Anyone who wishes to understand the literature of Finland, whether written in Finnish or Swedish (for the nation is officially bilingual), must have command of certain historical facts: as a land between East and West, Finland has been subjected throughout its history to tensions which have left their mark everywhere in its cultural life.

The Finns, members of the Finno-Ugric linguistic family, came to Finland sometime early in the Christian Era; the first Swedish speakers seem to have arrived on the southwestern and southern coasts of Finland during the Viking Age. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, "crusades" were sent out from Sweden in an effort to subjugate and Christianize the heathen Finns; and by 1323 Finland had become a definitive part of the Kingdom of Sweden, in which position it remained until the Swedish-Russian War of 1808-9. For the next one hundred and nine years Finland belonged to the Russian Empire, commencing as a semi-independent grand duchy, only to have the rights granted it by Alexander I at the Diet of Borgå (March, 1809) slowly whittled away by his successors on the Russian throne. On December 6, 1917, in the wake of the November (Bolshevik) Revolution, the Finnish diet and senate, re-established after the abdication of Nicholas II the previous March,   [p. x]   declared Finland's independence. A civil war ensued, between the "Red Guards" (many of whom were blinded by simple poverty to the fact that they were fighting for a return of Finland to Russia) and the newly organized Finnish national army, under the command of C. G. E. Mannerheim, lately a czarist officer. The "Whites," substantially aided by a German expeditionary force, won the short but bloody war; and after a year of unfortunate reprisals and political confusion the Finnish Republic was declared.

From November, 1939, until March, 1940, the Republic was involved in the "Winter War" with Soviet Russia, as a result of which it was forced to cede most of Carelia to its giant neighbor, as well as a strip of territory in the north. In the so-called "Continuation War" of 1941-44, the army of Finland, now a cobelligerent of Germany, advanced to the old boundary of 1939 and passed it, occupying the territory known as Eastern (Russian) Carelia. The war ended with the Russian offensive of the summer of 1944; by the armistice of Moscow, Soviet Russia was granted not only the territory it had been accorded in 1940 but also the Petsamo region in the extreme north, thus depriving Finland of its access to the Arctic Ocean. Since then, Finland has walked a tightrope between inclination and necessity, its difficulties increased by the problem of the resettlement of the Finnish Carelians inside the nation's new boundaries.

II

During the centuries of Swedish rule in Finland, the Swedish language clearly won ascendancy over Finnish as the instrument of culture and commerce; it was the major language of the towns and was spoken, as well, in the country regions which had received a Swedish population either before or after the establishment of Swedish hegemony. These regions were substantially the same as the ones   [p. xi]   which contain the Swedish-speaking population of Finland today: the coast of Ostrobothnia, north and south of the town of Vasa (Finnish: Vaasa); the Åland Islands; the academic city and, until 1827, the Finnish capital, Åbo (Turku), with its skerries; and the southern coast from Hangö (Hanko) and Ekenäs (Tammisaari) to Helsingfors (Helsinki), and then east past Borgå (Porvoo) to Lovisa (Loviisa). There also existed colonies of "inland Swedes"; of these, the most important was at Viborg (Viipuri) in Carelia. Isolated Swedish-speaking families were to be found everywhere in the Finnish regions; the large landowners were members, although hardly typical ones, of this group which comprised chiefly professional people, clergymen, and officials.

Not long after Finland had been incorporated into Russia, in 1809, the country's linguistic complexion began to change; nationalism, making its appearance here as it would, for example, in the Austrian Empire, encouraged the educated classes to adopt Finnish as their language. A movement was begun to make Finland monolingual; it is ironic that its leader, Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806-81), composed the majority of his works in Swedish. Some of Snellman's contemporaries, such as Finland's national poet, Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804-77) and the esthetician, Carl Gustav Estlander (1834-1910), felt that Snellman's demand for "one language, one people" was a kind of tilting at windmills; they argued that all Finns were Finns, regardless of what language they spoke. Nevertheless, the zeal of Snellman and his followers compelled some Finland-Swedes (for this is what they now began to call themselves, instead of "Finns" or "Finlanders," the latter a word which meant an inhabitant of Finland, no matter what his language was) to take up a position as extreme as Snellman's; the leader of these believers in a separate Swedish nationality in Finland was the philologist Axel Olof Freudenthal (1836-1911).

The teachings of Freudenthal acquired a special appeal for the Finland-Swede of the early twentieth century, who saw how the "true Finnish" element in Finland's national life was increasing its power and importance by leaps and bounds. Feeling steadily more homeless in his own homeland, the Finland-Swede retreated into the protective shell of "Freudenthalism," of what we might call a minority mentality. The establishment of the Republic did not bring with it an alleviation of the minority's fears; indeed, the Finland-Swedish position became even more precarious because of the understandable desire of a nation, suddenly independent after centuries of foreign rule, to become itself, like no other land on earth. The wars of 1939-40 and 1941-44, for all the suffering they caused, did benefit Finland in one way; the Finland-Swedes contributed so generously to the nation's defense that they found themselves more readily tolerated than before. The new tolerance may have also found encouragement in the likelihood of the language problem's resolving itself. The Swedish-speaking population is steadily decreasing, not least because of a smaller birth rate (in proportion to the Finnish-speaking Finns) and migration to Sweden in search of a better life, the very motive which led the ancestors of the Finland-Swedes eastward, ages before. According to the last census, there are 330,530 Swedish speakers in Finland, or 7.4 per cent of the nation's total inhabitants. The figure should be compared with that of 1880, the first year for which we have language statistics (295,000 or 14.3 per cent), of 1910 (339,000 or 11.6 per cent), and of 1950-51 (348,286 or 8.6 per cent).

