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Hagar Olsson (1893-1978) |
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Finland-Swedish writer, journalist, critic, friend of the poet Edith Södergran (1892-1923). Hagar Olsson wrote in both languages. She was among the first playwrights, who introduced to the Finnish public the Expressionistic drama. Olsson's theatre works were also visually pioneering. The set design for S.O.S. (1928) was planned by the famous architect Alvar Aalto. In the 1920s and 1930s, Olsson was one of the few major writers in Finland, who was more interested in such themes than pacifism, Pan-Europaneanism, and collectivism, than national, social, or historical issues. "Man kan mäta människors värde på mycket olika sätt. Man nämner deras intelligens, deras karaktär, deras godhet, deras duglighet. Om mig kunde man till exempel säga att jag är duglig. Det skulle då betyda att mina personliga egenskaper representerar en social tillgång. Både som socialistisk partimedlem och som ledare för de socialistiska ungdomsföreningarnas bildningsförbund och klubbverksamhet har jag uträttat ett och annat. Men å andra sidan är jag övertygad om att allt detta blivit gjort, och blivit gjort lika bra, om jag inte funnits." (Det blåser upp till storm by Hagar Olsson, Stockholm: Bokförlaget Natur och Kultur, 1930, p. 7) Hagar Olsson was born in Gustafs (Kustavi), the daughter of Anna Erika Holmberg and Karl Sixtus Olsson, a
Protestant minister. She spent her early childhood in Åland and Åbo,
but in 1906 the family moved to Räisälä on the Karelian Isthmus, the eastern Finland. Her
father, who read widely was bilingual. He was easily angered, prone to unreasonable outbursts. (Den unga Hagar Olsson by Olof Enckell, Helsingfors: Svenska Litteratursällskapet, 1949, p. 20) At home Olsson spoke Finnish with him
and Swedish with her mother. The Finnish-speaking parish of Räisälä was two miles north of Raivola where
Edith Södergran lived. After
finishing her schooling in Viborg, Olsson studied in Helsinki at the
Swedish School of Economics from 1913 to 1914, and at the University of
Helsinki. Olsson contributed literature critics to the newspaper Dagens Press, later transformed into Svenska Pressen. She was a staff member of the culture magazine Ultra with Elmer Diktonius, Lauri Haarla and Raoul af Hällström.
This short-lived but highly influential bilingual magazine was tied to the small publishing house Daimon,
founded by the writer and the antiquarian book dealer L. A.
Salava. Diktonius and Salava persuaded Olsson to become the Swedish
editor. She worked for free; the office was an ordinary two-room
flat in Helsinki. It has been speculated that Ultra received money from Moscow through O.W. Kuusinen. A cosmopolitian, Olsson was interested in new ideas, and
she
introduced contemporary literature to Finland. Beginning from the
article 'Det expressionistiska seendet (1920, The Expressionist
Vision), she wrote about German Expressionist movement.
Surprisingly, Olsson had very little to say in Expressionism in film:
she did not regard film as art. Moreover, she hosted a literay
salon at her home, a small one-room apartment, on Lapinlahdenkatu, in
Helsinki. Olavi Paavolainen, who visited her several time, dedicated his first book to Olsson. She called him an "impresario of modernism". In 1925 Olsson published a collection of essays under the title Ny generation (1925, New Generation). The cover of the book was drawn by the sculptor Wäinö Aaltonen, with whom she lived at that time. Aaltonen designed the scenography for her play Hjärtats pantomim (1928) at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki. Like the members of the literary movement Tulenkantajat, she reacted against the cynicism of the day, and was enthusiastic about the new youth in Russia, Germany, and Italy. A humiliating blow to her reputation as a critic was when she fell victim to a practical joke by Bertel Gripenberg, who published under the pseudonym Åke Eriksson a collection of poems parodying the modernist, Den hemliga glöden (1925) – after Olsson had eagerly welcomed the work, Gripenberg revealed the hoax. Olsson's first novel, Lars Thoman och döden, came out in 1916
– in the same year as Edith Södergran's collection of poems
Dikter. These works marked the beginning of the
Finland-Swedish modernism. Olsson's novel was about a young man,
who is haunted by fear of death and gains new strength from a forest
god named Samr. The theme of death reappeared in the
subsequent novels as well elements from fairy tales and mysticism. Kvinnan och nåden (1919),
written under the influence of Pär Lagerkvist, embraced the belief that
life continues after death. Though Olsson's friendship with Södergran
lasted only four years – Södergran died at the age of
31 – it had a deep influence on her work. "Have you forgotten me?"
