Södergran, Edith (1892–1923)

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Södergran, Edith (1892–1923)

Finnish poet, whose work went relatively unrecognized in her lifetime, now acknowledged as a germinal poet and a major liberating force for Scandinavian poetry. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on April 4, 1892; died at Raivola on Midsummer Day (June 24), 1923; daughter of Matts Södergran and Helena (Holmroos) Södergran; never married; no children.

Spent her life in Raivola, Finland, with her mother as companion; attended the girls' division of the German Hauptschule in St. Petersburg where she began to write poetry (1902–09); was a recurring patient at sanatoriums, treated for tuberculosis (1909–14); published four politically and stylistically controversial collections of poetry as well as a book of aphorisms; some of her poems translated into German by Nelly Sachs .

Selected works:

Dikter (Poems, 1916); Septemberlyran (The September Lyre, 1918); Rosenaltaret (The Rose Altar, 1919); Brokiga iakttagelser (Manifold Observations, 1919); Framtidens skugga (The Shadow of the Future, 1920).

Though Edith Södergran lived in Finland, close to the Russian border, her major works are in Swedish, which was the language spoken at her home. Her father's family had lived in the Swedish-speaking coastal region of western Finland since the beginning of the 18th century, and her mother was also a Swedish-speaking Finn, daughter of ironmaster Gabriel Holmroos. Matts Södergran and Helena Holmroos Södergran had met in St. Petersburg, Russia, where Matts was employed by Alfred Nobel, and their only child Edith was born there on April 4, 1892. Shortly afterwards, the family moved to Raivola, a village just inside the Finnish border, where Holmroos had purchased a house for them. It had a Russian quality to it, with its brightly painted balconies, verandas, and windows, and a large garden slanting towards a lake. Edith would climb the tall maples or place ladders against adjoining wooden buildings to ascend to the rooftops. From up there, she would observe the cats walking about in the courtyard or run after one in an attempt to stroke it. Cats were important to her throughout her life and, along with her mother, became her only steady companions.

Södergran was deeply attached to her mother with whom she shared a love of literature. To develop that interest and to provide a good liberal arts education, Helena enrolled Edith in a prestigious German school in St. Petersburg and moved with her daughter into the city for each term. Edith was a student there from the time she was ten until she turned sixteen, and she acquired a well-rounded education that stressed modern languages and literature. Trips to concerts, theaters, and museums were part of the curriculum as well; all lessons and conversations were in German, which remained Södergran's "best" language despite her choice of Swedish for her poetry.

Between January 1907 and the summer of 1909—when she was between 14 and 16 years old—Södergran wrote around 200 poems, 20 in Swedish, 5 in French, and 1 in Russian; all the rest were in German and heavily influenced by the German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine. They express a profound love of nature and a great yearning for a kindred soul with whom she might share this love. She had a severe schoolgirl crush on her French teacher, Henri Cottier, and felt intimately connected to two of her fellow students. A recurrent theme in her poetry is that of death with which the young poet was already familiar. Her father's health had been declining, and in May 1906 he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. A year later, he was declared incurable at the sanatorium of Nummela, and he returned to Raivola to spend his last summer there. Possibly Edith contracted tuberculosis from her father; certainly, her visit to him at the sanatorium had filled her with a dread of disease, "a fear without bounds, a dreadful horror of death, a fear of this illness, this slow conscious death," as she wrote in a letter to her doctor several years later. Accompanying that fear was a keenly felt confusion about her identity and direction in life. She expresses her sentiment in a poem from 1908:

I do not know to whom to bring my songs
I do not know in whose language to write
…
I curse loneliness
And look in the wide world
For a heart
And look into people's eyes.
And seek a human soul
That could understand me
Yet their eyes are so foreign to me
They look upon other things.

In that same year, she caught a severe cold, and on New Year's Day of 1909, she learned the devastating news that she was suffering from the early stages of tuberculosis.

Södergran was sent to the sanatorium she knew and dreaded, spending five extended periods at Nummela between 1909 and 1911. Her biographers have surmised that her neglected exterior and eccentric manners displayed there were a camouflage for her horror of illness. They describe her as "ugly, dirty, and oily"; she would answer questions rudely and take to the rooftops when it was time for her doctor's visit. As a countermeasure to such aloofness, she tried to initiate an affair with a junior staff member, and she improved her Swedish by extensive reading in Swedish and Finnish classics and in animated conversations with fellow Finland-Swedish patients. Her goal was to leave the sanatorium to enter a women's college where she could study literature and philosophy.

