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Jan Hall. Vagen til landet som icke ar: En essa om Edith Sodergran och Rudof Steiner.

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Jan Hall. Vagen til landet som icke ar: En essa om Edith Sodergran och Rudof Steiner. Helsingfors: SLSF; Stockholm: Atlantis, 2006. Pp. 229.

The author, a historian-of-ideas, states at the outset (14) that he is not an anthroposophist; no matter: he is completely at home in the labyrinthine thought of Steiner (1861-1925), the creator of the international anthroposophical movement, "knowledge produced by man's higher self," and active to this very day in numerous Waldorf schools. Sodergran was consumed by Steiner and Steinerism from the spring-summer of 1919 until her death from tuberculosis at Raivola on June 24, 1923. By fortunate or fatal accident, one Dagmar von Schantz, with her aged mother in tow, had shown up in the little community on the Karelian isthmus, and directly placed specimens of Steiner's writing in Edith's all too receptive hands. Edith's second book, Septemberlyran, had appeared at Schildts in December, 1918, and caused that infamous campaign of ridicule in the Finland-Swedish press, described by Gunnar Tidestrom (1949) and his many descedents and debtors. The next month, January, 1919, Edith's initially prickly correspondence with Hagar Olsson began: the poet's letters to Hagar, published with extensive textes de liaison by the recipient (Ediths brev, 1955), provides most (but not all) of the primary information about Edith's Steiner-raptus

Her Steiner-reading began with a Swedish translations of one of Steiner's many lecture series, Die geistige Fuhrung der Menschen und der Menschheit (1912) and continued apace. On July 13, 1920, she totted up, evidently in order of perusal, what else she had read thus far: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss (1910), Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der hoheren Welten (1909),...

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