Winter landscapes of anxiety and liberation in northern finnish literature, print version


Winter landscapes of anxiety and liberation in northern finnish literature Snow is oppressive, not liberating for me. It is distressing in its cleanliness, its colorlessness, its silence. /--/ The landscapes are familiar from several of my dreams. The dreams were nightmares. Pohjoinen yökirja [Northern night diary] 1981 This is how the first-person narrator describes her relationship to the northern landscape in Kirsti Simonsuuri's (b.1945) work Pohjoinen yökirja [Northern night diary] (1981). The alternation of light and dark is an ordeal for the narrator and she thinks: “Are people in the North less secure than people in the South? Will I become less secure here?” She has moved from Cambridge to the North and the outer limit of the world has shifted in her mind to Oulu: “Past Ylivieska there is nothing more than Oulu”. In studying people, she notices that all forms of human life and almost all types of people exist in the North “but they are often stunted, detached, doomed, not actualized”. The narrator surmises that because people have to prepare themselves constantly to face hostile nature, even humanism is in danger of being lost in the snows. Literature in the North has a relatively short history. Lapland's pioneer writers – clergy and civil servants – created the foundation of Romanticism in Lapland in the period between the world wars. Lapland became the mystical land of romantics and adventurers, where heroes waged heroic struggles for survival against nature and magic forces with the Northern Lights flaring and the cold crackling. E.N. Manninen (1893–1944) takes readers of his work Tunturi uhkaa [The fell threatens] (1938) directly into a mystical, eerie realm: In a bluish, bitterly cold emptiness, flakes of frost float in the rays of the moon. Cold, silent lights flash above the snowy mountains /—/ who would dare be out now–during the ghost time? A figure from the netherworld, a giant, a person killed by a witch might well rise from the swamp or from under a rock. The heart of winter is also full of demonic powers in Samuli Paulaharju's (1875–1994) book Tunturien yöpuolta [The night side of the fells] (1934). The eternal wanderer of the fells begins to look around in fright when the clock strikes midnight. A mythological urge drives him out, afoot, regardless of the weather. And Paksujalka, who is taking a witch who died in a trance to the graveyard, just barely survives. Light saves him from horrible, irrational forces. As Yrjö Sepänmaa has noted, the primary purpose of descriptions of nature in literature is not to depict reality; rather, nature is usually the landscape of the souls of the characters. In Annikki Kariniemi's (1913–1984) Poro-Kristiina [Reindeer Kristiina] (1952), the function of descriptions of nature is to indicate parallels between characters' minds and the world around them. The book begins with a description of a cold night. The writer brings the reader straight into a night in the dead of winter in the North, where the cold is become more intense. The main character is dying, and the entire winter landscape has stopped to listen to her lonely remorse: The cold was worst on the broad, frozen springs near Sompiovuoma. It no longer made any noise. It just was. It stands as a firm silence throughout the area, above and below. Stars twinkle with their own cold in the firmament. Even the light of the moon has the frozen pallor of cold. It is night–long and clear, clearer than the day is right now. But there is really no day now. There is nothing but gray morning and evening dusk. Then it is night again. Annikki Kariniemi, born in Rovaniemi, consciously builds up a difference in landscape and mentality between the South and the North. In her memoirs Ristisiipi (1982), she writes how a friend of hers in Helsinki complained that when it is freezing cold in Helsinki, everyone pushes each other angrily. Kariniemi answers the caller, saying that it is the other way around in the North: the cold makes everyone lovers, people and animals alike: —/ dogs, foxes, wolves, the most angry animals we have in the world, want to celebrate love precisely when it's coldest. The cold makes them lovers; they make love night after night, sing the praises of love with their endless song and become happy and kind. The winter wilderness in Lapland is the landscape for the heroic struggles for survival that are part of the romantic tradition. The theme of getting lost is very common in northern literature: a liminality between life and death, past and future, heroism and cowardice, the human being is forced to reflect on the basic questions of existence. In the short story Lumisokea [Snowblind] (1933) by K.M. Wallenius (1893 –1984), a general and writer born in Kuopio the soldier Taivalkoski becomes separated from his company and has to ski over unfamiliar fells with nothing but the wind as his compass. When snow blindness robs him of his sight and one of his skis is lost, he starts giving up but his suicidal thoughts are stopped by memories of his home, his mother and his father. He keeps on going and reaches safety. In the short story Suruttoman vaellusta [Journey of the undaunted] by Jussi Lainio (1898–1957), son of a reindeer herder from Kittilä, the scene is the same: the main character is lost; it is winter, cold; the character falls into a spring; he is not saved by memories of his home but by a primitive rage and desire to live: With the passion of a madman, foaming at the mouth, he began to pull himself up against the pine. /—/ his body was half frozen and all sense gone. Yet his desire to live – now raw instinct – cried out for its full right./— Pohjolan elinkautisia [Lifers in the North] 1935 The hero makes it but it remains unclear whether this is victory or defeat. The main character has lost his fingers and earlobes. He lives a life which, according to the writer “alternated between romanticism and irony”. The description of Lapland starts to take on realistic tones and in the short story Umpistaival [Trackless snows] (1989), Mirjam Kälkäjä (b. 1939) finally dispels the myth of male heroism – and romanticism. Harsh nature and setbacks have beaten a man: he lies depressed in bed. His wife now bears the financial and emotional responsibility for the whole family: It makes me mad. He did have to bring his family out here, to the wilderness, the edge of the world. Here you really have to trudge along, a woman does, with a cold and with your skirts frozen. He just lies in the bed in the corner of the room and stares at a knothole in the wall. Umpistaival ja muita novelleja [Trackless snows and other short stories] 1989 As Stuart Hall has observed, all identities have an imaginary “geography”; they are built upon a landscape that is natural to them. The literary scholar and cosmopolitan narrator of Kirsti Simonsuuri's Pohjoinen yökirja [Northern night diary] says that she feels like she is part of Europe, “ a new era and a segment of the world living in a different time that this one”. Her direction is the center of the city, into the midst of buildings made by human brains and human hands. In the work Lumi [Snow] (1994) by artist and cosmopolitan Esko Sarkkinen (b. 1932), the direction taken by the narrator is the reverse: away from the city, in which emptiness fills up life, towards winter and tranquility. In a lonely, deserted landscape, he reflects on the relation between the image in his mind and reality and the meaning of existence. “What was my role here?” asks the artist. “To be a hand, an eye, awareness/—?” As for many who describe Lapland, snow, winter and the heart of winter are metaphors for death; for Sarkkinen, who was born in Petsamo, they signify life: War was on. It was the dead of winter. It was dark. The light was in the snow, life was in the snow. /—/ I dug up a big, thick slab of ice. I started to shape it /—/ When the sculpture was finished, I stayed there in the dark looking at it. It didn't represent anything, but it had everything – the essence of snow, light, a fragrance, the touch of a hand – it had a soul. Riitta Kontio
© University of Lapland and Kemi-Tornio Polytechnic, Culture Unit

