Aleksis Kivi

• Born: October 10, 1834
• Birthplace: Palojoki, Finland
• Died: December 31, 1872
• Place of death: Tuusula, Finland

Other Literary Forms

Aleksis Kivi’s only novel, Seitsemän veljestä (1870; Seven Brothers, 1929, revised 1973), is a cornerstone of literature in Finnish; his lyric production, although small and long regarded as subsidiary to his novel and his dramas, also forms part of the classical corpus of Finland’s letters.

Achievements

When Finland, since the twelfth century a part of Sweden’s Baltic empire, passed into Russian hands in 1808-1809, its theatrical history consisted essentially of a few student plays, based partly on neo-Latin originals, performed in Swedish at Abo Academy (in Turku) in the middle of the seventeenth century, and, subsequently, the sporadic appearances of strolling players from Sweden and Germany. The opening of theaters in Helsinki (1827), Viipuri (1832), and Turku (1838) gave evidence of a stronger dramatic consciousness, but it was not until mid-century that texts by native playwrights were produced. These plays were still in Swedish, however, the language of education, culture, and commerce in Finland at the time, and it was not until May 10, 1869, when Aleksis Kivi’s Lea premiered at Helsinki’s New Theater, that the modern Finnish drama was born. The main role had been memorized by an actress who knew no Finnish, Hedvig Charlotte Raa; like other members of the professional company at the New Theater, she had been imported from Sweden.

Unhappily, Kivi’s own increasing emotional difficulties kept him from attending the first performance of Lea; indeed, it is doubtful that he ever saw any of his plays performed. By the time Kivi’s friend Kaarlo Bergbom, a member of the Helsinki upper class and a sometime playwright, had organized his Finnish Theater, Kivi was far gone in madness. The first appearance of Bergbom’s troupe took place at a hotel in the small coastal town of Pori on October 23, 1872, with Kivi’s Margareta; the repertoire of the ensemble, which made its debut in Helsinki the following March, also included Kivi’s Eva. A staging of Kivi’s tragedy Karkurit (the fugitives) took place, in Swedish translation, at the New Theater on December 13 and 15, 1872; the proceeds from these performances were used to pay for his funeral.

Thus Kivi has come to be regarded as the brilliant and unfortunate pioneer, or martyr, of drama in Finnish; his statue—depicting Kivi seated, his head bowed in melancholy—was unveiled, on his birthday, in 1939, before Finland’s National Theater in Helsinki. Only two of Kivi’s comedies (and dramatizations of his novel, Seven Brothers), however, hold the stage today: Nummisuutarit (the heath cobblers), which has attained the status of a national play, and the one-act Eva. In these works, his peculiar strengths are best seen: his sympathy with weak and even silly characters, his remarkable verbal inventiveness, and his sense that ludicrous events contain their element of sadness. In 1866, Kivi had planned to join a traveling theatrical company that another of his idealistic patrician friends, Emil Nervander, intended to organize; the project, never carried out, is assumed to have encouraged Kivi in his feverish dramatic production of the later 1860’s. The modern novelist and dramatist Veijo Meri has conjectured that, if Nervander’s plan had been realized, Kivi, “as playwright, dramaturg, director, and actor, would have been able to play as many-sided a role as . . . Shakespeare . . . in his time.” Whether Kivi would have been able to expand his effective dramatic range, had he lived longer and regained his sanity, is a moot question. Probably, Kivi himself had ambitions of becoming a Finnish Shakespeare; instead, he became Finland’s Ludvig Holberg—but a Holberg drunk on the rich possibilities of a language hitherto unused for dramatic literature.

