Veikko Huovinen - Literary Career

Literary Career

Huovinen started writing in 1949 when working in a fire watch post in Vuokatti. His first short story collection, Hirri was published in 1950, followed by the novel Havukka-ahon Ajattelija in 1952. Both of these concern the life and its peculiarities in the Kainuu region in Finland, written in a unique style of humor and characterized by their inventive use of language. The main character in Havukka-ahon Ajattelija, Konsta Pylkkänen, has since become ingrained into Finnish modern folklore as the archetype of a rustic, backwoods philosopher.

Huovinen's further works never strayed far from humor, but started to exhibit the author's pacifistic philosophies and later took a turn towards black humor. A good example of such is the trilogy, referred by the author as "Three devilish mustached men"; Veitikka – A. Hitlerin elämä ja teot, Joe-setä and Pietari Suuri hatun polki, concerning Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Peter the Great respectively.

Veitikka prompted some controversy at the time, as it portrays Hitler in a humoristic light. Huovinen countered the claims of impropriety by contending that by laughing at dictators, one strips them of their power to influence people. Veitikka is ostensibly a researched study into the character of Hitler, but the totally outlandish stories quickly betray the book as a work of fiction. The two subsequent books follow the same pattern of telling a ridiculous history of the dictators while letting the author to lament the effects such people have on mankind.

Huovinen's 1980 novel Koirankynnen leikkaaja (translation: Dog Nail Clipper) was adapted into a 2004 film of the same name.