Matti Kurjensaaren muotokuvat muista, muistista ja minästä

Abstrakti

Matti Kurjensaari’s Portraits of Others, On Memory and Himself

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Matti Kurjensaari (1907–1988) published three collections of essays that comprised portraits of well-known gures in Finnish political and cultural life. e portrait essays included in Veljeni merellä myrskyävällä (“My Brothers on the Stormy Sea”, 1966), Kansakunnan kaapin päällä (“On the Top of Nation’s Mantelpiece”, 1969) and Silmätikut (“The Eyesores”, 1971) had an ambivalent reception as it was debated whether the pieces should be read as essays or as mere gossip.

In the article the portraits are read as essays since Kurjensaari constantly blurs the separation between the objects of the portraits and the writing subject, that is, himself. Consequently the portraits by Kurjensaari display a typical essayistic characteristic by being an intimately personal form of writing. Kurjensaari himself perceived his portraits as essays on the grounds that they are always concerned with a larger scope than that of individual persons. As essays, notes Kurjensaari, the portraits depict individuals precisely as actors in the larger drama of history. As essays the portraits had a function as a genre to negotiate with what it meant to be Finnish and show how the history of the nation had always a place in the individual lives.