Frans Eemil Sillanpää (16 September 1888 – 3 June 1964)

Panu Rajala
Tampere University

1939 Nobel Prize in Literature Presentation Speech

Sillanpää: Autobiographical Statement

Biographies

References

Papers

BOOKS: Elämä ja aurinko (Helsinki: Kirja, 1916);

Ihmislapsia elämän saatossa (Helsinki: Kirja, 1917);

Hurskas kurjuus (Porvoo: Söderström, 1919); translated by Alex Matson as Meek Heritage (New York: Knopf, 1938); translation revised by John R. Pit-kin (Helsinki: Otava, 1971; New York: P. S. Eriksson, 1973);

Rakas isänmaani (Porvoo: Söderström, 1919);

Hiltu ja Ragnar (Porvoo: Söderström, 1923);

Enkelten suojatit (Porvoo: Söderström, 1923);

Maan tasalta (Porvoo: Söderström, 1924);

Omistani ja omilleni (Porvoo: Söderström, 1924);

Töllinmäki (Porvoo: Söderström, 1925);

Rippi (Porvoo: Söderström, 1928);

Kiitos hetkistä, Herra… (Helsinki: Otava, 1930);

Nuorena nukkunut (Helsinki: Otava, 1931); translated by Matson as Fallen Asleep While Young: The History of the Last Offshoot of an Old Family Tree (London: Putnam, 1933); translation republished as The Maid Silja: The History of the Last Offshoot of an Old Family Tree (New York: Macmillan, 1933);

Miehen tie (Helsinki: Otava, 1932);

Virran pohjalta (Helsinki: Otava, 1933);

Ihmiset suviyössä (Helsinki: Otava, 1934); translated by Alan Blair as People in the Summer Night: An Epic Suite (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966);

Viidestoista (Helsinki: Otava, 1936);

Elokuu (Helsinki: Otava, 1941);

Ihmiselon ihanuus ja kurjuus (Helsinki: Otava, 1945);

Poika eli elämäänsä (Helsinki: Otava, 1953);

Kerron ja kuvailen (Helsinki: Otava, 1954);

Päivä korkeimmillaan (Helsinki: Otava, 1956).

Editions and Collections: Teokset, 8 volumes (Porvoo, Finland: Söderström, 1925);

Kootut teokset, 12 volumes (Helsinki: Otava, 1932–1950);

Kuvia ja tarinoita (Helsinki: Otava, 1960);

Ajatelmia ja luonnehdintoja, edited by Aarne Laurila (Helsinki: Otava, 1960);

Novellit, 2 volumes, edited by Aarne Laurila (Helsinki: Otava, 1961);

Piika ja muita kertomuksia, edited by Hannu Mäkelä (Helsinki: Otava, 1978);

Kootut teokset, 8 volumes, edited by Panu Rajala (Helsinki: Otava, 1988–1991).

Frans Eemil Sillanpää was the first Finnish writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he was awarded in 1939 “for his deep understanding of his country’s peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature,” as the citation read. His education in natural science enriched the depictions in his short stories and novels of rural people with deep connections to the land.

Sillanpää was born on 16 September 1888 in Hämeenkyrö, at Myllykolu Croft in Kierikkala Village in southwest Finland. His father was an impoverished cottager named Frans Henrik Koskinen; but, according to Finnish village custom, the writer took the surname Sillanpää (meaning bridgehead) from the landscape of his childhood. The author’s mother, Loviisa Vilhelmiina Mäkelä, was a servant, and Frans Eemil was the only one of her three children to survive infancy. Both of his parents had descended from well-to-do peasant landowners, and this fact was of great importance to Sillanpää. As he grew older, he considered himself a descendant of this significant class in the old Finnish society. This consciousness developed to dilemma, an ambivalent situation between two classes, which was perhaps one of the main impulses that inspired Sillanpää to write. Although poor, the family saved and got wealthy supporters to send young Frans to Tampere grammar school in 1900. He first lived in the working-class district of Amuri and learned how Finnish workers lived and thought. He then worked as a tutor in the home of his benefactor, the manufacturer Henrik Liljeroos, an experience that gave him insight into the perspective of the wealthy factory owner in this industrial town, where deep social conflicts burst open during a major strike in 1905.

Sillanpää had already begun developing a special talent for accommodating himself to controversial circumstances. As an outsider he was able to see and understand what was going on with both rural and industrial workers and the best of the bourgeois. Later, as a writer he could, better than many others, consider political events from opposite angles.

