Edith Södergran is born in Saint Petersburg on April 4, 1892. Her Finnish father, Matts Södergran, were an engineer who had almost crossed qll the septentrional Europe before settling in the old capital of the Russian empire, Saint Petersburg fourth European city at the time after Paris, London and Berlin. Helena, his mother, an educated and refined woman, had much interest to the literature. When Edith was still very small, her parents had left the capital to settle in Ravioli, a Finnish city in the isthmus of Coré Lia. At eleven years she starts to study in the Deutsche Schulze for girls in St Petri where pupils learned the Swede Lou André Salome4s
poems as well as the modern languages, of which French that Edith had learned well, in addition to German, English and Russian. She was interested like the girls of this time in esthetics and the school programmed several visits to the Hermitage and other museums of arts and invited the schoolgirls with concerts.
Edith appreciated much the poems of Salome translate to German. These poems expressed strong feelings of nostalgia, of romantic love.
In 1909, after a pulmonary tracking, Edith discovered that she was reached of tuberculosis. Her health had worsened and she had been face to face against death. She was divided between the hope to cure and the abandonment with disrepair until wishing her death. At the same time she started to learn the Swedish poems what meant for her return at the origins and refuge with maternal protection.
In 1916, Edith
published her first collection of poems, of realistic and direct tendency, inspired of her contemporaries like Rimbaud and Whitman. In the first poem entitled " I
saw a
Tree " Edith launches three enigmas and a fatal conclusion:
Here is an extract:
I saw a large tree
:ore big than all the others,
Full with inaccessible pine cones;
I saw a large church
With the open doors
All those which left there were pale, strong and loans to die.
I saw a made up woman, smiling
She played of give trying her chance
I saw that she had lost.
There was a circle
that nobody exceeded.
With this first poem, Edith delimits her poetic universe invaded by frustration, disappointment, the
lost love and the fear of death. It is precisely this universe delimited by the circle of the destination, which nobody can escapes. The made up
woman is not other than Edith herself, sunken to Switzerland, full with hopes and happiness. The large tree with their inaccessible pine cones evokes the desire, the budding of a new generation and the desire for being mother.
The press of Helsinki had granted a great interest to this work which constituted a rupture with the conventional and traditional poems.
In 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized the power in Russia and, she and her mother had lost their financial pension and their incomes. The family was in an extreme poverty that she was pushed to sell the pieces of furniture of the property. The precarious conditions and social chaos had a negative impact on the creativity of Edith Sodergran. But thanks to her will, she published under these criticize conditions three collections:
** " Lira of September ", poems which exalting the beauty, the primitive force human being and its transformation capacity
** " the Furnace bridge of Pinks " (1919), and
* " Shade of the future " (1920).
Her last collection, “the Earth which is not” was published posthumously in 1925.
At the end of her life Edith lived a true misery. She nourished only bread cooked at the house with a flour of corn of lower quality.
The poetess died on January 24, 1924.
Died Edith, did not have more chance than during her life. We must remember her thanks to her great sensibility.
More summaries about the live or death,Edith Södergran was an unhappy great poetess