wrote Södergran when she waited for her letters; she was the more active part in their correspondence. Olsson met her the
last time in July 1922, when she traveled to Raivola with Raoul af
Hällström. Her interpretation of Södergran's work (that her poetry was
closely connected with the nature of the Karelian Isthmus) was
dominant until the publication of Gunnar Tideström's biography of
Edith Södergran (1949). Olsson's major novels include Mr Jeremias söker en illusion (1927), in which the protagonist dies in a traffic accident and finds the real adventure and a new world in death. Chitambo
(1933), which is considered her most important work of prose fiction,
reflected the conflict between individualism and collectivism. Set in
Helsinki before and after the Civil
War (1917-18), thebook took its title from the village in Africa
where the famous explorer David Livingstone died. "The inattentive browser who picked up Hagar Olsson's Chitambo
when it appeared in 1933 might have thought, looking at the title on
the jacket, that he was about the hear still more modernistic cries
from the peak; if he were not much interested in the history of
exploration, he could readily confuse the two wildly similar names,
Chimborazzo and Chitambo." (Hagar Olsson's "Chitambo": Anniversary Thoughts on Names and Structure' by George C. Schoolfield, Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, Summer 1973) Alexander von Humboldt tried to reach in 1802 the summit of Chimborazo in Ecuador. "In some unfathomable way, Mr Dreary connected my arrival with
his own dreams of greatness, and he wasted little time in implanting
them in my soul. Even as I lay in my cradle in my earliest days, the
mysterious aura of destiny hovered about my head. A delightedly
grinning face, mobile and surprising, was permanently bent over me;
gestures, facial contortions and astonishing expressions found their
way into my dreams and drew my waking soul into the magic spell of
singular expectations before it even had time to detach itself fully
from the darkness from which it had emerged. (Chitambo, translated by Sarah Death, London: Norvik Press, 2020, pp. 21-22) Vega Maria, the
protagonist of the novel, is named after A. E. Nordenskiöld's
famous ship. Her father, Mr. Dreary (Herr Dyster), is a visionary, who is not able to realize
his ideas. Following a personal crisis, Vega Maria decides to become a great
individual like David Livingstone, but in her own country. Olsson's play's were heavily experimental and showed her familiarity with the work of Pirandello and the German expressionist Georg Kaiser's Gas-trilogy (1917-1920). S.O.S. (1928) dealt with the guilt of a poison gas manufacturer, and his transformation into a pacifist through the love of a self-sacrifying woman. At the end he leads an underground resistance group and carries a red flag. Erkki Vala praised the play in his review in Tulenkantajat: "You did what no one else has dared to do. You have heard the voice of the times . . . " Noteworthy, in G.B. Shaw's Major Barbara (1905), which Olsson's most likely knew, the arms manufacturer Andrew Undershaft is a model employer and the conclusion is that you "cannot have power for good without having power for evil too." In the play Det blåa undret (1932) a sister and brother represent, respectively, communism and fascism, but at the end they learn to understand each other. Det blåser up till storm (1930) was a love story of a working class girl and a middle-class young boy, who propagate new ideas, but eventually the parents of the boy destroy their life. The novel received much attention in Sweden, where Olsson traveled in 1931 and became there in contact with writers around the magazine Tidevarvet and feminist activist at the Kvinnliga Medborgarskolan (The School for Women Citizens) in Fogelstad. With Ada Nilsson, the chief editor of Tidevarvet, and the rector Honorine Hermelin she began a decades-long correspondence. She wrote to Hermelin of the loss of her life's companion Toya Dahlgren, who died of