Alexis Kivi

Alexis Kivi (1834-1872), originally Alexis Stenvall, is the Finnish national writer, poet, playwright, novelist and the creator of modern Finnish literature. He was the first Finn to become a professional writer and published all his works in Finnish. According to everybody who has read his work, his masterpiece is the aforementioned novel Seitsemän Verjestä (Seven Brothers) published two years before his death in 1870.

Read more in a special article about Alexis Kivi in the Ovi Magazine.

During the last years of his life, Alexis Kivi suffered from health and financial problems ending in a hospital for schizophrenia treatment, where psychiatry was still in embryonic condition and experimental treatment in the early second half of the 19th century. In the spring of 1872, his brother brought him to Tuusula, where he lived in a small cottage, to be precise, inside the sauna of the small cottage. He died on December 31st, 1872, and, as the legend has it, his last words were: "Minä elän! (I am alive!)

Now dig my grave
Beneath the bay willows' boughs
And with blackness cover it over again,
The for evermore
Go from my domain:
I wish to slumber in peace.

- From the poem Weariness