She is a very great poet … one of our Byzantines, brave and loving as your Emily Brontë. It is a pity that such a rare bird should be buried for the world in a grave over which the war has passed several times.
—Gunnar Ekelöf

Instead, she and her mother set off for the sanatorium at Davos in Switzerland, the setting for Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. The Södergrans stayed at a nearby hotel while Edith received treatment from a doctor whose special interest in the psychological effects of tuberculosis made him particularly suited for her case. Edith took a deep liking to Dr. Muralt whom she thought "powerful and ingenuous" and in whose care she appeared "calm, distinguished and reserved," a far cry from the eccentric girl at Nummela. She never forgot him, and when she died at Raivola a dozen years later, his photograph was still on her bedside table. Partially due to his calming influence, Södergran read extensively at Davos. She discovered English writers and Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass would be an influence on her later poetry. Anticipating a trip to Milan and Florence, she began learning Italian and reading Dante, whose Inferno she thought a representation of the sanatorium: "No one speaks, but everyone screams, tears are not tears and all sorrows are without strength." Yet from her window she could see mountain meadows, green forests, and white Alpine peaks: promises of a future life she could still hope would be hers.

The Södergran women returned to Finland in late May 1913 to spend the summer at Raivola. Their days there were punctuated by seven trips to Nummela for "insufflation" treatments: filling Edith's lungs with nitrogen gas. The winter spent again at Davos provided little change in her deteriorating physical condition, and the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914 prevented further trips. The war also ended Edith's secret relationship with a Finnish doctor 16 years her senior, who was drafted for a military hospital. One last stay at Nummela was terminated by Södergran's running away. She was determined to concentrate on her poetry.

To that end, she approached the publishing house of Holger Schildt, who agreed to print her poems provided she would demand no royalties. Södergran accepted, and Dikter (Poems) appeared at Christmas of 1916 to mixed reviews. Drawing on inspiration from Whitman, Rimbaud, Max Dauthendey, and Else Lasker-Schüler , and heavily influenced by Södergran's childhood reading of fairy tales, the poems were too audacious, too "morbid," too "formless," too incomprehensible for their time and place. Only one critic called the book a cause for "rejoicing," because it not only introduced a "new name" into Scandinavian poetry, but also pointed in a direction not seen before.

Södergran was crushed by the criticism of her work and wrote little the following year, 1917. Other factors of physical and political nature contributed to the slender output. In March, she convinced her mother to make a trip with her to St. Petersburg so they might see for themselves the changes wrought in the aftermath of the abdication of the Russian tsar Nicholas II. The Bolshevik Revolution terrified and delighted her. Inspired by her reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, she saw in the upheavals a new stage in the development of the world. Despite an attack of pulmonary bleeding brought on by the exertions of the journey, she was determined to be a part of events. So she participated vicariously through a focused reading of not only Nietzsche but the futuristic Russian poets, Aleksandr Blok, Andrey Bely, Konstantin Balmont, Igor Severyanin and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

This literary and political focus and concentration gave her the strength to go to Helsinki in the fall of 1917 to make the acquaintance of "literary personalities." They were puzzled and intrigued by her presence, describing her as "mysterious and as if marked by fate," pale and unhealthy in appearance, but "avid for conversation," someone to whom experiencing the "fantastic" and thinking the "impossible" were second nature. They felt unable to help her, however. Södergran was too "extraordinary, too highly charged with her solitary exaltation for her contact with [them] to be even a little fruitful." She, in turn, found her colleagues "starchy, reserved, impersonal."

She returned to Raivola to face the outbreak of civil war in Finland. Her village was located just inside a Red zone and therefore subject to frequent attacks by White saboteurs cutting the lines of supply. When the White army captured Raivola, war had penetrated the rural environs, and the Södergrans were caught. Native speakers of neither Russian nor Finnish, they could not be sure of safety or economic survival, as the fall of the Russian tsar had lost them their Russian and Ukrainian securities. Understandably, Edith Södergran's excitement at witnessing the creation of a new world was tempered with fear of its destruction. Septemberlyran (The September Lyre), which was accepted for publication in November 1918, expresses her ambivalence. The poems reflect her horror at the devastation of war but are suffused with hope that a mangod would emerge to herald the higher stage of development resulting from war's divinely induced upheavals. "The World is Bathing in Blood" exemplifies her sentiment.