III

The Swedish literature of Finland has been not merely an interesting provincial phenomenon but a vital factor in the   [p. xiii]   development of Swedish literature as a whole; it provides an example of how a small and isolated linguistic group can produce literary works sometimes more exciting than those emerging from the heartland of the mother tongue, where poets do not feel that the very existence of their instrument, their language, is threatened. No exact comparisons can or should be made; yet the student of Finland's Swedish literature cannot help but recall the renaissance of German-language literature in Bohemia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first with Adalbert Stifter, then with Rilke, Kafka, and Werfel; or the flowering of Anglo-Irish letters during roughly the same period; or the appearance of one of the greatest of modern Greek lyricists, Konstantinos Kavafis, in the Greek colony at Alexandria.

While still Swedish territory, Finland produced the elegist, Jakob Frese (c. 1690-1729), the rococo poet, Gustaf Philip Creutz (1731-85), and the forerunner of Swedish romanticism, Frans Mikael Franzén (1772-1847); all of these poets spent a substantial part of their lives in Sweden proper, the first and last of them having fled there from the Russians. In the nineteenth century, under Russian rule, the Finland-Swedish author stuck by his guns as best he could; the first part of the century was dominated by the giant figure of Runeberg, the creator of the narrative poem on the War of 1808-9, Fänrik Ståls Sägner (The Tales of Ensign Stål, 1848-60), the author of epyllions on various aspects of Finnish, Finland-Swedish, and even Russian life, and a major lyricist. Runeberg overshadowed his contemporaries, but not completely: for Zachris Topelius (1818-98), who wrote a long series of connected novellas about Finland's history, Fältskärns berättelser (The Stories of the Field-Surgeon, 1851-66), became a story-teller for the whole of Scandinavia; and the lyric poet, Josef Julius Wecksell (1838-1907), whose career ended in madness at the age of   [p. xiv]   twenty-two, achieved a kind of international currency by the settings Sibelius made for some of his poems.

The ruling figure of the century's second half is Karl August Tavaststjerna (1860-98), the creator of the Swedish novel in Finland; Finnish literature had already received its classical prose work with the novel of Aleksis Kivi, Seitsemän veljestä (The Seven Brothers, 1870). Tavaststjerna was keenly aware of the growing isolation of the Swedish speaker in Finland, a theme continued by his successors, the novelist Mikael Lybeck (1864-1925) and the lyric poet Arvid Mörne (1876-1946); indeed, a whole literary group, the "flaneurs" of Helsingfors, made the despair of the Finland-Swede its main theme. No one who has read the masterly novellas of Runar Schildt (1888-1925) will forget the desire to die, the cupido dissolutionis, which permeates them: two of the "flaneurs," including Schildt himself, died by their own hand, another migrated to Sweden, and another fell into silence after having produced three small books.

In 1913, Holger Schildt, a cousin of the novella-writer, founded a publishing house, an act of faith in Finland-Swedish letters which was richly rewarded; "Schildt's" was responsible for the issuance of many of the principal works in the great age about to dawn. Suddenly, the little literature became a leading force in Scandinavia, with the appearance on the scene of the "modernists"---poets who had imbibed deeply of German expressionism, Russian futurism, and Dadaism, poets who threw off the conservative strictures of rhyme schemes and rhythmic patterns and traditional themes, poets who were determined to win an international audience. The pioneer and brightest star among the modernists was Edith Södergran (1892-1923), born and brought up in St. Petersburg, a patient in Swiss and Finnish sanatoriums, and finally a resident, with only her mother as   [p. xv]   her companion, in Raivola, a village on the Carelian Isthmus. It is doubtful that Edith Södergran's poetry (which appeared in several hotly attacked volumes from 1916 until 1920, to be followed by a posthumous collection in 1925) could have made its deep imprint upon Finnish and Scandinavian literary life if it had not been for the encouragement and aid vouchsafed her by Hagar Olsson, the young literary critic of the Helsingfors newspaper, Dagens Press, and Edith Södergran's closest---almost her only---friend during the last years of the poetess' life.

The example of Edith Södergran encouraged both older and younger poets to try their wings in modernism's new air. Gunnar Björling (1887-1960), a lyricist who would become known for his radical rejection of normal syntax and grammar, made his belated debut in 1922, from then on pouring out a flood of poetry and aphorisms (the latter a favorite form of the modernists). Elmer Diktonius (1896-1961), a violinist destined to make one of his many contributions to Finland-Swedish literature as a music critic of Shavian stature, upset conservative poetry-lovers by means of such poems as his "Jaguar" in Min dikt (My Poem, 1921); as a member of the political left, and an author quite capable of writing in Finnish, he remained a suspect figure in the eyes of many, despite the authenticity of the genius---and the patriotism---he demonstrated in his later works. Ragnar Robert Eklund (1895-1946) was a poet and aphorist whose affection for his home province of Ostrobothnia, coupled with a patent contempt for all literary and political programs, quickly cut him off from his colleagues: while he contributed to the first of the modernists' little magazines, the bilingual Ultra (1922), he refused to take part in the second, Quosego (1928-29). In his extreme sensibility and concern with style, as well as in his isolation, Eklund was not without points of resemblance to Kerstin   [p. xvi]   Söderholm (1897-1943), whose poetry is less interesting than her diary, Endast med mig själv (Only with Myself), published four years after her suicide. One of the lyric poets of modernism's golden age survives today, Rabbe Enckell (b. 1903), who began as the most idyllic of the modernists, went through a darker phase in the 1930's and early 1940's, and then, after the war, returned to a serenity---which on the surface resembles that of his beginnings.