Biography

Born Aleksis Stenvall on October 10, 1834, Aleksis Kivi (he later took this as his nom de plume) came from the northern reaches of Uusimaa, the province in which Helsinki lies, a region still known, at the time of his birth, for its lawlessness. Indeed, Kivi’s paternal great-uncle, Matti Stenvall, was sentenced to life imprisonment for banditry in 1829, spending the rest of his days incarcerated at Suomenlinna, the fortress-complex in Helsinki harbor. Matti’s brother, Kivi’s grandfather, was a sailor who returned to the countryside only late in life, and Kivi’s father, the village tailor, had briefly attended school in the capital and, at the time of his confirmation, was described in Nurmijärvi’s records as a “Swedish-speaker.” The Stenvalls were certainly well known in their home community; the command of Swedish gave Kivi’s father considerable authority (especially on legal matters) in his village. He was, as well, ambitious for his offspring: His oldest son, Juhani, nine years Aleksis’s senior, had been sent to a private school to learn Swedish, the key to business and social success, and when the gifted Aleksis, the youngest of the four sons, was dispatched to Helsinki at the age of twelve for schooling, Juhani, then employed as a clerk in the capital, was expected to help with the boy’s expenses, which he did grudgingly.

Kivi’s schooldays were made difficult not only by his poverty but also by the disparity in age between him and his fellow pupils, who as a rule were between three and four years younger. His education took place entirely in Swedish, which he mastered so completely that he at first thought of following a literary career in the language. His knowledge of Swedish also gave him access to the authors who perhaps meant the most to him in his own literary creation: Ludvig Holberg, whose Danish was easy to grasp, and Miguel de Cervantes, Homer, and William Shakespeare, all of whom he devoured in Swedish, learning whole passages of Karl August Hagberg’s translation of Shakespeare by heart, including the entire role of Cordelia in King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606). Each summer, the boy returned to the Finnish-speaking milieu of Nurmijärvi; Helsinki itself, and much of its adjacent territory, was still overwhelmingly Swedish in language.

After many vicissitudes, Kivi, at the age of eighteen, completed his preparatory training at Helsinki’s “advanced elementary school,” He then decided to prepare privately for the university and spent some time at cramming schools very much like the school Henrik Ibsen had attended in Norway a few years earlier, taking the university entrance examinations in December, 1857. Again, with characteristic dilatoriness, he delayed his formal entrance to the university until 1859 and pursued his studies in a desultory fashion, staying on the enrollment books until 1865 but never attaining an academic degree.

The advantages he drew from these apparently aimless years lay, on one hand, in the acquisition of supportive and sometimes affluent friends (such as Bergbom, Nervander, and the German-born poet Julius Krohn), who admired the genius from the countryside, and, on the other, in the inspiration he drew from two of his teachers: Elias Lönnrot, the compiler of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, and the aesthetician and critic Fredrik Cygnaeus, who lectured on drama (and who, in 1853, had published an essay, “The Tragic Element,” on the newly restored national epic). Lönnrot and Cygnaeus may fairly be regarded as the godfathers of Kivi’s first play, the tragedy Kullervo, based on cantos 31-36 of the Kalevala. The first version of the play, still in manuscript, got Kivi a prize, in March, 1860, from the Finnish Literary Society, for “the best theatrical work in Finnish”; Kivi suddenly became the great hope of a literature still in statu nascendi. Dissatisfied with what he had written, Kivi continued to work at the play until, entirely revised, it was published by the Finnish Literary Society in 1864. The same year, he issued another play, Nummisuutarit, a peasant comedy. (The cost of printing was paid by his generous friend, Bergbom.) Many years before, at the time of his qualifying examination, Kivi had written a sketch in Swedish (now lost) called “The Bridal Dance”; he developed his major theatrical work from this modest source. (Kivi had shown the manuscript as a proof of his talent to Topelius, Cygnaeus, and Johan Vilhelm Snellman—the last-named a brilliant polemical stylist in Swedish who, paradoxically, was the leading advocate of Finland as a monolingual, Finnish-speaking entity.)

Work on these two projects, the tragedy and the comedy, had been carried out in part at a farm leased by Juhani, Myllymaa, in Nurmijärvi (whose Finnish dialect Kivi employed in the play about the cobblers on the heath). He stayed there from the winter of 1862 until the spring of the following year. He was thrown out, he told Bergbom later on, by the niggardly Juhani. In considering Kivi’s unhappy relations with his brothers, one should make some effort to imagine their side of the story. Kivi had not yet found, and never would find, a means of supporting himself. He was already a heavy drinker, and as such could embarrass his siblings, who in particular needed the goodwill of the noble Adlercreutz family, on whose estates they found employment, and he was not above contrasting his fine city friends with his intellectually limited brothers.

