Alexis Kivi, or Stenvall, the greatest prose poet of Finland, was born at Palojoki (Nurmjaervi) in Finland, on the 10th October, 1834, in the poorest and humblest of circumstances.[1] His father was a village tailor, his first home a low-roofed hut in a remote part of the country, hemmed in by those virgin forests which Kivi has described so unforgettably in his _Seven Brothers_.

His life was one long struggle against poverty and countless difficulties. A great hunger for knowledge and education made him leave his native village quite early, but there were so many forced interruptions in his school days at Helsinki, the capital, that he only entered the University at the age of 23. There, however, he failed to complete his education, partly on account of want and ill-health, partly also, perhaps, because of his inborn restlessness, which induced him to take to the life of a literary freelance. Soon he turned his back on Helsinki, which he was only to revisit at intervals, and returned to the countryside for good and all. Here, in peace and isolation, he began to write in earnest. Yet, in spite of an apparently solitary life, he spent all these years in the best company conceivable, in long intercourse with the rarest spirits that ever communed with the minds of men. The Bible, Cervantes, Dante, Homer and Shakespeare--these were his friends, his teachers, his models! A secret kinship, a sure and unspoilt instinct, made this lonely ailing student turn away from the literature of his own times and guided him to these masters, the source of all poetry.

The influence of Shakespeare was especially powerful with him; as a contemporary critic remarks: ‘Shakespeare loosened the tongue of his Muse, though it would be too much to say that the English Titan taught him speech’. There were many plays and poems of Shakespeare which he learned by heart in Swedish translation (the Finnish version was not published until later) and he never tired of reading and re-reading them. Professor V. Tarkiainen, the well-known student of Kivi, observes that from Shakespeare Kivi learned the art of constructing a play, of grouping characters and situations, of contrasting light and shade. Moreover, Shakespeare and Cervantes together helped him to develop and express his great natural gifts of humour.

A kind-hearted, middle-aged motherly soul, by name Charlotta Lonngvist, cook and sempstress in the same parish, gave Alexis Kivi the shelter of her roof for many years, and such material help besides as her own scanty means allowed. And there it was, in the Swedish-speaking parish of Siuntio, that the greater number of Kivi’s masterpieces came into being, _Seven Brothers_ among them.

Nevertheless, the narrow circumstances of his life continued to have a depressing effect upon Kivi. When at leisure, he used to spend weeks together in the forest, snaring birds. Occasionally too, when want of money and companions and books became too oppressive, he escaped on short visits to the capital, or found solace for the weariness and restlessness of his soul in the glass.

No author living in Finland in those days could possibly hope to earn a competence as a writer; the reading public was small, and authors’ fees there were little or none. Still less was this possible in the case of Alexis Kivi, for he was a poet of such solitary and original genius that few of his contemporaries were able to understand the significance and range of his talents. He was like the bird that migrates too early and settles among drifting ice--his genius was not fated to light upon its hour, or awake response.

Outward circumstances combined with more intimate causes to hasten his fate. Ill-health and nervousness had dogged him through life; insanity at last declared itself. For a time the suffering poet was nursed in Helsinki, but soon he was pronounced incurable and sent back to his native village. There he was placed in the care of his brother, to whom the village allotted as maintenance a yearly allowance of rye. Kivi survived for one more year--passed, however, in almost complete apathy--and on New Year’s Eve 1872, his life, which had been rich only in the fairy gold of visions and dreams, was over. At his death he was only thirty-seven years of age. His last words were ‘I live!’

These words, murmured on his sad deathbed, were prophetic. For Kivi is still really alive, and more so perhaps than during his joyless wanderings upon this earth. He is a living force in the mind of to-day, in the literature and poetry of Finland.

Kivi’s writings embrace all the different branches of poetic art--lyric, epic, dramatic. In each of these different spheres he has experimented and attained to mastery; in epic and drama, he takes rank as a pioneer.

He first attempted a gloomy tragedy in prose, choosing a subject from the _Kalevala_, treating of Kullervo, one of the tragic heroes of the national epic; condemned to slavery, he broods like Hamlet, meditating vengeance upon his father’s brother. But this burning tragedy of revenge was to remain a great fragment in the hands of the author--an unfinished torso. In the choice of theme, however, and in certain soaring lines, one already discerns the master-hand.

His one or two ventures upon lofty tragic themes in the Shakespearean manner are scarcely likely to survive. But in his one-act play, _Leah_, the achievement is complete and fully realized. This lyrical play, with its biblical setting, has been described as a ‘sweet flower, where the voluptuousness of the East is blended with Finnish clarity.’

The action takes place during the life-time of Christ, in the house of Zacchæus, the publican. Though Christ is not seen in person on the stage, the radiance of His unseen presence seems to pervade the scene and glimmer through the ecstasy of Leah, daughter to Zacchæus.

It is from the first performance of _Leah_ in 1869 that the beginnings of the Finnish theatre are usually dated.

