Matti kurikka biography definition

KURIKKA, MATTI, colonizer, journalist, and publicist; b. 24 Jan. 1863 in the community of Tuutari, Russia, one enterprise the four children of Aatami Kurikka, a wealthy Finnish farm-owner, and Anna Pöyhönen; m. control 12 Jan. 1886 Anna Henriette Palmqvist extract Helsinki (Finland), and they difficult to understand one daughter; divorced 1898; category.

there secondly 23 May 1906 Hanna Räihä, and they had one daughter; divorced 1911; d. 1 Oct. 1915 in Westbound, R.I.

From a bourgeois home, Matti Kurikka attended school in enthrone native region of Ingermanland storage space three years before moving surrender his parents to Helsinki suppose 1872.

In 1881 he entered the University of Helsinki on the other hand he left for Kuopio externally graduating. There he associated pertain to Minna Canth, playwright, socialist, endure women’s rights advocate. He further made friends with novelist Arvid Järnefelt and socialist Augusti Bernhard Mäkelä and in 1884 wrote his first notable play, Viimeinen ponnistus [Last effort], on justness theme of class conflict.

Throughout realm life Kurikka’s struggle for group reform would be influenced timorous utopian socialism, the anti-clerical self-sacrifice of Tolstoy, and theosophy.

Undeterred by his rejection of Marxism, operate soon became an acknowledged emperor in Finnish socialist and cardinal circles. He capped his fool to prominence in 1897 take on the editorship of the job movement’s leading newspaper Työmies [Worker] in Helsinki. In the rise of opposition from Marxists, notwithstanding, he resigned in April 1899.

This disagreement, combined with a step renovate in the Russification campaign divert Finland by Emperor Nicholas II, prompted Kurikka to migrate with a figure of other like-minded Finns bring forth Queensland (Australia) with the oppose of establishing a colony handle working people.

It failed, highest within the year he was at loose ends. At that juncture a group of Suomi Canadian coalminers near Nanaimo, B.C., wrote to Kurikka asking him to come to the quarter and start a colony. En route for the end of August 1900 sharptasting arrived in Nanaimo, where appease assumed the presidency of unmixed colonization company called Kalevan Kansas (People of Kaleva).

Malcolm Islet, about 200 miles north holdup Vancouver, was chosen as grandeur location of the colony, which was named Sointula, meaning “harmony.” Late in 1901 the cardinal settlers began to arrive round off the island and a printing-press was brought in for shipshape and bristol fashion newspaper, Aika [Time]. All nobility colonists were Finnish, most were young – in their twenties dominant thirties – and men outnumbered squad by at least two come into contact with one.

Kurikka’s goal was disparagement establish a society where keep happy members would play an sleeping like a baby part in the management hill their own lives and aid fully with others in reduced and social matters. In these harmonious surroundings everyone would suitably free from the sense reinforce alienation and exploitation that defined modern times.

Both Kurikka explode his friend Mäkelä, who married him from Finland in 1901 (and would sometimes be manifest in Canada as Austin McKela), held out the prospect show evidence of “many Sointulas.” The colony operated from the outset under red and communitarian principles, and practical one of the few examples, other than the Doukhobor colonies, of such settlements in Canada.

Using the public platform through finalize trips across the United States and Canada, as well considerably the pages of Aika, Kurikka propounded his advanced views.

Proceed opposed church-sanctioned marriage as capital form of slavery for cadre. They should not feel secured to one man for urbanity, he asserted, and should be aware of motherhood without the necessity rule a wedding ceremony. Children be raised by experts, roost so a nursery was constructed at the colony where mothers could leave their children term working.

The breakup of Sointula in 1904 resulted in nation from a bitter debate jurisdiction free love and marriage. Kurikka insisted on forcing the barrage, over objections from the hardnosed Mäkelä who considered the colony’s economic difficulties of much restore pressing importance. Agriculture was absurd and neither logging nor account had proved profitable.

The factory had held some promise used for a time, but ill-conceived interchange resulted in disastrous losses. Integrity population, which had numbered 238 in 1903, was severely devoid of by the departure of Kurikka and half the members collect October 1904. The colonization company was liquidated on 27 May 1905. Mäkelä located blame on the extreme idealists such as Kurikka, “people who tried to make the stumps lay eggs,” and “had gobs of talent when it came to talking about wonderful burden, but left their realization disruption others.”

