Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Silja de dienstmaagd by Frans Emil Sillanpää Silja de dienstmaagd by Frans Emil Sillanpää. by birthday from the calendar. TimeSearch for Books and Writers by Bamber Gascoigne. This is an archive of a dead website. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared; some links and images may no longer function. A .zip of the website is also available. Frans Emil Sillanpää (1888-1964) Finnish writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1939. Sillanpää saw human beings as a small but integral part of the universe. Influenced by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Ostwald, and their theories about the unity of all nature in terms of physical laws, Sillanpää portrayed rural people living united with the land and dependent on the energy of the sun, the source of all life. Although Sillanpää based his work on knowledge of evolution theory and genetics, his picture of the agrarian society was rather idealized. Frans Emil Sillanpää was born into a peasant family in Hämeenkyrö, at Myllykolu Croft in Kierikkala Village in southwest Finland. His father, Frans Henrik Koskinen, was an impoverished day-laborer. Loviisa Vilhelmina Mäkelä, his mother, was a servant, who returned to home to give birth to an illegitimate child. She married Frans Henrik at the age of 34. Although poor, the family saved money to send Sillanpää to Tampere grammar school. Sillanpää lived in the working-class Amuri district and later moved to the home of his benefactor, the manufacturer Henrik Liljeroos. "Ei minua siis ahdista köyhyys aikä kallis aika, joten voitte minun suhteeni olla huoletta," he wrote home (I'm not haunted by poverty and these times do not depress me, you don't have to worry about me.) At school, Sillanpää was a good student and Liljeroos helped him to enter the University of Helsinki in 1908 to study medicine. Through a fellow student, Heikki Järnefelt, his acquaintances included the painter Eero Järnefelt. He also moved in the cultural circles of Jean Sibelius, Juhani Aho, and Pekka Halonen. During these years Sillanpää learned to drink heavily. He adopted the ideas of the so-called Young Finland movement, which was essentially nationalistic, romantic, and anti-Swedish. At that time, Finland was part of Russia but Swedish-speaking classes had still influence in cultural matters and Finno-Swedish literature had dominated before the times of Aleksis Kivi (1834-72). However, Sillanpää spoke Swedish and admired the work of August Strindberg. He was deeply affected by the biological theories of Ernst Haeckel, the symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck, and the writings of the Norwegian Knut Hamsun. He once said, that "my life has been an impossible collection of disconnected whims, and now I live by seeing sights � other people pay for being able to see them conveniently under my guidance." Later Sillanpää read the works of Osvald Spengler, especially his Decline of the West , and embraced Spengler's idea that the civilizations have life cycles like plants. Tolstoy's ideas became important to him through the influence of Arvid Järnfelt. In 1913 Sillanpää withdrew from the university and returned to home to Töllinmäki, devoting himself to farming and writing. In 1914 he traveled in Sweden and Denmark and wrote articles for the newspaper Uusi Suometar . For a time he even planned to become a journalist. Sillanpää's first novel, Elämä ja aurinko (1916, Life and Sun) was a triangle drama, in which a young man, Elias, loves two different girls, Olga and Lyyli, throughout a single summer. Like in the novels of D.H. Lawrence, love and sex are the driving forces of nature and human activity, but compared to the English novelist, Sillanpää's love scenes were more discreet and romantic. At the background of the story was the war raging on the Continent, but the young characters enjoy their summer. The novel was a critical success. O.A Kallio from the newspaper Aamulehti compared it to Aleksis Kivi's novel Seitsemän veljestä , but Mikko W. Erich from Turun Sanomat saw that the book came close to pornography. Life and Sun was followed next year by Ihmislapsia elämän saatossa (Children of Mankind in the Procession of Life), a collection of short stories, in which the central character is a student of modest origin. The work was actually was composed some years earlier. In 1916 he married Sigrid Maria Salomäki, an 18-year old domestic servant; they had eight children. They had met in 1914 and at the time of the marriage she was already pregnant. The outbreak of Finland's civil war, and its horrors, formed the basis for Sillanpää's first important work, Hurskas kurjuus (1919, Meek Heritage). It