Edith Södergran died at thirty-one, having published four volumes of poetry now considered foundational works of Nordic modernism. But after her death a mythology grew around her, and over time the myth replaced the person. Recent scholarship has sought to recover the whole woman beneath the icon and to read her poetry as the work of that person rather than as evidence for one or another of the legends built around her. The work of Agneta Rahikainen is particularly important to this project.⁴

Rahikainen uses a method known as biomythographical analysis⁵ to examine the life and myth of a subject. The exploration of the making of the Edith myth is fascinating but outside the scope of this essay. However, as part of this method, Rahikainen provides a fact-based, nuanced understanding of Edith’s life. This, along with a number of other sources, has formed the basis of this biographical sketch.

Edith Södergran died in poverty and illness. But that was not how things started.

Edith was born on April 4, 1892, in St. Petersburg,⁶ the capital of the Russian Empire. When she was a small child, her parents moved with her to the Karelian village of Raivola⁷ in the Russian Empire’s Grand Duchy of Finland, only a two-hour train ride from St. Petersburg.⁸ Her maternal grandfather, Gabriel Holmroos, purchased a villa there for them.⁹

The Karelian Isthmus before 1917 was not a remote wilderness. Around 100,000 summer guests travelled from a variety of places every year to the region’s forests and lakes,¹⁰ and the isthmus was famous for the almost 600 ornate wooden villas with their painted balconies, verandas, and gardens, many owned by Russians. The Södergran villa was one of these, with twelve rooms and servants.¹¹ In her letters Edith later describes the lilacs, the roses, the blue of the nearby lake, and a view of the sea.¹² It was a summer community in easy reach of one of the great cultural capitals of Europe, and the Södergran family was firmly part of it.

Edith’s father had no head for business, and her mother Helena’s family money was key to the family’s thriving. Gabriel Holmroos was a prosperous St. Petersburg foundry owner, and when he died in 1896, the family received an inheritance from him.¹³

In 1902, Helena and Edith moved to a St. Petersburg apartment so that Edith could attend the girls’ division of the prestigious Deutsche Hauptschule zu St. Petri, known as the Petrischule.¹⁴ Edith attended from 1902 through 1908. This was not a boarding-school arrangement but a mother and daughter sharing a city apartment, returning to Raivola for summers. Edith’s father, Matts, remained behind.

The Petrischule was not a minor institution. The education Edith received there was rigorous and cosmopolitan: instruction moved between German, French, and Russian; she was among the best in her class, which included girls from German, Russian, Finnish, Scandinavian, and Jewish families. She left fluent in German, French, Russian, and English, alongside her native Finland-Swedish.¹⁵ She would later describe German as her best language.¹⁶

Edith attended the Petrischule in the St. Petersburg of Diaghilev, Pavlova, and Nijinsky, while the Silver Age of Russian poetry¹⁷ was taking shape around her — Blok and Bely chief among its poets. The city teemed with Symbolist journals, literary cafés, and avant-garde manifestos. Surrounded by that milieu, she wrote her earliest poems primarily in German, over 200 of them between January 1907 and early 1909 in a wax-cloth notebook,¹⁸ switching exclusively to Swedish from October 1908.

In 1904, Matts was diagnosed with tuberculosis.¹⁹ In May 1906, he was admitted to Nummela sanatorium, Finland’s most distinguished tuberculosis facility.²⁰ Eventually he was sent home incurably ill and died at home in Raivola in October 1907. Edith was fifteen. She continued with her schooling in St. Petersburg, but by 1908 early signs of tuberculosis had appeared in Edith herself, and on January 25, 1909, she was admitted to Nummela,²¹ her hopes of graduating and attending university put on hold.

Tuberculosis was considered a virtual death sentence at the time: one-third of people died within a year, two-thirds within five years, and eighty per cent within ten years.²² She had ended up at the same institution where her father had been treated.

Between January 1909 and May 1911, she was under treatment at Nummela. That twenty-seven-month span was not continuous confinement: sixteen months of inpatient bouts, interspersed with just over eleven months at home. Seriously ill, but not locked away for years.²³

Despite being surrounded by the dying in Nummela, she found a socially active environment where she made lasting friendships and followed the wider world closely.²⁴ She sat a preliminary examination towards university matriculation in 1910, probably in Helsinki.²⁵ In October 1911, she and her mother left for Switzerland, moving first to the Alt-Sanatorium in Arosa, then in January 1912 to the famous sanatorium at Davos-Dorf,²⁶ high in the Alps and one of the most celebrated tuberculosis cure centres in Europe, where her intellectual formation as a poet continued even as the disease was ever present.

