Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

Runar Schildt, short story writer and playwright, has the status of a minor classic in Swedish-language literature. Among Finnish-speaking readers, however, let alone those abroad, he is less widely known. George C. Schoolfield re-evaluates the short career of an author whose life ended tragically in suicide

Now and again, Runar Schildt (1888–1925) is described as ‘a Finland­-Swedish classic,’ and the description is accurate: he is one of those rather few figures from the minority’s literary past whose works can be read with genuine pleasure today, and there are plenty of testimonies to the living quality of his production.

The late author Anders Cleve once remarked that Schildt had been his most essential literary experience (although Cleve never showed, save in his first and best book, Gatstenar [‘Paving stones’ 1959], that he had learned Schildt’s admirable concision); and the cultural essayist Johannes Salminen, the novelist and dramatist Johan Bargum, the political observer Leif Salmén have all paid tribute to Schildt’s suggestive style, social acuity, and emotional penetration. More…

Elmer Diktonius at his home in Kauniainen (Grankulla). Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Elmer Diktonius, one of the leading Finland-Swedish modernists of the 1920s, was a revolutionary poet, prose-writer and critic who also tried his hand at composing. Professor George Schoolfield, whose article on Diktonius appears below, appends his own translations of several of the lyrics: a filler selection is going to be published in the United States, Recently Professor Schoolfield has been working on a biography of Diktonius which he hopes to publish soon.

The literary fate of the Finland-Swedish modernist Elmer Diktonius (1896-1961) has not been an altogether happy one. Saluted early and late in his career as Finland’s Strindberg and as a possible rival to Mayakovsky in the contest for the greatest lyricist of the revolution, Diktonius would seem, surely, to deserve a place on the world’s literary stage. Yet the attention he has received outside the north has been mostly unwitting: the writers of program notes quote his description of the Silbelius Fourth, ‘the bark-bread symphony’ without knowing its source, the collected concert-reviews of Opus 12: Musik (1933). Surveys that might have introduced him to a larger public are silent. The chubby Pelican Guide to the European Literature of Modernism ignores him; the Penguin Book of Socialist Verse omits him from its 134 specimens of the lyric left; and Ulrich Weisstein’s volume of Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon does not have him in its chapter on ‘Expressionism in Scandinavia’, although he would qualify – as the Swedish scholar Bill Romefors has proved – as the major northern heir of German expressionism. More…