Arvid Järnefelt

Biography

In the spring of 1917, crowds of many thousands gathered at the Helsinki churches where Arvid Järnefelt was speaking. The priests had forbidden him to address the congregations from the pulpit, and he spoke anyway: about equality, about pacifism, about his own understanding of faith. There were three addresses in May. Later they were published as a book, “Church Sermons”.

A lawyer by training and a writer by vocation, he had begun quite differently.

Järnefelt was born on 16 November 1861 in Pulkovo, near St Petersburg, the son of General Alexander Järnefelt and Elisabeth, née Clodt von Jürgensburg, a niece of the sculptor Peter Clodt. Among his brothers and sisters were the painter Eero Järnefelt, the composer and conductor Armas Järnefelt, and Aino, the wife of Jean Sibelius. He passed his matriculation examination in 1885 and in 1890 completed his law degree at the University of Helsinki (then called Helsingfors). As a student he was an ardent Fennoman, a supporter of the Finnish-language national movement, and sang in the university choir; in 1889, together with Eero Erkko and Juhani Aho, he founded Päivälehti, the newspaper from which Helsingin Sanomat later grew. He had printed his first stories as early as 1883–84 in the journal Valvoja. In 1886–88 he studied in Moscow, from where he sent “Letters from Russia” to Finnish newspapers; the last of them, written in 1887, was devoted to Russian literature and to the fiftieth anniversary of Pushkin’s death. In 1891 he sat in the Diet as a representative of the nobility.

From 1891 Järnefelt served in Vaasa at the court of appeal, and it was there that he read Tolstoy in earnest. He described the spiritual crisis that followed in the autobiographical book “My Awakening” (1894); Tolstoyan themes were already present in his first novel, “Fatherland” (1893). From 1895 he corresponded with Tolstoy, and in 1899 and 1910 he travelled to Russia to see him; he wrote about the first journey in “Diary of My Journey in Russia”. He was one of the first to translate Tolstoy into Finnish. He left the court service (in 1895 by some accounts, in 1896 by others), bought land near Lohja, took up farming at the estate of Rantala, taught the local people to read and learned shoemaking and blacksmithing. Tolstoyism, as he saw it, was not meant to be a withdrawal from the world but to consist of deeds: he helped prisoners and the poor. Through Tolstoy he came to know the ideas of Henry George on land, and in 1907 he spoke out in defence of tenant farmers being evicted at Laukko; the pamphlet “The Land Belongs to Everyone!” appeared in the same year.

The books of these years formed a distinct line. “Brothers” (1900), “Helena” (1902), “Children of Mother Earth” (1905), “The People of Venehoja” (1909) and the play “Samuel Cröell”: in them social ills are joined to ideas of non-resistance and self-improvement. His play about Titus, the destroyer of Jerusalem, came out in Russian in Berlin in 1909. He received the state literature prize several times, beginning around the turn of the century. In the 1910s he wrote plays with a religious, didactic bent, lived for long periods in Europe, Paris among other places, and in 1916 published the novel “The Happy Ones” under a pseudonym.

After the May addresses of 1917, his followers were accused of violence and the bourgeois press called them hooligans, while the workers’ newspapers supported the writer; the poet Eino Leino and Sibelius were sympathetic. Järnefelt was sentenced to imprisonment; in 1919 the regent, Mannerheim, pardoned him.

From 1922 he travelled widely abroad, and many consider the works of this period his best. They include the psychological novel “My Martti”, based on a murder committed in Turku in early 1927. In 1928–30 the three volumes of “My Parents’ Novel” were published. I think it is his most personal book: in it his parents, Alexander and Elisabeth, are shown in Russia and in Finland.

Järnefelt died in Helsinki on 27 December 1932. In Virkkala, Lohja, a school and a square are named after him.