Sillanpää was an apt pupil, and in 1908 Liljeroos helped him to enter the University of Helsinki to study medicine. His motive to become a physician soon vanished, but he studied biology and natural sciences with thoughts of becoming a scientist. He did not earn any academic degree, partly because of a lack of money, partly because of a lack of real passion for an academic career. But his studies were not without importance. During these years, between 1908 and 1913, Sillanpää was deeply affected by the biological theories of scientists Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, and Wilhelm Ostwald; symbolistic poet Maurice Maeterlinck; Swedish writer August Strindberg; and Norwegian author Knut Hamsun. They all confirmed and explained what experience and instinct had already suggested to Sillanpää: that man exists only within the framework of the biological laws that govern all species, and that man fills his destiny in nature like any other species must. The so-called monists believed that natural science would solve all problems in the world and that a new war was impossible because it would be an immense waste of energy. Sillanpää felt he belonged to the lucky generation who would see a totally new era of mankind.

Through a fellow student, Heikki Järnefelt, Sillanpää met the famous painter Eero Järnefelt and his family living in Tuusula, where many Finnish artists were gathered. Sillanpää also became acquainted with composer Jean Sibelius, writer Juhani Aho, and painter Pekka Halonen. The Järnefelt family valued people not for their position in society or means but for their skill and intelligence; this valuation was a new and liberating experience for the poor student, who suffered from feelings of social inferiority. At the same time he understood, watching and listening to these great artists of the Golden Age, that art was something he also wanted to create himself.

On Christmas Eve 1913 Sillanpää withdrew from the university and returned home to the house called Tôllinmäki (Shanty Hill) in the town of Heinijärvi, where his parents had moved. There he devoted himself to writing. His father and mother were poorer than ever, and he lived in their hut, shared their meals, and felt deep humiliation in the small village. For a time he considered becoming a journalist; in 1914 he traveled in Sweden and Denmark and wrote articles for the newspaper Uusi Suometar. He also wrote some short stories and got them published under the pen name E. Syväri in the same paper. The literary world of Helsinki soon discovered the identity of this author, and he was approached by the well-known publisher Werner Sóderstróm from Porvoo, who asked him to write a whole book. Sillanpää’s first novel, Elämä ja aurinko (1916, Life and Sun), depicts a summer love triangle between a young man, Elias, and two different girls, Olga and Lyyli. But the main theme was a new look at the relationship between man and nature. Critics have noted that writers before Sillanpää depicted nature through man, while Sillanpää depicted man through nature. The narration is full of ecstasy and passion for life as the young people enjoy their sweet, essential northern summer despite the ravages of World War I on the Continent.

Contemporary readers were fascinated by the new style and new way of describing the feelings of the young characters in the lap of nature, and the novel was a huge success. The leading critics declared Sillanpää a new hope for Finnish literature. However, one critic, the Socialist and later parliament member Mikko W. Erich, declared that the book was pornographic. Nevertheless, a new sensational star was born within the young cultural life of Finland. Elämä ja aurinko was followed the next year by Ihmislapsia elämän saatossa (1917, Children of Mankind in the Procession of Life), a collection of short stories in which the main figure is a student caught between two social classes. There was some influence from Strindberg, and some from Russian writers such as Ivan Turgenev and Mikhail Lermontov as well. The most important Finnish writer for Sillanpää was Aho, a soft-style impressionist and national patriot. The period of short stories ended in 1916 when Sillanpää married Sigrid Salomäki, an eighteen-year-old domestic servant; the couple eventually had eight children. Salomäki was a full-blooded bohemian artist, and the family had constant economic difficulties, but the marriage was a happy one.

The novel Hurskas kurjuus (1919; translated as Meek Heritage, 1938), which is perhaps Sillanpää’s most important work, was inspired by the outbreak of Finland’s Civil War in 1918 and reflected the writer’s ambivalent views of these recent events. Sillanpää hated war in all its forms, but he was even more afraid of the Red Army fighters who took power in his home parish, Hämeenkyrö. He remained at home and translated Maeterlinck’s 1896 essay collection Le Trésor des humbles (The Treasure of the Humble) from French to Finnish to calm his nerves. He supported General Carl Gustaf Mannerheim’s White Army at first, but the revenge and the summary executions by the victorious Whites aroused his anger.

