Release date is 2025-11-21

He ja hän -- Siveellisyyssaarna -- Valkoinen mato -- Kunnia -- Kutrien kaipuu -- Ympyrä -- Rippileivät -- Hukuttautunut -- Sokea -- Puotissa -- Lapsen mietteitä -- Suihkualtaalla -- Naamiaisissa -- Näyttelijätär -- Kissa.

Tuula Temonen

"Viettejä" by Fanny Davidsson is a collection of short stories written in the early 20th century. The pieces move between urban salons, slums, and allegorical spaces to probe desire, power, hypocrisy, religion, and social constraint, often through sharply drawn women and the men who orbit them. Sensual, symbol-rich scenes test the line between longing and morality, suggesting both the intoxication and the cost of transgression.

The opening of the collection introduces a painter, Kavio, who signals rotating lovers with tulips in his studio window: a sharp-tongued primadonna, a shy society wife, and a Venus-like model whose aloofness reduces him to supplication. A succeeding tale pits a devout theology student against a “fallen” woman; invoking Eden, she seduces him and his certainty collapses. A dreamlike vignette about a swan feast hiding a white worm becomes a couple’s vicious breakup and the realization that mutual envy is the rot at love’s core. In a slum drama, the courtesan Reega refuses to kiss a domineering suitor and kills herself rather than submit. Lyrical pieces follow: a blond narrator longs for a true counterpart, an eerie night with a dark-haired lover ending in sheared locks; an allegory where Life-Weariness traps the narrator inside a ring of prejudices and conventions; and a startling scene in which children turn communion wafers into dominoes until a fanatic maid nearly harms them. A marital tragedy unfolds as Sigrid abandons her husband for “freedom,” then unwittingly joins the solemn recovery of a drowned man and recognizes, back in a familiar hall, that she is the widow; the section closes by beginning a rough-hewn monologue from a blind laborer recalling youth, work, and a fateful woman. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Helsinki: Vihtori Kosonen, 1908