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.