Enckell's example proves that Finland-Swedish literature did not end with the great decade of the 1920's; most of the modernists went on to long and distinguished careers. Contemporary with them there existed, of course, a more conservative strain in Finland-Swedish literature; its best-known younger representative was Jarl Hemmer (1893-1944), a lyric poet whose most widely read work, however, is a religious novel about the concentration camps maintained by the victorious "Whites," En man och hans samvete (A Man and His Conscience, 1931). The chief literary debut in the 1930's was that of Tito Colliander (b. 1904), a novelist whose background is like Södergran's and whose works continue Hemmer's pondering of good and evil; yet an Eastern element is added---Colliander embraced the Orthodox faith with an enthusiasm evident in all of his best works, for example, Korståget (The Crusade, 1937), about a pilgrimage to a monastery in Estonia, and Förbarma dig (Have Mercy, 1939), which deals with a Russian refugee among the Finland-Swedes of Helsingfors. In earlier books, where his Russian emigrants were to be found in Carelia, Colliander had been carried along by a new literary wave with political overtones, the "Carelian exoticism" or "Carelian romanticism" of the 1930's, which combined, for Finland-Swedish authors, some varied charms. It offered the attraction of the Orthodox faith, whose Finnish communicants resided almost entirely in Carelia---a faith apparently   [p. xvii]   more forgiving and certainly more exotic than Lutheranism. (Here it should be remembered that the stock of the religious novel was rising in Europe, thanks to François Mauriac and Graham Greene.) Carelia was a part of Finland where the ancient Russian threat had created a more tolerant and, in the case of Viborg, a more cosmopolitan atmosphere than that to be found farther west. Finally, Carelia was traditionally held to be the homeland of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, and was the object, in the minds of certain hotspurs in the young nation, of expansionist dreams: Eastern Carelia had already been briefly invaded by a Finnish Freikorps in 1919.

In an essay from February, 1941, published not long after Finnish Carelia had been lost in the Winter War, Hagar Olsson called the province "the holy place of Finnish culture," and by doing so summed up the attitude of many authors in the preceding decade, the writers who made more or less pious pilgrimages to the grave of Edith Södergran at Raivola and to the great Orthodox cloister church at Valamo in Lake Ladoga, or to the lesser-known establishment at Konevits, pilgrimages which were turned into books: Olof Enckell's Ett klosteräventyr (A Cloister Adventure, 1930), Vårt hjärta (Our Heart, 1933), and Guldkedjan (The Golden Chain, 1934); Göran Stenius' Det okända helgonets kloster (The Cloister of the Unknown Saint, 1934); and, of course, Hagar Olsson's Träsnidaren och döden (The Woodcarver and Death, 1940).

Even after the final amputation of Carelia in 1944, Finland-Swedish authors continued to mourn the lost province; one remembers in particular Oscar Parland (b. 1912) and Ralf Parland (b. 1914), both natives of Carelia, as was their short-lived and brilliant elder brother, the modernist Henry Parland (1908-30). Oscar Parland has composed a series of novels about the fate of a well-to-do family on the   [p. xviii]   Carelian Isthmus before and after the Finnish Civil War, and one of Ralf Parland's best books is Hem till sitt hav (Home to His Sea, 1957), a eulogy on Carelia with both mythical and historical ingredients. Since 1944, the attention of younger Finland-Swedish writers has turned to a more urgent problem, the predicament of the group to which they belong: this is the burden of the novels of Christer Kihlman, Anders Cleve, and Per-Hakon Påwals---but an account of Finland's Swedish literature since 1940 lies outside the scope of this introduction. It will be sufficient to remember that the princess of the small but fascinating realm is still Hagar Olsson.

IV

Hagar Olsson was born on September 16, 1893; shortly before her birth, her father, a Lutheran clergyman, had been appointed pastor on Föglö in the Åland Islands. It was in this completely Swedish-speaking milieu that she spent her early childhood; she began her schooling in Åbo, where her mother maintained a separate household for the Olsson children during the winter months. When Hagar Olsson was twelve years old, her father was transferred to Räisälä on the Carelian Isthmus between Viborg and Lake Ladoga; thus the family was removed to a predominantly Finnish-speaking area. During the Räisälä years, Hagar Olsson attended the Swedish Girls' School in Viborg, where she quickly became familiar with the atmosphere of the quadrilingual provincial capital and its Finnish, Finland-Swedish, Baltic German, and Russian components. At the same time she embarked on an independent program of reading from sources even more heterogeneous than Viborg's cultural make-up: according to her diary, she ranged from the Divine Comedy to Lafcadio Hearn, from Voltaire to the latest Danish novels of Herman Bang.

In 1913 Hagar Olsson took the "student's examination" which qualified her to attend the Imperial Alexander University at Helsingfors; but her father, a man with set ideas about the place of woman in society, insisted that she prepare herself for a "practical career" instead, and had her enrolled in the Advanced Swedish Commercial School in the Finnish capital. Nine months of training there, and a summer spent in a Viborg bank, convinced her that she must rebel against Pastor Olsson. After a bitter struggle, she was permitted to begin at the university, on the understanding that she would be trained as a teacher, a course for which she had little genuine interest but which would allow her to attend some lectures in literary history.

