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    Making Nordic Historiography: Connections, Tensions and Methodology, 1850-1970
    Making Nordic Historiography: Connections, Tensions and Methodology, 1850-1970
    Making Nordic Historiography: Connections, Tensions and Methodology, 1850-1970
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    Making Nordic Historiography: Connections, Tensions and Methodology, 1850-1970

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    Is there a “Nordic history”? If so, what are its origins, its scope, and its defining features? In this informative volume, scholars from all five Nordic nations tackle a notoriously problematic historical concept. Whether recounting Foucault’s departure from Sweden or tracing the rise of movements such as “aristocratic empiricism,” each contribution takes a deliberately transnational approach that is grounded in careful research, yielding rich, nuanced perspectives on shifting and contested historical terrain.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerghahn Books
    Release dateSep 1, 2017
    ISBN9781785336270
    Making Nordic Historiography: Connections, Tensions and Methodology, 1850-1970

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      Book preview

      Making Nordic Historiography - Pertti Haapala

      CHAPTER 1

      Writing our history

      The history of the ‘Finnish people’ (as written) by Zacharias Topelius and Väinö Linna

      PERTTI HAAPALA

      Introduction

      A typical way of writing history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, and in the Nordic countries, was to create national narratives. Despite a variety of forms, these narratives were stories of a particular nation, histories of ‘our people’. National narratives were written by professional historians, but not only by them. More important than erudite academic research was the wider history culture that was maintained by politicians, journalists and novelists, and above all by the reception of history among wider audiences. That is how history – or competing versions of it – became general knowledge and a basis for national identity. In many cases, the story of a nation’s past became the basis for a widely accepted political identity.¹

      In Finland, historical research was at the centre of political debates throughout both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The key figures in the debates were politically active historians and top politicians, who employed history in support of their particular political visions. The most influential and the most exploited writers of history were, however, the novelists Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898) and Väinö Linna (1920–1992). In a way, they replaced academic historians as great narrators, as novelists usually did, but they were not simply an alternative to academic research: Topelius was himself a professor of history and Linna wanted to challenge academic historians in their own field. In other Nordic countries, novelists and academic historians stayed more clearly in their own ‘field’ (Aronsson et al. 2008). The role of Topelius and Linna as writers of history is an interesting case with which to analyse how fiction and research interact with one another, that is, what history actually is and what explains the way a particular narrative is received, whether it be artistic or scientific.

      The works by and influence of Topelius and Linna are but one example of how history was written in the Nordic countries at the time. They both wrote national histories per se, but they did it in a transnational fashion, which will be described in greater detail below. Both had connections to and much influence in other Nordic countries. That is to say, they became to some extent a part of Nordic heritage despite their much touted ‘Finnishness’. More broadly, their works and reception reflect the power and success of methodological nationalism in historiography and in making identities. This was not limited to Finland or to similar ‘peripheral’ or ‘oppressed’ nations, as Finland was usually defined by others and by the Finns themselves. While the case of Finland was unique in its own way, it was at the same time universal and in many ways reflects the role of historical writing in (any) society.²

      Important men

      Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898) and Väinö Linna (1920–1992) were the two most successful and best-selling authors in Finland in the twentieth century. They, if anyone, were the two men who created the popular historical imagination in Finland by answering the question, ‘What is our history?’, and hence, ‘What is our (ideal) identity?’ They were in many ways similar and opposite types of thinkers. Topelius, though a professor of history, became famous by writing fiction, a great number of historical novels and children’s books. His Maamme kirja [Book of Our Land] was the foremost history textbook used in elementary schools between the 1870s and the 1940s, and it was read and commented on a great deal after the Second World War as well. Topelius created the canon of talking about ‘us Finns’, which has been repeated in Finland right up until the twenty-first century.

