Literature in Finnish between the Two World Wars
Elämä ja aurinko ['Life and the Sun,' 1916] is very different from all works published in Finland before that time and demonstrates [Sillanpää's] considerable literary talent. The attention and praise it received are deserved but have resulted in the inaccurate picture that Sillanpää's art is totally unrelated to all that was written before it. Tuomas Anhava has called Sillanpää a romanticist, and, vague as the term is, it does help us to understand the nature of his art. He believed in mysterious forces that govern man's destiny against his will, saw in every human being something unique, considered the inner man, the soul, more important than the body, and asserted that this soul remains pure no matter how much the body decays. He often animated nature, making it observe and take part in human actions…. [Sillanpää] had a tendency to overuse metaphors and similes; the trait was natural to him, but reinforced by the examples of earlier writers. He often begins with a vague, ill-defined comparison, assimilating a mood or feeling to an object, then describes the object at length, losing contact with the original idea. In Elämä ja aurinko, for example, something called the "poetic character of Midsummer night" first "keeps hold of the courtyards" and "softens the lines of everything visible," then "looks at flowers, birches, roofs" (et al.), "sees the low window of a small house," "settles close to it," and "looks into the room."… Later the "community of all human souls" is compared to a huge mountain honeycombed with numberless caves, the individual souls, and the author speaks of a magic bandage one must put over his eyes to enter them, explaining that they are narrow at first but then widen and send ramifications in every direction, and so forth. Not only does the author lose contact with the original idea, but also this idea has no meaningful relation to the rest of the book. (pp. 218-19)
Another of Sillanpää's peculiarities is apparent in Elämä ja aurinko: his habit of intruding in the story, interrupting the narration to tell the reader what it is about, that, although the events described may seem unimportant, they are connected with the deep rhythms of life and the universe (or something similar), without a trace of humor. (p. 219)
In many of his works Sillanpää meditates about time; his premise is that there is no objective measurement of duration, only the biological rhythm of living organisms, the result being that an interval said to be of definite length can be experienced quite differently by various observers or organisms…. It is not without relevance to note that during Sillanpää's life books were written about the sun that also rises and bells that toll. In the literature of the twenties and thirties there was a distinct taste for the deeply philosophical and majestic, combined with descriptions of very simple, primitive individuals in like surroundings which reflected the primeval truths of life. Robert Sherwood's play The Petrified Forest reflects this spirit in its gangsters, small-town people, and wealthy travelers thrown together by chance at a country store, where they bare their souls and a wandering poet underlines the philosophical implications and points out the symbolic importance of the petrified forest nearby. Sillanpää received the Nobel Prize because he reflected the spirit of his time…. (pp. 219-20)
Kai Laitinen, a Finnish critic and essayist, has divided Sillanpää's novels into two groups, the first characterized by predominance of plot, action, and characters, the second by equality or predominance of nature and environment. Hurskas kurjuus, Hiltu ja Ragnar, and Nuorena nukkunut belong to the first classification, Elämä ja aurinko, Miehen tie, and Ihmiset suviyössä to the second. The first works are tragic or at least melancholy, ending in the main characters' deaths, whereas the latter are happy or less pessimistic…. Elämä ja aurinko describes a brief interval—a few summer days—and emphasizes its overwhelming, exuberant beauty, dwelling at length on the elements which contribute to this quality, with an awareness of the ephemeral nature of the happy circumstances.
In this novel a young man, not unlike Sillanpää, who is a student from the country, returns to his home in the summer and has short love affairs with a girl of his own background and a young woman of a superior social position. He is willing to marry the girl, but she rejects him after hearing of the other incident. In fact, Sillanpää's women are often more conscious of their duties toward life, i.e., life in the biological sense as the author understands it, not society. According to him the ruling force of all human life is love or sex, although neither of these terms is accurate as a description of the motivations behind the behavior of his characters, who, though unconsciously, distinctly feel right and wrong. In Elämä ja aurinko it is right for the girl to surrender to the young man, for that is why nature made her, but it is also right for her to reject him when she hears of his other, simultaneous affair, which proves him unworthy of her. The importance Sillanpää gives to the reproductive instinct, love or sex depending upon point of view, and his insistence that it has moral values which are unconnected with social rules, has suggested a comparison to D. H. Lawrence…. However, Sillanpää does not aggressively assert the importance of sex, as Lawrence does; his characters submit to the forces of nature rather than act voluntarily, and he is so discreet in describing the act of love that the reader might be uncertain that anything happens…. Sillanpää also uses natural phenomena as sexual symbols. In the short story Nocturno (in Erään elämän satoa 'The Harvest of a Life,' 1948), a girl admits a young man to her room at night, the door closes, and it starts to rain:
The drops flowed with a rapturous violence over thousands of buds, beat them the whole night, and penetrated their softest tissues, giving them new life and making them swell…. On their leaves the rays of the sun still found drops of water, like bright tears. They had certainly welled up from the flowers themselves at the moment when the felicity of opening was sending its powerful vibrations through their tender bodies.