The world is bathing in blood because God had to live.
In order that his glory may persist, all others must perish ….
God wants to create anew. He wants to reform the world to a clearer sign….
What it is he creates no one knows. But it moves like a dread over half-awake senses.

This troubling ambivalence led to severe misgivings about the contents of her poems and their reception. To soften the anticipated critical response, she wrote a letter to her publisher asking if critics of the "provincial press and the broad public" could be kept away from the book. Perhaps unwisely, as a second step she went public with her sentiments. She published a "preface" to the poems in a Helsinki newspaper before the critics had submitted their reviews. Her book, she wrote, was only for those few individuals "who stand nearest the frontier of the future." Only they would understand how she herself was sacrificing "every atom" of her strength for the "great cause." She exhorted individuals to "place themselves in the service of the future," hoping she would not be alone with "that greatness which [she had] to bring." Expectedly, the male establishment thought her a megalomaniac, a "Nietzsche-crazed" woman; someone, indeed, who had been "infected by the same intellectual disease which in the political field is called Bolshevism." Readers and critics alike showed little understanding of her efforts to assimilate the political crisis with that of her own disease-ridden body and articulate her resulting, and highly subjective, understanding in poetry. Her desire to bring her readers into contact with the cosmic forces with which she communicated was perceived as a sign of hysteria.

Yet some fellow writers jumped to the poet's defense, and a literary feud developed in the press. A young Helsinki poet and critic, Hagar Olsson , wrote admiringly of the poems, which she found "pure" and "glowing," but regretfully of the damage the poet had done her own cause by publishing "explanations." Olsson considered those an act of self-aggrandizement, even propaganda. A flurry of letters ensued. In a final exchange, Olsson called Södergran a poet who had "consecrated herself to the role of mere instrument and medium…. This human being bears the earnestness of death with her … and her soul, at least in blessed moments, is as empty and pure as a Stradivarius waiting for the master's touch."

Södergran had responded to Olsson's first public letter of defense with a private one explaining how her publisher had deleted some of the best poems from the collection, which had thereby lost its "weight." Her publication in Dagens Press had been an attempt to avert the attacks she knew would be launched. She concluded her letter with an appeal to Olsson for friendship: "Could we reach a hand to one another? … Could there be a godlike relationship between us, so that all barriers between us would fall? … Are you the sea of fire I will plunge into? … [Y]ou ought to be worthy of the highest form of friendship, which Nietzsche advised his followers against on grounds of prudence." Olsson's additional contributions to the feud astonished and delighted Edith Södergran, who thought she had finally found a companion, a "sister" in whom she could confide.

But she would be disappointed. Hagar Olsson's career as a publicist and socialist literary critic allowed considerably less time for friendship and sisterly exchange than Södergran craved. Yet Olsson realized she was her friend's link with the world and responded to Edith's frequent letters and requests for visits as she could. In February 1919, she spent some time at Raivola at Södergran's specific command. Olsson

had been issued an ultimatum: either she come, or Edith would break with her forever. Likely, Olsson's guilt at not having been able to fully honor her friend's demands accounts for the delay in her publishing Södergran's letters. It took her 25 years after the poet's death before Olsson could face the material and edit it. The letters, published in 1955 as Ediths brev (Edith's Letters), are painful reading as they reveal the rather one-sided nature of the relationship between the two women, but they are helpful to an understanding of the writer's emotional and intellectual development.

The "sister" segment of Södergran's third collection of poems, Rosenaltaret (The Rose Altar), alternately celebrates and grieves her find of a "sister." The imagery of "Spring Mystery" conveys the miraculous nature of the encounter. "My sister/ you come like a spring wind over our valleys … / The violets in the shadow breathe sweet fulfillment/ I will take you to the sweetest corner of the woods:/ there we shall confess to each other how we saw God." In contrast, the fear of loss and betrayal indigenous to a friendship of such intensity surfaces in "I Believe in My Sister," despite its title. "My sister …/ Has she betrayed me?/ Does she carry a dagger at her bosom—the light-footed one?" The collection, which appeared in the spring of 1919, received modest attention in the press despite one reviewer's opinion that it was among "the strongest poetry written in Swedish during recent times." Another called Södergran an "expressionist" who "measures the uttermost boundaries of woe and jubilation."