Hurskas kurjuus starts from the great famine in the 1860s and follows the biography of the poor crofter Juha (sometimes called Jussi) Toivola until the Civil War in 1918. Sillanpää wanted to show his readers why his quiet and humble agrarian people took arms and rose to rebellion. Juha becomes embroiled in a Red Army plot and eventually is executed for a murder he did not commit. The revolutionary peasant movement, mixed with religious hope, was in his dim mind the only way to get any better life. Sillanpää depicts his destiny in a calm style but with a great human sympathy. The reader is invited to identify and empathize with the very essence of humanity that is hidden under the ugliness of events.

Among the few Finnish critics who praised the book was Aho, who shared similar views of the war events with Sillanpää. “They will get the scent of redness in this book,” Aho wrote to his younger colleague, “but this kind of redness we need.” He felt that Sillanpää showed the way into the future and made the suffering of the nation easier to bear. Hurskas kurjuus got a contradictory reception in Finland, because the rebellion was still so near and the moods among the people still inflamed. The novel was soon translated into Swedish by Hagar Olsson (1920), and in Sweden it found much more receptive critics. By this time Sillanpää, at the age of thirty-two, was already being mentioned as a Nobel candidate. The English translation of the novel, Meek Heritage, appeared in 1938. John Cournos wrote in The Mew York Times Book Review (18 September 1938):

The theme itself is of the soil, and the whole mood is Northern, very stark and monotonous, like the landscape itself.… The story itself is a marvel of concision, reduced to essentials, putting one in mind of a gaunt body whose ribs are visible. The life of a man—sixty years in this case—is encompassed within 273 modest pages; yet all that matters is here.… The novelist makes it clear that Juha, now 60, is a foolish, harmless old man and that his senile depredations, his brief triumphs, are a natural result of social evils of which he has been an innocent victim. There are pathos here, and pity, and tenderness, which come from comprehension. Now and again the prose rises to a quality which may be called poetry.

Maxwell Geismar, reviewing the book for the New York Herald Tribune (25 September 1938), found some Western influences in Sillanpää’s writing:

Mr. Sillanpää’s work is a blunt and powerful treatment of the farmer and the earth. But Mr. Sillanpää is, so to speak, a Marxian Knut Hamsun. From Rousseau to Jean Giono the modern treatment of nature and the natural man has been primarily a romantic movement, preaching independence and individualism and crying for an escape from the complexity, the turmoil, the “decadence” of society. Few novelists have viewed life on the soil as Mr. Sillanpää here does, without nostalgic yearnings, honestly, mercilessly.… Mr. Sillanpää, moreover, treats the peasant social order not as a back eddy of industrial civilization but as an integral part of those great currents of modern times which are sweeping all of us onward, but to what uncharted gulfs none can yet foresee.

In the 1920s Sillanpää published several short-story collections about poor rural people after the Finish Civil War, particularly about orphaned children. Since society often took scant care of such children, Sillanpää wanted to call attention to their plight; he also founded the local chapter of the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare. The short story was perhaps Sillanpää’s best genre. He had a special talent for writing sensitive and poetic impressions about the lives of poor and simple people in the countryside. Per Hallstróm of the Swedish Academy commented in his Nobel Prize presentation that Sillanpää’s “stylistic qualities are most fascinating in his descriptions of nature.” Sillanpää also wrote ironic confessions of his own life as a selfish and powerful public figure, showing a sharp and burlesque humor.

Among his stories was one longer tale, Hiltu ja Ragnar (1923, Hiltu and Ragnar), a love story between a servant girl and a wealthy young man; this book stirred moral indignation because of its sexual subject matter. Hiltu is the eldest daughter of Juha Toivola from Hurskas kurjuus, so the story completes the destiny of the poor Toivola family. When Hiltu becomes pregnant after being seduced by Ragnar, her panic and ignorance drive her to suicide. The sad love story is written with a deep psychoanalytic instinct. Sillanpää thought later that this small masterpiece was his best work. His villa, Saavutus (Achievement), which he built in Hämeenkyro, caused him much financial trouble, so he moved to Porvoo and Tampere and finally to Helsinki in 1929 with his growing family. Then he started to write his next novel, his first in ten years.