The symbolism is clear, but the author is seldom more explicit. His discretion is due to his lifelong faithfulness to his origin. Though he stresses the importance of sex, he believed in ideal love as pure, even in its physical form. He knew that country people do not have chaste expressions for it, so that any reference to love in those surroundings had to take the form of a coarse joke—some can be found in his works, but not many.
Ihmislapsia elämän saatossa ['The Procession of Life'], his next work, is interesting only as a human document; many of the stories describe students of modest origin like Sillanpää who can neither find their place in society nor readjust to their original surroundings. These problems obsessed the author almost to the end of his life.
Hurskas kurjuus, published soon after the Civil War, is very different from both earlier works. It concentrates entirely on the life of the main character, contains no lyrical nature descriptions and few philosophical considerations; those few are placed at the beginning and end, to give the reader the meaning of the book and help him draw conclusions from it. Sillanpää was not a religious man and never spoke explicitly about faith or the church, but he believed in the uniqueness of each human being and the existence of an essential part in man which remains pure even if the body is degraded, and some passages in Hurskas kurjuus seem to express faith in the immortality of soul. (pp. 221-22)
Hurskas kurjuus is mainly about the life of Juha Toivola before the Civil War and is one of the dreariest stories we have read. Contemporary literature is full of nauseating characters, but they are usually functions of violent protest or have a nightmarish, half-unreal intensity…. In Sillanpää's book, however, the dull misery of Juha Toivola's life is unrelieved. After he is left a penniless orphan, he works for people who take advantage of him. He marries and leases a small piece of land, but everything goes wrong for him because he is unable to take care of himself. After drifting into the socialist movement he is shot at the end of the war because he was present when a man was killed. The only positive quality Sillanpää gave him is that he never commits a dishonest or cruel act. (p. 223)
Only two of the several works Sillanpää wrote after Nuorena nukkunut are considered on the level of his best compositions—Miehen tie ['The Way of a Man,' 1932; also 'A Man's Road'] and Ihmiset suviyössä ('A Summer Night' …, 1934). Part of Miehen tie was written simultaneously to Nuorena nukkunut. It expresses the ideas about life and man which Sillanpää felt that he held at the time and is the one work by him which justifies comparisons to D. H. Lawrence. Paavo Ahrola and Alma, the main characters, are predestined by nature, fate, or the deep forces of life for each other, but they are not united until the man learns, after many mistakes including an unlucky marriage, that she is the right woman for him. His mistakes are described in so much detail that some offended critics claimed that the book should have been called The Way of a Bum. Sillanpää, however, stresses the connection between the rhythm of nature expressed in the seasons and the changes in the lives of his characters. In such passages the novel is not realistic; there is an epic breadth, perhaps not quite spontaneous or genuine, in the description of the work of the farmer, the succession of the seasons, and the actions of the man and woman destined to meet when their time is fulfilled. Again, the woman is conscious of their fate, whereas the man must struggle to reach the necessary maturity.
Ihmiset suviyössä is probably Sillanpää's most carefully composed and definitely his most complexly structured work. It is about a group of persons, all of whom do not know each other and some of whom do not see each other, but whose lives are connected and fates are decided on a summer night. The author's biological conception of time has a part in the manner in which the events are described; the duration of the action is indicated, but the flow of duration is experienced differently by the characters…. The narration shifts from one character to another, stressing their relative importance and parallel "destinies, and the events include all life's processes; birth, peaceful and violent death, young and mature love. An artist, representing Sillanpää more or less, arrives at a critical moment in his life and finds or thinks that he has found a solution for the crises. He is a man tortured by the gift of self-observation, who sees himself as an outsider even at the moment of strong emotional experience…. Sillanpää seems to have hoped to be like his characters, to surrender to the forces of nature and be guided by instinct, but he never succeeded. (pp. 226-27)
Jaakko Ahokas, "Literature in Finnish between the Two World Wars," in his A History of Finnish Literature, Indiana University Publications, Uralic and Altaic Series (copyright © 1973 by Indiana University), Indiana University, 1973, pp. 182-268.∗
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