Edith Södergran
Encyclopedia
Edith Irene Södergran was a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet. She was one of the first modernists
within Swedish-language literature and her influences came from French Symbolism, German expressionism
and Russian futurism
. At the age of 24 she released her first collection of poetry entitled Dikter ("Poems"). Södergran died at the age of 31, having contracted tuberculosis
as a teenager, and did not live to experience the world wide appreciation of her poetry. Her poetry has influenced many lyrical poets, and Södergran is today considered to have been one of the greatest modern Swedish poets. Södergran continues to influence Swedish poetry and musical lyrics, e.g. in the works of Mare Kandre
, Gunnar Harding, Eva Runefelt and Eva Dahlgren
.
Edith's mother came from a well positioned family and the women's status within the family is thought to have been strong. It is apparent that Edith and her mother shared a strong bond. Considerably less is known about her relationship to her father, who died when Edith was only 15.
When Edith was just a few months old the Södergrans moved to the village of Raivola on Karelian Isthmus
where her grandfather, Gabriel Holmroos, bought a house for them. A short time afterward Matts acquired a job as a superintendent at a sawmill
. Three years after Matts had begun working the company went into bankruptcy
and the family struggled to make ends meet. Helena's father died a few months later and the inheritance
was shared between her and her mother. With the money from the inheritance Helena was able to pay the family's debts and get them back on their feet. The rest of the money disappeared quickly, however, due to Matts' unsuccessful businesses. Helena managed to arrange for the family to receive a part of the proceeds from her mother's share of the inheritance, thus the family became debt free once more.
Edith attended the girls school at Petrischule in St. Petersburg. Petrischule was rich in tradition and created an interesting and highly intellectual surrounding for Edith. The school was situated opposite The Winter Palace, which enabled Edith to experience the troubles in Tsarist Russia at close range. She was almost certainly in the city on Bloody Sunday
in January 1905 when the Tsarist guards opened fire on thousands of starving citizens who had gathered to protest against the lack of food.
In 1904 her father was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and in May 1906 he was admitted to Nummela sanatorium in Nyland. He was later sent home, incurably ill. Matts Södergran died in October 1907, only a year before Edith would herself be diagnosed with the disease.
Under these complicated circumstances Edith's mother was responsible for the well-being of the family, especially as Matts Södergran's health deteriorated. This is believed to have first influenced Edith's belief in women and feminism. Though her first real encounter with a more structured questioning of the gender dynamics and the 'new woman' is believed to have taken place during her time in a sanatorium in Switzerland
.
Edith was a keen photographer and there are many pictures of her mother, albeit few of her father. Helena Södergran was a robust, petite and intelligent woman with a broad and capturing smile. Helena may have seemed stable, but was often nervous, shaken and restless. Edith enjoyed a very special bond with her mother, and Helena supported her daughter's wish to become a poet. Edith and her mother spent a lot more time together than Edith and her father. Edith and Helena would move into St Petersburg during the school terms, living in the Wiborgska part of the city. Edith's father only lived with them in the city for short periods of time.
Edith had made a few friends, but Helena feared her daughter might be becoming lonely. Some biographers, including Gunnar Tideström, have claimed that Helena hence found a foster sister of a similar age to Edith, named Singa. Singa is believed to have lived with the Södergrans during term time, but moved back to her biological family during the holidays. On one visit Singa, supposedly ran away back to her biological family, but while walking along the train tracks she was run over by a train, and Helena later found the mutilated body. However, other biographers, such as Ebba Witt-Brattström
, have disputed the story of Singa, claiming there is no real evidence she ever existed.
Edith was an intelligent pupil with the ability to assimilate knowledge quickly needing to spend little time revising. One of her classmates described her as the class' most gifted pupil. More and more she became interested in the French lessons she received. To a certain extent, this was due to her teacher Henri Cottier to whom she directed a large proportion of the love poems that appear in Vaxdukshäftet.
During 1908 Edith appears to have made a decision to make Swedish the main language of her writings and her poems in German suddenly stopped. This was not a self-evident decision. She had no close contact with Swedish literature, and Finland-Swedish poetry was in a depression. An important impulse to the decision might have come from one of her relatives, the Finland-Swedish language researcher Hugo Bergroth. Some years earlier she had published a poem Hoppet ("The Hope") in a membership newsletter for the Swedish Liberal Party in Helsingfors and began to come into contact with Finland-Swedish authors. The transition to Swedish seemed also to mark a clear decision to focus on poetry.
. Barely a month after the result she was admitted to Nummela sanatorium, the same hospital where her father had been a patient before he passed on, meaning that Edith was never entirely comfortable there. At the time, the chances of recovering entirely form tuberculosis weren't especially good. 70-80% of cases died within ten years of diagnosis.