At Davos she encountered the radical Expressionist journal Der Sturm;²⁷ read Swinburne, Dickens, and Whitman in English;²⁸ studied Italian; and visited art museums in Zurich, Munich, and Berlin on the journeys between Switzerland and Finland, as well as, reportedly, Milan and Florence with her mother.²⁹ She took English lessons from a young Australian woman while tutoring the woman in German.³⁰

It was also at Davos that her feminist political consciousness found expression. In a study notebook titled “English Compositions,” the twenty-year-old Edith wrote an essay called “Women’s Suffrage,” arguing that it was necessary to work for women’s rights in all countries, that women should claim their rights, and that they should realize they “do not only exist for the pleasure of men.”³¹

She first came back home to Raivola in May 1913, by then almost entirely well, the bacilli gone from her sputum. But she returned to Davos that October, and then went home for good in March 1914, when her doctor pronounced her as good as recovered.³²

What followed immediately was not the life of an invalid. In 1915, she travelled to Helsinki to seek responses to her work from leading literary figures, going directly to the poet Arvid Mörne and the academic Gunnar Castrén, approaching them with confidence.³³ In mid-June 1916, she sent her manuscript to Runar Schildt, the literary director at Schildts publishing house. He wrote to the publisher that her best poems were “extraordinarily strong and suggestive in mood.”³⁴ When Dikter appeared that November, she had been living as a recovered person for well over two years. The book did not emerge from a sickbed.

The reviews came, and they were more divided than the mythology suggests. The ridicule, particularly the rechristening of the collection as Dårdikter (“mad poems”), came from the provincial press, most notoriously Vasabladet. The literary press was a different matter. Dagens Press, Hufvudstadsbladet, Nya Argus, and Finsk Tidskrift all reviewed the collection positively.³⁵ Altogether Dikter received nine reviews, a remarkable amount of attention for a poetry debut.³⁶

She also had meaningful support from within the Finland-Swedish literary community: Arvid Mörne, Hjalmar Procopé, Runar Schildt, Bertel Gripenberg,³⁷ and others were collegial allies, whatever reservations some of them held about the work’s radicalism. The image of a poet universally mocked and entirely alone belongs to a later mythology.

In May 1917, she suffered her first lung hemorrhage; the disease, quiet since Davos had sent her home recovered three years before, was stirring again. But it was not the collapse it might sound like. The hemorrhages that followed were not severe, and she recovered from each; her health would hold, more or less, for nearly three more years until a severe bout of the Spanish flu in 1920.³⁸ She was still well enough to make an extended trip to Helsinki that September, and she did not wait passively for the literary world to come to her.

Over several weeks she met Runar Schildt, the critic Ruth Hedvall, the critic and librarian Olaf Homén, the poet Hjalmar Procopé, the Finnish writers Eino Leino and Juhani Aho, and the critic Hans Ruin, among others. She cold-called the writer L. Onerva by telephone: “This is Edith Södergran — don’t you know me? Have you not read my poems?”³⁹

The novelist and poet Jarl Hemmer described his evening with her as “one of the most beautiful memories of my life.” Hemmer also said, “She found us starchy, reserved, impersonal… she had a personality that was too extraordinary, too highly charged with her solitary exaltation for her contact with us to be even a little fruitful.”⁴⁰

Homén, meeting her in his office at the university library, noted specifically that she did not look particularly ill.⁴¹ Ruin recorded her visit in his diary the very next morning:⁴² she had appeared at his door at nearly half past nine on a Sunday, fixed him with a prolonged stare across his sitting room, and when he asked what she had thought of his review of her work, she told him he was “a profound psychologist” and that no one had yet so accurately captured her nature. She left abruptly when he said something that displeased her. This is the portrait of a socially audacious young woman on a deliberate campaign, not one close to dying.

But then, world events overtook the quiet bourgeois life of Edith Södergran.