Winter landscapes of anxiety and liberation in northern finnish literature

Snow is oppressive, not liberating for me. It is distressing in its cleanliness, its colorlessness, its silence. /--/ The landscapes are familiar from several of my dreams. The dreams were nightmares.
Pohjoinen yökirja [Northern night diary] 1981

This is how the first-person narrator describes her relationship to the northern landscape in Kirsti Simonsuuri's (b.1945) work Pohjoinen yökirja [Northern night diary] (1981). The alternation of light and dark is an ordeal for the narrator and she thinks: “Are people in the North less secure than people in the South? Will I become less secure here?” She has moved from Cambridge to the North and the outer limit of the world has shifted in her mind to Oulu: “Past Ylivieska there is nothing more than Oulu”. In studying people, she notices that all forms of human life and almost all types of people exist in the North “but they are often stunted, detached, doomed, not actualized”. The narrator surmises that because people have to prepare themselves constantly to face hostile nature, even humanism is in danger of being lost in the snows.

Literature in the North has a relatively short history. Lapland's pioneer writers – clergy and civil servants – created the foundation of Romanticism in Lapland in the period between the world wars. Lapland became the mystical land of romantics and adventurers, where heroes waged heroic struggles for survival against nature and magic forces with the Northern Lights flaring and the cold crackling. E.N. Manninen (1893–1944) takes readers of his work Tunturi uhkaa [The fell threatens] (1938) directly into a mystical, eerie realm:

In a bluish, bitterly cold emptiness, flakes of frost float in the rays of the moon. Cold, silent lights flash above the snowy mountains /—/ who would dare be out now–during the ghost time? A figure from the netherworld, a giant, a person killed by a witch might well rise from the swamp or from under a rock.

The heart of winter is also full of demonic powers in Samuli Paulaharju's (1875–1994) book Tunturien yöpuolta [The night side of the fells] (1934). The eternal wanderer of the fells begins to look around in fright when the clock strikes midnight. A mythological urge drives him out, afoot, regardless of the weather. And Paksujalka, who is taking a witch who died in a trance to the graveyard, just barely survives. Light saves him from horrible, irrational forces.