After his departure from the farm, Kivi moved to the nearby district of Siuntio, where he found refuge with Charlotta Lönnqvist, a successful countryside cateress some nineteen years his senior, who sheltered him at her farm, Fanjunkars, for the next half-decade and more. The relationship between Kivi and Lönnqvist, whom he simply called “the woman” in his letters, has given rise to much comment among Kivi scholars: It has been argued that she was a replacement for Kivi’s beloved mother (who was forty-one when Aleksis was born and died in the very year of his removal to Fanjunkars). In earlier, hagiographic Kivi research, the possibility of a love relationship was violently denied; but less prudish scholarship, somewhat encouraged by Leo ja Liina, Kivi’s semiautobiographical little play about the attraction between a twenty-year-old youth and a rather mannish twenty-eight-year-old woman, has concluded that the two became lovers and were regarded as such by their neighbors. Whatever the physical case may have been, the sojourn at Fanjunkars was the most productive period in Kivi’s life, although he often complained about his linguistic isolation. Siuntio was a Swedish-speaking district, and Lönnqvist herself could not read what Kivi wrote.

While at Fanjunkars, Kivi’s fortunes seemed to take a marked turn for the better. In 1865, Nummisuutarit got a prize of twenty-five hundred marks announced by the government as an “encouragement to awaken and further literary activity within the country.” Kivi’s cause was aided in particular by his former teacher, Cygnaeus, who wrote an enthusiastic review of the comedy for Zacharias Topelius’s newspaper, Helsingfors tidningar. The selection of Kivi annoyed Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s wife, Fredrika, who thought her husband deserved it for his Greek tragedy, Kungarne på Salamis (1863; the kings on Salamis). She suspected that Kivi had been chosen because, alone among the candidates, he had written in Finnish. Yet she went on to confess that her knowledge of Finnish was insufficient for her to judge the quality of Kivi’s work.

Grown somewhat more self-confident, Kivi brought out his lyric collection Kanervala (the heather dweller) in 1866, continued to write play after play for a Finnish stage that, thus far, existed only in his imagination and those of his admiring friends, and worked at his novel, Seven Brothers, which he submitted to the Finnish Literary Society in the spring of 1869, at the same time that his play Lea was produced at the New Theater. The novel was published in four installments by the Society; as soon as the last of these had appeared, August Ahlqvist, Lönnrot’s successor as professor of Finnish language and literature at the university, wrote a savage review (in Swedish) of the book for a conservative newspaper, in which he described Kivi’s picture of the undisciplined seven brothers, who flee civilization for a time, as an insult to the “quiet and earnest” Finnish people.

Frightened, the Finnish Literary Society was very slow to come to its former favorite’s defense; a statement by Kivi’s champion, the generous Cygnaeus, was delayed by the latter’s long illness; and the promised book edition of the novel was postponed until 1873. The blow was too much for the labile Kivi. In the spring of 1870, he made one of his many trips, away from Lönnqvist’s guardian eyes, to Helsinki and, after a drinking bout that lasted several days, fell victim to delirium tremens. His drunkenness led to painful scenes at his refuge in the countryside. In the autumn of the same year, left alone at Fanjunkars while Lönnqvist arranged a wedding reception, he was assailed by severe anxiety and followed her to the celebration, causing a general scandal by his behavior. For nine months, from May, 1871, to February, 1872, he was confined at Lapinlahti Asylum in Helsinki (the exact nature of his illness, never fully diagnosed, later became the object of fascinating research by a psychiatrist at that institution); then he was released in the care of his brother Alpertti. Accounts of his last months make painful reading, especially the stories of his begging for food at nearby farms. Alpertti, who, after his late brother’s fame was secure, played guide for pilgrims to the site of Kivi’s death, seems to have kept the deranged man on short rations. Kivi died of an inflammation of the lungs on New Year’s Eve, 1872; his last words, like those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Henrik Ibsen, have given rise to much speculation. They were: “I live, I live.”