In October 1917, the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, and the Russian and Ukrainian bonds she and her mother depended on soon became worthless.⁴³ In January 1918, the Finnish Civil War began and immediately arrived at their doorstep: the whole of Kivinebb parish was occupied by Red Guards from Raivola, and fighting moved through the area until the White forces won and the war ended in May. The newly independent Finland then closed the Finnish-Russian border along the Systerbäck River, and Raivola, previously a lively railway junction two hours from Petrograd, became a dead end.⁴⁴ The summer guests vanished. The villagers lost their livelihoods. This all happened in a matter of months.

For the Södergrans the loss of the family fortune ended up being the most consequential of those events. From 1917 until her death on Midsummer’s Day 1923, the story is one of decline in her finances and her living situation. Even so, between 1918 and 1920, she published three more collections of poetry, Septemberlyran, Rosenaltaret, and Framtidens skugga, and one of aphorisms, Brokiga iakttagelser.⁴⁵

On New Year’s Eve 1918, before a single review of Septemberlyran had appeared, Edith published her manifesto “Individual Art” in Dagens Press as a letter to the editor. It opened with “This book is not intended for the general public, still less for exalted intellectual circles, but only for those few individuals that stand closest to the frontier of the future.” It closed with “I hope I shall not find myself alone with the great thing I have to bring forward.”⁴⁶

This caused a local controversy as the literary community lined up on either side of the debate over whether she was brilliant or insane. The criticism is sometimes portrayed as a gendered discussion because here was a woman speaking up against the literary establishment, which was mostly men. But the picture is more complicated than that framing allows.

One of the most consequential reviews came from Hagar Olsson in Dagens Press on January 11, 1919.⁴⁷ Olsson, a woman who was already one of the most important literary critics in the country at twenty-five, called Edith a “cheap variety-show performer” making propaganda for herself, criticized her “intelligence-aristocratic attitude,” and found “unbearably banal traits” in certain poems. The same review called the book “a find,” and credited her with “an unusually rich and creative intuition” and “an intellect unusual for our conditions.”

That hostile review became the unlikely beginning of an important relationship in Edith’s increasingly solitary life. Olsson corresponded with her over a number of years and met her in person five times, though sometimes for just a day.⁴⁸ Olsson became one of those rare individuals Edith had called for in her manifesto, someone who recognized what Edith was doing, even when Olsson couldn’t fully meet the demands Edith placed on the friendship. Elmer Diktonius found her too, and both writers supported her in print, in correspondence, and quietly in other ways as her circumstances worsened.

They worsened considerably. She and her mother sold off possessions to live. From 1920, her health declined in a way it did not recover from. She refused all forms of hospital care. Through all of it her mind kept moving: from the Nietzsche she had absorbed seriously in 1918, to Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, to the New Testament and the Psalms, which she read with the same intensity she had brought to everything else.⁴⁹

Edith died on June 24, 1923, Midsummer’s Day, in Raivola.⁵⁰ Some thirty neighbours and friends attended the burial.⁵¹ The last letter she sent, to Diktonius,⁵² ended: “Forget me not now, Strong Storm. I’ve had one card from Hagar, a field of narcissus at Les Avants. This is a really hard time for me now. Weak. I can’t stand light or noise.”

Hirshfield had it right: “they will miss the wrong woman.” That invented Södergran is largely the one who has been promoted for the last century. The hardships of her final years were real. But this is also a woman with a cosmopolitan education in one of Europe’s cultural capitals. When Dikter appeared in 1916, she had been well for over two years, the family was still prosperous, Raivola was a lively junction two hours from Petrograd, and she was engaging directly with the literati of Finland. She kept publishing after Dikter, producing three collections and a book of aphorisms even as her circumstances collapsed. Far from being universally ridiculed, she had strong supporters from within the literary establishment. She was an audacious visionary but also a difficult personality. This moves us closer to an understanding of the right woman.

3. Jane Hirshfield, “It Was Like This: You Were Happy,” in After (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 92.

4. Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014.

5. From the English-language summary “The Poet and Her Apostles,” Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 245.

6. “Edith Södergran, född 4 april 1892 i S:t Petersburg.” [Edith Södergran, born April 4, 1892 in St. Petersburg.] — Witt-Brattström, “Edith Södergran,” Litteraturbanken, 2011, p. 1.

7. “Familjen bodde året om i Raivola fram till att dottern inledde sin skolgång.” [The family lived year-round in Raivola until the daughter began her schooling.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 22.

