īut Parland’s double-life, with neglected studies, bill-jobbing, alcohol abuse, and messy love affairs, came to light in the end. “Rebellion of the things” (“Sakernas uppror”) was the felicitous title of one of Parland’s texts in Quosego. A very common device is the animation of things. Parland’s poems are not emotionally cold, but distanced. The I of the poems moves with sovereignty in its poetic world. They communicate by addressing the reader, by exclamation, questions, colloquial language. They are light, airy, elliptical, and seemingly sketchy. The poems are extremely concentrated, 4–13 lines long. The title of the poetry collection and the section headings consist of words that have been plucked from individual poems in the collection. The book consists of four divisions: “Stains”, “Socks”, “Flu”, and “Grimaces”. A year later, he did better, and in the spring of 1929, the through-composed collection Idealrealisation appeared, one of the most exciting Finland-Swedish poem collections of the 20 th century. The goal-oriented Parland had already tried to get a collection of poetry published in the fall of 1927, without success. Tidskrift för ny generation (1928–1929), together with, among others, the older modernist authors Elmer Diktonius, Hagar Olsson, Gunnar Björling, and Rabbe Enckell. Parland became one of the collaborators in the journal Quosego. Swedish became his fourth language - after German, Russian, and Finnish - and his literary language.Ī f t er h e co mpl e t ed his secondary school studies in 1927, there followed two academic years of law study at the University of Helsinki, but even more of “life studies” and preparations for a life of letters.

But they had Finnish citizenship.Īs a fourteen-year-old, Henry Parland, the eldest of four gifted brothers, began attending a Swedish school in Grankulla (Kauniainen) outside Helsinki. Like many other emigrants, the family had lost their homes and other assets in the revolution. Petersburg, and in Vyborg, and, further back in time, with German-Baltic and English fore-fathers, had settled in Finland after the Russian Revolution. The Parland family, domiciled on the Karelian Isthmus, in St. It was the final move for the young author, who died a year and a half later of scarlet fever in his exile. They wanted to save him from booze, bohemianism, and modernism. In May of 1929, the Finland-Swedish student of law and recently debuted poet, Henry Parland, was sent by his parents from Helsinki to Kaunas (Kovno), the capital of Lithuania.

Khimaira by Henry Parland