Search

Autobiography can be thought of as, among other things, a speech of defence. The Estonian-Finnish author Hella Wuolijoki started writing her autobiography in prison and it very much reads as a legitimization of her political life choices. The article investigates how Wuolijoki depicts her own politicization, and how she plays with different author names in order to destabilize a taken-for-granted author position. The material used is her three part autobiography/memoirs, in which she explicitly declares that she is less interested in the facts of her life, but rather wants to keep them in their original memory-form. This gives her the freedom to recount events she deems important for her self-formation, rather than events or general interest. Feminist and autobiographical theory is used as a tool to investigate how dislodging the authorial position can open new ways of emphasising a woman’s political development. Thus, the literary formation of a political and feminist persona can be studied through her works. In this article I relate Wuolijoki’s writing to a way of theorizing the position of the political woman that could be found in Alexandra Kollontai’s pamphlet on the socialist New Woman written in 1918. The article analyses how Wuolijoki legitimizes her political activities by recounting her life as always intricately connected to contemporary political events. The article shows that political autobiography is a concept that can open new perspectives on women’s life writing and that the construction of an autobiographical persona that combines the concepts of woman and political may rely, as in this case, on types or models found in literature rather than life. Swedish: Självbiografi kan ses som, bland annat, ett försvarstal. Den estnisk-finska författaren Hella Wuolijoki började skriva sin självbiografi i fängelset för att legitimera sina politiska livsval. Artikeln undersöker hur Wuolijoki skildrar sin egen politisering och hur hon leker med olika

Internationalism in the interwar era carried different meaning for different groups. A Nordic school for adult education, with the aim of raising the 'international citizenship proficiency' of the Nordic peoples, was established in Geneva in 1931, through cooperation between representatives of international organisations and adult educationists. Both groups harboured an intense passion for internationalism, but whereas the officials understood the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization to represent true internationalism, the educationists took a critical stance. Internationalism was for them related to nationalism and Nordism, and an expansion of the power of the small and neutral European states. This article examines the establishment of the Nordic school in the interwar period and analyses the ideological controversies surrounding its internationalism., Från suffragett till medborgare

Articulation and representation of national identity in Estonia and Finland around 1900–1940: Theoretical readings of Aino Kallas and Hella Wuolijoki

Articulation and representation of national identity in Estonia and Finland abound 1900–1940: Theoretical readings of Aino Kallas and Hella Wuolijoki