Edith was unhappy at Nummela. The place was altogether too strongly associated with her father's death. She lost weight, her mood was low and she was described afterwards as unkempt and "strange". She was even thought to have a mild mental illness after she proposed to one of the doctors. It is apparent that she did not get on well at Nummela and felt that the place resembled more closely a prison. During the long days Edith day dreamed of other lands and exotic places. She willingly shared her dreams which made her seem even more peculiar. During the following year her condition worsened and the family looked for help abroad. The obvious choice was Switzerland, which was at the time the centre for tuberculosis treatment within Europe.
At the beginning of October 1911, roughly three years after the start of her illness, Edith and her mother travelled to Arosa
in Switzerland
but even there she did not get on especially well. She was examined by three different doctors who all came up with entirely different solutions to her illness. Some months later she was transported to the doctor Dr Ludwig von Muralt at the Davos-Dorf sanatorium. Edith immediately took a liking to her new doctor and got on much better there. Dr von Muralt suggested that a so-called left-sided pneumothorax
should be performed. This involved puncturing the lung during an operation and filling it with nitrogen
gas. The punctured lung would be unusable but it would be "rested". After May 1912 no more tuberculosis bacteria were shown to be in her lungs although she wasn't free from the sickness and knew that she must be watchful of her diet and rest for several hours every day.
Her time in Switzerland played a large role in Edith's international orientation. From a remote part of Finland she had arrived in an intellectually vital country where, not least at the sanatorium, she met many gifted people from the whole of Europe. With them she felt a connection that she had rarely felt in St. Petersburg. Thomas Mann
's novel The Magic Mountain
, which admittedly was written after the war but is set in a sanatorium during these years gives a picture of the intellectually lively atmosphere. Her doctor, von Muralt appears also to be one of the first doctors who truly won her trust and friendship. When he died in 1917 Edith wrote two poems Trädet i skogen ("The Tree in the Forest") and Fragment av en stämning ("Fragment of a Mood") which expresses her sorrow and conflicted memories of her time in Switzerland.
Finally, Edith felt better, her cough had disappeared and she was perkier than normal. In the spring of 1914 she finally travelled home but the sickness shadowed her and her poetry faced a struggle against illness and later fatigue.
After the October Revolution
in 1917, Edith and her mother's economic assets were suddenly rendered worthless since they had been placed in Ukrainian securities; and soon after, from the spring of 1918, the Karelian Isthmus
became a war zone. In Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was called from 1914) people were being shot without trial and Södergran knew that several of her classmates had fled from the city. She read Friedrich Nietzsche
and found in him the courage to keep upright against a periodically shifting and degrading everyday life.
Her new poetic direction with Septemberlyran ("The September Lyre") met no greater understanding from the public and from critics. She tried to discuss her poetry in a notorious letter to the editor in the Helsinki newspaper, Dagens Press on New Year's Eve 1918 in order to clear up some of her intentions with the paradoxical visions in her new book. She succeeded instead in provoking the first debate about modernism
's incomprehensible poetry in the Swedish language - a debate which would later return regarding Birger Sjöberg
, Peter Weiss
and Erik Lindegren
. The newspaper debate in Södergran's case was harsh - none of the debaters seemed either to have had any sense of the conditions under which the poems had been written: hunger, tuberculosis, the threat of being exiled or killed if Raivola was taken by the Red Guard - but she won a friend and life-long ally in the young critic Hagar Olsson
(1893–1978).
Olsson became a first breach in her isolated and threatened existence in the distant village - she made a number of visits and the two women remained in contact by letter until a few weeks before Södergran's death, when Olsson went on a tour to France without an inkling that she was to lose one of her best friends. She was to grow into one of the most powerful modernist critics in Finland and at times she has been seen as almost a posthumous spokeswoman and interpreter of Södergran, not least because so few others had been in continuous and close long-term contact with the poet and were still alive and willing to speak in public when Södergran became an established classic. It was a position that Olsson was, by her own admission, uncomfortable with, but her accounts of Södergran and her edition of the author's letters to her, with Olsson's own evocative commentary (her own letters were lost after Södergran's death), have had an incalculable effect on the later image of her friend.
In the next book, Rosenaltaret ("The Rose Altar"), printed in June 1919, a cycle of poems, Fantastique celebrates the sister, a being who seems to hover between reality and fairytale in some of the poems while some of the details are quite close to subjects that had been discussed in the letters of the two. The poem Systern ("The Sister") is silently dedicated to her, and contains the line "She got lost to me in the throng of the city" which, as biographer Gunnar Tideström has put it, corresponds to Södergran's dismay after the too short visits by Hagar Olsson and her friend's return to Helsingfors. Olsson has later recalled Södergran's both lyrical, funny, warm and sometimes frightening and imposing personality. Both of them have sometimes been seen as bisexuals, and the question whether there was a lesbian element in the emotional bond between them remains a disputed one.
