Tavaststjerna — Prince and Prisoner

Sibelius set ten poems by the contemporary writer Karl August Tavaststjerna (1860–1898); here we step into the epoch of realism, in many ways remote from the worlds of Runeberg, Topelius, Wecksell and Rydberg. Tavaststjerna published his first collection of poems, För morgonbris (For Morning Breeze), in 1883, just six years after Runeberg’s death. Tavaststjerna was well aware of Runeberg and Topelius, the two great literary figures of the century, but he represented an aesthetic position that distanced itself from the idealistic and nationalistic heritage of the Romantics. Unlike these romanticists, Tavaststjerna’s most famous novel, Hårda tider (Hard Times, 1891), was a ruthless description of the famine years of the 1860s, and it was revelatory of the abyss between the social classes. He “poked a hole in the national myths of misery nobly and patiently borne and of a caring upper class.”

Tavaststjerna has been called the first modern writer in Finland. He spent several years in Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and Germany and brought both a cosmopolitan and urban perspective to Finnish poetry. His restless traveling generated an oscillation between Europeanism and Finnishness, and he felt at home nowhere. His poem “Hemåt” (Homeward) from his collection Dikter i väntan (Poems in Waiting, 1890), exhibits a new approach:

Tavaststjerna belonged to the first generation of poets who wrote of the growing language tensions. Writing in Swedish, he registered that he belonged to a minority, whereas Runeberg, although also writing in Swedish, had been the poet of the whole (literate) nation. In light of the emerging language conflict of the 1880s and 1890s, such a broad embrace was no longer possible: the two languages had begun to generate separate cultures, and the position of the Finnish language was clearly changing.

Greater awareness also developed between the diverging lingual variants of Finland’s Swedish language and the Swedish in Sweden. This tendency occasionally gave Tavaststjerna’s editor in Sweden reason to correct his texts, as some of the words he chose were not used in Sweden. The scenery and poetic themes also changed: Runeberg had praised the idyllic beauty of inland Finland and its lakes. Tavaststjerna, himself a sailor, was more familiar with the coastal archipelago area and its powerful sea, storms, and perils.

Tavaststjerna was born in a manor house in Hame (Tavastland).