Analysis

Three chief impulses are at work in the dramas of Aleksis Kivi. The first is his desire to create classics that, by their very presence, would make literature in Finnish a worthy part of European letters. The second is the infinitely more modest wish to write short plays readily accessible to amateur actors. Kivi could only hope that, sooner or later, professional theater in Finnish would come into being. The third is his own urge toward self-expression. Scholarship has detected self-portraits, or at least self-comments, in his plays on the stage of his imagination and of aspects of his own life.

Kullervo

The publication of the national epic, the Kalevala (in 1835, and, revised and expanded, in 1849), had been a source of intense national pride. Kivi was one of the first authors to use its themes for drama in his Kullervo; Topelius’s curious mix of Greek and Finnish material in Prinsessan of Cypern (1860; the Princess of Cyprus) is another example. Even if Cygnaeus had not suggested that the Kullervo story in the Kalevala was an apt subject for treatment in a tragedy, Kivi might well have been drawn to it; it provided expression for his own sense of isolation and his awareness of his great-uncle’s fate. When Kullervo, in the play’s most famous monologue, laments that he has been “locked into a mountain of steel,” into a “cell so small that he can only sit curled up within it,” Kivi must have thought of Matti Stenvall, chained for life to a wall inside Suomenlinna. In Lönnrot’s Kalevala, Kullervo’s family has been wiped out (or so he believes), by his evil uncle Untamo. Brutally brought up by Untamo and sold as a slave to the smith, Ilmarinen, Kullervo takes revenge on Ilmarinen’s malicious wife, who has given him a stone instead of bread as he goes out to tend the family’s cattle. He drives the livestock into a bog, where they drown. By magic, he then gives cattle’s shape to bears and wolves, and brings them home, where they devour his tormentor. Learning that his parents are still alive, Kullervo finds them on the frontier of Lapland, but discovers that one of his sisters has vanished while berrying. Incapable of carrying out even the simplest of tasks at his father’s farm (a trait left over from his unhappy childhood and youth), he is sent to deliver the taxes, and as he returns, he meets and swiftly seduces a young girl. Realizing, after their night of love, that they are siblings, she kills herself. Kullervo tells his mother what has happened, and she persuades him not to take his own life. Cursed by his father, his brother, and his surviving sister, he sets out to take bloody vengeance on Untamo; going home again, he finds that his family has been slaughtered, as the feud continues. Accompanied only by the family dog, Musti, he roams the woods until he comes to the place of the encounter with his sister; there, “the luckless one” throws himself on his sword.

Kivi makes several important changes in the tale: Forever lonely in the original, the drama’s Kullervo is given both a devoted companion, Kimmo, and a boastful and cowardly one, Nyyrikki—Shakespeare’s Pistol transferred to the Finnish wilderness. In the second act, Kullervo, pondering revenge, is confronted by two spirits of the woods, the evil Ajatar, who urges him to follow his murderous urge, and the good Sinipiika, who counsels self-control. (A resemblance to the myth of Hercules at the crossroads, the subject of the most important piece of Swedish literature from the seventeenth century, a hexameter poem by Georg Stiernhielm, has been noted in the scene.) Though far more introspective than the impulsive Kullervo of the epic, Kivi’s hero, not heeding the wiser voice, slays Ilmarinen’s wife. Aware of nineteenth century sensibilities and stage practicalities, however, Kivi does not employ the original’s magnificently grotesque transmogrification of the cattle; rather, he simply has Kullervo slay the woman after she calls him a slave. Similarly, the third act deals in a very gingerly fashion with the seduction of the sister, here given the name of Ainikki. While Kullervo is in pursuit of Untamo, Kivi causes him to fall in with a company of bear hunters, crude and almost comical lovers of violence for its own sake, who show more than a passing resemblance to the members of Karl Moor’s band in Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber (pb. 1781; The Robbers, 1792). At the end, Kimmo goes mad on learning that Kullervo’s parents have been slain in the feud; obeying the voice of his mother’s ghost, Kullervo withdraws to the forest, where he kills himself. His mother’s spirit has asked the forest nymph Sinipiika to forgive his deeds, and his death is witnessed by the three great heroes of the Kalevala, Väinämöinen, Lemminkäinen, and Kullervo’s sometime master, Ilmarinen, who, though he still mourns his wife, prays that the youth will be granted peace in death.