With the next collection of poems, Framtidens skugga ("The Shadow of the Future") (whose original title was "Köttets mysterier" ("Mysteries of the Flesh")), the visions that had exhorted Södergran culminate in poems speaking of a renewed world after the wars and catastrophes that now ravage the Earth - Raivola was, as stated earlier a war zone in 1918 and even later Edith was able to hear gunfire from her kitchen window. The wording can lead one to think both of Walt Whitman
and Jim Morrison
when the poet takes on the role of fortune teller, general or quite simply that of Eros' chosen intermediary as in the poem Eros hemlighet ("Eros' secret").
Despite the visionary overtones, Södergran was during this period an atheist and according to neighbours and friends she was entirely capable of differentiating between her own self and the shimmering queens
and prophet
s she took as characters in her poetry. The change imagined in her writing would create a new humanity, led by "the strongest spirits" (Nietzsche's Übermensch
en; see for example the poems Botgörarne ("The Atoners") and Först vill jag bestiga Chimborazzo ("First I shall ascend Chimborazzo in my own land"). Generally, when she gave space for a more positive belief in nature and religious spirituality in her poems it meant that she felt a release from some of the specific expectations that had upheld her in a dreary everyday existence – a waiting and "charging-up" that could not be endured indefinitely – but also an incipient repudiation of, and retreat from, her Nietzschean vision of the future.
From the summer of 1920 on she abandoned her poetry until August 1922; during the autumn and winter she wrote her final poems, stimulated by the review Ultra; the short-lived review, started by Elmer Diktonius, Hagar Olsson and other young writers, was the first publication in Finland to embrace literary modernism and it hailed Edith as a pioneering genius and printed her new poems. The expectations of a leading role for herself had been left behind but not the daring descriptive language and some of these final poems have come to be her most loved.
Edith died on Midsummer Day 1923 at her home in Raivola and was buried at the village church. Her mother continued to live in the village until 1939 and died during the evacuation that occurred due to the winter war. Following The Moscow Peace Treaty in 1940 the village became Soviet territory and belongs to this day to Russia
(the area has become urbanized since 1950 and most visible traces of the village that existed in Södergran's day are now long gone).. The site of Edith's grave is today unknown; however, in 1960 a statue to her was erected in Raivola. Shortly after the war, Raivola was renamed Roschino (Russian: Рощино). Of her former home, only the ground stones remain. They are situated behind the Orthodox church, which after the Fall of the Soviet Union was rebuilt in the same place using photographs of her house as a guide.
(1896–1961), Gunnar Björling (1887–1960) and Rabbe Enckell (1903–74). In Sweden she became an important guide for a number of poets from Gunnar Ekelöf
and Karin Boye
and beyond and her poems are now translated to Russian, Spanish, Chinese and other languages.
It took many years for her to gain recognition. Fourteen years after Södergrans death the author Jarl Hemmer
said that her poetry surely had meaning but did not believe that it would be appreciated by people in general.
She was often fascinated by expressionism but later broadened her lyrical expression and has come to be called a modernist. This despite that she is considered amongst others Elmer Diktonius
and Rabbe Enckell on the whole as being distinct.
Of her poems, some of the most well-known are Svart eller vitt ("Black or White"), Ingenting ("Nothing"), Min barndoms träd ("My Childhood's Trees") and Landet som icke är ("The Land which is not"). Her most quoted poem is probably Dagen svalnar... ("The Day Cools...") which deals with feelings such as longing, fear, closeness and distance.
Södergran's poetic authority and her sense of herself were clearly liberated by her reading of Nietzsche and her acceptance of the concept of the superman. In her middle-period poems, we often meet a commanding figure - a prophet, a princess, a saint, or simply an imposing "I" projecting their will, their visions and feelings. This kind of assertiveness, particularly coming from a woman writer, has been an obstacle to some reading her work and a highly attractive and convincing element to others. But Södergran herself was enough of a realist to know that these personae are not simply to be conflated with her own private self - she obliquely refers to that distinction several times in her letters to Hagar Olsson, and many people who knew her have attested that she was aware of it - so the ego in her production can be a role that she'll visit and investigate, as in the poems Rosenaltaret ("The Rose Altar") , Stormen ("The Storm")(there are two poems with this title, both of them with a visionary slant), Skaparegestalter ("Creator Figures") and Vad är mitt hemland ("What Is My Homeland?") and many others. In Den stora trädgården ("The Big Garden), a beautiful 1920 poem about the mission of artists and the new age, she states openly that "Naked we walk in shredded clothes ..." and that artists have no outward power and should not aim to have any:
The poem was originally sent to Hagar Olsson in an April 1920 letter where Edith recounts flu, abject poverty and a humiliating attempt to sell some old underwear to get money. Gunnar Tideström has commented that "few documents of her hand give such a striking idea of her everyday self" and "she admits that life is cruel and that she will perish if this goes on for much longer - but it is not a self-pitying letter; it glows with light".
