ABSTRACT
Riikka Rossi focuses on rural decadence in two major novels by the 1939 Nobel Laureate F. E. Sillanpää, Hurskas kurjuus (Sacred Misery, 1919) and Nuorena Nukkunut (Fallen Asleep While Young, 1931). These works represent variants of “spiritual naturalism,” which builds on a combination of primitivism, religious and nature spirituality. The naturalistic documentation of biological processes opens onto mystical life forces and evokes spiritual emotions, a sense of sacredness and a union of souls, bliss and rapture. The article illustrates the entwinement of the spiritual and the primitive by analyzing two recurrent topics in Sillanpää’s works: death and the white Nordic summer night, and how they convert into tropes of decadence.