As Yrjö Sepänmaa has noted, the primary purpose of descriptions of nature in literature is not to depict reality; rather, nature is usually the landscape of the souls of the characters. In Annikki Kariniemi's (1913–1984) Poro-Kristiina [Reindeer Kristiina] (1952), the function of descriptions of nature is to indicate parallels between characters' minds and the world around them. The book begins with a description of a cold night. The writer brings the reader straight into a night in the dead of winter in the North, where the cold is become more intense. The main character is dying, and the entire winter landscape has stopped to listen to her lonely remorse:

The cold was worst on the broad, frozen springs near Sompiovuoma. It no longer made any noise. It just was. It stands as a firm silence throughout the area, above and below. Stars twinkle with their own cold in the firmament. Even the light of the moon has the frozen pallor of cold. It is night–long and clear, clearer than the day is right now. But there is really no day now. There is nothing but gray morning and evening dusk. Then it is night again.

Annikki Kariniemi, born in Rovaniemi, consciously builds up a difference in landscape and mentality between the South and the North. In her memoirs Ristisiipi (1982), she writes how a friend of hers in Helsinki complained that when it is freezing cold in Helsinki, everyone pushes each other angrily. Kariniemi answers the caller, saying that it is the other way around in the North: the cold makes everyone lovers, people and animals alike:

—/ dogs, foxes, wolves, the most angry animals we have in the world, want to celebrate love precisely when it's coldest. The cold makes them lovers; they make love night after night, sing the praises of love with their endless song and become happy and kind.

The winter wilderness in Lapland is the landscape for the heroic struggles for survival that are part of the romantic tradition. The theme of getting lost is very common in northern literature: a liminality between life and death, past and future, heroism and cowardice, the human being is forced to reflect on the basic questions of existence. In the short story Lumisokea [Snowblind] (1933) by K.M. Wallenius (1893 –1984), a general and writer born in Kuopio the soldier Taivalkoski becomes separated from his company and has to ski over unfamiliar fells with nothing but the wind as his compass. When snow blindness robs him of his sight and one of his skis is lost, he starts giving up but his suicidal thoughts are stopped by memories of his home, his mother and his father. He keeps on going and reaches safety.

In the short story Suruttoman vaellusta [Journey of the undaunted] by Jussi Lainio (1898–1957), son of a reindeer herder from Kittilä, the scene is the same: the main character is lost; it is winter, cold; the character falls into a spring; he is not saved by memories of his home but by a primitive rage and desire to live:

With the passion of a madman, foaming at the mouth, he began to pull himself up against the pine. /—/ his body was half frozen and all sense gone. Yet his desire to live – now raw instinct – cried out for its full right./—
Pohjolan elinkautisia [Lifers in the North] 1935

The hero makes it but it remains unclear whether this is victory or defeat. The main character has lost his fingers and earlobes. He lives a life which, according to the writer “alternated between romanticism and irony”. The description of Lapland starts to take on realistic tones and in the short story Umpistaival [Trackless snows] (1989), Mirjam Kälkäjä (b. 1939) finally dispels the myth of male heroism – and romanticism. Harsh nature and setbacks have beaten a man: he lies depressed in bed. His wife now bears the financial and emotional responsibility for the whole family:

It makes me mad. He did have to bring his family out here, to the wilderness, the edge of the world. Here you really have to trudge along, a woman does, with a cold and with your skirts frozen. He just lies in the bed in the corner of the room and stares at a knothole in the wall.
Umpistaival ja muita novelleja [Trackless snows and other short stories] 1989

As Stuart Hall has observed, all identities have an imaginary “geography”; they are built upon a landscape that is natural to them. The literary scholar and cosmopolitan narrator of Kirsti Simonsuuri's Pohjoinen yökirja [Northern night diary] says that she feels like she is part of Europe, “ a new era and a segment of the world living in a different time that this one”. Her direction is the center of the city, into the midst of buildings made by human brains and human hands.

In the work Lumi [Snow] (1994) by artist and cosmopolitan Esko Sarkkinen (b. 1932), the direction taken by the narrator is the reverse: away from the city, in which emptiness fills up life, towards winter and tranquility. In a lonely, deserted landscape, he reflects on the relation between the image in his mind and reality and the meaning of existence. “What was my role here?” asks the artist. “To be a hand, an eye, awareness/—?” As for many who describe Lapland, snow, winter and the heart of winter are metaphors for death; for Sarkkinen, who was born in Petsamo, they signify life:

War was on. It was the dead of winter. It was dark. The light was in the snow, life was in the snow. /—/ I dug up a big, thick slab of ice. I started to shape it /—/ When the sculpture was finished, I stayed there in the dark looking at it. It didn't represent anything, but it had everything – the essence of snow, light, a fragrance, the touch of a hand – it had a soul.