Parland ate daily at the home of his uncle's woman friend. In a letter to his parents which Parland wrote soon after arriving the city he complained of bad coffee and muddy roads.

There his uncle Wilhelm Seesemann was a professor of philosophy.

Parlan's Bohemian lifestyle worried his parents and in 1929 they decided to sent him to Kaunas (Kovno), the capital of Lithuania. It remained Parland's only published book. The results were seen in Parland's first collection on poems, Idealrealisation, a youthfully cynical visit to the jazz age. Parland was in the beginning more interested in fiction, but a meeting with Gunnar Björling inspired him to try his hand at poetry. In 1928 Parland made his debut as a writer at the magazine Quosego as the youngest member of the modernist literary group. In 1927 Parland graduated from the Grankulla gymnasium, and started to study law at the University of Helsinki. According to Oscar Parland he never fully learned the new language, but wrote his books in Swedish.

Henry Parland's early years in his new surrounding in Helsinki were not happy – he felt lonesome, was bullied in a Finnish school, and eventually he was transferred to the Swedish school at Grankulla. When the border was closed, the father was unable to join his family until 1920. In 1912 the family returned to Vyborg and then moved to Finland on the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. His early diary notes – he was about 10 years old at that time – were written in Russian. Parland spent his first years in Russia in Kiev and St. The family's home language was German and Russian. His mother Ida Maria Parland came from a Baltic-German family, the Sesemanns, prominent in Vyborg's history. His father Oswald Parland was an engineer and bridge builder, who worked for the Russian civil service. Henry Parland was born in Vyborg into a family with a distant English background. Parland and Ralf Parland also gained fame as Idealrealisation (1929) was the only book published during his life time. Parland was among the rising stars of modernism in the 1920s, who introduced formalism and semiotic concepts to Finnish literature. zip of the website is also available.įinland-Swedish poet and cosmopolitan critic, whose career as a writer lasted only a few years – he died at the age of 22. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared some links and images may no longer function. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Khimaira by Henry Parland