8. “År 1900 kom det 18 tåg per dygn till Raivola från Petersburg. Tågfärden tog två timmar.” [In 1900 eighteen trains a day ran to Raivola from St. Petersburg. The train journey took two hours.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 122.

9. “Köpebrev i kopia över Gabriel Holmroos inköp av hus och mark i Raivola 1894.” [Bill of sale documenting Gabriel Holmroos’s purchase of house and land in Raivola, 1894.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 261 (archival reference).

10. “Före första världskriget uppgick sommargästernas antal på näset till omkring 100 000. […] 1908 fanns där 574 villor, varav 463 ägdes av icke-finländare, främst ryssar men också tyskar och balter.” [Before the First World War the number of summer guests on the isthmus reached around 100,000. […] In 1908 there were 574 villas there, of which 463 were owned by non-Finns — mainly Russians but also Germans and Balts.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 122.

11. The detail of the Södergran villa — its twelve rooms and servants — is drawn from David McDuff’s introduction to Complete Poems, p. 9.

12. Edith Södergran, The Poet Who Created Herself: Selected Letters of Edith Södergran, trans. Silvester Mazzarella (Norwich: Norvik Press, 2015), p. 55 (“the lake is so blue”), p. 58 (“from Suomenkylä hill you can see the sea”), p. 59 (“the lilacs are in flower now, I hope you’ll stay until the roses”). Södergran is using these details to entice Olsson to visit.

13. The family’s reliance on the maternal grandfather’s fortune is documented in Witt-Brattström, “Edith Södergran,” Litteraturbanken, 2011, p. 1. For “foundry owner” and the 1896 death date: Gabriel Holmroos’s Geni profile records his occupation as Gjuterimästare (foundry master) and cites Max Engman’s Pietarinsuomalaiset; Encyclopedia.com corroborates with “ironmaster.” — “Holmroos, Gabriel Michelsson (1824–1896),” Geni, https://www.geni.com/people/Gabriel-Holmroos/6000000079397328050. “Södergran, Edith (1892–1923),” Women in World History, Encyclopedia.com.

14. “Gick 1902–1908 i tyskspråkiga ‘Höhere Mädchenschule’, flickläroverket vid Deutsche Hauptschule zu S:t Petri, S:t Petersburg.” [Attended 1902–1908 the German-language ‘Höhere Mädchenschule’, the girls’ upper secondary at Deutsche Hauptschule zu St. Petri, St. Petersburg.] — Witt-Brattström, “Edith Södergran,” Litteraturbanken, 2011, p. 1.

15. On Södergran being among the best in her class, with classmates from German, Russian, Finnish, Scandinavian, and Jewish families, see Mier-Cruz, Edith Södergran’s Modern Virgin, 2013, p. 16 (drawing on Witt-Brattström, p. 30).

16. On German as her best language, see Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, pp. 7 and 140, citing Södergran’s own statement “Tyskan är mitt bästa språk.”

17. On the Silver Age of Russian poetry and its leading figures — Blok, Bely — see “Silver Age of Russian Poetry,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Age_of_Russian_Poetry.

18. “I ett vaxdukshäfte har hon tecknat ner 238 poem, daterade mellan den 29 januari 1907 och den januari 1909 […]. 206 av dikterna i Vaxdukshäftet är på skolspråket tyska, 27 på svenska, fyra på franska och en på ryska. […] Från och med den 3 oktober 1908 är de enbart på svenska.” [In a wax-cloth notebook she set down 238 poems, dated between January 29, 1907 and January 1909 […]. 206 of the poems in the Vaxdukshäftet are in her school-language German, 27 in Swedish, four in French, and one in Russian. […] From October 3, 1908 onward they are exclusively in Swedish.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 24.

19. The account of Matts Södergran’s illness in this paragraph — diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1904, admitted to Nummela in May 1906, sent home incurably ill, and dead in October 1907 — follows “Edith Södergran,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Södergran.

20. On the sanatorium’s standing, Rahikainen describes Nummela as “det bästa lungsjukhuset i Finland” [the best lung hospital in Finland] — Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 26. On the sanatorium as a social and lived environment, see Heini Hakosalo, “The Walled-in Illness: The Twentieth-Century Finnish Tuberculosis Sanatorium as Lived Space,” in Lived Institutions as History of Experience, ed. J. Annola, H. Lindberg, and P. Markkola (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38956-6_9.

