Eino Leino – The Poet

The play is about the life of Finland’s greatest poet, Eino Leino (1878-1926). It concentrates on the last ten years of Leino’s life, a time when the poet’s years of success were already behind him. Leino is portrayed as a decrepit, former genius, whose deterioration is attributed mainly to Finland’s calamitous civil war of 1918. The war smashed Leino’s dreams of a unified, independent nation. He sympathised with both sides in the war, the Whites as well as the Reds, and ended up as a target for criticism from both sides of the firing lines. (Tinfo)