Readers, or viewers of the play’s occasional revivals, may smile at the apparently old-fashioned device of the evil nymphs and good nymphs and the mother’s ghost; the exchanges between the mother’s spirit and Sinipiika in the final act are particularly trying. It must be remembered, however, that the young Ibsen, almost simultaneously, used similar melodramatic effects: for example, the struggles between Aurelia and Furia in his Catalina (pb. 1850, rev. pb. 1875; Catiline, 1921) and the appearance of the vengeful spirit of Bishop Nicholas in Kongsemnerne (pb. 1863; The Pretenders, 1890). Also, choosing prose instead of blank verse, Kivi broke free of the standard linguistic dress of high tragedy in his age—just as Ibsen did in Hærmænde paa Helgeland (pr., pb. 1858; The Vikings at Helgeland, 1890), Fru Inger til Østraat (pr. 1855; Lady Inger of Østraat, 1906), and, again, The Pretenders. Although the play does not expressly address the topic, Kullervo is one of those several idea dramas of the mid-century (such as Friedrich Hebbel’s trilogy Die Nibelungen of 1861) in which pagan and Christian codes of conduct are contrasted. Most important, in the depiction of the violent yet intelligent Kullervo, the gifted man who cannot rise above his misfortunes but rather is twisted by them, Kivi made a first effort to plumb his own nature. Kullervo, it is hinted, realizes that, whatever effort he may make to escape, he is trapped, as much by personality as by circumstance.

Nummisuutarit

Kullervohas a single complex character, the eponymous hero; the main strength of Nummisuutarit lies in its large gallery of memorable portraits. Writers on Kivi have repeatedly said that the debt to Holberg is obvious: The dictatorial mother of the play’s main family, Martta, is kin to the shrewish Rille in Jeppe paa Bjerget (pr. 1722, pb. 1723; Jeppe of the Hill, 1906), and Sepeteus, the half-educated parish clerk, resembles Per Degn in Erasmus Montanus (wr. 1723, pb. 1731; English translation, 1885). Nevertheless, in both cases, Kivi has expanded the pattern; he lets his audience know that a weak husband and silly sons have turned Martta into a bossy and scheming woman, and he gives Sepeteus a voice of reason amid the complications of Nummisuutarit’s final act, where the play’s several strands, in the best comic tradition, are brought together. The male members of Martta’s family are prone to an extraordinary credulity: Believing that he has arranged a marriage between his older son, Esko, and Kreeta, the foster daughter of a prosperous farmer, the cobbler Topias sends the trusting Esko off to fetch his bride. (Both Martta and Topias want to get Esko married as quickly as possible, lest a mysterious inheritance, left behind by a whimsical old corporal, fall to Jaana, who has been reared as a ward of the cobbler’s household. The first of the children to marry, Esko or Jaana, will get the money. The high-minded Jaana does want to get married, to the honest smith Kristo; but she is moved by true love, not the thought of the five hundred rix-dollars.) Accompanied by the quick-witted Mikko, Esko proceeds to the nearby farm; it takes him some time to realize that the wedding preparations there are intended not for him but for Kreeta’s union with Jaakko, a maker of wooden shoes who wants to be a farmer, like his father-in-law-to-be. Baffled, then foolishly aggressive, and egged on by Mikko, Esko is twice bested in fights, first with the hot-tempered Teemu, a fiddler, and then with Teemu and the fiddler’s father. Unable to bear so much humiliation, Esko goes berserk and wrecks the bridal hall. The angry guests at their heels, Esko and Mikko run away. The scene is not unlike the conclusion of the second act of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (pb. 1867, English translation, 1892): There, to be sure, the outsider Peer abducts the willing bride.

