Otto Wille Kuusinen began writing at an early age. As was the case with many of his contemporaries, the first outlet for the young poet was his school newspaper. At the end of the 1890s, he adopted the pseudonym Otto Näre to write for Oras, the newspaper of Jyväskylä Lyceum.

At the same time that Otto Näre was embarking on his literary career, the Grand Duchy of Finland was in turmoil. The end of the 1890s is known as a period of oppression, when the Russian government attempted to bring the Grand Duchy, accustomed to a high degree of autonomy, closer to the motherland through integratory measures. These measures were met with strong opposition, as the blossoming idea of national identities in Europe had also spread to Finland in the mid-1800s. There was talk of “national awakening,” and Otto Wille Kuusinen also took part in that movement. In 1900, the future undergraduate glorified the national poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg in a poem that was received with enthusiasm:

Mitä lausuis ruhtinaslaulaja,
jos nousis haudastansa
ja näkis kuin maani on murheessa
ja mykkänä miettivi kansa,
näkis miesten pettua purevan
ja vaimojen vaikeroivan
ja kuulis kaunihin Karjalan
soraäänin virsiä soivan?

Jos huutais pilvien pitäjä:
”Ylös sankari nurmen alta,
sun maassasi vilu on isäntä
ja valheella herran valta!”
Ja jos nousisi hän sekä riemuissaan
hänet kansa keskeensä kantais,
mitä tekisi hän, mitä lausuiskaan
ja min neuvon meille hän antais?

The works of the young Otto Wille Kuusinen are very much in keeping with the spirit of the time—neo-romantic, nationalistic and written in Finnish. Kuusinen admired the great Finnish poets Runeberg and Zacharias Topelius, and echoes of Kalevala are also evident in his own work.

Perhaps what is somewhat surprising is that the Bible was an important source of inspiration for the Marxist-Leninist in the making. Besides Finland and Runeberg, the other great love of his life was his future wife Saima Dahlström, and in his poetry Kuusinen struggles between the desire for romantic love and his sense of responsibility:

 

The poetically inclined student enrolled at Imperial Alexander University in the autumn of 1900, majoring in philosophy and minoring in aesthetics and art history. Kuusinen joined the Hämäläinen Osakunta student nation, and in his first year at university he already became a member of the editorial staff of Hälläpyörä, the student nation’s newspaper. It would appear that his poems also found an audience in the capital, as he was named the best poet in the student nation in the spring of 1901.

After the birth of his first daughter in the summer of that year, Kuusinen supported himself and his family as a journalist for the Jyväskylä based Suomalainen (‘Finnish’) newspaper. In 1904, Kuusinen became an assistant at the Työmies (‘Labourer’) newspaper and joined the Social Democratic Party of Finland.

Although his own works became more ideological than poetic, particularly after the general strike of 1905, Kuusinen remained deeply interested in art, a fact borne out by his friendship with a pioneer of Swedish modernism, Elmer Diktonius. Their friendship began at the end of the First World War, when Diktonius placed an advertisement in Työmies offering music lessons, and the future chairman of the Social Democratic Party became his student. Kuusinen and Diktonius remained in touch even after the Civil War, when Kuusinen had fled to the Soviet Union and Diktonius moved in revolutionary circles in Helsinki, Paris and London.

According to Olof Enckell, the biographer of Diktonius, Kuusinen had a strong influence on the radical poetry Diktonius wrote in his youth. Their friendship also seems to have served to moderate the views of Kuusinen when it came to language politics, an area in which he played little part.

Sources:

Sainio, Venla. Kuusinen, Otto Wille. Online publication of the National Biography. Accessed September 24, 2015.
Salminen, Vesa (ed.) Nuori Otto Ville Kuusinen 1881-1920 (‘Young Otto Ville Kuusinen 1881-1920’). K.J. Gummerus Osakeyhtiö. Jyväskylä 1970.
Uitto, Antero. Suomensyöjä Otto Wille Kuusinen (‘Otto Wille Kuusinen, Devourer of Finland’). Kustannusosakeyhtiö Paasilinna. Juva 2013.