However, it was not until Kivi wrote that broad comedy of peasant life called _The Heath Cobblers_ that his powers for creating characters and situations became revealed in their full range and richness and versatility. The subject is the unsuccessful courtship of Esko, the heath cobbler’s son, who reaches the home of his would-be bride just as she is celebrating her marriage with another suitor. There is a world of varied and many-coloured types in this play; all of them are depicted with the inexhaustible joy of creative energy, and bathed in the golden light of genial humour.

Like some smaller piece cast in the same mould as _The Heath Cobblers_, and of the same material, yet in miniature, is Kivi’s one-act comedy, _The Betrothal_. Once again the subject is an unsuccessful courtship, but this time the hero is a village tailor. _The Betrothal_ appeared in an English version in the _Dublin Review_, translated by Professor R. Pape Cowl, and was staged by the Ashburton Players in 1922.

Professor Tarkiainen has made a happy comparison between Kivi’s poetry and the wonder-bird of Finnish folklore--that bird ‘whose one wing touches the water while the other sweeps the heavens’.

In his lyrical poems, so tender and delicate that they scarcely will suffer any fetters of form, Kivi sometimes attains to a wonderful unearthliness, as in the poem called _Dusk_, which begins:

‘What fainting light What shadows of night Surround my soul!’

Here already one feels the gathering menace of the oncoming clouds of insanity.

In his prose, there is the same frail and dreamlike lyricism, combined with a strong grasp of the realities--the soarings of the imagination are linked with rich faculties of pithy observation, which spring directly from the soil and often indeed bring us near to naked realism.

These two fundamental and apparently contradictory qualities are also found together in Kivi’s masterpiece, _Seven Brothers_, now for the first time given to the English public. _Seven Brothers_ was first published in 1870, only a short time before Kivi’s fateful illness. Nine years went to the writing of this work, and more care and pains were spent upon it than upon any other of his writings.

In this great epic novel, which has been compared with the greatest literary creations of all times and countries, and where the influence of Cervantes is unmistakable, Kivi has found the most original theme, the largest scope for his creative fantasy. The story tells of the fate of seven Finnish brothers who fly from civilization into the freedom of primeval forests, and return at last of their own free-will to human habitations and society.

There are passages where the story gleams with lyrical loveliness, as in Aapo’s tale of the Pale Maiden, or in that scene set in Eero’s home on a Sunday evening, when his young wife sings a lullaby to her child. Again, the description creates for us powerful plastic pictures, full of forest mystery, of the brothers’ hunting adventures, of their fight on the top of a boulder with a frenzied herd of bulls. At times it turns to the comic and burlesque, as in the spelling scene between the brothers and the parish clerk; and now it is rich in bubbling dialogue, and we listen to the living tones of each brother’s voice in turn, from obstinate, bristle-haired Juhani, and prating, drunken Simeoni, down to the youngest, sly and witty Eero.

In this spacious tale, unique among Kivi’s writings, and also in Finnish literature, the virgin forest-lands of Finland live and have their being, even as the wandering Kivi knew and loved them.

Kivi’s language, wonderful and original always, reaches full maturity in _Seven Brothers_. At a time when Finnish was still undeveloped as a literary language, he forges and creates an instrument entirely his own which he can turn, now to sublime and tragic themes, now to the comic and burlesque; he draws upon all sources and most of all upon the Bible, the _Kalevala_ and the peasant talk of his fellow parishioners, with its wealth of idioms and puns. The nearest parallel which English readers could find would probably be the work of John M. Synge, for he has drawn upon like sources, and the rhythm of his prose most nearly recalls the language of Kivi.

The fate that befell _Seven Brothers_ was the fate common to all masterpieces created in solitary grandeur, and independently of their time. So far from gaining early recognition, Kivi’s epic found very few readers able to divine its true significance. In various quarters indeed, criticism was violently hostile: the language was held to be coarse, the construction (here there was some justice for the comment) not sufficiently compact, and the component parts--epic, dramatic and lyric--wanting in harmony. The author’s unquestionable birthright of genius remained an unguessed secret for most of his contemporaries. It was only by slow degrees and with the passage of years that Kivi’s genius came to be recognized. To-day, fresh editions of his works are constantly appearing; Finland’s greatest artist, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, has illustrated _Seven Brothers_; towns vie with each other in erecting monuments to the author’s memory. Special students, known as Kivi-scholars, have risen into prominence and devote much time to the study of Kivi’s life and work, the most representative among them being the forementioned V. Tarkiainen, Professor of Finnish Literature at the University of Helsinki, and Dr. J. W. Lehtonen, lecturer at the same University.

_Seven Brothers_ has already been translated into many languages, notably French, German, Swedish, Estonian, and now also into English.

The words of the Bible concerning the stone which the builders rejected have indeed come true of Alexis Kivi; for Kivi (The Stone) has become the cornerstone of Finnish literature.

AINO KALLAS.

SEVEN BROTHERS