This novel, Nuorena nukkunut (1931; translated as Fallen Asleep While Young, 1933; translation republished as The Maid Silja, 1933), was translated into twelve languages and brought Sillanpää international fame. Silja Salmelus, like Hiltu, comes from an impoverished and doomed family; but she in fact lives a beautiful life despite being orphaned at a young age. She preserves her shy and sensitive personality through all difficulties and humiliations as she works as a servant on different farms. One of her landlords, the professor of Rantoo, is a kind old scholar who helps Silja. In his house Silja meets Armas, a student, and falls in love. But Armas leaves suddenly, and then the Civil War breaks out. Silja is involved in the bloody events but remains totally innocent; she does not know what it is all about, only that she tries to help people. Finally, she develops tuberculosis and dies on a bright summer morning just after the war. There is a lot of pure romanticism in Sillanpää’s outlook, but he is a realist at the same time; this paradox has astonished many readers. Scholars agree that Sillanpää’s artistic mastery is at its peak in this work.

Following the appearance of Nuorena nukkunut, Sillanpää was one of the strongest Nobel candidates. Although readers in Finland and Sweden greeted the novel with great enthusiasm, the critics in Great Britain and America were more reserved. Harold Nicholson described the novel in a review for the Daily Telegraph (22 September 1933):

It is a story of peasant life among the lakes and forests of Finland. His characters are very simple people through whom flows “the fundamental current of life.” Silja, the heroine, is “not much more than a human being who smilingly fulfilled her fate.” Her father, Kustaa, and her mother, Hilma, are both dryad types. The years and seasons revolve around the story with a certain somnolence, and one has the sense of white hot nights in summer following upon dark February afternoons. The peasants dance together and sit on the rocks at 2 a.m. in the sunshine. It is remote and rather dignified. Yet there is always a feeling of imminence in the book. Nothing really happens, yet one is certain that something has happened.

Nicholson concluded, “I do not think that Mr. Sillanpää is a new European genius. But I do think that he writes in a way which is very honourable, and might well be of value to many English writers and readers.” Edward Garnett offered a higher opinion on the novel in the Manchester Guardian(10 November 1933): “The mutability and pathos of life are enforced by the Finnish author without any sentimentalising. The last hundred pages of the book carry us further along the road of suffering and reopen for us the chapter of national conflict between Finnish Reds and Whites. We can only say that Sillanpää holds the balance between the Communists and the victorious Whites with marvellous sureness, and that the closing pages on Silja’s death show the hand of a master.”

Sillanpää’s next book, Miehen tie (1932, The Way of a Man), depicts the maturation of a farmer, Paavo Ahrola. Paavo is not an ideal hero, and he has difficulties in finding his way. Following an ill-fated marriage to an older woman, Paavo is eventually reunited with the woman he has loved since childhood. The story describes a strong biological determination in the relationship between a man and a woman, but the main theme in the book is the life of an ordinary Finnish southwestern farm through the course of one year. Sillanpää wanted to write a strong and happy love story to follow Nuorena nukkunut, and he succeeded. But some critical readers, such as Hallström, felt that the main characters are seen from a distance; they are too speechless and stiff to be intellectually interesting human beings.

In 1934 Sillanpää published one of his most artistic works, Ihmiset suviyóssä (translated as People in the Summer Night: An Epic Suite, 1966), which depicts various events of one summer weekend, including a murder and a birth. The beginning of the book is famous:

Mitään suviyotä pohjolassa tuskin onkaan; on vain viipyvä, viipyessään hiukan himmenevä ehtoo, mutta siinä himmeydessäkin on tuo sanalla sanomaton kirkastuksensa. Se on suviaamun aavistus, joka lähenee. Kun ehtoopuolen musiikki on painunut orvokintummaksi pianissimoksi, niin hienoksi, että se jatkuu vielä lyhyenä taukonakin; niin silloin herää jo ensiviulu vienoon korkeaan säveleeseen, johon sello pian yhtyy, ja tuo sisäisesti tajuttu sävelkkuva saa jo ulkonaisenkin tukensa: tuhansilta oksilta ja ilman korkeuksista liv-ertää tuhatkielinen säestys: aamu on jo, vaikka äsken vielä. oli ehtoo.

(There is almost no summer night in the north; only a lingering evening, darkening slightly as it lingers, but even this darkening has its ineffable clarity. It is the approaching presentiment of the summer morning. When the music of late evening has sunk to a violet, dusky pianissimo, so delicate that it lengthens into a brief rest, then the first violin awakens with a soft, high cadence in which the cello soon joins, and this inwardly perceived tone picture is supported outwardly by a thousand-tongued accompaniment twittering from a myriad of branches and from the heights of the air. It is already morning, yet a moment ago it was still evening.)

