Aleksis Kivi and Siuntio Finland's national author Aleksis Kivi (Aleksis Stenvall) was the product of three different home districts. He was born in the parish of Palojoki in the municipality of Nurmijärvi on October 10, 1834 and spent his childhood there up to the age of twelve. He lived in Helsinki as a schoolboy and as a student and from time to time later on, too, but always returned to Palojoki, where he was born, for his holidays. As a writer, Aleksis Kivi settled in the Swedish-speaking coastal parish of Sjundeå, or Siuntio, where he wrote most of his poetry and plays and his novel Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers). Kivi lived on the Purnus farm, rented by his elder brother Juhani Stenvall, close to the village of Siuntio in 1857-1858, at Kvarnby Manor in 1860-1861 and in a cottage belonging to a gamekeeper named Karelius in 1863. In these places, he wrote poetry and the original versions of his plays Kullervo and Nummisuutarit and, according to Juhani Stenvall, certain passages from Seitsemän veljestä were also written during his years at Purnus. In the 1850s, Kivi wrote a number of poems in Swedish, which he spoke fluently. The first manuscript of Nummisuutarit was in fact entitled Bröllopsdansen på ljungheden. Aleksis Kivi found a permanent home in Siuntio from 1864 to 1871, in a house named Fanjunkars, owned by Charlotta Lönnqvist (1815-1891). Narrow-minded gossips thought it quite unsuitable for a bachelor to live in a house where there were young girls residing under the tutelage of the housekeeper, not to mention the mistress of the house herself and some servant girls. Kivi, in fact had fallen for one of the girls, Olga Björkman, who was the daughter of priest. This state of affairs indeed caused problems from time to time, but far more important than this was the fact that Kivi had his own study in the house and peace and quiet for working in. He was fed and clothed, he could rest and at times he could even be ill. He had a home. Siuntio and the neighbouring parishes offered the nature-loving poet splendid landscapes to inspire his poetry and his descriptions of nature, river valleys, impressive rocky escarpments and extensive tracts of forest through which Kivi roamed with his rifle and hunting bag on his shoulder. He had no regular income at all, but he was often able to top up the larder of the house through his skill as a hunter and bird catcher. In one of his letters he recounts that in 1868 he caught almost a hundred game birds, black grouse, capercaille, hazel grouse and ptarmigan. He went fishing with his friend Johan Manelius in Lake Bollstad (Tjusträsk) nearby and in the Siuntio river. For several summers he rowed, fished and wrote at Svinö in the archipelago, as a guest of a fisherman's family named Boström. Neither Siuntio nor Nurmijärvi were able to offer Aleksis Kivi libraries, theatre performances, university lectures, concerts, or discussions about culture with interesting friends, however. These could only be had in Helsinki, so Kivi often used to go there to live for months at a time until lack of funds sent him back to Siuntio. As far as progress with his writing was concerned, it seems to have been an advantage that he lived at some distance from Helsinki, and from Nurmijärvi with its common people and its troubles. Yearning and melancholy, however, caused his imagination to take flight and he was able to put his feelings down on paper and turn them into Finnish literature through the medium of his goose-quill pen. He is known to have modelled many of his characters and settings on the people and landscape of Siuntio. The people who lived in Siuntio and Nurmijärvi respected the traditional work of the yeoman farmer and took rather a sceptical view of Kivi's efforts as a writer. This only increased his solitude and marginalized him even more. He came from yeoman stock and was strongly attached to people of his own estate. He found incomparable types amongst them, but he himself had the soul of a poet and the outlook on the world of a man of learning. Although this may have been an advantage to his literary imagination, it seems to have been the reason why he had no family of his own, something that he sometimes said he yearned for. In the final analysis, the only obstacle to marriage was the fact that he had neither an official government position nor the regular income that went with it. His potential in-laws also refused to accept him as a son-in-law. But he was no hermit; he had numerous friends in all the places where he lived. Both Siuntio and Helsinki were Swedish speaking and in his everyday life, Kivi mainly spoke Swedish. Although he was opposed to the language's dominant status, Swedish was thoroughly familiar to him. He understood its beauty; after all he read Shakespeare and the poetry of Stagnelius in Swedish and in fact almost all his other books as well, as they were simply not available in Finnish. Kivi himself did not sit back and wait for Finnish to develop into a literary language, he wrote his own works in the rich idiosyncratic dialect of Southern Häme. So far, 1.2 million copies of his novel Seitsemän veljestä have been printed and it has been translated into 27 languages. Newer and newer adaptations of Nummisuutarit, Kihlaus and Kivi's other plays can be seen in the theatre. Many of his poems have been set to music and become much-loved traditional songs, some of the better known being Onnelliset, Sunnuntai, Sydämeni laulu and Timon laulu oravalle. Esko Rahikainen, University of Helsinki Translated by Nicholas Mayow	Web-kirjasto [ svenska ]
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