tuberlulosis like Södergran. Olsson kept large number of the letters she received. The letters are stored in Åbo Akademi. The short story Kinesisk ulflykt (1949) was dedicated to Olsson's friend Ella Frelander. The dream fantasy, an imitation of a Chinese legend, was built around scenes from the author's life. Träsnidaren och döden (1940, The Woodcarver and Death), a romantic novel, tells the story of a woodcarver, Abel Myyriäinen, who is drawn to mysterious Karelia, the source of his art. He meets a young sick girl Sanni and her father on their way to a monastery. She wants to see Saint Mary before she dies. After her death under a miracle-working icon, Abel follows Sanni's father to her home village and finds again his true calling as an artist. Olsson edited a collection of Edith Södergran's letters. This work,
which
appeared in 1955, emphasized her role as Södergran's closest friend and
confidante. Olsson also translated into Swedish works from such Finnish
authors as L. Onerva, Johannes Linnankoski, Juhani Aho, Maila Talvio and F. E. Sillanpää. In 1969 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Helsinki. Olsson's memoirs, Möte med kära gestalter (1963) returned partly to the events of Kinesisk utflykt.
In the 1960s she published three collections of short stories, in which
she dealt with religious themes. The title story of Hemkomst
(1961) examined the daughter-father relationship, which was a recurrent
subject in her work. Olsson died in Helsinki on February 21, 1978. She
never married. From 1917 to 1920 she was engaged to the poet R.R.
Eklund (1895-1946). Olsson's forbidden play Lumisota (Snowball war), which
she wrote under the shadow of the Winter War
(1939-40) and which criticized nationalism and the martial spirit, was
not professionally performed until 1982. During the postwar years, she
was one of the most important cultural critics, who urged his
colleagues to remember the lessons of the past. In 1965, Olsson
received the prestigious Eino Leino award for her work as a critic. For further reading: 'Den unga Hagar Olsson' by Olof Enckell, in Skrifter utgivna av Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland (1949); A History of Finnish Literature by Jaakko Ahokas (1973); 'Hagar Olsson's "Chitambo": Anniversary Thoughts on Names and Structure' by George C. Schoolfield, Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Summer 1973); Hagar Olsson och den nya teatern by Lena Fridell (1976); A History of Scandinavian Literature, 1870-1980 by Sven H. Rossel (1982); Karakteristik och värdering by Roger Holmström (1988); 'Avantgardet i öster' by Clas Zilliacus in Den Svenska Litteraturen, Vol. 5 (1989); Hagar Olsson och den öppna horisonten: Liv och diktning by Roger Holmström (1993); 'Olsson' by George C. Schoolfield, in A History of Finland's Literature, ed. by George C. Schoolfield (1998); 'Med ansvar för hela mäskligheten,' in Nordisk kvinnoliteraturhistoria 3: Vida Världen 1900-1960, ed. Elisabeth Møller-Jensen (1998); 'Hagar Olsson's "Chitambo" and the Ambiguities of Female Modernism' by Ellen Rees, Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer 1999); The Poet Who Created Herself: The Complete Letters of Edith Södergran to Hagar Olsson with Hagar Olsson's Commentary and the Complete Letters of Edith Södergran to Elmer Diktonius, edited by Silvester Mazzarella (2001); Häilyvyyden liittolaiset: kerronnan ja seksuaalisuuden ambivalenssit by Pauliina Haasjoki (2012); The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume III: Europe 1880 - 1940, edited by Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop (2013); 'Picture - Word - Scream. Hagar Olsson and the Art of Tomorrow' by Gunilla Hermansson, in Joutsen / Svanen 2016; Dekadens och queer i Hagar Olssons tidiga prosa by Eva Kuhlefelt (2018) - "There can be no doubt that a new cultural idea, which aims at unity and togetherness in human affairs, is beginning to emerge in the world." (Olsson in 1948) Selected works:
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