21. “Edith Södergran skrevs in på Nummela lungsanatorium den 25 januari 1909, bara några veckor efter att hon fick sin diagnos.” [Edith Södergran was admitted to Nummela lung sanatorium on January 25, 1909, just a few weeks after receiving her diagnosis.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 25.

22. The mortality figures for untreated tuberculosis — roughly one-third dead within a year, two-thirds within five years, and some eighty per cent within ten — are drawn from early-1900s data for the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Denmark. See Hannah Ritchie and Fiona Spooner, “Once a Leading Killer, Tuberculosis Is Now Rare in Rich Countries — Here’s How It Happened,” Our World in Data, June 2, 2025, https://ourworldindata.org/tuberculosis-history-decline.

23. “Edith Södergran var intagen på Nummela från den 25 januari 1909 fram till den 4 maj 1911, kortare intervaller vistades hon hemma. Tillsammans blev det 480 dygn, alltså ett år och fyra månader, en betydligt längre tid än medelvårdtiden på fem månader.” [Edith Södergran was an inpatient at Nummela from January 25, 1909 until May 4, 1911, with shorter intervals at home. Together this came to 480 days — a year and four months, considerably longer than the average inpatient stay of five months.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 26.

24. “Södergran får fler vänner, förutom Siiri Böök och Salme Murrik, även Helmi Kesti och Julia Hämäläinen.” [Södergran gains more friends — besides Siiri Böök and Salme Murrik, also Helmi Kesti and Julia Hämäläinen.] Julia Hämäläinen is described as a fellow patient and friend of many years. — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, pp. 25–26 (Hämäläinen, p. 160).

25. “Tenterade 1910 för rätten att avlägga studentexamen, troligen vid en skola i Helsingfors.” [Sat the 1910 examination for the right to take the matriculation exam, probably at a school in Helsinki.] — Witt-Brattström, “Edith Södergran,” Litteraturbanken, 2011, p. 1.

26. “[…] beslöt hon sig för att tillsammans med sin mor resa till Alt-Sanatorium i Arosa i Schweiz. I januari 1912 flyttar Södergran till sanatoriet Davos-Dorf.” [[…] she decided to travel with her mother to the Alt-Sanatorium in Arosa, Switzerland. In January 1912 Södergran moved to the Davos-Dorf sanatorium.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 26.

27. “Det är troligt att hon här stiftar bekantskap med den radikala expressionistiska tidskriften Der Sturm, som utkom varje vecka sedan 1910.” [It is likely that here she became acquainted with the radical Expressionist journal Der Sturm, which had been appearing weekly since 1910.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 27.

28. Introduction to Edith Södergran, The Poet Who Created Herself: Selected Letters of Edith Södergran, p. 9

29. On her study of Italian, her wish to read Dickens and Swinburne in the original — “under Davostiden läser hon åtminstone Dickens Bleak House” (during the Davos period she reads at least Dickens’s Bleak House) — and the art-museum visits in Berlin, Munich, and Zurich (“där de besöker konstmuseer”), see Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, pp. 27–28; the further visits to Milan and Florence are Tideström’s claim, which Rahikainen notes “har inte kunnat verifieras” (could not be verified), p. 28, citing Gunnar Tideström, Edith Södergran (1991), p. 59. On Whitman, see McDuff, introduction to Complete Poems, p. 21

30. “En australiensisk fröken ger henne lektioner i engelska och hon hjälper i sin tur miss Jenkins med tyskan och väljer lämplig litteratur åt henne från hotellbiblioteket.” [An Australian woman gives her English lessons, and in turn she helps Miss Jenkins with her German and selects suitable literature for her from the hotel library.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 27.

31. “Studiehäftet ‘English Compositions’ innehåller korta essäer, roliga historier och diktamenstexter […]. Hon skriver i essän ‘Women’s Suffrage’ om varför hon tycker det är nödvändigt att arbeta för kvinnors rättigheter i alla länder. Den tjugoåriga Södergran skriver att kvinnor ska kräva sina rättigheter och att de borde inse att de inte enbart finns till för männens nöje.” [The study notebook ‘English Compositions’ contains short essays, amusing stories and dictation texts […]. In her essay ‘Women’s Suffrage’ she writes about why she thinks it is necessary to work for women’s rights in all countries. The twenty-year-old Södergran writes that women should claim their rights and that they should realize they do not only exist for the pleasure of men.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 27.