The structure of this small book is a modern puzzle, as the chronology of the events is capricious and irregular. Sillanpää had an instinct of the coming new world war; there is a special shadow above the idyllic summer weekend on the Finnish countryside, a sense that life is no longer as it was. Finnish writer and translator Thomas Warburton wrote in his introduction to Alan Blair’s translation of this work:

People in the Summer Night is a kind of summer-night symphony where voices and themes appear and disappear, waving a tapestry which might be said to reveal his [Sillanpää’s] whole outlook on life and his insights into the remarkably varied human beings directed by the laws of life—birth, love, death—and the tangential petty frustrations and small joys. Here he examines the innermost thoughts of the neurotic, the stable, the weary aged, the young, the simple, the complex, the uncouth, and the cultured. His diversely contrasting figures interact and intertwine into a coherent and unified portrayal of reality, under the illuminating canopy of a personified summer night. And carefully emphasizing the ecology and the human beings—the way each fulfills a fundamental natural role—is a parallel ecological study of nature’s other forms.

The Nobel Prize continued to elude Sillanpää during the 1930s. At this time in Finland there was a struggle against the other official language, Swedish, especially within Helsinki University, and this debate was one obstacle in Sillanpää’s way, although he himself was popular in Sweden and had warm relationships with many Swedish writers. A translation of several of his short stories into Swedish by Ragnar Ekelund under the title Färden till Kvarnbäcken (A Trip to Kvarnbacken) in 1936 again brought him to the attention of the Nobel committee, but that year the prize went to American playwright Eugene O’Neill.

World politics depressed Sillanpää, and the outbreak of World War II deepened his troubles. On 24 December 1938 he published in Suomen Sosialidemokraatti the highly critical ’Joulukirje diktaattoreille” (Christmas Letter to the Dictators), directed at Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini, causing his German translations to be pulled from the market. A few months after his beloved wife died in 1939, Sillanpää entered a short and unhappy marriage with his secretary, Anna Armia von Hertzen, and the alcoholism that had begun to trouble him grew worse.

In the 1939 Nobel Prize voting Sillanpää bested Hermann Hesse and Johan Huizinga. By this time Finland was struggling against Soviet aggression, and the distress of the country during the autumn of 1939 was, of course, in the mind of Swedish academics. The prize was interpreted as an opportunity to show Nordic sympathy for Finland. The public forgot that Sillanpää had already been a candidate for at least a decade. Sillanpää went to Sweden to receive the prize at a regular meeting of the Swedish Academy (rather than a full ceremony) on 14 December 1939. Although he did not give an official Nobel lecture, he gave speeches in several churches to collect money for his country, and he sent his golden Nobel medal to Finland to buy more military equipment. He also wrote words for the “March Song,” which became a theme song for Finnish soldiers in the successful struggle against the overwhelming Soviet troops. Olof Enckell quotes a note that Sillanpää wrote in the spring of 1942, indicating the extent of his mental exhaustion at the time of the award: “Darkness closes in. On the table in front of me is an old magazine, a whole page is covered with illustrations relating to me, and the text on the opposite page tells about me. From all this I gather I was awarded the Nobel Prize. I even learn that I was present and received it.”

The Nobel Prize ultimately came at a bad time for Sillanpää. All literary debate was crushed underfoot by World War II, and no one had time to translate his works as they would have done in times of peace. At the same time the name of Sillanpää became a tool for national propaganda. The war was a heavy trial for the whole nation and for Sillanpää. In 1940 he was confined to the mental hospital Kammio, mainly because of his heavy drinking, and he remained there until 1943. In the 1940s Sillanpää published two more novels: Elokuu (1941, August) and Ihmiselon ihanuus ja kurjuus (1945, The Beauty and Misery of Human Life). The main character in both novels is an artist, an alter ego of the writer, who knew his time was over. After World War II Sillanpää published no more fiction. His final works were the memoirs, late stories, and articles that comprise Poika eli elämäänsä (1953, The Boy Lived his Life), Kerron ja kuvailen (1954, I Tell and Describe), and Päivä korkeimmillaan(1956, High Noon). With his memoirs and many speeches and Christmas sermons he delivered on the radio, Sillanpää became a highly popular figure in Finland. His full white beard sometimes caused children to confuse him with Santa Claus. When Sillanpää died on 3 June 1964, he was given a solemn funeral in Helsinki and Hämeenkyrö like that given to an old statesman.

