Timo K. Mukka

Biography

The largest known painting by Mukka (257.5 × 228 cm) hangs in no museum. In the summer of 1962, while working in his maternal uncle’s painting business, he covered a wall in a room of a private house in Kuusamo with a landscape. Only photographs survive; they were taken by staff of the Finnish National Museum.

Timo Kustaa Mukka was born on 17 December 1944 in Bollnäs, in central Sweden, where his family had fled from the Lapland War, leaving their home municipality of Pello. His parents, Eemeli and Lyyli, lost two older daughters on the way: one stayed with foster parents in Sweden for good, the other was returned to them after the war. In 1945 the family went back to Orajärvi, a village of about three hundred people, which the Germans had burned during their retreat along with the rest of Lapland, so that life had to be begun again from nothing. Both communists and Laestadians, followers of a pietist Lutheran revival movement, lived in the village, and both milieus left a mark on his outlook.

He could read before he started school, began writing poems and drawing early, and did well in his lessons. In the summer of 1957, at thirteen, he had meningitis and suffered from headaches for more than four years afterwards. Relatives and biographers linked a change in his character to the illness: he became quieter, and solitary walks in the forest replaced company. Adolescence may also have played a part.

He sent manuscripts to publishers from the age of fifteen, and they were returned; the early texts have not survived, because he destroyed them himself. A novel of fifty-six pages, finished in March 1960, was turned down by the publisher Gummerus. In the autumn of 1961 Mukka went to Helsinki to study painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and, reportedly, was the youngest student in the school’s history. He stayed less than a year. He wrote later that he had liked neither the method nor the teachers, and that after that year he never picked up a brush again. That is probably an exaggeration: surviving works show that he did not give up drawing. At the Academy he met Tuula Pekkola, whom he married in 1963.

His father died on 5 June 1962. The family was poor, and Mukka took over as its head and did odd jobs. That year he had a religious conversion and joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses, going from cottage to cottage in Orajärvi to talk about God; later he called this the happiest time of his life. It ended suddenly, after a vision, and he never went to their meetings again. By the end of the year he had begun writing “The Earth Is a Sinful Song”.

Publishers hesitated for more than a year and demanded changes. The book came out in 1964, when the author was nineteen. Critics received it with bewilderment or hostility, most of all because of its frank scenes. That same year he was called up for military service. As a pacifist, he refused to carry a weapon or take the oath. After his service came the collection “Tabu” and the novel “Täältä jostakin” (both 1965), the latter a critical portrait of the army. In 1966 Mukka received the Finnish State Prize for Literature; in the same year came the poetry collection “Red” and the novel “Song of the Children of Sipirja”, followed in 1967 by the story collection “Death of a Dog”. In 1966 he also joined the Communist Party of Finland and stood unsuccessfully in an election.

An artist’s grant came only in 1968, and for one year. In 1968–1969 he made five long trips: to Moscow, to Yalta, to Stockholm, to the Canary Islands and to Iceland. The novel “And the Summer Hay Dies” appeared in the same period. In 1970 came the story collection “Fear of Snow” and the novel “The Dove and the Poppy”. In all, he wrote nine books, published between 1964 and 1970. In Helsinki in the late 1960s he took part in cultural events, and films were later made from his scripts.

In 1971 he moved to Rovaniemi and made a stage adaptation of “Song of the Children of Sipirja” for the local theatre. In 1972 he was awarded a five-year state grant.

In January 1973 the tabloid Hymy printed a scandalous article about him, “You’re Already Hanging on the Cross, Timo Mukka”, and it is believed to have worsened his condition. Mukka died in Rovaniemi on 27 March 1973, at the age of twenty-eight. His heirs sued the magazine and won; the case lies behind a privacy law known as “Lex Hymy”. Rauni Mollberg’s film “The Earth Is a Sinful Song” came out in the same year, 1973, and became the most widely attended film in Finnish cinema history; in 1980 Mollberg made “Milka”, based on “Tabu”.