Edith Irene Södergran (4 April 1892 – 24 June 1923) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet. One of the first modernists within Swedish-language literature, her influences came from French Symbolism, German expressionism, and Russian futurism. She was fluent in French, English and Russian. At the age of 24 she released her first collection of poetry entitled Dikter ("Poems"). Södergran died at the age of 31, having contracted tuberculosis as a teenager. She did not live to experience the worldwide appreciation of her poetry, which has influenced many lyrical poets. Södergran is considered to have been one of the greatest modern Swedish-language poets, and her work continues to influence Swedish-language poetry and musical lyrics, for example, in the works of Mare Kandre, Gunnar Harding, Eva Runefelt, Heidi Sundblad-Halme, and Eva Dahlgren.
Childhood Edith Irene Södergran was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, into a middle-class Swedish speaking family. Her father, Mats Södergran hailed from Ostrobothnia while her mother, Helena Södergran, née Holmroos, was born and raised in Saint Petersburg. Edith grew up as an only child. Her mother had earlier become pregnant by a Russian soldier and given birth to an illegitimate son, but the child died after only two days. Her father had been a widower after the death of his wife and two small children. The sorrow united her parents, who were also both considered less suitable in marriage due to their past.
Edith's mother came from a well-positioned family, and the status of women within the family is thought to have been strong. It is apparent that Edith and her mother shared a strong bond. Considerably less is known about her relationship to her father, who died when Edith was only 15.
When Edith was just a few months old, the Södergran family moved to the village of Raivola on the Karelian Isthmus where her grandfather, Gabriel Holmroos, bought a house for them. A short time afterward, Mats acquired a job as a superintendent at a sawmill. Three years later, the company went into bankruptcy, and the family struggled to make ends meet. Helena's father died a few months later, and the inheritance was shared between her and her mother. With the money from the inheritance, Helena was able to pay the family's debts and get them back on their feet. The rest of the money disappeared quickly, however, due to Mats' unsuccessful businesses. Helena managed to arrange for the family to receive a part of the proceeds from her mother's share of the inheritance, making the family debt-free once more.
Edith attended the girls school at Petrischule in St. Petersburg. Petrischule was rich in tradition and created an interesting and highly intellectual surrounding for Edith. The school was situated opposite The Winter Palace, which enabled Edith to experience the troubles in Tsarist Russia at close range. She was almost certainly in the city on Bloody Sunday in January 1905 when the Tsarist guards opened fire on thousands of starving citizens who had gathered to protest the lack of food.
In 1904, her father was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and in May 1906 he was admitted to Nummela sanatorium in Uusimaa. He was later sent home, incurably ill. Mats Södergran died in October 1907, only a year before Edith would herself be diagnosed with the disease.
Under these complicated circumstances, Edith's mother was responsible for the well-being of the family, especially as Mats Södergran's health deteriorated. This is believed to have been an early influence on Edith's belief in women and feminism. Though her first real encounter with a more structured questioning of the gender dynamics and the 'new woman' is believed to have taken place during her time in a sanatorium in Switzerland.
Edith was a keen photographer, and there are many pictures of her mother, albeit few of her father. Helena Södergran was a robust, petite and intelligent woman with a broad and captivating smile. Helena may have seemed stable, but was often nervous, shaken and restless. Edith enjoyed a close bond with her mother, and Helena supported her daughter's wish to become a poet. Edith and her mother spent a lot more time together than Edith and her father. Edith and Helena would move into St. Petersburg during the school terms, living in the Wiborgska part of the city. Edith's father only lived with them in the city for short periods of time.
Edith had made a few friends, but Helena feared her daughter might be lonely. Some biographers, including Gunnar Tideström, have claimed that Helena had found a foster sister of a similar age to Edith, named Singa. Singa is believed to have lived with the Södergrans during school terms, but moved back to her biological family during the holidays. On one visit, Singa supposedly ran away back to her biological family, but while walking along the train tracks she was run over by a train, and Helena later found the mutilated body. However, other biographers, such as Ebba Witt-Brattström, have disputed the story of Singa, claiming there is no real evidence she ever existed.
School days In 1902, Edith began her schooling in Die deutsche Hauptschule zu St. Petri () where she studied until 1909. These school years were characterized by worries and strong social tensions which likely affected her worldview. Amongst the poems in Vaxdukshäftet that depict Edith's school years, there are poems with political themes. At school there were pupils of many nationalities, including German, Russian, Finnish and Scandinavian. Her studies focused on modern languages, and she learned German, French, English and Russian; however, she received no instruction in her mother tongue of Swedish, and her knowledge of Swedish grammar and spelling was somewhat faltering. German was the language she spoke most both in school and with her friends. It was in German that she wrote her first poems. She improved her German during her stay in Davos, Switzerland as a patient during 1912-1913 and from 1913 to 1914 for the second time.Europeus 3 Retrieved on 24 Jan 2018
Edith was an intelligent pupil with the ability to assimilate knowledge quickly, needing to spend little time revising. One of her classmates described her as the class' most gifted pupil. More and more she became interested in the French lessons she received. To a certain extent, this was due to her teacher, Henri Cottier, to whom she directed a large proportion of the love poems that appear in Vaxdukshäftet.
