvonen lived in ‘the drab surroundings of post-war Helsinki’, where, after studying at Helsinki University, she occupied posts as a bank clerk and a proof reader, before earning her living as a writer and translator. Her life was ‘circumscribed’, ‘often penurious’, and characterised by solitude and suffering; Juvonen underwent mental and physical illness and died at the age of 39.

But the isolation reported here is exaggerated; Juvonen lived with a female companion, Sirkka Meriluoto, for about ten years. This partnership offers interesting points of departure as far as biographical readings of Juvonen’s work are concerned. In an article about Juvonen in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (27 October 2009), the poet Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen detects in Juvonen’s poems signs of hidden homosexual experience. The sense of precariousness and dividedness in Juvonen’s poems is powerful and multivalent, whatever its precise, ‘actual’ cause. The poems present vivid metaphors for unease and instability, as in ‘The tightrope walker’:

Two summits rose up above the dark.
Between them,
taut as a bow’s arc
the walker’s rope is strung.
If you look into the dark, dizziness strikes.
You need to have brains of ice.

I see the summits, both ablaze.
Back and forth, back and forth!

Such evocations of dividedness can be read in numerous ways, as expressions of the modern, alienated, urban individual; of the female writer, that recent invention; of the queer subject, forced into hiding; or the believer whose faith has been challenged. The sense of being in between can also be linked to Juvonen’s place in literary tradition, for she was a poet at the cusp of modernism.

Modernism came to Finnish poetry in the 1940s and 1950s; at this time, formal restraint slowly gave way to freer forms. Juvonen’s poetry combines technical formality with startling imagery and a clear, direct voice. It moves between rhyme and free verse and forms a bridge between ‘tradition’ and modernism.

Helvi Juvonen published five collections of poetry between 1949 and 1955; a sixth was published posthumously in 1959, and in 1974, a collection of prose works, edited by Mirkka Rekola, came out.

Helvi Juvonen (1950s). Photo: WSOY

As 2009 marked a number of anniversaries – 90 years since Juvonen’s birth, 50 years since her death, and 60 years since her debut collection, Kääpiöpuu (‘Dwarf tree’) – her collected poems, Aukea ei koskaan metsään ovi (‘The door to the forest never opens’, WSOY) was also published; the volume includes other writings by the poet as well as critical and biographical material.

The recent anniversaries have meant a timely renewed focus on Juvonen’s work, which asks us to attend to that which is usually hushed up and overlooked; to sharpen our senses; and finally, to ‘toast the richness of our lives’.

Satukuningatar Anni Swan. Elämä ja teokset

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).

A new profession for ladies: tram conductresses, 1917

The curator of the exhibition, writer and art historian Anna Kortelainen, is also the editor of the book Eri kivaa! Onerva – kaupungin naiset 1910 (‘Jolly good! Onerva – women of the city, 1910’, graphic design by Anders Carpelan, Tammi 2010).

In this large illustrated album, Kortelainen introduces us to Onerva’s Helsinki: streets and parks, people and everyday life, art galleries, films and cinemas, cafés, restaurants, theatre premieres, concerts and other social events.

L. Onerva studied art history at university, wrote reviews, poems and novels, painted, lived on her own, travelled abroad, enjoyed the cultural scene of the city and had an active social life.

Between 1901–1918 she was in turn single, married and divorced, and had lovers – among them the poet Eino Leino (1878–1926). Life was not easy for an independent working woman – there were debts, limited freedom, moral judgement.

A working woman: L. Onerva, artist, critic, researcher, femme fatale

Onerva’s second marriage, to the composer Leevi Madetoja (1887–1947), was finally ruined by alcohol;  both were at times admitted to mental hospitals.

She was extremely creative all her life, but after 1952 she didn’t publish anything. When she died, at the age of 89 in a mental hospital, among her artistic legacy she left thousands of self-portraits and more than a hundred thousand poems.

Yrjö Jylhä, talvisodan runoilija

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

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.