At Christmas, 1916, her first novel, Lars Thorman och döden (Lars Thorman and Death) was published, the story of a young man who believes he is about to die and who is terrified at the thought. Eventually Lars Thorman realizes that his soul "has become familiar with death"; he explains his coming to terms with death by a restatement of the parable on the grain of wheat in John 12:24, which later will appear undisguised in The Woodcarver and Death. Lars says: "I saw the whole field, where a piece of grain means everything if it enters into the earth and dies, but nothing if it remains a single speck of dust, flying whither the wind blows." Earlier, Lars has seen nothing but terror in death; he has received a shock of immeasurable effect upon beholding the corpse of a dead friend, and since then has been pursued by an entity he calls the "corpse-devil." This violent reaction to death's physical fact apparently has its source in an episode which befell Hagar Olsson herself; on February 26, 1916, she wrote in her diary: "Finally, I might as well come out with the thing that is haunting me: I've seen the corpse of Aunt E." At the end of this troubled novel, Lars does not die after all; instead, his beloved   [p. xx]   Lisbeth does---becoming his scapegoat, as it were---while he has gained new strength from his meetings with a Northern Pan, a forest god who bears the Old Norse name of Samr.

Lars Thorman and Death was followed by two other youthful works which must have been still more confusing to their first readers, the prose-poems Själarnas ansikten (The Countenances of the Souls, 1917), in which Hagar Olsson celebrated "the world's fanatics," zealous beings prepared, like the modernists to come, to fight and if necessary to die for apparently quixotic ideals, and Kvinnan och nåden (The Woman and Grace, 1919). The Woman and Grace is based upon the biblical story of the prophet Samuel's birth; the interest of the author is focused, however, on the mother and the mystical experiences she undergoes before parturition, rather than on the baby, who is born just before the novel's end, or on the father, who dies immediately upon Samuel's conception. Scholarship has called attention to the connection between portions of The Woman and Grace and the prose-poem, Jordaltaret (The Earth Altar, 1919) of R. R. Eklund. Brought together by an article on a Van Gogh exhibition which Hagar Olsson had written for a Helsingfors student paper, the two modernists-to-be had become engaged in 1917; during her visits to Raivola, Hagar Olsson read to Edith Södergran from the manuscript of Eklund's book. The engagement, which forms part of the background of a later Hagar Olsson novel, Chitambo (1933), was broken off in 1920.

In the autumn of 1918, Hagar Olsson became the literary critic of the Helsingfors newspaper, Dagens Press (later renamed Svenska Pressen). From this vantage point, she was able to propagate and defend the modernist cause with brilliance and clarity; her arguments for modernism appeared in book form in 1925, as Ny generation (New Generation). In 1927 she made a creative contribution to   [p. xxi]   the movement with Hjärtats pantomim (The Heart's Pantomime), a dream play in the style of the later Strindberg, where the heroine, like Sabine in The Woodcarver and Death, tries to escape her loneliness by communicating with an image of Buddha. The following year produced S.O.S., a drama about a manufacturer of poison gas who decides to abandon his calling and is subjected to political persecution. And Hagar Olsson attempted the novel again, first with the curiously evanescent Mr. Jeremias söker en illusion (Mr. Jeremiah Seeks an Illusion, 1926), about a man who, unlike the praiseworthy fanatics of The Countenances of the Souls, is unable to interest himself in any cause, until he is killed in a traffic accident and whisked away by a magical airplane into the "great adventure" of death. From the technical standpoint, her next book of prose, På Kanaanexpressen (On the Canaan Express, 1929), shows a clear advance over Mr. Jeremiah; its greater solidity of texture may stem from the fact that it is less tendentious. In it, looking back over the 1920's, Hagar Olsson concludes that the members of the new generation are branded by the "degradation of the chosen ones," for, by their very self-liberation, they have also freed themselves from older and sometimes salubrious norms of personal conduct.

On the Canaan Express suffers from---and is made more interesting by---the opposition of two views in the mind of its creator; she feels that she must side with the "new generation," which mocks the sometimes sentimental liberalism of the past, but at the same time her sympathy plainly lies with some of the book's older characters. Hagar Olsson's next novel, Det blåser upp till storm (A Storm is Brewing, 1930), finds her attempting once more to put herself into the shoes of the young. The book is concerned with a love affair between a wealthy boy and a poor girl in a Helsingfors school; the boy rebels against his father, although   [p. xxii]   he loves him deeply, and ends as a suicide; the girl---whose father, long since a jailbird, has had no influence upon her---can embrace the brave new world without reservations. But there is an almost religious consolation to be found in Herbert's death; moving from the social plane (where Herbert, in dying, seems to be caught in the Hegelian "hinges of history") to the mystic, Hagar Olsson has Sara Ellman, her heroine, remark that Herbert was one of those rare beings "capable of death." "Is not he who passes the test of death the stronger, since death at any event is stronger than life?" Death must somehow be given a meaning; suicide, the voluntary anticipation of the inevitable, is made the paradoxical means by which death is incorporated into a significant pattern of living.

The heroine of Chitambo (1933) tries to commit suicide at the book's end, but does not succeed. She is another of those figures in Hagar Olsson caught between two standpoints, this time between an acute and adventurous individualism (her father has given her the name Vega, after the vessel in which Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld explored the Northeast Passage) and a desire to become united with and to serve a community (her mother has christened her Maria). The problems of the novel, in many respects Hagar Olsson's best, are manifold: one detects Pastor Olsson behind the tyrannical Carl Johan Dyster, Vega Maria's father; her lover, Tancred, has some features of R. R. Eklund; the isolation of the Finland-Swede, at once contemptuous and envious of the Finns' trust in their special "historical mission," is skirted; and, at the book's end, Vega Maria is almost shattered upon the realization that the new "tellurian revolution" which she has tried to embrace, the collectivist world of the dictators, will bring endless destruction over Europe. She is saved by a salto mortale: she will be like Livingstone, who died in the African village of Chitambo,   [p. xxiii]   simultaneously a superb individual and a man ready to sacrifice himself for the masses.