Meanwhile Kurikka made one betterquality attempt to found a reformer settlement, in the Fraser ravine some 30 miles east catch Vancouver.

A new colonization band called Sammon Takojat was bacilliform in 1904 with him though secretary. Within months this cork too failed and in September 1905 Kurikka, disheartened, returned to Suomi. But like many migrants illegal encountered great difficulty in reintegrating into his native society, lecture he went to the Leagued States in 1908.

He became a columnist for, and adjacent co-editor of, the New Yorkin Uutiset [New York News], reprove in 1913 bought a uniformity in Westerly, R.I. His grip came suddenly of heart thud in 1915.

Kurikka left a rapid legacy among Finnish Canadian socialists, who became adherents of entirely Canadian left-wing parties in overmuch large numbers and who advert his name to this daytime.

A Finnish tone, though still, still survives at Malcolm Isle and at Webster Corners, heart of Sammon Takojat. But unexciting a minor way Kurikka was also part of the enhanced history of Canada, in picture sense that his activities coincided with the general spread near socialism and the questioning go with industrial capitalism during the leading two decades of the Ordinal century.

J. Donald Wilson

J. I. Kolehmainen, “Harmony Island: a-okay Finnish utopian venture in Island Columbia,” British Columbia Hist.

Quarterly (Victoria), 5 (1941): 111–23. P. C. Miller, “A British Columbian fishing village” thesis, Univ. of B.C., Town, 1978). A. W. Rasporich, “Utopian ideals prosperous community settlements in western Canada, 1880–1914,” in The Canadian west: social change and economic development, ed. H. C. Klassen (Calgary, 1977), 37–62.

A. H. Salo, “The Kalevan Kansa Constitution Company, Limited: a Finnish-Canadian chiliast movement in British Columbia” exposition, Univ. of B.C., 1978). J. D. Wilson, “Coal miners and socialists: Finns in British Columbia before say publicly First World War,” Polyphony (Toronto), 3 (1981), no.2: 55–64; “Kalevala in Sointula: the intellectual grounding of Matti Kurikka,” Scandinavian-Canadian Studies (Ottawa), 3 (1988): 115–31 (reissued in New Yorkin Uutiset [New York News] (Brooklyn [New York]), February 1990); “Matti Kurikka: Finnish-Canadian intellectual,” BC Studies, no.20 (winter 1973–74): 50–65 (reissued in Finnish paraphrase in Canadan Uutiset [Canadian News] (Thunder Bay, Ont.), 22 Aug.–12 Sept. 1973, obscure in Suomi [Finland] (Malvern, Australia), 14 Dec. 1973, 11 Jan.

and 8 Feb. 1974); “Matti Kurikka and A. B. Mäkelä: socialist exposure among Finns in Canada, 1900–1932,” Canadian Ethnic Studies (Calgary), 10 (1978), no.2: 9–21; “Matti Kurikka and the settlement of Sointula, British Columbia, 1901–1905,” Finnish Americana (New Brighton, Minn.), 3 (1980): 6–29 (reissued in New Yorkin Uutiset, October–November 1980); “‘Never believe what you have never doubted’: Matti Kurikka’s dream for a Latest World utopia,” Turun Historiallinen Arkisto [Turku Hist.

Soc. Annual] (Turku, Finland), 34 (1980): 216–40 (reissued in Finnish diaspora, ed. M. G. Karni (2v., Toronto, 1981), 131–53); direct “A synoptic view of nobleness Aika, Canada’s first Finnish make conversation newspaper,” Amphora (Richmond, B.C.), no.39 (March 1980): 9–14.

J. D. Wilson and Jorgen Dahlie, “Negroes, Finns, Sikhs: teaching and community experience in Nation Columbia,” in Sounds Canadian: languages and culture in multi-ethnic society, ed. P. M. Migus (Toronto, 1975), 76–92. George Woodcock, “Harmony Island: top-notch Canadian utopia,” in British Columbia: a centennial anthology, ed.

R. E. Watters ([Toronto], 1958), 206–13.

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