Meanwhile, Iivari, Esko’s younger brother, has been sent to the city to buy provisions for the coming nuptials of Esko and Kreeta at Topias’s house; already as assiduous a toper as his father, Iivari has fallen in with his maternal uncle, Sakeri (a shiftless former policeman whom his sister, Martta, thoroughly despises) and has drunk up all the money entrusted to him. Terrified of Martta, nephew and uncle decide that they must track down a criminal who has robbed a foreign nobleman, and then use the reward money to save the day. Their plan is overheard by Niko, Jaana’s long-lost seaman father, who disguises himself as the robber described in the warrant, thinking in this way to get a free ride home. His plan succeeds; he lets himself be “captured.” As afraid of confronting his mother as Iivari has been, Esko, in the fourth act, is persuaded by Mikko to take his first drink. Similarly fearful of what the hard-handed Martta will do to him, Mikko wants to escape Esko’s company. He flees, leaving the hopelessly intoxicated Esko alone—but only briefly, for Esko meets the clarinetist Antres, who is on his way to the festivities at Topias’s place, and, in another fit of rage, throttles him.

At the finale, the situation of the several culprits grows darker still. Iivari and Sakeri learn that they have been tricked by the clever Niko. Esko has to confess that his expedition has come to a catastrophic end. Mikko, who has sprained his foot, is hauled before the terrible-tempered Martta. Yet all’s well that ends well. Niko gives his blessing to the immediate marriage of Jaana, his daughter, and Kristo. Generously, Jaana proposes that the inheritance be divided between Esko and herself. At the same time, with remarkable forgiveness, she thanks Martta for the stern upbringing the tyrannical woman has given her. Encouraged by Niko, Iivari decides to go to sea. Esko resolves to stay at home forever, and Martta, mollified by the turn of events, invites the company to Esko’s wedding board, which will now serve as an engagement banquet for Jaana and Kristo. The play ends with a procession to the sound of Antres’s clarinet; he has nicely recovered—the impulsive Esko is not a murderer after all. Plainly, the intrigue is a little artificial; yet Nummisuutarit is full of the same good humor and understanding that characterize great epithalamic comedies from more elegant milieus, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s La Folle Journée: Ou, Le Mariage de Figaro (wr. 1775-1778, pr. 1784, pb. 1785; The Marriage of Figaro, 1784), for example, or Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People (pr. 1895).

What makes the play a fascinating and satisfying stage work is Kivi’s ability to turn comic types into full human beings: Martta; Sepeteus; the boastful but timid Topias; the loudmouthed Iivari; the irascible Teemu (who is deathly afraid of his father); Mikko, the troublemaker not nearly as clever as he thinks; the genuinely bright but irresponsible Niko; the baffled and then terrified Antres; and above all, Esko. Suppressed and gullible, strong of limb and weak of mind, he will never escape (nor does he want to) from the family cocoon. Casual theatergoers may laugh at Esko’s outbursts of violence; they are the expressions, though, of a permanently stunted—and quite lovable—personality.

Eva

The same leavening of the burlesque with a hint of melancholy is to be found in Eva, in which, again, an inescapable fate is described in comic terms. Two tailors, Aapeli and Eenokki, well along in years, have spent their lives as bachelors; Aapeli has decided to take a wife, choosing Eeva, the experienced housekeeper of some “young gentlemen” in the neighborhood. Eeva, though, is too sophisticated to endure more than a small taste of Aapeli’s life and abruptly leaves the engagement dinner at his cottage; Aapeli and Eenokki dance a little bridal waltz together, accompanied by the song of Jooseppi, Aapeli’s apprentice. After some wondering about what has gone wrong, Aapeli is happy to sink back into his old life, and Eenokki is happy that the danger has past. Eeva, with her citified airs, is well out of the marital trap, too. Modern audiences may spy elements in the little comedy of which their forebears, laughing heartily, were unaware: Eenokki, it is plain, is a better bride for Aapeli than Eeva (or any other woman) could have been.

