The importance of literature for Finland as a nation

From war to peace

BY TIMO HÄMÄLÄINEN

Forty years ago, there was a war of books in Finland. At that time, the country was living on its paper industry and agriculture, the baby-boom generation was still at school and the men who had worn grey army uniforms for five years (1939-1944) were beginning to turn fifty.
The northern parts of Finland were rapidly becoming depopulated. Most of the people who left ended up in Sweden, in Gothenburg, Uddevalla, Trollhättan, Gislaved, Borås, who knows where. By fleeing from the unemployment in Finland, they saved Sweden from a labour shortage.
In those days, Urho Kekkonen was president of Finland, and the guideline for political and social life, even for economic activity was “good and trusting relations with the great eastern neighbour”.
Väinö Linna (1929-1992) had given the nation a mirror to examine itself in when he wrote a book about Finland at war, Tuntematon sotilas (The unknown soldier; 1954). The book gave patriotism in the national-romantic tradition a good shaking, and Linna’s next books, Täällä Pohjantähden alla I-III (Here under the North Star), published in 1959-1962, shed more light on the emergence of the republic of Finland and inspired discussion about issues such as bias and objectivity in history.
Linna was a writer, and literature made him a prominent figure in Finnish society and ultimately an academic. Until the 1970s, literature was a way to social advancement and one study has shown that, in those days, writers were held in the same high esteem as a colonel in the Finnish Army. These writers who had become great men usually had only compulsory education, and were essentially self-taught. Samuel Oino, the working-class intellectual who is the main character of Toivo Pekkanen’s (1902-1957) novel Tehtaan varjossa (In the shadow of the factory), now comes across practically as a caricature, however believable he may be as a type. Pekkanen was elected to the Academy of Finland in the end, in 1955.
The war of books started by the publication of Sissiluutnantti (The long distance patrol; 1963) by Paavo Rintala (1930-2001) and Juhannustanssit (Midsummer Night’s Dance; 1964) by Hannu Salama (b. 1936) was actually the beginning of a new era and also began to undermine the status of literature, because the war of books was certainly proof of how important literature was felt to be for the construction of nationhood.
With his novel, Rintala chiefly insulted officers who had seen active duty at the front, members of the women’s auxiliary services and people who identified with them. Salama’s blasphemy left religious people gasping for breath. Salama was convicted, but was later pardoned by the President, and at the same time, the last taboos of Finnish literature disappeared. The literary construction of nationhood continued, that was true, and Finnish writers produced a wealth of social realism in the form of trilogies and tetralogies. These described the development of individual families, ‘clans’ or villages, following their life over the decades toward success or failure.
Kalle Päätalo (1919-2000) is one of the monuments of this era. He wrote dozens of novels about the time of his childhood and youth in Taivalkoski, and was awarded an honorary professorship. In Päätalo’s Finland the supreme virtues were poverty borne with pride, diligence, independence, honesty and ‘sisu’, that uniquely Finnish brand of perseverance or guts.
It is a long way from Päätalo’s Finland to the Finland that Kjell Westö (b. 1961) describes in his novel Lang, published last year. The main character of the book is Christian Lang, a writer and television celebrity whose popularity is in a decline and who experiences the treacherousness of strictly controlled bourgeois public life.
Lang’s Finland is superficially a very modern country, a promised land of mobile phones and communicators. Finland is a model student, a model Member State of the EU and monetary union, obedient and humble. Literature can no longer provide social advancement, and the best way of reaching the shallow awareness of the masses is television, specifically talkshows. That includes humiliation rituals and mechanisms, just like ‘real life’.
“Perhaps we are wrong in measuring everything in speed and money, perhaps we are doing damage in worshiping youth and wit while considering experience and decrepitude to be practically synonymous. It is perfectly possible that we are living in an age of cultural decline. But we have no choice other than to embrace the existing structures and the prevailing mass-psychology. Dismantling it all would be incredibly expensive and it would also be an awful waste of human talent and technical resources,” the owner of a TV channel says in the novel as he fires Lang from his post as programme host. Westö’s novel is a morality play about our times and our ancient ways, and at the same time an interesting description of passion, its exigencies and its victims. One of the important observations in the novel which capture the spirit of our times is that sexual intercourse has become an easier way to spend shared time than an open and honest conversation.
Lang was one of six candidates for the Finlandia Prize, Finland’s biggest literary award. The chair of the jury, library director Maija Berndtson, felt that there had been no change in Finnish literature, that it is a continuation of the heritage from Snellman and continues to build national identity – our home country is still the focus.
“Where the description of society is concerned, we have got stuck in wartime and post-war Finland and it looks as if we cannot move on. It seems to be easier to describe difficulties in the past, people’s lives in the poverty-stricken Finland of old, than to create an in-depth multifaceted image of today’s wealthy and prosperous society as a background for the characters,” Berndtson grumbled.