As the 1930's wore on, Hagar Olsson saw that her compromise answer would not do; in her play, Det blåa undret (The Blue Marvel, 1932), she had evidently identified herself with the sister and brother, representing Communism and Fascism respectively, as opposed to the out-of-date liberalism of their father; in her essays, Arbetare i natten (Workers in the Night, 1935), she reports with a good deal of sympathy on various expressions of totalitarian thought in European letters; but in the Finnish-language play, Lumisota (The Snowball War, 1939, first produced in 1958), the father of a Fascist extremist is allowed to speak his piece against totalitarianism, at least in the form it had taken in Germany and Italy, and which it was taking in certain Finnish circles.

The Finnish wars of 1939-40 and 1941-44, parts of a greater conflict, broke off the dialogue between individual and mass, a dialogue in which Hagar Olsson gave her support first to one speaker, then the other. Reflecting upon the situation of Finland, which stood in an alliance with Hitler's Germany against Stalin's Russia, the outsider will readily understand why Hagar Olsson despaired of a solution of the dialogue on a political basis. Instead, with The Woodcarver and Death (1940), she pacified her political venturesomeness by giving her heart wholly to Finland---a move scarcely surprising at a time when Finland's existence was threatened, and a move predicted at the end of Chitambo, where Finland is called both the "new Atlantis" and the "Africa" where Vega Maria, a northern Livingstone, will follow in the great humanitarian's footsteps. Having taken Finland as her community, she advanced on death, that problem which had tormented her so often in the past, and found its solution in Christianity, a Christianity dressed,   [p. xxiv]   however, in the vestments of the Orthodox Church.

In his little manual on the Orthodox Church, Timothy Ware remarks: "An Orthodox Christian is vividly conscious of belonging to a community." He also points out that the Eastern Church concentrates its attention upon the Risen Christ, Christ the Victor, while the West is more concerned with Christ's suffering. The characters of Hagar Olsson who come from a Lutheran milieu are given the chance to enter a church which emphasizes the community's rather than the individual's approach to the divine, and in which triumph over death, rather than the death agony, is foremost in the worshipper's mind, as well as in the decorations and liturgy of the church. Hagar Olsson's next work after The Woodcarver and Death is a play, Rövaren och jungfrun (The Robber and the Maiden, 1944), which takes place somewhere in Swedish-speaking Finland during the famine of the 1860's; thus it is apparently removed altogether from the Carelian and Orthodox setting of the novel which preceded it. Yet its hero, Elk-Matts, a peasant forced by injustice to become a highwayman, is saved from execution by a miracle pure and simple---he flies away, it seems, on a chariot like Elijah's, and a girl among the spectators sees "the victor's crown" on his head; his beloved, Sanna, decides to defy her family's wishes and devote herself to the starving children who have streamed down from the north, becoming one with them. The play, then, is not so far removed from The Woodcarver and Death as one might at first suppose; and Hagar Olsson's long essay, Jag lever (I Live, written between 1945 and 1948, and with the dying words of Aleksis Kivi as its title), leads clearly eastward once again, to the Orthodox Church, which, she argues, has preserved the true message of Christianity, whereas the western churches have perverted it, creating a "pseudo-Christian" culture in which the individual's freedom   [p. xxv]   plays all too great a role. Indeed, her last play, Kärlekens död (The Death of Love, 1952), demonstrates how a group of "western individualists" torment one another in the rooms of a cheap hotel.

In 1949, Hagar Olsson published a tiny book of prose, Kinesisk utflykt (Chinese Excursion), which defies classification as to its genre: it might be termed a short novel, a fragmentary autobiography, or simply a journey into the past, the past of her childhood and of nineteenth-century liberalism, which she had made so many of her creations condemn, all the while the reader suspected that their creator loved it against her will. The framework of the book is a Chinese legend, but from China the legend quickly returns to the Åland Islands and the Carelian parish of Hagar Olsson's girlhood. Professor Erik Ekelund has summed up the book, and the tension which in one form or another has marked the whole of Hagar Olsson's literary career, with a sentence in his essay, "Resa till det förflutna" ("Journey to the Past"): "The individualistic will, the strong self-assertion, which Hagar Olsson has tried in vain to subdue by her devotion to the idea of collectivism, by the thought of the many members of society who suffer hardship, has thus [in Chinese Excursion] given way to retrospective melancholy, estrangement from the world, and a longing for self-annihilation of the same sort as the Christian mystic's absorption in the divine or the destruction of the ego which the Nirvana of Buddhism represents"---a longing for self-annihilation which, as has been noted above, has long been a main theme of Finland-Swedish letters.

Yet the story of Hagar Olsson's literary production does not end with Chinese Excursion or The Death of Love; in 1953, Olof Enckell issued a collection of Hagar Olsson's newspaper criticism which proved that she had to be acknowledged as one of the great constructive critics in the   [p. xxvi]   Swedish language. In fact, Hagar Olsson's critical voice is not yet still; in 1963, four recent essays---on the nineteenth century novelists Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Victoria Benedictsson, and George Sand---together with an earlier work, from 1935, on C. J. L. Almqvist, the Swedish Romantic, were published under the significant title, Möte med kära gestalter (Meeting with Dear Figures). And, two years before, she had given her public a volume of three novellas, Hemkomst (Homecoming, 1961), the heroines of which are all young girls, of the same age as Sara Ellman when she loved Herbert Wirén, or Vega Maria Dyster when she loved Tancred. Of the three girls, one is desperately afraid of losing her individuality because her father has denied her existence, the second deserts a humdrum way of life (and a humdrum father and fiancé) for a man who she suspects is a god, the third is so much the individual that she tyrannizes her father.

