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Lauri (Arvi) Viita (1916-1965) |
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Poet and novelist, one of the most important figuress of the Finnish post-World War II literature. Lauri Viita published only four collections of poems. As a writer he was self-learned but he had a first-class, original talent for language. Viita mastered many verse forms and examined new uses of rhymes. His public readings of his own poems were appreciated by large audiences, often by people who otherwise had little or no interest in literature. Viita's second wife the writer Aila Meriluoto. Tikka päätään puuhun nakkaa, Lauri Viita was born in Pohjois-Pirkkala (from 1938 Nokia),
the son
of a carpenter. His mother, Alfhild Josefina (Nikander) Viita, was a
social person, talkative and optimistic, and later Viita depicted her
in many loving and sentimental poems. Emil Viita, his father, was
uncommunicative – he learned to read and write relatively late in life.
In 1909-1910 he was a secretary of a local trade union division. The
family moved to Pispala in 1895, but as a result of conflicts with
local inhabitants, they resided for some years in the neighbouring city
of Tampere, before permanently settling in Pispala. From the age of
five until he entered the army,
Viita lived in the house number 97 at the top of the ridge; nowadays
it's a writer's museum. Pispala was the center – spiritually and geographically – of
Viita work. The lively and proudly self-abrorbed working-class
community had a bad reputation as a place of "bootleggers and loose
women." Moreover, a number of people living there supported Communists.
After the battle of Tampere during the
Finnish Civil War (1917-18), Pispala was the last stronghold of the Red
Guard. At
school Viita was an average student. He did not finish high school –
his parents thought that the school fees at the Classical Lyceum of
Tampere were too high. In general,
education
was not considered the first priority in the community; to be a good
worker was something more valuable. Before devoting himself entirely to literature, Viita earned his living as a carpenter in construction sites. His spare time Viita spent reading, especially he was interested in natural sciences. Important authors for his early development were Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Knut Hamsun. Viita had penned some poems in his youth, but it was not until he went through a spiritual crisis during the war years, he began to play with idea of abandoning the security of salaried employment. Viita fought at the front in the Winter War (1939-40) and was wounded in his hand – later he said that the wound was self-inflicted. In December 1939, while on a leave, he married Kerttu Solin. Their correspondence from this period record Viita's determination to find his own literary voice. To inform his wife about the whereabouts of his unit, Viita used a code language. During the Continuation War (1941-44) Viita served a
signaler,
building telephone lines off the front. His last pennies he spent on
books by such authors as James Joyce, Maupassant, James Oliver Curwood,
Egon Friedell, Stefan Zweig, Uuno Kailas and Kaarlo Sarkia. In the
evenings he wrote most of his first collection of poems, Betonimylläri
(1947, Concrete Mixer). The title poem plunges into a dream
of a construction worker on a lunch break. "Some voice is
explaining: / – This is that sick head / in which the lunacy is bread.
