Volter Kilpi

Volter Kilpi, born Volter Ericsson, (December 12, 1874 – June 13, 1939) was a Finnish author best known for his two-volume novel Alastalon salissa, often considered one of the best written in the Finnish language. Kilpi has been considered an exponent of the modern experimental novel.

Early life

Kilpi was born and brought up in Kustavi, in Finland's western archipelago, and attended a private Finnish-language grammar school in Turku. He was the older brother of stage and film actor Eero Kilpi. An avid reader, he studied at the University of Helsinki. He worked for more than twenty years at the University of Helsinki Library and other libraries in Helsinki before moving to Turku, where he became first a librarian at that city's municipal library, later, in November 1920, the first librarian of Turku's Finnish-language university. Kilpi's most important literary work was written during his years in Turku, near his family roots.

Alastalon salissa is a 900-page two-volume novel whose time-span covers a mere 6 hours of an October Thursday in 1866, and whose setting is the roughly 50 square metres of the Alastalo parlour as the richest men in Kustavi haggle over investing in the building of a barque. The surroundings were familiar to Kilpi from his childhood, as his father and father's stepfather were shipowners, and his relatives had played a key role in the development of Kustavi into an important home port for sailing ships.

The second and third volumes of the Archipelago series, Pitäjän pienempiä (The County's Littler Ones, short stories) and Kirkolle (To the Church Village, a novel), appeared in 1934 and 1937; they were followed by the collection of "swelling prose" Suljetuilla porteilla (At Closed Gates) in 1938. In 1938 he also began his final novel, Gulliverin matka Fantomimian mantereelle, translated by Douglas Robinson as Gulliver's Voyage to Phantomimia; it remained unfinished at his death in Turku, and was published posthumously by his literary executor in 1944.