V

The author of Chitambo does not tell us what method Vega Maria Dyster uses in her attempted suicide; she assumes that we do not need to know. Likewise, in The Woodcarver and Death a great many details remain shadowy---much more important ones than the nature of the instrument with which Vega Maria tries to kill herself. The reader familiar with the Finnish scene may be able to supply several of these pieces of information for himself, but the foreigner will have more difficulty in reading between the lines.

The principal male figure in the book, Abel Myyriäinen, is a native of a Carelian parish lying somewhere to the north of Lake Ladoga; in the novel, he does not return to his birthplace during his wanderings, which are confined to Carelia's southern part, west of the great lake. The Myyriäinen family has left its home in the country (after   [p. xxvii]   the father's death?) in order to come to the metropolis, which can only be Helsingfors; there the mother works in a factory, while the son carves and peddles comical wooden figures. He has higher artistic ambitions; the contrast between these aims and the life he leads is one cause of the unrest which makes him set out for the east of Finland. But there are other factors, too: his longing to revisit his home province, the Carelia which was the object of such various Finnish dreams in the 1930's and before; his desire, so typical of Hagar Olsson's characters, to leave isolation for a true community; and, finally, an overwhelming fear of death which stems from an experience he had as a boy, when he and his playmates spied on the autopsy of a suicide, and which has recently been stimulated by the apparent increase of the power of meaningless death in the world around him.

Near the shores of Ladoga, Myyriäinen meets a band of monks: the reader versed in the literature of "Carelian romanticism" might conclude at first sight that they come from Valamo, the rich and famous monastery located on a group of thirty islands in the lake's northern part. However, we are told that they do not belong to "the large and more famous" cloister, but to a smaller one, which people do not visit "for amusement's sake." The cloister possesses a miracle-working Madonna to which Iivana Lampinen, a Carelian peasant who crosses Myyriäinen's path at about the same time as the monks, wishes to bring his dying daughter, Sanni. By means of this information, the cloister can be identified as Konevits, which lies on an island in the western part of Ladoga, not far from Räisälä, Hagar Olsson's girlhood home. The site has been used in Finland-Swedish literature before, in the book Från Karelen (From Carelia, 1894) by the Viborg architect and author, Jac. Ahrenberg (1847-1914). Ahrenberg tells the story of how the monks   [p. xxviii]   of the island give aid to the survivors of a party of horse-traders who have been caught in a storm on the frozen lake; one of the travelers, in gratitude, lights a candle before the image of the "Madonna of Kazan." The Madonna from whom little Sanni expects a wondrous cure, however, is "Our Lady of the Dove" (Golubitskaya), an icon-painting sufficiently famous to have received a descriptive paragraph and a reproduction in N. K. Kondakov's The Russian Icon (Oxford, 1927, pp. 8o-81).

Even before he sails out to Konevits with the monks and Lampinen and Sanni, the woodcarver realizes that he is entering a cultural sphere "which still stood in living contact with impulses from distant and duskily illuminated centuries, when crusaders from Novgorod and holy men from Athos had implanted the light of Christianity in the people's heart, long before the West came to these reaches with fire and sword." Konevits was founded in 1393 by the monk Arseni of Novgorod; like the much older Valamo (established, according to tradition, in 992 by the monks Sergej and Herman from Athos) it served as a center for the dissemination of Orthodox Christianity in Carelia, to which the free state of Novgorod laid claim. Lying on the boundary between the Swedish and Russian spheres, Konevits (again like Valamo) was frequently plundered, by the troops of Gustav Vasa's son, John III, in 1577, and by Charles IX's general, Jakob De la Gardie, early in the seventeenth century---on the same expedition, De la Gardie performed a similar exploit at Valamo. When Carelia became Russian at the end of the Great Northern War (1721), the monastery was reinstituted, and was especially favored by the Empress Elizabeth. Somehow its main treasure, the Golubitskaya, which had been in the church since its founding, was able to survive all the monastery's and Carelia's vicissitudes, at least until the Winter War of   [p. xxix]   1939-40. The Orthodox icon, by the way, is not completely unfamiliar to Myyriäinen; as a small boy he had made friends with a little old woman who was a devotee of the "old faith," an oddity in the part of Carelia where Myyriäinen was born. Orthodoxy, to which less than 2 per cent of Finland's inhabitants subscribed at the beginning of the twentieth century, had been pressed back into communities in the direct vicinity of the Russian border. The village---"our village"---to which Lampinen leads Myyriäinen after the trip to Konevits, is such a place.

Iivana Lampinen has the characteristics of the typical Carelian of literature and popular legend: the books of Jac. Ahrenberg are full of persons like him---who are frequently horse-traders: note that Carl Johan Dyster in Hagar Olsson's Chitambo has "Carelian horse-trader's blood" in his veins. In Finnish literature proper, foreign readers may remember Rokka, the most remarkable of all the heroes in Väinö Linna's epic of the 1941-44 war, Tuntematon Sotilas (Unknown Soldier, 1954). Lampinen is all that a Carelian is supposed to be: poetically gifted, quick of mind and tongue, apparently easy of access to outsiders; he differs from the "typical" Carelian only in that he is Orthodox, a special trait which in Hagar Olsson's opinion contributes to his inherent humanity and to the sometimes surprising naturalness with which he approaches religious matters (as in the scene where he relieves himself before entering the cloister-church).

