Seitsemän munaa

Pikareski ja parannus Aleksis Kiven romaanissa

• Sari Salin Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74850

Abstract

Seven Eggs: Picaresque and Repentance in Aleksis Kivi’s Novel

My article offers a generic approach, one that has usually been neglected by literary scholars, to Aleksis Kivi’s sole novel Seven Brothers (1870). The exception is Pirjo Lyytikäinen’s study Vimman villityt pojat (2004) which quite correctly proclaims that Kivi’s novel belongs to the seriocomical or carnivalesque genre formalized by Mikhail Bakhtin. The novel tells the story of seven reckless brothers who escape the society and move to live in a forest. Finally, after some adventures, they return, settle down and submit themselves to the demands of the society. Unfortunately, Lyytikäinen comes to emphasize the transgressive aspect of the novel’s content to the extent of creating a brand new subgenre: transgression novel. She denies the idea of the seven protagonists’ change and development and is reluctant to admit that the end of the novel would depict the repentance of the seven protagonists.

My article shows, however, that Seven Brothers is a picaresque novel. In picaresque novels (belonging to the family of serio-comical novels) it is common for the protago¬nist to want to repent and sometimes they even succeed, even if their repentance can also be ridiculed and depicted ironically. The pivotal mise en abyme of the novel, Juhani’s dream about a chicken’s nest with seven eggs, notwithstanding its comicality, symbolises the situation of the adolescent seven brothers and reflects the plot of the novel as a whole. First the eggs are broken and everything seems to be ruined but, eventually, a big meal is made of the seven eggs. In other words, something good becomes of the seven brothers, after all; something valuable for the whole community.