Olviretki Schleusingenissä

Evahas often and rightly been called a by-blow of Nummisuutarit; Aapeli and Eenokki come, as it were, from Topias’s and Esko’s good-natured village. Unfortunately, Kivi could be lured away from this beloved place into other realms. In Olviretki Schleusingenissä (the beer campaign at Schleusingen), Kivi at least stayed close to a theme, drunkenness, that he knew very well, even if the setting was foreign to him. He had read a newspaper item about an episode in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 in which a small band of Prussians bloodlessly conquered a much larger force of Bavarians, addled by excessive consumption of beer. (Once again, Kivi’s attitude toward alcohol is ambiguous; it can save lives and liberate imaginations, as it does here.) Nevertheless, unable to use the local color of Nurmijärvi, Kivi turns to the time-honored figure of the boastful soldier and essays the mock-heroic mode: The Prussians manage to persuade the intoxicated Bavarians that they have entered the realm of the dead and are among the heroes of antiquity. (Kivi evidently meant to emulate Holberg’s Homeric parody Ulysses von Ithacia, pr. 1724, pb. 1725, but his hand is much heavier than Holberg’s.) The play, it must be added, was among Kivi’s manuscripts, and he perhaps intended to give it a final tightening; it could have gained, surely, by a reduction of its large cast of semi-amusing military men.

Karkurit

In the play Karkurit, Kivi demonstrated much loftier literary ambitions. The weakness that besets Olviretki Schleusingenissä, the stultifying effect of an unfamiliar milieu, is magnified, even though the setting is in Finland. Kivi attempted to move the story of Romeo and Juliet to a Finnish manor house, a social world to which he seldom had admittance. The son of Baron Markus, Tyko, has been a prisoner of war; returning to the family estate, he learns the Niilo, his foster brother and an imitation of the villainous Franz Moor in The Robbers, has deprived him of his beloved Elma, the daughter of Baron Mauno. She has been led to believe that her marriage to Niilo will free her father from the burden of debts owed to Markus. When the play is over, Tyko, Elma, and Niilo are all dead, and the survivors of the two families are reconciled. Admirers of Kivi have attempted to find poetic virtues in the several descriptions of Finnish nature Karkurit contains. Its best passages, perhaps, are those in which Kivi—here having learned from Runeberg’s little verse epic, Julkvällen (1841; Christmas Eve)—portrays the tender relationship between the much-tried Elma and her foster sister, Hanna.

Canzio

Kivi’s Canzio was described by him in January, 1868, as “a five-act tragedy, which takes place on the banks of the Arno.” For explorers of Kivi’s personality, the play’s interest lies in its attempts to fathom the evil that has taken possession of the inherently noble hero. (Thus it bears traces of the familiar, Byronic pattern continued by Alfred de Musset in another play with a Florentine setting, his Lorenzaccio, pb. 1834; English translation, 1905.) Canzio is a proclaimed atheist, a richly gifted but unhappy youth torn, like many other figures in nineteenth century stage works, between women, evil and good—between the wildly passionate Marcia, the widow of a robber chieftain, and the saintly Mariamne, Canzio’s fiancée. Mariamne’s goodness is reinforced by the figure of Rachel, Canzio’s devoted sister, who has looked after him since childhood. Like so many of his contemporaries, Kivi believed firmly in the corpse-strewn stage: Claudio, Canzio’s dearest friend, insults Marcia and is challenged to a duel by Canzio. Marcia gives Claudio’s servant a cup of poison for his master, and Claudio falls easily beneath Canzio’s sword, but, before he dies, he tells Canzio the truth about Marcia: that she is in fact Flaminia, the murderer of Canzio’s father. As the police lead the femme fatale away, she momentarily slips free and stabs the unhappy Rachel with Canzio’s sword. (Just prior to the curtain’s final fall, a policeman reports that Marcia has escaped a second time and, “strong and lithe as a lion,” has thrown herself into a ravine.) Once more, Kivi is derivative. Rachel’s madness after Canzio’s death suggests Ophelia, and the cynical joviality of Varro, Canzio’s uncle, suggests Sir John Falstaff; in fact, the play is often described as a tardy imitation of Shakespeare, Kivi’s last effort to make a great tragedy for the Finnish stage.