The majority of Carelians, of course, are speakers of Finnish, although they differ, in dialect as in character, from Finns farther to the west; but the village to which Lampinen takes Myyriäinen by no means presents a unity of language or culture, any more than Carelia itself did. In "our village" most of the ordinary folk are Finns, the Lampinens and the Mitronens and Matvej Olkkonen; on   [p. xxx]   the other hand, "the unfortunate Schwancken who ran away from his elegant father and his crazy mother" probably has Swedish for his native tongue, as do, we suspect, the "master of Vornikka" and the members of the family at Lintula-Mortimer, Ottilia, and Sabine. The unpleasant old woman Olsbom bears an incontestably Swedish name, but, socially, is at the greatest distance from the ladies and gentlemen of Lintula; we doubt that she has ever seen better days. Her boarder, Assendorff, and Uncle Ungert have plainly come down in the world, at least as far as external station is concerned. Both are from imperial St. Petersburg, where Assendorff had been a trainer at the czar's stables and Ungert an officer in the czar's armies, in which capacity he traveled widely in Asia. Assendorff is perhaps a product of the large German colony in St. Petersburg; Ungert may again be of German extraction or perhaps one of the numerous Finland-Swedes who served in the Russian armies---in Vår landsman (Our Countryman, 1897) Ahrenberg describes the strangely split life of these Russified Finlanders. We may recall that the young Mannerheim, later marshal of Finland, once served on a secret mission to central Asia as a czarist officer, when we read that Uncle Ungert, "somewhere beyond Mongolia's steppes, in the timeless stillness beside the river Ljao-he," had come to the conclusion that his life was a "pursuit of the wind"---a conclusion evidently not reached by Mannerheim. Of the refugees from the new Russia in the village, only one, Natalia Ivanovna, the teacher of religion, seems to be of true Slavic stock.

The model for "our village" must be sought in Hagar Olsson's Räisälä and Edith Södergran's Raivola, the latter a village that was largely Orthodox. In her introduction to Edith Södergran's collected poems, which appeared the same year as The Woodcarver and Death, and in her   [p. xxxi]   commentary to her correspondence with the poetess, Ediths brev (Edith's Letters, 1955), Hagar Olsson has told us about the Raivola she knew. Traveling into the militarized boundary zone in the summer of 1919, she was oppressed by a sense of unreality in the almost empty train; "but how happy I was when I had finally got out into the road, I remember all my summer days in Carelia this way, warm from the sun and happy and full of smiling charm. . . . This was Edith's land." The opening of "The Arrival," as Lampinen leads Myyriäinen down the path to "our village," comes immediately to mind. In Hagar Olsson's description, Raivola is clearly Lampinen's native ground, "a typical border village with a mixed population and a picturesque assortment of more or less decayed but richly ornamented villas embedded in its spreading greenness." Raivola even possessed an original old fellow named Peck, to whom the Södergrans had given shelter; he is a model for Ungert or Assendorff or both.

Hagar Olsson last saw Edith Södergran in August, 1922, somewhat less than a year before the latter's death on Midsummer Day, 1923. "Edith lay on her cot on the veranda when I took leave of her, I was just about to go when she seized by hand and gave me a strange glance I have never been able to forget. Smiling in her intense way, she said: 'You will still find Christ.'" The prediction was a bold one, since Hagar Olsson, during her student days at Helsingfors, had spoken with a good deal of pride about her "old atheist's heart." But even then, as can be deduced from the debut-article, "Some Questions," in the Helsingfors Studentblad of March 28, 1916, she had refused to condemn Christianity straight out; the works she published during the heyday of Finland-Swedish modernism betray a strong urge to experimentation with religious problems. An overt concern with the Christian message first becomes apparent,   [p. xxxii]   however, in a little passage in the play, S.O.S. (1927): the chemist, Patrick, tells what made him change his mind about his calling. Emerging from his laboratory one evening, he sees some children playing on the street. "Then a little hand was stuck into mine. It was so tender and warm, it lay there, suspecting no ill. . . . I felt a faint pressure. My hand trembled. I looked at the child, who laughed up at me . . . and in a second everything stood clarified before me." The prophecy of Isaiah is behind the experience of Patrick, and likewise the rebuke which Jesus offers the disciples when the babes are brought to Him "that He should teach them." By the time Chitambo was published in 1933, Hagar Olsson had become still less shy about her Christianity: at the novel's end, Vega Maria hears a voice which cries: "He is risen from the dead!"

Attention has been called to the Orthodox dress given the Christianity of The Woodcarver and Death; and there is sufficient evidence in the book to show that the author has penetrated beneath the trappings of the Eastern church---for example, Myyriäinen, pondering the nature of God after his first meeting with the monks, falls readily into the classical apophatic style of Orthodoxy. Yet, in essence, Hagar Olsson's Christianity is not especially Orthodox; it is her own, and is built upon her own experiences. We have noted, in connection with Lars Thorman, that the sight of her dead aunt filled Hagar Olsson with an unreasonable and overwhelming fear of death, the same fear which has gripped Myyriäinen ever since he beheld the body of the suicide; yet Myyriäinen's fear is not just a selfish concern with his own individual fate. Sailing to the cloister with the monks and the dying child, Myyriäinen is tormented by image after image of senseless death (including a vision based upon the widely distributed news photograph of dead children in a Shanghai street, taken during the defense of the   [p. xxxiii]   city against the Japanese in the autumn of 1937); the shadow of even more hideous catastrophes to come is cast by the hermit whom Myyriäinen meets at the end of the same chapter. The hermit has been turned into a human wreck during the first World War; now, in the late 1930's, he hears the angel of death spread out his wings once more. (A related figure has already appeared in Chitambo. Before her attempted suicide, Vega Maria meets Death in the garb of an Orthodox monk; he tells her that Europe's seductive leaders---none of the dictators of the 1930's is mentioned by name---are preparing new and terrible sacrifices to him, to Death.) Confronted by the sure knowledge of his own obliteration, confronted by the slaughter of innocents, Myyriäinen's reason---or, we might say, the usefulness of his earthly existence---can be saved only by a miracle.

