Henry Parland at the Crossroads of Cultures

This monograph examines how the multifaceted, avant-garde oeuvre of Henry Parland (1908–1930) – a writer, critic, and Finland’s first semiotician, who lived in Finland and Lithuania while casting his gaze towards Sweden – has been received and reinterpreted across a span of one hundred years in the aforementioned cultures through diverse media. The study employs the theory of cultural memory developed by the cultural semiotician Juri Lotman. First, it presents and analyses the context of the writer’s life and work, devoting most attention to his non-fiction: criticism and ego documents. It investigates how the author lived and created, what topics were of interest to him, how he developed Finnish-Swedish and disseminated Lithuanian modernist and avant-garde ideas, and how he articulated a distinctive conception of creativity in his analyses of Swedish and Finland Swedish literature, American and Russian cinema, dance (ballet), Jewish theatre, and music (jazz). Second, the monograph explores how and in what forms the aforementioned cultures, perceived and reflected upon by Parland himself, at the intersection of the modernist and postmodernist epochs, respond to and resonate with his personal life and work. It investigates how the writer’s life and work is incorporated in cultural memory not only in academic texts, but also within those areas that interested Parland himself: word, sound, and image. This work also looks at how cultural memory is articulated in contemporary popular discourse, augmented reality mobile phone games, as well as in educational and bibliotherapeutic applications of Parland’s work.