Juhani Konkka

Juhani Konkka (September 4, 1904 – June 22, 1970) was an Ingrian Finnish writer, translator, screenwriter and politician.

Biography Juhani Konkka was born in the village of Konkkala near the village of Toksovo in the Shlisselburg district of St. Petersburg Governorate (now the Vsevolozhsky District of the Leningrad region) into a wealthy Ingerian family. His father, Simo Konkka, was the head of the village, was elected justice of the peace, and his mother was Katri Vanhanen. There were twelve children in the family, five of whom died in infancy. His father encouraged reading in his large family, and thanks to him there were always many books in the house – from the Bible to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Konkka began writing poetry in Finnish at the age of eight. He graduated from elementary school in his village of Konkkala. In the autumn of 1917 he entered one of the Petrograd lyceums, then continued his education at the Petrograd Agricultural School. However, he did not graduate, as after the arrest of his father by the Bolsheviks for not informing on his son from a previous marriage who fled to Finland and his subsequent own fleeing to Finland, the whole household and the care of the family became the responsibility of the teenage Konkka, as the eldest of men.

In 1932 Konkka founded the National Socialist Union of Finland together with Yrjö Ruutu. Konkka was the party secretary of the NSUF (1933–1934) and the editor-in-chief of the party newspaper The National Socialist. Konkka was politically even more extreme than Ruutu.

In 1943, the autobiographical novel (Summer of the Tramp) was published, which became a Finnish bestseller and was reprinted several times. A series of autobiographical novels of the time also included (The Shackles of the Tramp, 1945), (The Schools of the Tramp, 1946), and (The Wanderings of the Tramp, 1947).

In 1958, as part of a delegation of Finnish writers, Konkka visited Moscow, Samarkand and St. Petersburg. While in St. Petersburg, he came to Toksovo hoping to visit the place where his native village was, but he was not allowed to the landfill. The same year, he published his most famous, autobiographical novel (The Lights of St. Petersburg), about his childhood and youth in the revolutionary Russian Empire.

Besides literary work, Konkka worked as an editor in the publishing house WSOY from 1937 to 1944 and 1950 to 1955 respectively.

From 1949 to 1958 he was a member of the board of the Union of Finnish Writers.

Konkka was involved in many translations of Russian classics, including Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokhov and others. In total, he translated more than a hundred books by Russian writers into Finnish, for which in 1967 he received a prize for translators in the USSR.

Having received the prize, Konkka went to Petrozavodsk to visit his relatives, whom he had not seen for more than forty years, and distributed money to his relatives. Karelian writers considered him a traitor and a fascist and refused to meet with him.

Juhani Konkka died on June 22, 1970 at his dacha in the town of Kuhmoinen in Central Finland.

He had three children: Anita, Urho and Heikki.

Awards , 1961 Title of Master Translator, Moscow, 1967