      Linna was a novelist who challenged professional historians in their ideas – often quite successfully – but was never accepted by professional historians of his generation. Linna also created a new canon of seeing ‘us Finns’, one that is still much repeated in public discussions, in political rhetoric and even in business management (Arnkill and Sinivaara 2006). Both for Topelius and Linna, the idea of a nation was the key concept in defining history and identity. Both emphasized that the Finnish nation included all of the people living in Finland. Still, both writers emphasized the homogeneity of the nation, the need for compromise and the need to strive for the common good. Their ideal picture of nationhood failed to take into account the linguistic and ethnic minorities living in Finland, like the Swedish speakers, the Sámi peoples, Russians and other foreigners; however, when either author did occasionally mention such peoples, they were tolerated and treated fairly. Most important was the fact that they regarded ordinary people as the backbone of the nation, that is to say, ordinary people were elevated to the status of those who made history.

      The big difference between Topelius and Linna was, of course, the point in time at which they wrote. To Topelius’s way of thinking, social harmony was based on Christianity and on the order created by a hierarchical society. Linna’s vision was the opposite: he struggled against the old regime, in which individuals were seen as basically unequal and the intellectual autonomy of the lower classes was not respected. He believed that a true nation (or any true community) consisted of independent individuals who did not want to benefit at the expense of others.³ While this democratic idea was not very original at the time, Linna became quite popular as an advocate of the cultural capacity of the lower social strata. He was himself the best example of social mobility. He also succeeded in another way: over the course of time, his fictitious working class heroes became fictitious national heroes (Arnkil and Sinivaara 2006).

      Though Topelius and Linna belonged to different worlds, there are several good reasons to write about them in a single chapter and to compare their work, life, social contexts and importance. This comparison will shed light on how history was actually written in two different centuries, how it was received and how historical identities were constructed. The relationship between Topelius and Linna is interesting. On the one hand, Linna became famous because he challenged the nationalistic and patriotic historical narratives of Topelius and J.L. Runeberg, the other literary hero of the later nineteenth century.⁴ Linna often critically referred to the conservative worldview of the previous century as ‘Topelian’ or ‘Runebergian’. On the other hand, Linna’s own works replaced the Topelian view of history, and his version became the new national master narrative for several decades after the Second World War. Linna was even called the ‘new Topelius’ – often with both a sense of irony and admiration (Varpio 1980). Linna achieved a position similar to the one Topelius previously had enjoyed as an idealized patriarch, even having a statue erected in his honour at an early age. In his fifties, Linna was offered and gladly assumed the role of a ‘great man’ in Finnish society, a role he had criticized so harshly as a young author (Varpio 2004: 612–37 and 640–51). Moreover, it is of special interest here that Linna’s narrative strategies were, despite his critiques, in many ways similar to those employed by Topelius.

      From a Nordic standpoint, it is interesting that even though both Topelius and Linna wrote about Finland from a very nationalistic perspective, they both were well known and widely read in other Nordic countries as well, especially in Sweden. Since Topelius wrote his books in Swedish, like Runeberg, they were widely distributed and readily available in other Nordic countries. Linna’s books were translated from Finnish into Swedish immediately after they were published in Finland. Linna valued the Nordic realists (Knut Hamsun, Vilhelm Moberg, Ivar Lo-Johansson) very highly, and his Nordic colleagues, such as Moberg, Lo-Johansson and Moa Martinsson, were enthusiastic about Linna’s work. Topelius and Linna greatly influenced the Nordic imagination with respect to Finnish history and to some extent Swedish history too. Topelius’s Fältskärns berättelser (1853–1867) told of the joint history of Finns and Swedes from 1630 until 1772, and it was a commercial success in Sweden as well.⁵ This was natural in a way, because Finland had been a part of Sweden from the Middle Ages until 1809, when it was annexed to Russia as an outcome of the Napoleonic Wars. In other words, Finns had long belonged to the Swedish tradition. Therefore, it is no small wonder that six of Topelius’s poems are still included in the official Swedish Lutheran hymnal and he is listed in the dictionary of Swedish literature, though he was never a citizen of Sweden and his parents had also been born in Finland.⁶