I do not know if her complaint is justified, but I doubt it. It is naturally possible to demand all sorts of things from literature, as we well remember in this country. However, it is hardly the task of literature to write topical commentary, sociological reports or a barometer indicating satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Hannu Raittila, the 2001 winner of the Finlandia Prize, responded to Berndtson’s comments in a column in Helsingin Sanomat, saying among other things that “the importance of a subject within literature can hardly be based only on whether it is topical or not.”
“The present is fodder for impatient, shallow media. On the whole, the present cannot become literature until it has first become the past. It does not gain content until it is seen from the interpretive horizon of a future ‘now’,” Raittila writes.
One of last year’s strong Finnish novels was Det turkiska huset. En berättelse på liv och död (The Turkish house. A tale of life and death) by Tom Sandqvist (b. 1954). Sandqvist writes in fiction form about his father, a father who disappeared, a father he caught glimpses of only in newspapers, in the arts section or the gossip column. Det turkiska huset is about four generations of men in the same family, it is about the Finnish civil war (and the class war, in this case), about subsequent wars, about childhood, longing, memories, memory itself, and perhaps also reconciliation and atonement, when the father is finally found. And thus also the writer and his calling.
The contemporary Finnish writer is different from the nation-builders of earlier generations not just by being more highly educated, but in that he does many other things besides writing novels. He may write radio drama, commentary, columns, TV scripts, have his own ‘slot’ on television, feature frequently in tabloids and women’s magazines and similar.
Kari Hotakainen (b. 1957) – winner of the 2002 Finlandia Prize – is this kind of ‘jack-of-all-trades’. He is not just a writer but has also worked in journalism and advertising. He has published texts in many different genres and been a film reviewer on TV. Hotakainen’s winning novel is simply called Juoksuhaudantie (Trench Street), and it is about the Finnish man, his marriage, his family, his life in Helsinki today and how he extricates himself from a very tricky situation.
Reviewers have praised the book for its social dimension. “When Hotakainen now writes about his own generation, the ‘men on the home front’, he does so in relation to the men who came back from the war in the 1940s. These were the men who had saved their country, and as heritage, they passed on their own ‘taciturnness and fear of women’ to their sons. The had come home from the front with splintered minds, and they were never able to understand how anyone could seriously talk about having problems when the war was over,” as Kristina Rotkirch wrote in praise of Hotakainen’s novel. Kari Hotakainen writes about contemporary, urban Finland and asks what happened to us after the war. In a way, Juha Seppälä (b. 1956) is asking the same thing, and his novel Yhtiökumppanit (The business partners) got far less attention than it deserved when it appeared last autumn. It might be that Seppälä’s highly disciplined, economic language and direct approach to his themes was too much for the critics.
Like Kjell Westö, Seppälä has written a morality play. The protagonist of his novel, a content producer, works in an IT company and makes a fortune. Gradually, however, the company begins to go downhill. Indifference, monotony and a lack of warmth also predominate in the protagonist’s marriage and family life, which becomes the ‘operative core’ of the story. And in the background and the flashbacks, the war is present. In fact, the war is present in many ways in contemporary Finnish literature, in almost all genres, and the surprising thing is that war literature proper – fiction about Finland’s wars between 1939 and 1944 – is still very popular. The great-grandsons of Finland’s war veterans are reaching the age when they are beginning to read books about the heroic deeds – because mainly it is tales of heroism – of the brave Finnish soldiers.
It is typical that the most talked-about book in autumn 2001 was Marsipansoldaten (The marzipan soldier) by Ulla-Lena Lundberg (b. 1947), in which she writes about food and culinary pleasures in wartime Finland, both at the front and on the home front, partly based on letters preserved from the time. It was said that the tone in Lundberg’s book was far too frivolous for the serious subject at hand. A couple of factual errors in the text were all it took to ensure that it was excluded from the Finnish ‘patriotic canon’.
It is characteristic of Finnish literature that major historical events such as the war are recurrent themes. Also, both Swedish and Finnish-language literature in Finland commonly deal with themes such as society and history. A young nation has a need to examine itself.
Where literature in Sweden is concerned, a corresponding phenomenon might be found in the interest in the nation’s long history and glorious past, in this age which is so often accused of lacking a sense of history. Over the last decade, a number of biographies of great men have been published in Sweden, anyone from Gustav Vasa to Tage Erlander. For example, the August Prize for non-fiction 2002 was awarded to Lars-Olof Larsson’s biography of Gustav Vasa. And the massive volumes about Axel Oxenstierna written by Gunnar Wetterberg were a huge success both with the critics and the reading public. Peter Englund reclaimed Sweden’s period as a great power in his work Ofredsår (Years of war), while Jan Guillou gives the kingdom an honourable birth and historic beginning with his series about the crusader Arn Magnusson. A slightly older nation can find greatness in its own past.

Timo Hämäläinen is a literary critic

Translated by The English Centre/Monica Sonck and Nicholas Mayow