In the summer of 1919, Olsson made a second visit to Raivola. She was horrified at the conditions of poverty in the Södergran household where scant money was obtained from the sale of household effects and furniture. Nonetheless, Södergran was at work on another collection of poetry. In subsequent letters to Olsson, she describes herself during the fall of that year as suffused with an "infernal electricity" almost "impossible to endure." This highly charged emotional state was partly due to her struggle between two irreconcilable poles of longing and desire. She had departed from her reliance on Nietzsche, who represented her sensual and sexual yearnings, and embraced the nature mysticism of the Swiss anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, which drew her to Christ and God.

Edith Södergran had always felt contained in nature, and now she demanded that nature "answer her thought." As a spiritual guide, Steiner offered her "the experience of the divine nature of reality," as her biographer Gunnar Tideström puts it. Her reading of Steiner occupied considerable time during the remaining years of her life, as did her activities in pursuit of money. Her letters to Olsson tell of her plans to write reviews for Dagens Press, to do translations and even to photograph the soldiers in the village. A Norwegian writer came to her aid temporarily by suggesting that half the fee for a translation of one of her books be given to an "ill or aged writer." The thousand marks were awarded to Södergran.

Framtidens skugga (The Shadow of the Future), which would be Södergran's last collection of poems, appeared in November 1920. Again allegations of megalomania and madness greeted the publication. Readers mistook her highly charged images of grandeur for representations of her own importance and power; they failed to hear in the voice of the poet that of a human being who attempts to surrender her body and free herself from earthly concerns and material wants, even as she is racked with desire. "I am quite broken by forcing myself to Christianity," she wrote to Olsson. "I am hungry as a wolf for Dionysus…. May one dance with Christ, or is the dance the devil's sole property?"

An attack of Spanish influenza in the winter of 1920 left her further exhausted, and to that physical setback was added an intellectual defeat. A volume of German translations of Finnish-Swedish poetry which she had prepared and sent to the Rowohlt publishing firm in the fall of 1922 was rejected by the German publisher on the grounds that times were unfavorable for poetry. Hagar Olsson then dispatched to Raivola her friend and protégé Elmer Diktonius, a writer of the Helsinki avant-garde. He arranged for Södergran to write poems and articles for a new magazine, Ultra, intended to announce contemporary literature in the North. At his instigation, and supported by Olsson, Södergran wrote a translation of Igor Severyanin's poem "Overture" for the second issue of the magazine and new poems of her own for subsequent issues. The payment she received took her through the winter, but when Ultra was discontinued after five issues, she lost both an avenue for her literary creations and a much-needed source of income.

"Nothing shimmers, nothing glistens anymore," she wrote to Olsson shortly before Christmas of 1922. She worried that her mother and her friend had plans of sending her to the dreaded sanatorium again. But it did not come to that. Hagar Olsson was on the Riviera when she learned the news of Södergran's death in March 1923; the immediate cause was heart failure. Edith Södergran was buried in the yard of the Russian church.

Two years later, in 1925, Elmer Diktonius edited a collection of Södergran's poems titled Landet som icke är (The Land Which Is Not). It included the Ultra poems as well as some previously published and unpublished work. In the 1930s, a monument was erected on her grave by the Finland-Swedish Authors' Union. At the ceremony, Diktonius read his poem in Södergran's memory and the aging Helena Södergran spoke, as he reported, "in words she cast out in bursts [like] scenes in some classic tragedy." The site became the destination of pilgrimages for Finland-Swedish and Swedish poets until the Winter War of 1939–40 destroyed the church, the grave, and the Södergran home.

In 1960, when Edith Södergran had been generally acknowledged as a major liberating force for Scandinavian poetry and her reputation was growing throughout and beyond all of Scandinavia, the same Authors' Union received permission from Soviet authorities to erect a monument in a new Culture Park. The theme of the ceremony was Finnish-Soviet friendship, a political tribute. Thirteen years later, on the 50th anniversary of Södergran's death, a second, more literary ceremony was held at the same site. On that occasion, her poems were read in four tongues: Swedish, Finnish, Russian, and French. The new monument is located several hundred yards from the actual grave, a fitting reminder that in death as in life, Edith Södergran remains a poet off center.