      In 1918, the Swedish Academy organized celebrations to honour the one hundredth anniversary of Topelius’s birth, and it asked a famous author, Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, to write about Topelius. She was a great fan of Topelius and had close contacts with Finnish artists. In 1920, she published a biography on Topelius, and the book was immediately translated into Finnish (Lagerlöf 1920a; in Finnish, Lagerlöf 1920b; see also Zacharias Topelius hundraårsminne 1918). The book portrays Topelius and his works as fine representations of Finnish national culture, which had Swedish roots, of course, and which bound the fates of the two nations within the same cultural family. Lagerlöf even refers to Sweden as Topelius’s ‘own land’ (Lagerlöf 1920b: 388). The expression is metaphoric and refers to Topelius’s native language, Swedish. Lagerlöf’s praise of Finnish culture was not accidental or a matter of personal feelings; rather, it reflected the current political situation. Finland had just gone through a brutal civil war in which hundreds of Swedish volunteers had joined the government troops against the Finnish Red Guards and the Bolsheviks.⁷ Lagerlöf did not comment on the war, but she spent a number of pages describing the Finns’ long-time struggle for political freedom and cultural independence. She saw Topelius as a personification of the purpose of history and of God. The same sentiments can be found in Topelius’s own works, but in a milder form. Topelius died in 1898, just one year before Finland’s constitutional conflict with Russia began, which caused much debate in all of the Nordic countries (Tommila 1999: 270–89).⁸

      Linna’s reception in Sweden was also related to war: the Second World War. Once again, a campaign in support of Finland was organized in Sweden under the title ‘The Cause of Finland is Ours’. Sympathy for Finland did not take the form of military support, but the atmosphere after the war was very empathetic because of Finland’s wartime experiences and examples of Finnish heroism. Väinö Linna happened to write about the war in a way that was just as appealing for Swedes as it was for Finns. His war novel Tuntematon sotilas [Unknown Soldiers], which combined vivid realism with a democratic and pacifist attitude, was a success in Sweden too. After his subsequent books, published in 1959–1962, Linna received the Nordic Council Literature Prize and even became a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in the early 1960s. His international success was also made possible because he had some influential advocates in Sweden, like editor and author Olof Lagercrantz and historian Sven Ulric Palme, people with close connections to and an interest in Finland.⁹ Thus, it was not an accident that Linna’s long-time debate with Finnish historians began with an interview in a Swedish paper, Dagens Nyheter, in 1960. The interview promoted the cause of Finland in Sweden, ensured strong sales of Linna’s work in Sweden and offered him a ‘neutral’ platform from which to gain greater visibility in Finland.¹⁰

      A third interesting topic combining Topelius and Linna has to do with their ‘method’, how they crafted their books, who influenced them and how they constructed their influential narratives, which moved between history and fiction, between facts and imagination.¹¹ Both writers emphasized in their comments that there could be no history without poetry, that is, there could be no story without a poet’s intuition. Still, their audiences read their books as if they reported historical facts, the true story. The public’s realistic reading of Topelius and Linna was an obscure phenomenon and an interesting reminder of the nature of historical knowledge. Despite the fact that readers realized they were reading fiction, they seemed to be seeking the real past. Correspondingly, and logically, the basic argument made by those who criticized Topelius and Linna was that their stories were not true, but constructed, biased or misleading – even purposefully so.

      In the end, the influence of Topelius’s and Linna’s histories stems from the way in which their books were received, with the most important point being how their works were received by wider audiences, including ordinary Finns, the cultural elites, the media and the authorities. The reception tells us much about the social context in which the books were read, about the questions being asked and expectations that the books were responding to. A final topic of interest here is the political role of the authors, that is to say, their relationship to power: who supported and encouraged them, and how they and their works were used in politics and in social life. Without these factors it is difficult to understand the unparalleled success and influence of the two writers.