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
within Swedish-language literature and her influences came from French Symbolism, German expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
and Russian futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
. At the age of 24 she released her first collection of poetry entitled Dikter ("Poems"). Södergran died at the age of 31, having contracted tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
as a teenager, and did not live to experience the world wide appreciation of her poetry. Her poetry has influenced many lyrical poets, and Södergran is today considered to have been one of the greatest modern Swedish poets. Södergran continues to influence Swedish poetry and musical lyrics, e.g. in the works of Mare Kandre
Mare Kandre
Mare Kandre was a writer of Swedish and Estonian stock. She was born on May 27, 1962 in Söderala, a small place in mid-Sweden and grew up in Gothenburg and Stockholm. A few years between 1967 and 1969 she lived with her family in B.C., Canada, a period which made a very deep impression on her and...
, Gunnar Harding, Eva Runefelt and Eva Dahlgren
Eva Dahlgren
Eva Dahlgren is a Swedish pop musician, born 9 June 1960 in Umeå, Sweden.Dahlgren was discovered by musician/producer Bruno Glenmark in 1978 after appearing on the TV show "Sveriges magasin" and her debut album Finns det nån som bryr sej om was released the same year...
.
Childhood
Edith Irene Södergran was born in St. Petersburg into a middle-class Finnish-Swedish family. Her parents, Matts Södergran and Helena (né Holmroos) were both born in Finland and belonged to the Finnish-Swedish minority with Swedish as their native language. Edith grew up as an only child. Her mother had earlier become pregnant by a Russian soldier and given birth to an illegitimate son, but the child died after only two days. Her father had been a widower after the death of his wife and two small children. The sorrow united her parents, who were also both considered less suitable in marriage due to their past.Edith's mother came from a well positioned family and the women's status within the family is thought to have been strong. It is apparent that Edith and her mother shared a strong bond. Considerably less is known about her relationship to her father, who died when Edith was only 15.
When Edith was just a few months old the Södergrans moved to the village of Raivola on Karelian Isthmus
Karelian Isthmus
The Karelian Isthmus is the approximately 45–110 km wide stretch of land, situated between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga in northwestern Russia, to the north of the River Neva . Its northwestern boundary is the relatively narrow area between the Bay of Vyborg and Lake Ladoga...
where her grandfather, Gabriel Holmroos, bought a house for them. A short time afterward Matts acquired a job as a superintendent at a sawmill
Sawmill
A sawmill is a facility where logs are cut into boards.-Sawmill process:A sawmill's basic operation is much like those of hundreds of years ago; a log enters on one end and dimensional lumber exits on the other end....
. Three years after Matts had begun working the company went into bankruptcy
Bankruptcy
Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....
and the family struggled to make ends meet. Helena's father died a few months later and the inheritance
Inheritance
Inheritance is the practice of passing on property, titles, debts, rights and obligations upon the death of an individual. It has long played an important role in human societies...
was shared between her and her mother. With the money from the inheritance Helena was able to pay the family's debts and get them back on their feet. The rest of the money disappeared quickly, however, due to Matts' unsuccessful businesses. Helena managed to arrange for the family to receive a part of the proceeds from her mother's share of the inheritance, thus the family became debt free once more.
Edith attended the girls school at Petrischule in St. Petersburg. Petrischule was rich in tradition and created an interesting and highly intellectual surrounding for Edith. The school was situated opposite The Winter Palace, which enabled Edith to experience the troubles in Tsarist Russia at close range. She was almost certainly in the city on Bloody Sunday
Bloody Sunday (1905)
Bloody Sunday was a massacre on in St. Petersburg, Russia, where unarmed, peaceful demonstrators marching to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II were gunned down by the Imperial Guard while approaching the city center and the Winter Palace from several gathering points. The shooting did not...
in January 1905 when the Tsarist guards opened fire on thousands of starving citizens who had gathered to protest against the lack of food.
In 1904 her father was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and in May 1906 he was admitted to Nummela sanatorium in Nyland. He was later sent home, incurably ill. Matts Södergran died in October 1907, only a year before Edith would herself be diagnosed with the disease.
