Eva Konikoff

“You’re right, I am your best friend – and I always will be,” writes Tove Jansson in a letter to Eva Konikoff in 1947. It has been six years since Eva moved to the USA, but their friendship endures through their correspondence. There is something special about Eva, a feeling that transcends geographical distance.

Tove Jansson and Eva Konikoff (1908-1999) met in the late 1930s – Eva celebrated her thirtieth birthday in Tove’s studio at the time – and ran in the same artists’ circles in Helsinki along with Sam Vanni and Tapio Tapiovaara – who were important to Tove, both professionally and romantically – and others such as Ada Indursky, Rosa Linnala and Eva Cederström. They spent time together in the textile and interior design shop Hemflit, where Eva Konikoff was employed and Tove had occasional work. But they also holidayed together in the Pellinge archipelago where the Hammarsten Jansson family rented a summer house. One of Tove’s first letters to Eva wistfully recalls her life-affirming presence: “Everywhere I walk, I remember the way it was for us in this same place a year ago. Two of the happiest weeks I have ever experienced in Pellinge!” (4.8.1941)

Eva Konikoff was born in Helsinki to a family with a Russian-Jewish background. She spent a period of her childhood living with a relative in Novgorod, possibly due to her parents’ divorce in 1916. Her family, including one brother and two half-brothers, lived in Helsinki. When she left Finland for the USA at the beginning of June 1941, mere weeks before the Continuation War broke out, she was thirty-three years old. Her reasons for emigrating aren’t explained in her letters, but the political situation was tense and any Finns with an inclination to see the world had to take the opportunity to leave before the borders were closed. “I am glad that you made it over there – the war has made life problematic here in many ways,” writes Tove Jansson in reply to her friend’s first much-anticipated letter from the USA. Eva Konikoff wanted to break free and sought out new paths for her life and work. She was a free spirit who was eager to move on, as Tove Jansson would later characterise her. 

Eva Konikoff arrived in Boston and travelled on to Philadelphia where her uncle Joseph Konick lived. She stayed there for about half a year before moving to New York where she worked as a nanny for the Hansen family in Manhattan. In July 1942 she moved again, and Tove Jansson comments in a letter: “You have a new address now. Which doesn’t tell me anything except that you’re no longer looking after Hansen’s brat” (14.7.1942). This new address, 114 West 21st Street, was Eva’s residence for several years before she moved to West 22nd Street. She was employed as a seamstress in a fashion boutique – named as her official profession on her immigration documents – and (presumably) married Ramon Cordova in 1945. Judging from Tove’s letters, the marriage seemed to be a happy one to begin with, but the pair divorced three years later. Eva continued to live in New York for many years before moving to Seattle, where she had family, in the 1960s.

Tove Jansson turned twenty-seven in 1942, the same year as Eva Konikoff emigrated to the USA, and Tove began work on a painting entitled “Eva”. The subject sits with her legs wide, her hands firmly clasped together, elbows resting on her thighs, looking to the side and not posing. She is wearing a petticoat. A free woman. This is Tove Jansson’s interpretation of her friend. The depiction of Eva in undergarments, without the protective veil of clothing, intensifies this impression of freedom. After Eva left, she repainted the background and changed the lighting. The painting was only exhibited once, in 1942, and later sent to Eva in the USA.

The young painter saw her friend, six years her senior, as the epitome of liberty, power and will – Tove later compares Eva to an albatross – and their letters make many references to the strength of their friendship and the mutual candour that binds them. Tove housed a desire to represent and capture Eva, to paint and write about her – something she does much later in the short story “Letters to Konikova”, which appears in the story collection Messages (1998).

Tove Jansson’s letters to Eva Konikoff became a way for her to write about herself, her life and her innermost thoughts. They functioned as a sort of journal, written to “Koni” – a nickname Tove often used – which gave her someone “to talk to.” Tove uses this expression many times, and emphasises the importance of their intimacy and confidence: “I seem able to talk to you about all my great joys, all my agonies, everything going on in my head – there’s no one else I can talk to as I do to you.” (August 1946). There were plans for Tove to visit her friend in the USA in the late 1940s, but it never came to pass.

In her letters to Eva Konikoff, Tove Jansson describes her wish for the courage to live her own life, the quest for her identity as an artist, as a social and sexual being. She writes about her romantic liaisons with men and women, but her friend offers no support in her choice to pursue lesbian relationships. When Tove expresses her intention to go over to the “ghost side” – ghost being a euphemism for lesbian in Tove’s circles – she makes it clear that this is her decision and no one else’s. Sincerity is the foundation of their friendship.

“I think I finally know what I want now, and as my friendship with you is very important to me and is very much founded on honesty, I want to talk this over with you. I haven’t made the final decision, but I’m convinced that the happiest and most genuine course for me would be to go over to the ghost side. It would be silly of you to get upset about that. For my own part, I’m very glad and feel intensely relieved and at peace.” (28.2.1952)

Tove Jansson’s friendship with Eva Konikoff was of enormous significance to the young painter and writer. It informed her fundamental understanding of friendship: “I am never alone when I talk to you,” Tove writes in one of her letters. Much later, the letters became material for one of the last short stories in the collection Meddelande (1998), simply called “Letters to Konikova.” Alternative titles that Tove Jansson toyed with include “Portrait of a Friendship”, “Early Friendship”, “To My Albatross”, and “Just Before the War.” Originally, Tove wanted to write a novel, but the material was difficult to process and she couldn’t bring herself to write about the war, which she describes as the most difficult time in her life. In a letter to me, she writes: “I visualised a book about the Winter War and Eva’s brave new life in America as background, and it would have been illustrated with her terrific photographs of Harlem and Manhattan. Then Helen Svensson [Tove Jansson’s publisher] came and said: how about boiling it down into a short story?”