Johan Vilhelm Snellman

Who was Johan Vilhelm Snellman?

Johan Vilhelm Snellman was an influential Fennoman philosopher and Finnish statesman, ennobled in 1866.

Snellman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, as son of Kristian Henrik Snellman, a ship's captain. After the Russian conquest of Finland in 1808–09, and the promising establishing of the semi-autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, his family moved there in 1813, to the Ostrobothnian coastal town of Kokkola, where his mother Maria Magdalena Snellman died only a year later.

In 1835, after academic work in Hegel's following, Snellman was appointed lecturer at the University of Helsinki, where he belonged to the famous circle of Cygnaeus, Lönnrot, and Runeberg comprising the brightest of their generation. Snellman's lectures quickly became popular with the students, but in November 1838 his lectureship was temporarily recalled after a judicial proceeding that ultimately aimed at establishing the government's firm control of new and oppositional thoughts among the academics.

As a consequence Snellman exiled himself to Sweden and Germany, more or less voluntarily, from 1839 to 1842. By the time he returned to Helsinki, his popularity had increased further, but the political juncture did not allow the University to employ him. Instead he took up the position as headmaster for a school in distant Kuopio, and published starkly polemical periodicals, including the paper Saima in Swedish that advocated the duty of the educated classes to take up the language of the then circa 85% majority of Finns, and develop Finnish into a language of the civilized world useful for academic works, fine arts, state craft, and nation building.