Lannistumaton. Matti Kurikan haaveet ja haaksirikot kolmella mantereella

Out of all Finnish political figures who never held a political office, Matti Kurikka (1863–1915) must be among the most researched. The Ingrian socialist firebrand, who led political movements on three continents at the turn of the twentieth century, has continued to inspire novelists, artists, and historians well into the twenty-first century. Given the volume of academic and popular works on Kurikka, it might seem unlikely that yet another biographical study on Kurikka could break new ground. Yet, the new anthology Lannistumaton. Matti Kurikan haaveet ja haaksirikot kolmella mantereella (Indomitable: Matti Kurikka's dreams and failures on three continents) manages to do just that. It not only offers novel interpretations on Kurikka's diverse career as a playwright, political journalist, and communal organizer; it also challenges long-held myths about Kurikka and provides new evidence about some key events in his life. By drawing on digitized Finnish, Australian, and North American newspapers, among other fresh sources, the authors shed new light on various aspects of Kurikka's versatile life. We receive new insight on the familiar parts: Kurikka's controversial role in the 1899 mobilization against the February Manifesto or his role in establishing the Sointula, a utopian socialist colony in British Columbia. But even more fascinatingly, we also learn about the less-trodden paths of Kurikka's biography: for example, his activities in Finland after the Great Strike of 1905 and his last years in the United States in 1909–1915.Lannistumaton is a collective work of seven authors—historians and folklore scholars—who have long collaborated on the project. The longevity of their commitment shows, as the book avoids the common pitfalls of biographical anthologies. Not a disjointed collection of individual articles, the book is a well-organized and coherent whole. It is divided into three parts, which trace Kurikka's life in loosely chronological thematic chapters. The first part focuses on Kurikka the playwright and aspiring journalist. It introduces the reader to Kurikka's early years as the son of a well-to-do Ingrian peasant, who, as a student in Helsinki, becomes enthralled with the nationalism and social reformism of the 1880s. Chapters by Mikko-Olavi Seppälä and Päivi Salmesvuori study Kurikka's breakthrough plays in the contexts of Finland's emerging nationalist and feminist movements, respectively. A chapter by Mikko-Olavi Seppälä and Sami Suodenjoki explores Kurikka's entry into journalism in the context of vastly expanding print culture in late-nineteenth-century Finland.The second part of the book focuses on Kurikka's political activities. After achieving renown as a socially reformist playwright in the 1880s, Kurikka went into political journalism. He first edited a Young Finnish newspaper in Vyborg before landing a chief editorship at Työmies, the Helsinki organ of the incipient Finnish labor movement. Kurikka's years at the helm of Finland's chief labor paper (1897–1899) catapulted him into national limelight, earning him both admiration and antipathy. Kurikka steered the paper left, helping to distance the workers’ movement from bourgeois paternalism and clearing the way for an autonomous labor party. Yet Kurikka would play no significant role in the labor party his radical editorials had helped to establish. He was present at the founding convention of the Workers’ Party in 1899, but left Finland soon thereafter. Sami Suodenjoki relates in his chapter the political controversy which ended with Kurikka's resignation from Työmies and his eventual departure from Finland. Kurikka's years with Työmies coincided with a dramatic period in Russo-Finnish relations, as St. Petersburg sought to integrate the grand duchy more firmly into the empire. When Finland's emerging nationalist opposition organized a popular appeal for the tsar to protest the Russification measures—the so-called Great Petition of 1899—Kurikka attacked the project in an infamous Työmies editorial. Contrary to some later accounts of this controversy, Kurikka did not oppose resistance to Russification as such. Rather, as Suodenjoki explains, Kurikka's criticism was aimed at the opportunistic Finnish bourgeoisie, which sought the workers’ support for nationalist causes but refused to consider their demands for more dignified working conditions. Nevertheless, this nuance was lost on Finland's bourgeois press, which painted Kurikka as a traitor and associated his Ingrian background with his purported sympathy for Russia. Facing intimidation and outright violence, Kurikka decided to resign from Työmies and leave Finland.After leaving Finland in August 1899, Kurikka would spend most of his remaining years abroad. Yet, he never lost his influence in Finland. In her chapter, Anna Rajavuori traces the political influence Kurikka and his brand of Theosophist socialism, or kurikkalaisuus, played in the early twentieth-century labor movement in Finland. Traditional labor history has often cast Kurikka's non-Marxist socialism as an anachronism, which was bound to recede from the scene as the more “scientific” Marxism won adherence. As Rajavuori illustrates, however, this teleological account misses the movement's ideological