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.