reflected the writer's ambivalent views about the Finnish Civil War � Sillanpää had supported General Mannerheim's German-backed White Army, but saw that the victory had caused bloody consequences. The novel depicted the fate of a poor sharecropper, Juha Toivola, who is executed by the representantives of the victorious Whites for a murder he did not commit. Sillanpää refused to take sides and to glorify the war. "Even the dead arise and wonder why they have been buried like this, in separate graves, for they cannot possibly remember what that was supposed to mean." Readers are made to identify with the protagonist, a miserable character. Sillanpää's attacks on the reprisals of the Whites were removed from the novel. These part were first published in the leftist newspaper Kansan Tahto in 1929 and later, after World War II, in another magazines. "Minua tympäisee se jatkuva naivi jankutus, että vielä julmempia punaiset olivat. Mitä se tähän kuuluu? Tässähän on eurooppalainen valtio harjoittamassa laillista kylmää oikeutta rikollisia kohtaan eikä tiemmä ottamassa osviittaa huligaanikoplien menettelytavoista." (from a letter, in F.E. Sillanpää vuosina 1888-1923 by Panu Rajala, 1983) Among the few critics, who praised the book, was Juhani Aho. Meek Heritage was translated into Swedish and Sillanpää's name was mentioned in Nobel candidate speculations. After the war Sillanpää participated in the activities of the General Mannerheim League for Child Welfare, founded to take care of the orphans left from the conflict. In the 1920s Sillanpää published several short story collections, among them Hiltu ja Ragnar (1923), which arose moral indignation due to its sexual subject matter � a love story between a young man from a well-to-do family and a servant girl. Ragnar seduces Hiltu, the daughter of Juha Toivola. Hiltu's ignorance and fear of being left alone drives her into suicide. The Villa Saavutus (achievement), which Sillanpää built in Hämeenkyrö, and growing family, kept him in debt. By 1923, he himself had four children. His publisher, WSOY at that time, offered him a regular income as a publishing clerk, but the author's financial and mental crisis drove him to the brink of suicide. Sillanpää moved to Helsinki with his family, and started to write his first novel in ten years. He also changed in 1929 his publisher from WSOY to Otava. International fame Sillanpää gained in 1931, when Nuorena nukkunut (The Maid Silja/Fallen Asleep While Young) was translated into English, and was published in the United States and in the United Kingdom. The Dutch and Italian critics predicted a Nobel Prize for Sillanpää. The story depicts the loss of a farm and the extinction of a family, culminating in the death of the farmer's daughter, Silja Salmelus. After losing her home, she is forced to take work as a servant girl. Silja's sexual intercourse with Armas, her beloved, is the turning point of the story. Armas leaves her, and she dies of tuberculosis at the height of a sunny summer. Miehen tie (1932, The Way of a Man) was a story of an ideal hero, Paavo Ahrola, who goes through a period of youthful quests and mistakes. In the end, after spending his time on the way of a bum, he marries Alma, the woman he desired; they were actually predestinated to each other. Paavo's drinking was censored in the German translation � it did not fit in the ideal portrait of an Aryan peasant. In 1934 appeared Sillanpää's most important work, Ihmiset suviyössä (People in the Summer Night), about a group of people, whose lives and fates are connected on a summer weekend. In the little book the narrator presents the many happenings � new life is born, old life dies, man is slain in his prime, and the murdered man's wife continues her life. "There is almost no summer night in the north; only a lingering evening, darkening slightly as it lingers, but even this darkening has its ineffable clarity. It is the approaching presentiment of the summer morning. When the music of late evening has sunk to a violet, dusky pianissimo, so delicate that it lenghtens into a brief rest, then the first violin awakens with a soft, high cadence in which the cello soon joins, and this inwardly perceived tone picture is supported outwardly by a thousand-tongued accompaniment twittering from a myriad of branches and from the heights of the air. It is already morning, yet a moment ago it was still evening." (from People in the Summer Night , translated by Alan Blair) Sillanpää's intellectual and emotional crisis deepened in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II. He had become a voice of cultural liberalism and was mocked by the right-wing activist circles and viewed with suspicion by leftist intellectuals.