 During his study period in the 1930s, Matti Kuusi was involved with nationalist political organizations.In the 1950s, he was appointed as the Professor of Folklore in the University of Helsinki, and later as the member of the Academy of Finland, becoming a nationally celebrated intellectual.He led the effort to produce a collection of "900 Balto-Finnic Proverb Types with Russian, Baltic, German and Scandinavian Parallels", described as one of the "major multilingual proverb dictionaries".