/ Is it a leak in the mould, a blast / in the alloy, or a fault in the
cast?" ('Concrete Mixer', translated by Herbert Lomas,
in A Way To Measure Time,
edited by Bo Carpelan, Veijo Meri and Matti Suurpää, 1992, p, 143)
The most popular poem of the collection is 'Alfhild', about
maternal love: "Mothers alone, endowed / with hope, see God. / They
have given strength and given will / to climb in dream from under the
cloud, / and look from a higher hill." (translated by Herbert Lomas, in '"Do Not Think Whether This Is Poetry or Prose": Metre and Poetics in the Works of
Lauri Viita' by Erika Laamanen, in Versification:
Metrics in Practice,
edited by Satu Frog, Satu Grünthal, Kati Kallio & Jarkko Niemi, 2021, p. 176) Moreeni (Earth's Hardy Chattels), novel set
in Pispala, was published three years
later, but it had been under work from the early 1940s. When Väinö
Linna depicted agricultural proletariat in his trilogy Täällä
Pohjantähden alla (1959-1962, Here Beneath the North Star),
Viita focused on the poor people in the industrial city of Tampere. Moreeni
was widely reviewed – Alex Matson said
that the
book was the most perfect example of the art of the novel since Aleksis Kivi. Another critic noted that Viita's
protagonists lacked
"class-consciousness." Viita himself claimed that never before in
Finland there
has been written a more leftist book. Partly based on Viita's own life, the novel tells about the family Nieminen from the Civil War to the Depression of the 1930s. The dramatic historical events of the time are touched upon only fleetingly: Viita was more interested in the personal lives of his characters than the big picture. Much of the story revolves aroud Isaac Nieminen, a general handyman and a carpenter, who builds for his family a house and becomes self-employed. At the end, Isaac falls down with a thrombosis, gets a kick by a police, is moved from the road to a police station, constanly "groaning like a broken-winded cuddy," and thrown in a cell. Nobody has any opinion on anything, nothing is anybody's business, they just stroll on from one dung heap to the next like Ellu's hens. If they were either hot or cold, but no, they're lukewarm and indifferent, so they've no idea that all the evil is done with just that very normal ordinary Joe. (Earth's Hardy Chattels by Lauri Viita, translated by Virginia Mattila, Lauri Viita Society, 2020, p. 319) Among Viita's other major works is the poem Kukunor
(1949),
a playful adult fairy tale about two young goblins, Kukunor and
Kalahari (or Kuku and Kala). They read books and debate on geography. Kukunor (name taken from a salt lake in Central Asia), an
idealist, believes in her dreams. Kalahari's name comes from a in Southern Africa. The long poem was partly inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck's philosophical play The Blue Bird
(1908), that Viita had read in 1948, but Kukonor is more related to the genre of nonsense literature. The collection included one of the most
performed poems of the author, about a woodpecker, starting with the
words "Tikka päätään puuhun nakkaa / – muttei loukkaa / koskei
lakkaa . . ." Kukunor received mixed reviews, it was considered
difficult and sold only 1 384 copies by the end of 1950. The verse
collection Käppyräinen
(1954, Withered) contained several poems written in prose metre or in
archaic
Kalevala metre, which dominated his last lyrical works. Some of the
poems were aimed at Viita's critics, including the 'Satakieli,' about a
boy
who kills a nightingale to prove that he had recognized the bird right.
Humor was present as in Betonimylläri, although now it was not
so bitingly satirical. In many of his poems Viita expressed his troubled feelings about faith. "Oh Jesus, must I know everything?" the poet asks in 'Uskonko' ('Do I believe,' in Käppyräinen, 1954). His mother Alfhild was very religious, but Viita himself had left the Lutheran Church in protest. However, in the last period of his life he joined the church again, still viewing it suspiciously as an institution. Viita was married to the writer and translator Aila Meriluoto (1924-2019) from 1948 to 1956. Meriluoto published in 1946 her first collection of poems, Lasimaalaus (The Glass Painting), which gained a huge success, selling 25 000 copies in a short time. Meriluoto was inspired in particular by the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, and quickly emerged as one of the leading voices of the post-war generation. Her experimentation with metre also encouraged other young poets. At the time she met Viita, he was still married. They both fell passionately in love, but, as writers, they differed greatly: her work was marked by bourgeois optimism while Viita viewed the world in terms of class struggle. Besides poems, Meriluoto's oeuvre consists of novels, short stories, fairy tales, children's books. Her many translations include Harry Martinson's Aniara (1963), Nelly Sachs' Israelin kärsimys (1966), and Rilke's Duinon elegiat (1974). - Selected works: Sairas tyttö tanssii (1952), Pommorommo (1956), Pahat unet (1958), Portaat (1961), Asumattomiin (1963), Ateljee Katariina (1965), Tuoddaris (1965), Meidän linna (1968), Silmämitta (1969), Peter-Peter (1971), Elämästä (1972), Lauri Viita: legenda jo eläessään (1974), Kootut runot (1976), Kotimaa kuin mies (1977), Varokaa putoilevia enkeitä (1977), Sisar vesi, veli tuli: jännitysromaani (1979), Talvikaupunki (1980), Vihreä tukka (1982), Lasimaalauksen läpi: päiväkirja vuosilta 1944-47 (1986), Ruusujen sota (1988), Vaarallista kokea: päiväkirja vuosilta 1953-1975 (1996), Mekko meni taululle (2001), Kimeä metsä (2002), Miehen muotoinen aukko (2005), Tältä kohtaa: päiväkirja vuosilta 1975-2004 (2010), Tämä täyteys, tämä paino (2011). - For further reading: Lasinkirkas, hullunrohkea: Aila Meriluodon elämästä ja runoudesta by Panu Rajala (2010); 'Lauri Viita & Aila Meriluto', in Suurin on rakkaus by Kaija Valkonen, Elina Koivunen (1997) In 1948 Viita left his home town and moved with Meriluoto
to
Orimattila and then to Pieksämäki, where he wrote in a small sauna room
a part of Moreeni. During
this period he read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and
Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.
