Olavi Paavolainen

Who was Olavi Paavolainen?

Olavi Paavolainen was a Finnish essayist, journalist, travel book writer, and poet. He often went under the pseudonym of Olavi Lauri. Paavolainen was the central figure of the literary group Tulenkantajat and one of the most influential literary opinion leaders between the two World wars in Finland. He represented liberal and Europe oriented views of culture and had an eclectic eye for new ideas.

In the late 1920s Paavolainen praised urban life, technology, and roaring cars in his works centering around modernism as the Italian Futurist poet F.T. Marinetti had done two decades earlier. In the 1930s and 1940s he published a number of works that controversially criticised the members of the Nazi cabinet in Germany and later the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union.