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.