Under these complicated circumstances Edith's mother was responsible for the well-being of the family, especially as Matts Södergran's health deteriorated. This is believed to have first influenced Edith's belief in women and feminism. Though her first real encounter with a more structured questioning of the gender dynamics and the 'new woman' is believed to have taken place during her time in a sanatorium in Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
.
Edith was a keen photographer and there are many pictures of her mother, albeit few of her father. Helena Södergran was a robust, petite and intelligent woman with a broad and capturing smile. Helena may have seemed stable, but was often nervous, shaken and restless. Edith enjoyed a very special bond with her mother, and Helena supported her daughter's wish to become a poet. Edith and her mother spent a lot more time together than Edith and her father. Edith and Helena would move into St Petersburg during the school terms, living in the Wiborgska part of the city. Edith's father only lived with them in the city for short periods of time.
Edith had made a few friends, but Helena feared her daughter might be becoming lonely. Some biographers, including Gunnar Tideström, have claimed that Helena hence found a foster sister of a similar age to Edith, named Singa. Singa is believed to have lived with the Södergrans during term time, but moved back to her biological family during the holidays. On one visit Singa, supposedly ran away back to her biological family, but while walking along the train tracks she was run over by a train, and Helena later found the mutilated body. However, other biographers, such as Ebba Witt-Brattström
Ebba Witt-Brattström
Ebba Witt-Brattström is a Swedish scholar in comparative literature. She is Professor of Literature and head of department at Södertörn University outside Stockholm, and a well-known feminist...
, have disputed the story of Singa, claiming there is no real evidence she ever existed.
School days
In 1902 Edith began her schooling in Die deutsche Hauptschule zu St. Petri where she studied until 1909. These school years were characterized by worries and strong social tensions which likely effected her world view. Amongst the poems in Vaxdukshäftet that depict Edith's school years there are poems with political motivations. At school there were pupils of many different nationalities including German, Russian, Finnish and Scandinavian. The main focus of her studies were modern languages and she learned German, French, English and Russian but she received no instruction in her mother tongue of Swedish, and her knowledge of Swedish grammar and spelling was somewhat faltering. German was the language she spoke most both in school and with her friends.Edith was an intelligent pupil with the ability to assimilate knowledge quickly needing to spend little time revising. One of her classmates described her as the class' most gifted pupil. More and more she became interested in the French lessons she received. To a certain extent, this was due to her teacher Henri Cottier to whom she directed a large proportion of the love poems that appear in Vaxdukshäftet.
During 1908 Edith appears to have made a decision to make Swedish the main language of her writings and her poems in German suddenly stopped. This was not a self-evident decision. She had no close contact with Swedish literature, and Finland-Swedish poetry was in a depression. An important impulse to the decision might have come from one of her relatives, the Finland-Swedish language researcher Hugo Bergroth. Some years earlier she had published a poem Hoppet ("The Hope") in a membership newsletter for the Swedish Liberal Party in Helsingfors and began to come into contact with Finland-Swedish authors. The transition to Swedish seemed also to mark a clear decision to focus on poetry.
Illness
One day in November 1908 Edith came home from school saying that she was restless and that she did not feel well. Helena called for a doctor who diagnosed that Edith had an inflammation of the lungs. According to the mother, the girl understood what it was as she asked several times if she had got "lung soot". Edith had guessed correctly. On New Year's Day 1909 it was established and Edith tested positive for tuberculosisTuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
. Barely a month after the result she was admitted to Nummela sanatorium, the same hospital where her father had been a patient before he passed on, meaning that Edith was never entirely comfortable there. At the time, the chances of recovering entirely form tuberculosis weren't especially good. 70-80% of cases died within ten years of diagnosis.
Edith was unhappy at Nummela. The place was altogether too strongly associated with her father's death. She lost weight, her mood was low and she was described afterwards as unkempt and "strange". She was even thought to have a mild mental illness after she proposed to one of the doctors. It is apparent that she did not get on well at Nummela and felt that the place resembled more closely a prison. During the long days Edith day dreamed of other lands and exotic places. She willingly shared her dreams which made her seem even more peculiar. During the following year her condition worsened and the family looked for help abroad. The obvious choice was Switzerland, which was at the time the centre for tuberculosis treatment within Europe.