32. On the arc of her recovery — home to Raivola in May 1913, by then almost entirely well, “inte längre några tuberkulosbaciller” (no tuberculosis bacilli left in her sputum); “återvänder till Davos i oktober och stannar där fram till mars 1914” (returns to Davos in October and stays there until March 1914); and sent home that spring “så gott som återställd” (as good as recovered) — see Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 28.

33. On the 1915 journey to Helsinki to seek responses from Arvid Mörne and Gunnar Castrén — “1915, beger hon sig till Helsingfors för att söka respons för sitt skapande hos några författare och akademiker” (in 1915 she travels to Helsinki to seek a response to her work from some writers and academics) — and the dispatch of the manuscript to Runar Schildt — “I mitten av juni 1916 … skickar hon ett häfte dikter till författaren Runar Schildt” (in mid-June 1916 … she sends a booklet of poems to the writer Runar Schildt) — see Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 29.

34. “Runar Schildt skrev att Södergrans bästa dikter var ‘utomordentligt starka och suggestiva i stämningen’ och att man trots alla ‘vidunderligheter’ ändå hade ‘förnimmelsen af någonting absolut äkta, genomlefvadt och genomlidit’.” [Runar Schildt wrote that Södergran’s best poems were ‘extraordinarily strong and suggestive in mood’, and that despite all their ‘marvels’ one still had ‘the sense of something absolutely genuine, lived-through and suffered-through’.] — Martin Welander, “Om dikter och papperspriser,” Hufvudstadsbladet, November 4, 2023, https://www.hbl.fi/2023-11-04/om-dikter-och-papperspriser/.

35. “Vid debuten 1916 med Dikter avhånad i landsortspressen (ex: ‘Dårdikter’, Vasabladet), dock positivt recenserad i Dagens Press, Hufvudstadsbladet, Nya Argus och Finsk Tidskrift.” [At her 1916 debut with Dikter, ridiculed in the provincial press (e.g. ‘mad poems’, Vasabladet), but positively reviewed in Dagens Press, Hufvudstadsbladet, Nya Argus and Finsk Tidskrift.] — Witt-Brattström, “Edith Södergran,” Litteraturbanken, 2011, p. 1.

36. “Hon får nio recensioner, ett raljerande kåseri och en försvarande insändare i tidningspressen, vilket var och fortfarande är mycket uppmärksamhet för en poetisk debut.” [She receives nine reviews, one satirical column, and one defending letter to the editor in the press, which was, and still is, a lot of attention for a poetry debut.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 30.

37. “Dock visst stöd från finlandssvenska författarkolleger (Hjalmar Procopé, Runar Schildt, Bertel Gripenberg, Arvid Mörne m fl).” [Some support, however, from Finland-Swedish writer colleagues (Hjalmar Procopé, Runar Schildt, Bertel Gripenberg, Arvid Mörne, among others).] — Witt-Brattström, “Edith Södergran,” Litteraturbanken, 2011, p. 1.

38. “I slutet av maj drabbades hon av sin första lungblödning” [at the end of May she suffered her first lung hemorrhage] (p. 33). On the years that followed: “Edith Södergrans hälsa är ganska stabil under flera år även om hon haft tre lungblödningar som synbarligen inte var särskilt allvarliga. Från samtliga återhämtar hon sig ganska snabbt” [her health remained fairly stable for several years, despite three lung hemorrhages that were apparently not especially serious, from each of which she recovered fairly quickly] (p. 46). — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014.

39. “Det här är Edith Södergran – känner Ni mig inte? Har Ni inte läst mina dikter?” [This is Edith Södergran — don’t you know me? Have you not read my poems?] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 31.

40. The Hemmer recollections are quoted from David McDuff’s introduction to Complete Poems, p. 29.

41. “[H]an tycker inte att hon ser särskilt sjuk ut.” [He does not think she looks particularly ill.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 31.

42. From Hans Ruin’s diary, written the morning after Södergran appeared unannounced at his door — her words on reading his review of her work: “Ni måtte vara en djup psykolog. Ingen har ännu som ni bespeglat mitt väsen.” [You must be a profound psychologist. No one has yet reflected my being as you have.] — Hans Ruin’s diary, October 1, 1917, quoted in Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 32.

