Novels, Histories, Novel Nations Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia
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Novels, Histories, Novel Nations Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia Edited by Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes and Ilona Pikkanen Studia Fennica Historica The Finnish Literature Society (SKS) was founded in 1831 and has, from the very beginning, engaged in publishing operations. It nowadays publishes literature in the fields of ethnology and folkloristics, linguistics, literary research and cultural history. The first volume of the Studia Fennica series appeared in 1933. Since 1992, the series has been divided into three thematic subseries: Ethnologica, Folkloristica and Linguistica. Two additional subseries were formed in 2002, Historica and Litteraria. The subseries Anthropologica was formed in 2007. In addition to its publishing activities, the Finnish Literature Society maintains research activities and infrastructures, an archive containing folklore and literary collections, a research library and promotes Finnish literature abroad. Studia fennica editorial board Pasi Ihalainen, Professor, University of Jyväskylä, Finland Timo Kaartinen, Title of Docent, Lecturer, University of Helsinki, Finland Taru Nordlund, Title of Docent, Lecturer, University of Helsinki, Finland Riikka Rossi, Title of Docent, Researcher, University of Helsinki, Finland Katriina Siivonen, Sunstitute Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland Lotte Tarkka, Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen, Secretary General, Dr. Phil., Finnish Literature Society, Finland Tero Norkola, Publishing Director, Finnish Literature Society, Finland Maija Hakala, Secretary of the Board, Finnish Literature Society, Finland Editorial Office SKS P.O. Box 259 FI-00171 Helsinki www.finlit.fi Novels, Histories, Novel Nations Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia Edited by Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes & Ilona Pikkanen Finnish Literature Society SKS • Helsinki Studia Fennica Historica 19 The publication has undergone a peer review. The open access publication of this volume has received part funding via a Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation grant. The publication project was supported by the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. © 2015 Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, Ilona Pikkanen and SKS License CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0. International A digital edition of a printed book first published in 2015 by the Finnish Literature Society. Cover Design: Timo Numminen EPUB: Tero Salmén ISBN 978-952-222-629-7 (Print) ISBN 978-952-222-746-1 (PDF) ISBN 978-952-222-760-7 (EPUB) ISSN 0085-6835 (Studia Fennica) ISSN 1458-526X (Studia Fennica Historica) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21435/sfh.19 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0. International License. To view a copy of the license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ A free open access version of the book is available at http://dx.doi. org/10.21435/sfh.19 or by scanning this QR code with your mobile device. Artikkelin otsikko Contents Acknowlegdements 7 Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, Ilona Pikkanen Preface 8 Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, Ilona Pikkanen Introduction Historical Fiction, Cultural Memory and Nation Building in Finland and Estonia 26 I Fictional Foundations: Histories for the Young Nations Mari Hatavara Composing Finnish National History Zacharias Topelius’ The Surgeon’s Stories 79 Piret Peiker History, Politics and Myth Lydia Koidula’s Novella Juudit, or the Last Maroons of Jamaica 98 Eneken Laanes Cultural Memory, Travelling Forms and the Boundaries of the Nation The Free Man in Eduard Bornhöhe’s The Avenger 121 Heidi Grönstrand Historical Fiction and the Dynamics of Romance The Cases of Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson and Fredrika Runeberg 140 5 Kirjoittajan nimi II Masculinities and the Nation State in the Interwar Period Ilona Pikkanen The Dangers of “Too Easy a Life” Aarno Karimo’s Historical Vignettes and the Post-Civil War Nation 159 Linda Kaljundi Challenging Expansions Estonian Viking Novels and the Politics of Memory in the 1930s 182 III Post-WWII Fiction: Contestation and Amnesia Aare Pilv Is it Possible to Read Soviet Literature Anew? Rudolf Sirge’s Historical Novels 211 Jaan Undusk Literature of Amnesia – On the Creative Function of the Loss of Memory Karl Ristikivi’s Historical Prose 234 Tiina Ann Kirss Balthasar Russow at Koluvere Peasant Rebellion in Jaan Kross’ Between Three Plagues 257 Nina Sääskilahti Women as Sites for the Contestation of Northern Memories of War Historical Novels and the Lapland War 279 Marita Hietasaari Postmodernist Warfare Lars Sund’s Siklax Trilogy 298 Ann Rigney Postface Multidirectional Fictions 322 Abstract 329 