The small town depressed him. After Moreeni came out he moved
to Ruovesi, but also spent much time in
restaurants in Tampere. He had several writing plans, the most
fantastic of which was a play entitled Lindströmin pihvi (Lindström's
steak) about a missionary, named Lindström, who is captured by
cannibals in Africa. Like Helvi Juvonen (1919-1959), Viita
debuted
as a poet relatively late,
at the age of 31 (Meriluoto was 22). However, he was very conscious of
his worth as a writer and uniqueness. This manifested already in his
first collection, in which he takes up the issue of genius: it is not
of heavenly origin, but sister of tears and anguish, "vain sisar
kyyneleitten mustan ahdistuksen valamain" (in 'Nerous'). Mental illness, that shadowed Viita's last creative years were, comes to the fore in Meriluoto's biography Lauri Viita: A Legend in His Lifetime (1974). When she started to fear Viita, she arranged their divorce without delay, in two weeks. Most of the poems in his last collection, Suutarikin, suuri viisas (1961, And the Cobbler, Great Wise Man), were written in the summer of 1960. 19 of the 51 poems in total were composed in Kalevala metre, but Viita did not follow it slavishly. In reviews the work was compared to Eino Leino's Hekavirsiä (1903-1916, Whit songs). Viita was hailed as the last great representative of traditional poetry. In 1962 Viita married Anneli Kuurinmaa; they had one son. The new marriage did not stop his restless traveling to Helsinki or Tampere, and once police returned him from Sweden back to Finland. Viita was treated in Kellokoski Hospital in Tuusula. His final work was the first volume of the trilogy Entäs sitten, Leevi (And Then, Leevi), published for the Christmas market of 1965. Meriluoto read its early version and considered it "incomprehensible." Only two chapters have survived from the second volume. "It's better to die in the middle of my work than it dies before I do," says the aspiring writer Leevi, the protagonist of the novel. Viita's stature encouraged aspiring poets and novelists in Tampere to form a literary club, the so-called "Mäkelän piiri" (Mäkelä circle). It was organized by Mikko Mäkelä, the director of the Municipal Library. The group consisted mostly of writers who had a working class background, except Alex Matson (1888-1972), a critic and essayist, who guided the meetings. Viita, a kind of Zarathustra figure, could keep everybody awake with his loud voice and energetical personality, sometimes until three-four o'clock in the morning. His example as a novelist inspired Väinö Linna, but Viita himself did not understand why Linna's The Unknown Soldier (1954) gained a huge popularity. "When I have died, when I have died / Summer will continue. / Summer". (from 'Joy,' quited in A History of Finlands Literature, edited by George C. Schoolfield, 1998, p. 183) Lauri
Viita died of injuries after a car accident in Mäntsälä. He was a
passenger in a taxi, which was hit by a lorry driven by a drunk driver.
The author
himself though that he was not badly hurt, and said: "No
nyt on pahin ohi!" (Now the worst is
over) Viita was taken to a hospital in Helsinki, where
he perished on
December
22, 1965. He was 49. What becomes of Viita's innovative use of language, his successor Juhani Peltonen published his first colllection of poems in 1964.
Selected works:
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