43. Södergran herself describes being cash-strapped with “Capital tied up in Ukrainian and Russian bonds, salvation depends on the fall of Bolshevism,” in a letter to Hagar Olsson of January 26, 1919; Rahikainen confirms the holdings as “ryska och ukrainska obligationer” (Russian and Ukrainian bonds), rendered worthless when the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917. — Edith Södergran, The Poet Who Created Herself: Selected Letters of Edith Södergran, p. 33; Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 33.

44. On the war’s arrival in her home district — “I januari 1918 ockuperades hela Kivinebb socken av bolsjevikiska rödgardister från Raivola” (in January 1918, the whole of Kivinebb parish was occupied by Bolshevik Red Guards from Raivola) — the White victory in May (“den 16 maj tog kriget officiellt slut”), and the closing of the Finnish-Russian border along the Systerbäck in May 1918, after which “nu blev Raivola och Kivinebb socken en sista finländsk utpost” (Raivola and Kivinebb parish became a last Finnish outpost), see Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, pp. 33–34

45. Witt-Brattström lists the later collections: Septemberlyran (1918), Rosenaltaret (1919), the aphorism collection Brokiga iakttagelser (1919), and Framtidens skugga (1920). — Witt-Brattström, “Edith Södergran,” Litteraturbanken, 2011, p. 1.

46. The “Individual Art” manifesto, published in Dagens Press on New Year’s Eve 1918, is quoted from Edith Södergran, The Poet Who Created Herself: Selected Letters of Edith Södergran, p. 24.

47. Hagar Olsson’s review of Septemberlyran, Dagens Press, January 11, 1919, as quoted by Rahikainen: “Hon kallade henne för en ‘billig tingeltangelmakare’ som bara gjorde propaganda för sig själv. […] Hon tog starkt avstånd från hennes ‘intelligensaristokratiska attityd’. […] Hon talar också om vissa dikters ‘olidligt banala drag’. […] Å andra sidan menar Olsson att boken i sig är ett fynd och att författaren har en ‘ovanligt rik och skapande intuition’ och ett ‘för våra förhållanden ovanligt intellekt’.” [Olsson called her a ‘cheap variety-show performer’ who merely made propaganda for herself. […] She strongly objected to her ‘intelligence-aristocratic attitude’. […] She also speaks of certain poems’ ‘unbearably banal traits’. […] On the other hand, Olsson holds that the book itself is a find, and that the author has ‘an unusually rich and creative intuition’ and ‘an intellect unusual for our conditions’.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 39.

48. “Olsson träffade Södergran bara fem gånger personligen.” [Olsson met Södergran only five times in person.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 145.

49. On the sale of household goods, see Witt-Brattström, “Edith Södergran,” Litteraturbanken, 2011, p. 1 (“försäljning av lösöre”). On her refusal of care, Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 55: “Södergran sedan 1914 vägrat alla former av sjukhusvård” (Södergran had, since 1914, refused all forms of hospital care). On the Spanish flu and the decline, p. 46: “i januari 1920 får hon spanska sjukan och ligger länge sjuk i feber” (in January 1920 she fell ill with the Spanish flu and lay feverish for a long time). Her Nietzschean period of 1918 and her reading of Steiner are noted by Witt-Brattström (p. 1); on the turn to Christianity in the autumn of 1920, Rahikainen, p. 49: “Hon börjar intressera sig för kristendomen och läser Nya testamentet och Psaltaren flitigt” (she begins to take an interest in Christianity and reads the New Testament and the Psalter diligently) — a pull, after Jan Häll, between the nature-philosophy Steiner could give and the religion of feeling he could not.

50. “Avled försvagad av sin TBC midsommardagen 1923 i Raivola, Karelska näset.” [She died, weakened by tuberculosis, on Midsummer’s Day 1923 in Raivola, Karelian Isthmus.] — Witt-Brattström, “Edith Södergran,” Litteraturbanken, 2011, p. 1.

51. “[J]ordfästningen skedde i närvaro av ett trettiotal grannar och vänner.” [The funeral took place in the presence of some thirty neighbours and friends.] — Rahikainen, Poeten och hennes apostlar, 2014, p. 56.

52. The last letter, to Elmer Diktonius, is quoted from Edith Södergran, The Poet Who Created Herself: Selected Letters of Edith Södergran, p. 156.