During 1908, Edith appears to have made a decision to make Swedish the main language of her writings and her poems in German suddenly stopped. This was not a self-evident decision. She had no close contact with Swedish literature, and Finland-Swedish poetry was in a depression. An important impulse to the decision might have come from one of her relatives, the Finland-Swedish language researcher Hugo Bergroth. Some years earlier she had published a poem, Hoppet ("The Hope"), in a membership newsletter for the Swedish Liberal Party in Helsingfors and began to come into contact with Finland-Swedish authors. The transition to Swedish seemed also to mark a clear decision to focus on poetry.
Illness One day in November 1908, Edith came home from school saying that she was restless and that she did not feel well. Helena called for a doctor, who diagnosed that Edith had an inflammation of the lungs. According to the mother, the girl understood what it was as she asked several times if she had got "lung soot". Edith had guessed correctly. On New Year's Day 1909, it was established and Edith tested positive for tuberculosis. Barely a month after the result, she was admitted to Nummela sanatorium, the same hospital where her father had been a patient before he passed on, meaning that Edith was never entirely comfortable there. At the time, the chances of recovering entirely from tuberculosis were not especially good. 70–80% of cases died within ten years of diagnosis.
Edith was unhappy at Nummela. The place was altogether too strongly associated with her father's death. She lost weight, her mood was low, and she was described afterwards as unkempt and "strange". She was even thought to have a mild mental illness after she proposed to one of the doctors. It is apparent that she did not get on well at Nummela and felt that the place resembled more closely a prison. During the long days, Edith daydreamed of other lands and exotic places. She willingly shared her dreams, which made her seem even more peculiar. During the following year, her condition worsened, and the family looked for help abroad. The obvious choice was Switzerland, which was at the time the centre for tuberculosis treatment within Europe.
At the beginning of October 1911, roughly three years after the start of her illness, Edith and her mother travelled to Arosa in Switzerland, but even there she did not get on especially well. She was examined by three doctors who all came up with entirely different solutions to her illness. Some months later, she was transported to Dr Ludwig von Muralt at the Davos-Dorf sanatorium. Edith immediately took a liking to her new doctor and got on much better there. Dr von Muralt suggested that a so-called left-sided pneumothorax should be performed. This involved puncturing the lung during an operation and filling it with nitrogen gas. The punctured lung would be unusable but it would be "rested". After May 1912 no more tuberculosis bacteria were shown to be in her lungs although she was not free from the sickness and knew that she must be watchful of her diet and rest for several hours every day.
Her time in Switzerland played a large role in Edith's international orientation. From a remote part of Finland she had arrived in an intellectually vital country where, not least at the sanatorium, she met many gifted people from the whole of Europe. With them she felt a connection that she had rarely felt in St. Petersburg. Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, which admittedly was written after the war but is set in a sanatorium during these years, gives a picture of the intellectually lively atmosphere. Her doctor, von Muralt, appears also to be one of the first doctors who truly won her trust and friendship. When he died in 1917, Edith wrote two poems, Trädet i skogen ("The Tree in the Forest") and Fragment av en stämning ("Fragment of a Mood"), which expresses her sorrow and conflicted memories of her time in Switzerland.
Finally, Edith felt better, her cough had disappeared, and she was perkier than normal. In the spring of 1914 she finally travelled home, but the sickness shadowed her and her poetry faced a struggle against illness and, later, fatigue.
Literary revolt Her debut book Dikter ("Poems"), which came out in the autumn of 1916, gained no great notice, even if a few critics were slightly perplexed – Södergran was already using associative free verse and describing selected details instead of entire landscapes. Expression of a young, modern, female consciousness in poems like Dagen svalnar... ("The Day Cools...") and Vierge moderne ("Modern Lady") was entirely new within Swedish language poetry.
After the October Revolution in 1917, Edith and her mother's economic assets were suddenly rendered worthless since they had been placed in Ukrainian securities; and soon after, from the spring of 1918, the Karelian Isthmus became a war zone. In Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was called from 1914), people were being shot without trial, and Södergran knew that several of her classmates had fled from the city. She read Friedrich Nietzsche and found in him the courage to keep upright against a periodically shifting and degrading life.