The miracle has been foreshadowed in Lars Thorman, just as the birth of the fear of death was described in that first novel. In the school at which Lars teaches, he becomes acquainted with two sisters, of whom the younger is hunchbacked; the crippled child dies, and her sister tells Lars what has happened. The child had been injured in infancy by an accident which the sister believed was her own fault; the child, however, lived and died in the belief that a nurse had been to blame. "Even in the moment of death," the surviving sister says, "her eyes were fastened on me with an indescribable love." The makings of a miracle, at any rate, are present, in the child's love; accepting it, the sister could have overcome her sense of guilt and Lars his terror of death, but neither of them understands the strength of the gift they have been offered. The acceptance of the gift must wait for a quarter of a century, until the appearance of Sanni, the dying child in The Woodcarver and Death.

Some readers, hoping for Sanni's recovery, may be disappointed at the miracle in The Woodcarver and Death; they   [p. xxxiv]   may have expected a miracle like that which had a theatrical revival in such works as Das Mirakel (1912) of Karl Vollmoeller and Max Reinhardt, or Ordet (The Word, 1925) of the Danish dramatist, Kaj Munk, where a dead woman is brought back to life by the faith of a man long deemed insane. Yet these miracles, contrary to natural law, are not what Hagar Olsson intends us to behold, for they concern only the individual case, that of Lazarus awakened, without achieving the larger and truer miracle of making death---and so, life---have a meaning. The kind of miracle Hagar Olsson will place before us is intimated in the closing lines of the first chapter. Myyriäinen dreams of a tramp on the highway, a tramp who is Jesus. The vision, incidentally, forms an interesting pendant to the cruel novella of Runar Schildt, Prövningens dag (The Day of the Test, 1917), in which the inhabitants of a Nyland village imagine for a while that a drunken cripple is the Christ. The Jesus whom Myyriäinen sees is not the Jesus who works the miracle of raising the dead---a miracle somehow pointless, since the dead must die again, sooner or later. He is an "everyday" Jesus who can show men the meaning of their "everyday" terror of death, and how to overcome it. For His miracle He chooses Sanni as His instrument, the poor illiterate Finnish girl who (paradoxically like the Livingstone of Chitambo) dies in the miraculous realization not only that she has been herself, an individual (her last words are her name), but that she has died in the service of others, a service she performed with love. This love, like that of the hunchback in Lars Thorman, has been transmitted to Myyriäinen in two ways: by the last glance Sanni gives him, and by the story of her life he has pieced together. Slowly, Myyriäinen realizes that her miracle has saved him---in a way, it is his miracle, not hers---and he endeavors to transmit the miracle to still another being.

Sabine, the third of the major characters in The Woodcarver and Death after Myyriäinen and Sanni, is something of a self-portrait of Hagar Olsson, as indeed all her young girls are: Sabine comes from a cultured but unhappy home, she finds refuge in Bach (Elmer Diktonius has dedicated a poem about Bach to Hagar Olsson), she exists within a frozen mask---in 1912, Hagar Olsson wrote in her diary: "I'm always acting when I'm with people." Also, Sabine has undergone the same shattering experience as Lars Thorman, Abel Myyriäinen, and Hagar Olsson herself; she has beheld a dead person, her beloved brother Joachim. Like Vega Maria in Chitambo, she makes an attempt at suicide: her flight in the boat is a not altogether wholehearted move in the direction of self-destruction. Finally, she is saved from her terror of death---a terror that would eventually lead her into suicide or spiritual self-mutilation---by Myyriäinen, and, in a subsidiary fashion, by the kindness of the "uncles," Assendorff and Ungert. And she rewards her saviors: the childless old men by her very presence, Myyriäinen by a devotion which seems destined to become a love of the flesh without ceasing to be a love of the spirit. Of course, we are not told what becomes of Sabine and Myyriäinen; the novel ends like a fairy tale, and so its characters may be expected to live happily ever after, in mutual transformation. Sabine has been changed into a living being by Myyriäinen's love, Myyriäinen into a prince, albeit a clumsy one, by Sabine's. Their isolation has ended: Sabine has broken through the barriers surrounding the dying Finland-Swedish estate of Lintula (which Myyriäinen, a Finn, enters in the novel's last paragraph); Myyriäinen has been nicknamed "the ant" by Sabine---and what creature is more a part of a community than the ant? Nevertheless, Sabine is still a princess, although she has joined the outside world, and Myyriäinen a prince, although   [p. xxxvi]   an ant. Erik Ekelund's words about the split in Hagar Olsson's soul should be remembered.

Not all fairy tales end happily---not Andersen's Little Mermaid, which Sabine plans to illustrate for Myyriäinen. There the prince marries a human bride instead of the mermaid, who has undergone such torment for his sake; refusing to save herself at the cost of the prince's life, the mermaid plunges from his bridal ship into the sea, feeling her body dissolve into foam. The pious coda that Andersen added to the story does not erase its tragedy from our minds. Myyriäinen and Sabine belong to different worlds, and it is possible that they will someday be separated. The part of Finland where their transformations took place has vanished. All that is left is the miracle of Sanni; of course, that is enough, if we can understand it or believe in it.