At the beginning of October 1911, roughly three years after the start of her illness, Edith and her mother travelled to Arosa
Arosa
Arosa is a town and a municipality in the district of Plessur in the canton of Graubünden in Switzerland. It is both a summer and a winter tourist resort.-History:...
in Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
but even there she did not get on especially well. She was examined by three different doctors who all came up with entirely different solutions to her illness. Some months later she was transported to the doctor Dr Ludwig von Muralt at the Davos-Dorf sanatorium. Edith immediately took a liking to her new doctor and got on much better there. Dr von Muralt suggested that a so-called left-sided pneumothorax
Pneumothorax
Pneumothorax is a collection of air or gas in the pleural cavity of the chest between the lung and the chest wall. It may occur spontaneously in people without chronic lung conditions as well as in those with lung disease , and many pneumothoraces occur after physical trauma to the chest, blast...
should be performed. This involved puncturing the lung during an operation and filling it with nitrogen
Nitrogen
Nitrogen is a chemical element that has the symbol N, atomic number of 7 and atomic mass 14.00674 u. Elemental nitrogen is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, and mostly inert diatomic gas at standard conditions, constituting 78.08% by volume of Earth's atmosphere...
gas. The punctured lung would be unusable but it would be "rested". After May 1912 no more tuberculosis bacteria were shown to be in her lungs although she wasn't free from the sickness and knew that she must be watchful of her diet and rest for several hours every day.
Her time in Switzerland played a large role in Edith's international orientation. From a remote part of Finland she had arrived in an intellectually vital country where, not least at the sanatorium, she met many gifted people from the whole of Europe. With them she felt a connection that she had rarely felt in St. Petersburg. Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
's novel The Magic Mountain
The Magic Mountain
The Magic Mountain is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in November 1924. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of 20th century German literature....
, which admittedly was written after the war but is set in a sanatorium during these years gives a picture of the intellectually lively atmosphere. Her doctor, von Muralt appears also to be one of the first doctors who truly won her trust and friendship. When he died in 1917 Edith wrote two poems Trädet i skogen ("The Tree in the Forest") and Fragment av en stämning ("Fragment of a Mood") which expresses her sorrow and conflicted memories of her time in Switzerland.
Finally, Edith felt better, her cough had disappeared and she was perkier than normal. In the spring of 1914 she finally travelled home but the sickness shadowed her and her poetry faced a struggle against illness and later fatigue.
Literary revolt
Her debut book Dikter ("Poems"), which came out in the autumn of 1916 gained no great notice, even if a few critics were slightly perplexed – Södergran was already using associative free verse and describing selected details instead of entire landscapes. Expression of a young, modern, female consciousness in poems like Dagen svalnar... ("The Day Cools...") and Vierge moderne was entirely new within Swedish language poetry.After the October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
in 1917, Edith and her mother's economic assets were suddenly rendered worthless since they had been placed in Ukrainian securities; and soon after, from the spring of 1918, the Karelian Isthmus
Karelian Isthmus
The Karelian Isthmus is the approximately 45–110 km wide stretch of land, situated between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga in northwestern Russia, to the north of the River Neva . Its northwestern boundary is the relatively narrow area between the Bay of Vyborg and Lake Ladoga...
became a war zone. In Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was called from 1914) people were being shot without trial and Södergran knew that several of her classmates had fled from the city. She read Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
and found in him the courage to keep upright against a periodically shifting and degrading everyday life.
Her new poetic direction with Septemberlyran ("The September Lyre") met no greater understanding from the public and from critics. She tried to discuss her poetry in a notorious letter to the editor in the Helsinki newspaper, Dagens Press on New Year's Eve 1918 in order to clear up some of her intentions with the paradoxical visions in her new book. She succeeded instead in provoking the first debate about modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
's incomprehensible poetry in the Swedish language - a debate which would later return regarding Birger Sjöberg
Birger Sjöberg
Birger Sjöberg was a modern Swedish poet and songwriter.Originally a journalist, Sjöberg wrote songs in his spare time. His first collection Frida's Book was extremely popular...
, Peter Weiss
Peter Weiss
Peter Ulrich Weiss was a German writer, painter, and artist of adopted Swedish nationality. He is particularly known for his plays Marat/Sade and The Investigation and his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance....
and Erik Lindegren
Erik Lindegren
J. Erik Lindegren was a Swedish author, poet, critical writer and member of the Swedish Academy . Grandson of composer Johan Lindegren....
. The newspaper debate in Södergran's case was harsh - none of the debaters seemed either to have had any sense of the conditions under which the poems had been written: hunger, tuberculosis, the threat of being exiled or killed if Raivola was taken by the Red Guard - but she won a friend and life-long ally in the young critic Hagar Olsson
Hagar Olsson
Hagar Olsson was a Finnish writer and recipient of the Eino Leino Prize in 1965.-References:...
(1893–1978).
Olsson became a first breach in her isolated and threatened existence in the distant village - she made a number of visits and the two women remained in contact by letter until a few weeks before Södergran's death, when Olsson went on a tour to France without an inkling that she was to lose one of her best friends. She was to grow into one of the most powerful modernist critics in Finland and at times she has been seen as almost a posthumous spokeswoman and interpreter of Södergran, not least because so few others had been in continuous and close long-term contact with the poet and were still alive and willing to speak in public when Södergran became an established classic. It was a position that Olsson was, by her own admission, uncomfortable with, but her accounts of Södergran and her edition of the author's letters to her, with Olsson's own evocative commentary (her own letters were lost after Södergran's death), have had an incalculable effect on the later image of her friend.
