Abstract
Elvi Sinervo (1912–86) was a Finnish working-class author who became prominent during the 1930s. At first, her texts were published in newspapers of the labor movement, but then her first book was released in 1937 by the publishing house Gummerus, and her career lasted until the end of the 1950s. Sinervo's worldview was socialist, and she participated in the political activity of the labor movement. For her, and for the whole group of Finnish left-wing intellectuals to which she belonged, literature was a part of the struggle for the working class and for socialism, a necessary component of any work by an author who was supposed to be in the vanguard of this struggle. They declared themselves a new power in the field of Finnish literature and a counterforce to the dominant bourgeois literary institution. This article examines how Elvi Sinervo's authorship took shape in this context and analyzes how different experiential, ideological, and social elements influenced it.