Esko Rahikainen
University of Helsinki
Translated by Nicholas Mayow
Aleksis Kivi was born into a tailor's family in the province of Uusimaa in Finland, at a village named Palojoki which is in the parish of Nurmijärvi, on October 10th, 1834.
His parents were Eerik Stenvall and Anna-Kristiina Hamberg and they already had three sons. After Aleksis, they had a daughter named Agnes, who died when she was thirteen.
Kivi's great-grandfather had had a soldier's croft in Palojoki since 1766 but, from time to time, the family had also lived in Helsinki. According to Yrjö Blomstedt, his earliest-known ancestors came from Janakkala. His maternal grandfather, Antti Hamberg, was a blacksmith at a place called Nahkela in Tuusula, his paternal grandfather, Antti Juhana Stenvall was a seaman who had sailed as far as the Mediterranean. Uncle Kalle Kustaa was in the Finnish Guards and helped to put down the Polish uprising. The writer's own father, Eerik Stenvall, had lived in Helsinki as a child and gone to school there.
Aleksis' parents could speak Swedish, a skill which the boy acquired himself by moving to Helsinki to go to school; it was a necessity for matriculation and for further study for the priesthood. In fact, Kivi seems to have spoken Swedish distinctly more than Finnish during his lifetime. Between the years 1821 and 1868, only seven boys from Nurmijärvi passed the matriculation examination to become university students. Of these, Aleksis Stenvall was the only commoner, the others were all children of persons of rank. In the year he matriculated, 1857, Kivi made a critical and historic decision from his own point of view and from the point of view of literature, to become a writer in the Finnish language instead of a priest.
Aleksis Kivi, which he used for the first time as a nom de plume in conjunction with the manuscript of Kullervo, in 1860, was unable to travel abroad for financial reasons, yet he did visit Turku. However, his reading and along with it his horizons, extended far beyond school and university textbooks, to the literature of the whole world.
Only a fraction is known to researchers, but Kivi read everything he could lay his hands on, from Held and Corvin's History of the World to works dealing with chemical analysis, newspapers, the poems of Stagnelius and the plays of Shakespeare, which are known to have been an influence on him.
Kivi's most important literary works could be considered as beginning in the mid 1850s, with the play Nummisuutarit (The Wedding Dance) and ending with the play Margareta, which was published in 1871. The play Nummisuutarit, which came into being as the result of the development of the Finnish language, was awarded the State prize for literature in 1865 and is still today the most frequently performed play ever written in Finnish.
Kivi's most important supporter was Fredrik Cygnaeus, professor of aesthetics and modern literature, who examined Kivi for the matriculation examination and who, from the time of Kivi's very first prize, right up to Kullervo, Nummisuutarit and Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers), which has attained the status of a national novel, repeatedly placed his whole expertise and authority behind Kivi's talent and art. Of his opponents, those narrow-minded captives of literary tradition, the most famous was August Ahlqvist, professor of Finnish language and literature, who achieved an undying reputation by belittling Kivi's works.
Karl Bergbom, the theatre director who made Kivi's plays familiar to the general public, starting with a performance of Lea in 1869, became Kivi's friend and researcher as early as 1864. In his books, the writer named his school and university friend Robert Svanström, who later became a forestry official, as his best friend.
It seems probable that in the development of many of his important poems, and of Kihlaus, Nummmisuutarit, Lea and Seitsemän Veljestä it was in fact an advantage that Kivi had to write them in a completely Swedish-language environment, at Fanjunkars in Siuntio, where he was forced into isolation from his friends through lack of funds. He took this very heavily at times and in his letters he expressed his longing for the company of his friends and his homesickness for the parish of Nurmijärvi.
Besides Cygnaeus, Charlotta Lönnqvist the mistress of Fanjunkars could, without exaggeration, be described as the writer's most important supporter.
From a large group of admirers it is worth mentioning Kivi's beloved Albina Palmqvist, daughter of a Helsinki clothing manufacturer and Aurora Hemmilä, a Mäntsälä inn-keeper's daughter. Marriage was impossible, however, since in the society of the civil servant class, Kivi lacked the most essential things of all, an official position and the income that went with it. In his works, Kivi also wrote about his yearning for a family of his own.
Socially, Aleksis Kivi fell between two stools in a rather ill-fated way; he was no longer a vulgar peasant but neither did he belong to the gentry.
The fount of strength in Kivi's career as a writer was his incredible imagination, his knowledge of people and his literary talent and, at the same time, the love and sympathy towards ordinary people that appears over and over again in his works - incomparable humour as well as a sense of tragedy and comedy.
Aleksis Kivi was a product of three localities - Nurmijärvi, Helsinki and Siuntio - and all of them had their own essential importance to his growth as a person and as a writer. Kivi's mother's home parish of Tuusula provided a final resting place for the author, who suffered in the last years of his life from mental illness. At the time of his death on the night before the last day of 1872, Aleksis Kivi was only 38 years old, but as a writer he is ageless. Seitsemän veljestä and Nummisuutarit are classics of Finnish culture on a par with the Kalevala and the Kanteletar.
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 The Birthplace of Aleksis Kivi.
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