diversity, which persisted well into the twentieth century. While the leadership of Finland's Social Democratic Party (SDP) did become increasingly orthodox in its Marxism, other currents of socialism—among them Kurikka's Theosophy—retained adherents on the local level, especially in rural chapters. The parliamentary reform of 1906 worked to consolidate the SDP's hold over the labor movement, but even then its dominance did not go uncontested. In his chapter, Mikko Pollari sheds light on “an unwritten chapter” of Kurikka's political biography: his years in Finland before his final departure for America in 1909. Most biographies of Kurikka have depicted his 1905 return to Finland and his subsequent work with the Elämä newspaper (1906–1908) as his swan song in Finnish politics. An influential 1978 Kurikka biography by Kalevi Kalemaa—which has become a go-to source for much subsequent writing on Kurikka—dates Kurikka's departure from Finland to December 1908. According to Kalemaa, Kurikka then left Finland as an isolated and thoroughly failed figure. Pollari offers a thorough rebuke of this established narrative, illustrating how Kurikka stayed involved in Finnish politics well beyond his purported departure date, even making his third run for parliament in the elections of 1909. Far from an isolated figure, Kurikka during his final years in Finland formed diverse connections and unorthodox coalitions in his attempts to regain political influence. Only after repeatedly failing to gain a seat in parliament, Kurikka made his way to America in June 1909.For scholars of Finnish transatlantic migration, Kurikka is undoubtedly best known for his role in establishing utopian communities for Finnish immigrants in Australia and Canada between 1899 and 1905. When Kurikka first left Finland in August 1899, he went to Queensland to build a cooperative farming society for Finnish immigrants. Anne Heimo recounts this less-known episode of Kurikka's colony-building. Her use of digitized Australian newspapers gives unique insight into Kurikka's difficult months “under the Southern Cross.” Having failed to secure the support of the Queensland government for his colony effort, Kurikka left Australia for North America. In British Columbia, Kurikka made a new attempt at his experiment. He helped to establish a colonization company which purchased land from a relatively remote island off the northeastern coast of Vancouver Island. There, between 1901 and 1904, Kurikka led the cooperative community Sointula (place of harmony) and edited the community newspaper Aika, the first Finnish-language newspaper published in Canada. The community eventually went the way of most similar experiments, disintegrating amid ideological conflicts, personal feuds and exhaustion from trying living conditions. Päivi Salmesvuori explores Kurikka's time in Sointula, paying particular attention to the place of women in the experiment. Sami Suodenjoki contextualizes the Sointula experiment within the broader histories of communitarian experimentations. Especially fascinating is his discussion of the utopian experiments in Finland. As Suodenjoki shows, Kurikka also influenced his followers to attempt cooperative communal living in Finland, in rural communities near Porvoo and Oulu. The chapters by Heimo, Salmesvuori, and Suodenjoki well illustrate the transnational dimensions of Kurikka's utopian socialism.The final two chapters of the anthology probe Kurikka's activities during the last years of his life between 1909 and 1915. During these years, Kurikka lived near New York City and edited a Finnish-language newspaper, New Yorkin Uutiset. His last years have received little scholarly attention, as his influence on Finnish politics remained miniscule after his departure for America in 1909. As Päivi Salmesvuori and Kirsti Salmi-Niklander show in their chapters, however, Kurikka was never forgotten among Finnish immigrants in North America. As an editor of the well-circulated New Yorkin Uutiset, he continued to wield influence especially among East Coast Finns. In a coauthored chapter, Salmesvuori and Salmi-Niklander discuss Kurikka's attempt to establish a home in New York for Finnish immigrant women. The project illustrates how “the women's question” continued to inspire Kurikka even in his later years, but the paternalistic endeavor also points to the limits of his feminism. In the book's final chapter, Salmi-Niklander examines the long-simmered uncertainties surrounding Kurikka's death in 1915. While most contemporary accounts and the official death certificate indicate that Kurikka died from heart failure at his farm in Connecticut, there has existed an alternative telling of his demise, placing his scene of death at a park bench in Brooklyn. Salmi-Niklander establishes the verity of the former, more prosaic version of Kurikka's death, but she also traces the origin and circulation of the more romanticized account. The competing versions and the continuing mystifications surrounding Kurikka's death are a telling illustration of the long shadow he left in the histories of Finland and Finnish diaspora. In the book's epilogue, Sami Suodenjoki well encapsulates this long influence. As he states, the present study will hardly be the last on Kurikka.

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