Sillanpää’s works have been translated into about thirty languages, and there have been several movie adaptations. The first was a 1937 version of Nuorena nukkunut, directed by Teuvo Tulio and starring Regina Linnanheimo as the young Silja; in this version, a controversial scene showing Silja bathing in a sauna had to be cut. The 1955 motion picture Poika eli kesäänsä (He Lived His Summer) was based on Elämä ja aurinko, and this time a nude swimming scene with actress Tea Ista helped to sell the movie. Other adaptations include Miehen tie(in which Sillanpää even makes an uncredited appearance as a “man at the dances”) in 1940, Ihmiset suviyössä in 1948, Elokuuin 1956, and Hiltu ja Ragnar for television in 1988. Also in 1988, director Matti Kassila’s adaptation of Ihmiselon ihanuus ja kurjuuswon an Audience Award and a Grand Jury Prize at the Rouen Nordic Film Festival in France.

In Sillanpää’s home parish, Hämeenkyrä, the famous summer theater of Myllykolu has been the site of several amateur and professional plays about his life and dramatizations of his novels and short stories. During the 2002–2003 season, the theater presented the first adaptation of Hurskas kurjuus, never seen before on stage or screen. Stage adaptations of Miehen tie and Ihmiset suviyössä have also been performed in Finland’s biggest summer theater, Pyynikki, in Tampere.

In 1990, American writer Timothy Crouse discovered the three existing English translations of Sillanpää’s books and wrote an assessment for The Nationabout this proportionally unknown Nobel winner. He was struck by how objectively Sillanpää could write about the Civil War in Finland, as though from a distance of a thousand years, even though he himself lived in the middle of the bloody events. The stories of Juha Toivola and Silja reminded Crouse of Leo Tolstoy’s work, though he admitted that the mystery of Silja remained closed for him. People in the Summer Night surprised Crouse as the events, like headlines in a newspaper, grew to a wonderful lyric beauty. Other scholarship on Sillanpää in English has been scant.

Critical attention to Frans Eemil Sillanpää’s work has declined in Finland, but he remains a central figure among Northern classic writers. His popularity when alive was so high that the counterreaction was inevitable. Perhaps his most important influence still is in his stylistic mastery, his modern outlook on nature, and his deep psychological skill at depicting his characters’ inner, secret lives.

Biographies

T. Vaaskivi, F. E. Sillanpää: Elämä ja teokset(Helsinki: Otava, 1937);

Rafael Koskimies, F. E. Sillanpää: Muotokuva (Helsinki: Otava, 1948);

Edwin Linkomies, F. E. Sillanpää: Eräitä peruspiirteitä (Helsinki: Otava, 1948);

Aarne Laurila, F. E. Sillanpää, vuosina 1888–1958 (Helsinki: Otava, 1958);

Panu Rajala, F. E. Sillanpää vuosina 1888–1923 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1983);

Rajala, Siljan synty: F. E. Sillanpää vuosina 1923–1931 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1988);

Rajala, Korkea paäivä ja ehtoo: F. E. Sillanpää vuosina 1931–1964(Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1993).

References

Timothy Crouse, “Past Present,” Nation (1 October 1990);

Olof Enckell, “The Life and Works of Frans Eemil Sillanpää,” in Nelly Sachs, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, René Sully-Prudhomme, Nobel Prize Library (New York: A. Gregory, 1971), pp. 287-295;

Harry Järv, Konst är kvalitet: Kulturpolitiska inlägg och utblickar (Lund, Sweden: Cavefors, 1979);

Aino Karvonen, Kirjailija F. E. Sillanpään arkiston luettelo (Tampere, Finland: Tampereen yliopisto, 1987);

Lasse Koskela, Katkotut sormet ja enkelten suru: Näkokulmä F. E. Sillanpään tuotantoon (Helsinki: Otava, 1988);

Aarne Laurila, F. E. Sillanpään romaanitaide kirjailijan asenteiden ja kertojan aseman kannalta (Helsinki: Otava, 1979);

Laurila and Panu Rajala, eds., Sillanpää Suomen kirjallisuudessa: F. E. Sillanpään juhlakirja (Helsinki: Sillanpää-seura, 1989);

Zenta Maurina, Denn das Wagnis ist schön: Geschichte eines Lebens (Memmingen, Germany: Maximilian Dietrich, 1953);

Gunnar Mårtenson, En själ att dansa med: Essäer om svenskt och finskt (Porvoo, Finland: Söderström, 1973);

Kaulo Aatos Ojala, Kohtalon toteuttaminen: Essee F. E. Sillanpäästä (Hämeenlinna, Germany: Karisto, 1959).

Papers

The main archive of Frans Eemil Sillanpää’s papers is at the Library of Tampere University.