List of authors 330 Index 332 6 Artikkelin otsikko Acknowledgements his book would not have been possible without the authors of the Tfollowing chapters from both shores of the Gulf of Finland, who have answered our appeal to explore historical fiction – a topic that has not suffered from being too prestigious among historians and literary scholars – and provided us with an array of most stimulating new interpretations on the function of literature in the field of cultural memory. Furthermore, the editors owe their collaboration on this book to the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences (UTLC) in Tallinn. Two of the editors were members of the research project ‘Historical Fiction as Medium of Cultural Memory’ hosted by UTCL, led by Eneken Laanes and funded by the Estonian Science Foundation (No. 8530). UTCL also supported two workshops where the chapters of the volume were discussed in detail, one held at the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki in December 2011 and the other in Tallinn in October 2012. In addition to UTLC, we are grateful to the following institutions and research projects for their financial, institutional and intellectual help and support in different phases of our project: The Cultural Endowment of Estonia, who generously contributed funding to the proofreading costs of this volume; the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Historical Research: History of Society: Re-thinking Finland 1400–2000 (University of Tampere); the Finnish Academy project No. 137906 ‘Oral and Literary Cultures in the Medieval and Early Modern Baltic Sea Region’ at the Finnish Literature Society; the Research Department of the Finnish Literature Society; the Institute of History of Tallinn University; and the institutional research funding projects ‘Entangled Literatures: Discursive History of Literary Culture in Estonia’ (IUT 28-1) and ‘The Making of Livonia’ (IUT18–8) of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research. In addition, we would like to thank all the peer-reviewers for their comments, and Robin Hazlehurst for language editing. We are also indebted to the support of our editor Eija Hukka at the Finnish Literature Society publishing house, and the editor of the Studia Fennica Historica series Professor Pasi Ihalainen. Needless to say, the responsibility for any flaws and shortcomings falls solely upon us. Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, Ilona Pikkanen, February 2015 7 Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, Ilona Pikkanen Preface escribing the whimsical fate of historical painting, Francis Haskell D(1971: 109) pointedly remarked that “No kind of art was more influential during the first half of the nineteenth century and none has now so hopelessly retreated beyond the frontiers of our appreciation”. In the context of Romantic Historicism most of the great painters of the academic art world attempted reconstructions of historical scenes that were appreciated by both art connoisseurs and the wider public, but after the breakthrough of Modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century this sort of evocation of the past seemed so banal that the whole concept of historical painting was largely dismissed as futile. The genre of the historical novel has experienced an equally changeful destiny, even if in a less dramatic form. Having its heyday in the nineteenth century, its emergence at the beginning of the century was linked to the fundamental social and cultural transformations of the era, such as the change in time consciousness, modernisation and the rise of nationalisms. In the course of the century, history established itself as an academic discipline, but the popular forms for dealing with the past, including the historical novel, became equally ubiquitous and were successfully used in the various national constructions of identity (Trumpener 1997; Moretti 1999). Both the historical novel and painting aimed at a total retrospective view of a nation, with a detailed representation of its people and milieus in their historical development and across all segments of society (Maxwell 2009: 59: Duncan 2006: 179).1 The detailed representations of time and space also allowed for powerful ideological and political generalisations. The decline of the genres in the twentieth century can be linked to the experiences of the two world wars, to the critique of nationalism and to the transformations in the literary and art worlds. The reasons for the renewed interest in the historical novel (and, indeed, historical fiction) and painting in the last decades of the twentieth century are again similar. The study of nationalism and so-called invented traditions from the 1970s and of cultural memory from the 1990s onwards2 made the nineteenth-century forms germane again and posed the question of their relationship to the new modes of representing the past in fictional form that had been developed in response to the experiences