In the next book, Rosenaltaret ("The Rose Altar"), printed in June 1919, a cycle of poems, Fantastique celebrates the sister, a being who seems to hover between reality and fairytale in some of the poems while some of the details are quite close to subjects that had been discussed in the letters of the two. The poem Systern ("The Sister") is silently dedicated to her, and contains the line "She got lost to me in the throng of the city" which, as biographer Gunnar Tideström has put it, corresponds to Södergran's dismay after the too short visits by Hagar Olsson and her friend's return to Helsingfors. Olsson has later recalled Södergran's both lyrical, funny, warm and sometimes frightening and imposing personality. Both of them have sometimes been seen as bisexuals, and the question whether there was a lesbian element in the emotional bond between them remains a disputed one.
With the next collection of poems, Framtidens skugga ("The Shadow of the Future") (whose original title was "Köttets mysterier" ("Mysteries of the Flesh")), the visions that had exhorted Södergran culminate in poems speaking of a renewed world after the wars and catastrophes that now ravage the Earth - Raivola was, as stated earlier a war zone in 1918 and even later Edith was able to hear gunfire from her kitchen window. The wording can lead one to think both of Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
and Jim Morrison
Jim Morrison
James Douglas "Jim" Morrison was an American musician, singer, and poet, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors...
when the poet takes on the role of fortune teller, general or quite simply that of Eros' chosen intermediary as in the poem Eros hemlighet ("Eros' secret").
Despite the visionary overtones, Södergran was during this period an atheist and according to neighbours and friends she was entirely capable of differentiating between her own self and the shimmering queens
Queens
Queens is the easternmost of the five boroughs of New York City. The largest borough in area and the second-largest in population, it is coextensive with Queens County, an administrative division of New York state, in the United States....
and prophet
Prophet
In religion, a prophet, from the Greek word προφήτης profitis meaning "foreteller", is an individual who is claimed to have been contacted by the supernatural or the divine, and serves as an intermediary with humanity, delivering this newfound knowledge from the supernatural entity to other people...
s she took as characters in her poetry. The change imagined in her writing would create a new humanity, led by "the strongest spirits" (Nietzsche's Übermensch
Übermensch
The Übermensch is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche posited the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself in his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra ....
en; see for example the poems Botgörarne ("The Atoners") and Först vill jag bestiga Chimborazzo ("First I shall ascend Chimborazzo in my own land"). Generally, when she gave space for a more positive belief in nature and religious spirituality in her poems it meant that she felt a release from some of the specific expectations that had upheld her in a dreary everyday existence – a waiting and "charging-up" that could not be endured indefinitely – but also an incipient repudiation of, and retreat from, her Nietzschean vision of the future.
From the summer of 1920 on she abandoned her poetry until August 1922; during the autumn and winter she wrote her final poems, stimulated by the review Ultra; the short-lived review, started by Elmer Diktonius, Hagar Olsson and other young writers, was the first publication in Finland to embrace literary modernism and it hailed Edith as a pioneering genius and printed her new poems. The expectations of a leading role for herself had been left behind but not the daring descriptive language and some of these final poems have come to be her most loved.
Edith died on Midsummer Day 1923 at her home in Raivola and was buried at the village church. Her mother continued to live in the village until 1939 and died during the evacuation that occurred due to the winter war. Following The Moscow Peace Treaty in 1940 the village became Soviet territory and belongs to this day to Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
(the area has become urbanized since 1950 and most visible traces of the village that existed in Södergran's day are now long gone).. The site of Edith's grave is today unknown; however, in 1960 a statue to her was erected in Raivola. Shortly after the war, Raivola was renamed Roschino (Russian: Рощино). Of her former home, only the ground stones remain. They are situated behind the Orthodox church, which after the Fall of the Soviet Union was rebuilt in the same place using photographs of her house as a guide.
Work and aesthetic position
Edith Södergran was a trailblazer within modernist Swedish poetry and got many followers, amongst others: Elmer DiktoniusElmer Diktonius
Elmer Rafael Diktonius was a Finnish poet and composer, who wrote in both Swedish and Finnish.-External links:*...