Yö ja päivä and Lea

In contrast to the ponderous Karkurit and Canzio (which was left unfinished by Kivi, in two versions), the short plays from the latter years of Kivi’s brief creative career were of great value to Bergbom in filling out his repertoire with material at once actable and edifying. Yö ja päivä (night and day) shows how, in a single summer night, Liisa, blind since childhood, miraculously recovers her sight and then reconciles her family with that of her beloved, Tapani. The little play is based on a popular Danish Romantic work of 1845, Kong Renés Datter, by Henrik Hertz. In Lea, the heroine succeeds in leading her father, Saakeus, and the man she loves, Aram, to a belief in Jesus as he passes through Jericho. (Of course, Jesus does not appear onstage in this expansion of the story of Zacchaeus, the rich publican, from Luke 19:2-9.) Even the Pharisee Joas, to whom Lea has become engaged, in compliance with her father’s wishes, is touched; he leaves Zacchaeus’s home without complaint, as the tax gatherer embraces his daughter and Aram.

Margareta

Finns liked to think of their new theater as a place of uplift and instruction, in contrast to what they argued was the worldly and frivolous theater of the country’s Swedish speakers, and such plays as Yö ja päivä and Lea were perfect instruments for this earnest concept, as was Kivi’s final play, Margareta. Runeberg’s narrative poems about Finnish bravery in the war of 1808-1809, Fänrik Ståls sägner (1848-1860; The Tales of Ensign Stål, 1925), had become enormously popular; Kivi’s friend Nervander had sketched a drama from the same conflict, about the capitulation of the Helsinki fortress, Suomenlinna, to the Russians. Bergbom had taken up Nervander’s plan and then passed it along to Kivi for completion. A young officer, Anian, has been present at the surrender of the fortress; his fiancée, Margareta, is filled with shame, only to grow ecstatic on learning, from Anian, that he plans to join the Swedish-Finnish army in the north, there to seek glorious death on the battlefield. The play’s early popularity no doubt came from the fact that it so strongly reminded audiences of Runeberg’s patriotic rhetoric; what actually belongs to Kivi in the play is its affection for Finland’s nature and not its salute to blind Finnish valor.

Later Works

Among the manuscripts Kivi left behind are Leo ja Liina (Leo and Liina) and the fragmentary Alma and Selman juonet (Selma’s dodges). In the completed play, Kivi looked bravely at his own dependence on Charlotta Lönnqvist: Leo is inspired by the presence of a new railroad line to think about migration to America but realizes that he is in fact deeply in love with the brusque Liina. The two fragments have nothing of the confession about them, but are meant to be, above all else, effective works for the stage; in a letter, Kivi called them the best things he had written. Alma, in which the spirit of a young woman is tested by reports of a series of misfortunes, was fashioned as a new starring role for Hedwig Charlotte Raa, the actress who had created Lea’s part. Selman juonet is a comedy in the Holbergian vein. A tyrannical father, Herman, wants his daughter, Selma, to marry the miser Fokas, but her brother Konrad, disguising himself as a magician from Lapland, persuades Fokas that he should reject Selma and take Thekla, who is in fact Konrad’s fiancée. The text breaks off here, but it is clear what will happen. Herman has observed the foolish superstitions of Fokas and will no longer place any barrier in the way of Selma and her young man, Kilian, while Konrad will marry Thekla.

Kivi attempted too much in the years leading up to his mental collapse. The disappointment even his admirers feel at the large dramatic production after Kullervo, Nummisuutarit, and Eva must be tempered by the thought that, almost single-handedly, he was attempting to create representative works for a new literature, in a language hitherto little used for literary purposes, and that he was at work on his novelistic masterpiece, Seven Brothers, while he struggled to provide a whole theatrical repertoire.

Bibliography

Ahokas, Jaakko. A History of Finnish Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Presents a broad overview of Finnish literature, touching on Kivi’s fiction and drama. Bibliography.

James, Anthony. Introducing Kivi: Poems and Translations. Swansea, England: Karhu, 1994. Although this work focuses on Kivi’s poems, it includes an introduction that looks at the life and works of the Finnish author.

Vähämäki, Börje. “Aleksis Kivi’s Kullervo: A Historical Drama of Ideas.” Scandinavian Studies 50 (1978): 269-291. This essay examines Kivi’s best-known play, Kullervo, from a historical perspective.