History of Finland by Henrik Meinander

Author:Henrik Meinander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cultural Expression

One reason this vision of Finland as a nation with its own historical orbit made such a pervasive impact on all sections of society was that it appeared in so many different guises, reinvented and adapted to the demands of the time. It was popularised above all by the writer Zacharias Topelius, whose poems, tales, novels and schoolbooks were published in huge numbers and thus very effectively disseminated the concept of Finland as a nation with a past and a future of its own. There is no doubt that the most influential was Boken om vårt land (The Book About Our Country), 1875, which he wrote for use in elementary schools and which continued to serve that purpose right up to the 1940s. In the main, Topelius elaborated ideas already expressed by Runeberg and Snellman, but as a versatile writer he had that rare ability to clothe them in lively new literary form. A considerable portion of his output was translated into Finnish, a necessary requirement for the national status it was to achieve.

Whereas Topelius was the populariser, Aleksis Kivi was the real literary pioneer in the Finnish language with his novel Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers), published in 1870. Its humorous but classic depiction of the confrontation between Finnish peasant culture and modern civilisation became an exemplar for the country’s twentieth-century narrative prose. But his contemporary readers found it difficult to stomach his burlesque parody and racy language. So it was not until the 1890s that the book attained greater popularity, when a specifically Finnish culture had become more established and there was scope for national self-irony. Another valuable contribution to Finnish-language public life was a vibrant theatre, which really took off in the 1880s with the Ibsen-inspired plays of Minna Canth. The theatre in general was important for the incipient civic awareness, and in 1902, after various temporary locations, the National Theatre moved into the magnificent art nouveau building on Station Square which it still occupies today. In a similar way, Canth’s novels and stories of emancipated women and the social insecurities of the middle classes opened the gates to a burgeoning social criticism in literature.

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