(1896–1961), Gunnar Björling (1887–1960) and Rabbe Enckell (1903–74). In Sweden she became an important guide for a number of poets from Gunnar Ekelöf
Gunnar Ekelöf
Gunnar Ekelöf was a Swedish poet and writer. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1958. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Uppsala University in 1958...
and Karin Boye
Karin Boye
was a Swedish poet and novelist.- Career :Boye was born in Gothenburg , Sweden and moved with her family to Stockholm in 1909. She studied at Uppsala University from 1921 to 1926 and debuted in 1922 with a collection of poems, "Clouds"...
and beyond and her poems are now translated to Russian, Spanish, Chinese and other languages.
It took many years for her to gain recognition. Fourteen years after Södergrans death the author Jarl Hemmer
Jarl Hemmer
Jarl Robert Hemmer was a Finland-Swedish author from Vaasa, Finland where he was born into a wealthy family. His first collection of poems was called Rösterna and it was published in 1914. He made his breakthrough in 1922 with another collection of epic poetry called Rågens rike...
said that her poetry surely had meaning but did not believe that it would be appreciated by people in general.
She was often fascinated by expressionism but later broadened her lyrical expression and has come to be called a modernist. This despite that she is considered amongst others Elmer Diktonius
Elmer Diktonius
Elmer Rafael Diktonius was a Finnish poet and composer, who wrote in both Swedish and Finnish.-External links:*...
and Rabbe Enckell on the whole as being distinct.
Of her poems, some of the most well-known are Svart eller vitt ("Black or White"), Ingenting ("Nothing"), Min barndoms träd ("My Childhood's Trees") and Landet som icke är ("The Land which is not"). Her most quoted poem is probably Dagen svalnar... ("The Day Cools...") which deals with feelings such as longing, fear, closeness and distance.
Södergran's poetic authority and her sense of herself were clearly liberated by her reading of Nietzsche and her acceptance of the concept of the superman. In her middle-period poems, we often meet a commanding figure - a prophet, a princess, a saint, or simply an imposing "I" projecting their will, their visions and feelings. This kind of assertiveness, particularly coming from a woman writer, has been an obstacle to some reading her work and a highly attractive and convincing element to others. But Södergran herself was enough of a realist to know that these personae are not simply to be conflated with her own private self - she obliquely refers to that distinction several times in her letters to Hagar Olsson, and many people who knew her have attested that she was aware of it - so the ego in her production can be a role that she'll visit and investigate, as in the poems Rosenaltaret ("The Rose Altar") , Stormen ("The Storm")(there are two poems with this title, both of them with a visionary slant), Skaparegestalter ("Creator Figures") and Vad är mitt hemland ("What Is My Homeland?") and many others. In Den stora trädgården ("The Big Garden), a beautiful 1920 poem about the mission of artists and the new age, she states openly that "Naked we walk in shredded clothes ..." and that artists have no outward power and should not aim to have any:
- If I had a big garden
- I would invite all my brothers and sisters there.
- Each one would bring a large treasure.
- We own nothing, thus we could become one people.
- We shall build bars around our garden
- letting no sound from the world reach us.
- Out of our silent garden
- we shall bring the world a new life.
The poem was originally sent to Hagar Olsson in an April 1920 letter where Edith recounts flu, abject poverty and a humiliating attempt to sell some old underwear to get money. Gunnar Tideström has commented that "few documents of her hand give such a striking idea of her everyday self" and "she admits that life is cruel and that she will perish if this goes on for much longer - but it is not a self-pitying letter; it glows with light".
External links
- Project Runeberg
- Dikter av Edith Södergran från Svensk Lyrik
Literature and sources
- Gunnar Tideström, Edith Södergran. En biografi (akad. avh.) Stockholm 1949.
- Hagar OlssonHagar OlssonHagar Olsson was a Finnish writer and recipient of the Eino Leino Prize in 1965.-References:...
, Ediths brev. Helsingfors och Stockholm 1955. - Ernst Brunner, Till fots genom solsystemen. Studier i Edith Södergrans expressionism. Stockholm (akad. avh.) 1983.
- Ulla Evers, Hettan av en gud : en studie i skapandetemat hos Edith Södergran. Göteborg (akad. avh.) 1992
- George C. Schoolfield, Edith Södergran - Modernist Poet in Finland. Greenwood Press, Westport 1984.
- Eva StrömEva StrömEva Ström is a Swedish lyricist, novelist, biographer and literary critic. She made her literary debut in 1977 with the poetry collection Den brinnande zeppelinaren...
, Edith Södergran. Natur och Kultur, Stockholm 1994. - Ebba Witt-BrattströmEbba Witt-BrattströmEbba Witt-Brattström is a Swedish scholar in comparative literature. She is Professor of Literature and head of department at Södertörn University outside Stockholm, and a well-known feminist...
, Ediths jag - Edith Södergran och modernismens födelse, Norstedts förlag AB, Stockholm, 1997