Toivo Pekkanen
Toivo Rikhard Pekkanen (born September 10, 1902 in Kotka , † May 30, 1957 in Copenhagen ) was a Finnish writer .
Life
Pekkanen comes from a humble background (his father was a stone knocker) and earned his living as a factory worker and blacksmith. As an autodidact , he taught himself all the necessary basics of “writing” alongside his work and was able to set up as a freelance writer from around 1930 .
As early as 1928 he was close to the group Tulenkantajat . There he found his first recognition for his literary work through Olavi Paavolainen . From 1932 to 1938, Pekkanen made several study trips to Berlin, London, Paris and Stockholm. With his novel Tehtaan varjossa , Pekkanen addressed the life and work of industrial workers for the first time in Finnish literature .
In 1955, Pekkanen was honored with the Finnish Academic Award.
Toivo Pekkanen died on May 30, 1957 in Copenhagen at the age of 54.
Committed to realism , Pekkanen addresses the life and fate of the worker in all of his literary work, without slipping into political agitation .
criticism
“The cultural will of the Nordic workers is revealed in Pekkan's work,” writes Hans Marquardt in “People in Spring” (Leipzig 1974; p. 595). “Pekkanen has masterfully succeeded in interweaving individual fate with social problems in the (...) love story Ihmisten kevät (People in Spring; translated into German by Charlotte and Friedrich Ege). The work is a pearl of Finnish novelism ”; it was first published in 1935 by Werner Södertröm, Porvoo and Helsinki (Finland).
The Finnish literary historian W. Tarkiainen thinks that Pekkan's descriptions show “nothing romantically, pathologically excited or expressionistically constructed. You speak in a subdued tone of hard life experiences, which meanwhile lead to a positive result. His portrayal of modern working-class life did not stick to external circumstances (...), but rather seeks people and individual fate. ”(Quoted from Marquardt; see above).
Works
- 1927 Rautaiset kädet - The iron hands
- 1929 Satama ja meri - port and sea
- 1931 Kuolemattomat - The Immortals
- 1932 Tehtaan varjossa - In the shadow of the factory
- 1933 Sisarukset - The siblings
- 1935 Ihmisten kevät - people in spring
- 1939 Musta hurmio - Black Intoxication
- 1953 Lapsuuteni - My childhood
- 1955 departure for a journey, poems
See also
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Pekkanen, Toivo |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Pekkanen, Toivo Rikhard (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Finnish writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 10, 1902 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kotka |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 30, 1957 |
| Place of death | Copenhagen |