      Men and their work

      Both Topelius and Linna became national celebrities. Statues of them were erected during their lifetimes. They are both historical legends and subjects of a number of laudatory books. The popular image of both is still basically positive; they are still viewed from a historical standpoint as representatives of ‘our common task’. Neither Topelius nor Linna has been much criticized as a person. So there are no hidden histories of them; their life stories are told in accordance with their remarkable work. Topelius wrote a charming autobiography, but the book ends before his academic and political career began (Topelius 1923). Valfrid Vasenius published a six-volume, detailed biography of Topelius in 1912–1931. The book provides a positive and valuable description of his life and work.¹² Lagerlöf used it as her major source. A shorter version was written by Topelius’s grandson, Paul Nyberg, in 1949 (in Finnish, Nyberg 1950). The first modern and comprehensive analysis of Topelius’s political thinking and influence was published by Matti Klinge in 1998.¹³ All of Topelius’s works have been published in several collections, and his plays, operas and stories have been filmed and are still performed on stage. His stories were published in major European languages during his lifetime, but it is fair to say that he did not enjoy much success outside of Scandinavia.¹⁴

      Linna was born in 1920, 102 years after Topelius’s birth and twenty-two years after his death. They did not belong to related generations but instead were men of different centuries who lived in different worlds despite their intellectual connections. Linna was not willing to write his – expected – autobiography and he was unwilling to comment on his own past or be commented on. He burned his memoirs and the manuscripts and, after his death, the family left almost nothing to researchers. Linna, however, did donate a large set of biographical interviews to posterity, but those tapes have not yet been published. They were used, however, in the massive biography written by Yrjo Varpio in 2006, fourteen years after Linna’s death (Varpio 2006).¹⁵ The collected works of Linna, including a valuable volume of his many unpublished essays, came out in six volumes in 2000 (Linna 2000). Linna has been studied much as a novelist. His influence has been commented on a great deal but not researched carefully.¹⁶ It is self-evident that Linna was the most read and the most influential author in twentieth-century Finland. All of his books were made into films and have been seen by all Finns – at school if not elsewhere. His fictional characters still predominantly represent the Finnish mentality, or at least have become stereotypes. Perhaps because of the deep resonances with Finnish reality, experiences, memory and emotions, his books and films did not achieve international success outside of Scandinavia. Also, the epic narration of Finland during the war years came off as slightly ‘old-fashioned’ on an international level, and the early translations of his books into English and other major languages were quite poor (Varpio 1979; Kilpeläinen 2006).¹⁷ People expected more, precisely because the ‘heroic’ history of Finland was widely known in Europe and in the USA, and Finland enjoyed a great deal of sympathy internationally for its fight during the Winter War. But the story offered by Linna was not that story; it was an ironic conversion of it.

      The lives of both men have become the stuff of legend, but they were real persons whose experiences undoubtedly were reflected in their works. They both lived in social and political conditions not of their own choosing, and both had to struggle to achieve the position they finally attained. But they lived under lucky stars – and used that metaphor in their books. They can both be seen as examples of a certain cultural and political milieu, namely the rise of integrating nationalism in the nineteenth century and its reshaping after the Second World War.

      Angry young men

      Neither Topelius nor Linna belonged to the privileged strata of society at the time in which they lived, though Topelius came from much better circumstances. His family was educated, his grandfather was a church painter and his father was a medical doctor who was interested in folklore. The family was of Finnish origin but spoke Swedish as their mother tongue, the official language of Finland at the time. In addition, the family had close connections to Sweden. Topelius’s father had served in the Swedish army during the war against Russia in 1808–1809; the family escaped to Stockholm but returned to Finland, now a Grand Duchy of Russia, in 1811. Lagerlöf emphasizes how the family, both grandfather in his time and then his grandsons, had suffered under the Russian occupation, how the land had been morally devastated, but how a patriotic mindset had motivated them to stay in Finland and make the land into a ‘rose garden’. Topelius’s father died when he was twelve and so during his education he was surrounded by ladies and friendly servants. He liked reading; one of his favourite books was Anders Fryxell’s Swedish history for youngsters.¹⁸ Zacharias was ‘the happiest child on earth’, wrote Lagerlöf, echoing what Topelius himself said of his childhood (Lagerlöf 1920b:

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