SOURCE: "The Kalevala and Finnish Literature," translated by Hildi Hawkins, in Books from Finland, Vol. XIX, Ño. 1, 1985, pp. 61-64.

[In the following excerpt, Laitinen examines the influence of the Kalevala on the development of Finnish literature and of a Finnish national identity.]

I

Finnish literature began with the Kalevala.

That statement is at the same time more and less than the truth. A fair amount of literature had been published in Finland before the Kalevala appeared in 1835. Bishop Mikael Agricola, who brought Lutheranism to Finland in the sixteenth century, gave a start to Finnish-language literature when he translated the Bible into Finnish, and Swedish-language literature had had a number of distinguished representatives, such as Frans Michael Franzén (1772-1847) and the poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg, who made his debut five years before the Kalevala appeared. All the same, it is true to say that it was the publication of the Kalevala that gave Finnish-language literature its basis and its sense of importance. It is also arguable, with only a little exaggeration, that within only a few years the Kalevala had brought about yet more: the creation of a Finnish national identity.

As we now know, the extraordinarily direct influence of the Kalevala was in large part based on two misconceptions. The first of these was put forward by Elias Lönnrot; it was the notion that the folk poetry of which the Kalevala is made up actually gave an account of the history of the Finnish people. This belief was echoed by many others. And a nation with its own history, so the argument went, had the right to its place among the independent nations.

The other misconception was the belief that the Kalevala was part of a huge, fragmented national epic. Lönnrot was supposed to have reconstructed a portion of it from the fragments he collected from ballad singers. Lönnrot himself abandoned this idea fairly early, but it was still current until long after the Second World War. Studies of the way in which the Kalevala was put together—especially the work of Professor Väinö Kaukonen—have demonstrated that there is no truth in the notion of a great, lost national epic: it is now clear that Lönnrot constructed the Kalevala we know today piece by piece from a number of widely differing sources. But at the time when the Kalevala first appeared, the idea of a national epic served its purpose. It reinforced the national identity by demonstrating that Finland was capable of creating a work as impressive as the Kalevala. It had not only its own history, but its own ancient culture.

For literature and all the other arts, too, the Kalevala formed an important foundation stone: it created a national mythology. The importance of this was recognised in learned circles in Mikael Agricola's time: the foreword to his 1551 translation of the Psaltar acknowledges that 'Väinämöinen hammered hymns.' In his Mythologia Fennica of 1789, Christfrid Ganander characterised Väinämöinen as 'Finland's Apollo,' its 'excellent Orpheus', and identified Ilmarinen with Aeolus. The records of folk poetry that survive from before Lönnrot' s time mention many other demigods or heroes; it is clear that Finnish mythology was not unknown even then. But it was forced to compete on the one hand with Christian ideology and on the other with Classical mythology. The former was represented by the church, which was quick to condemn folk poetry as 'pagan'; the latter was dominant in the circles of the learned devotees of secular poetry.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century Danish influence brought a new subject into Nordic poetry: Nordic mythology. It replaced Classical subject-matter and the symbolic language that went with it; or at least, it won an honourable place alongside the Classics. In Finland the same phenomenon was more clearly marked than elsewhere, thanks to the Kalevala. Finnish mythology had certainly already been studied and presented (Agricola, H. G. Porthan, Christfrid Ganander) and used in poetry (Jaakko Juteini), but it was only with the appearance of Lönnrot' s Kalevala that it received a unified, organised form.

In the old folk poems there was little continuity in the characters from one poem to the next; often the protagonists could be interchanged at will. Their names, too, appeared in many variants. With the compilation of the Kalevala, however, the characters became clearly delineated. Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, Lemminkäinen, Kullervo, Louhi and the rest became clear, definite literary figures with their own individual histories and destinies. Finnish mythology, in the popular and artistic meaning of the word, was well-established. The heroes of the Kalevala and their deeds could now be used as universally recognisable symbols. They could become the bearers of all kinds of nationalistic, ideological and social values. Lönnrot himself had hinted at this possibility in the final verses of the Kalevala, in which it is possible to read a demanding programme of national and cultural advancement.

Before the Kalevala there was only one universally known work to which it was possible to allude in the certainty that one would be understood. This was the Bible. The appearance of the Kalevala changed all this. It offered the young literature of Finland inspiration on two counts: on the one hand subject matter, situations, dramatic confrontations and, above all, powerful characters, and on the other stylistic stimuli in the form of an original and essentially Finnish poetic metre, together with similes, proverbs and metaphors. But the indirect possibilities it offered were equally important. Even today, in works that have nothing whatsoever in common, in subject-matter or form, with the Kalevala, one still encounters references to it. A single name, an almost imperceptible allusion, is enough: everyone knows at once what is being referred to.

II

The literature of different periods has used the Kalevala and its subject-matter or stylistic devices in different ways. The ways in which writers have treated its heroes and stories reflect the changes that have taken place in Finland's cultural and political climate.

The earliest significant works with subjects taken from the Kalevala appeared in the 1860s, when Finnish-language literature was developing rapidly. The subject of Aleksis Kivi's Kullervo is taken straight from the Kalevala (verses 31-36), but Kivi adds his own characterisation of the hero and an explanation and discussion of the motives for his actions. Like the Kalevala hero, Kivi's Kullervo is an implacable avenger who destroys the supposed killer of his parents, and his victim's family. At the same time it is made clear that the cause of Kullervo's rage is oppression and his subjugated position—the 'mark of the slave' is often cited as the origin of his violence. The cause of his destiny and his tragedy lie in himself as well as in his external circumstances. His character is deeper, more complex and more unpredictable than that of his original in the Kalevala.

Kullervo has attracted the attention of more than one writer. In a play written in 1895, the poet J. H. Erkko presented the same figure as a social rebel, even a revolutionary. As Raoul Palmgren has pointed out, 'by opposing the landowners and the landless, free men and slaves, the writer has turned the Kullervo story into a social tragedy'. The Väinämöinen character makes no secret of the play's political nature. 'In the strong working class/are the original people of the Kalevala.' His later play Pohjolan häät ('The Northland wedding')—it, too, based on a story from the Kalevala—also touches on the politics of the day, this time the conflict and internal contradictions caused by the period of Russian oppression that began at the end of the nineteenth century.

It has generally been Finnish-language authors who have been drawn to the Kalevala, but there are exceptions. Zacharias Topelius, who wrote the first Finnish historical novel and gained the status of a classic children's story writer, was fascinated by the Kalevala, and drew the character of the Don Juan figure of his Prinsessan av Cypern ('The princess of Cyprus', 1860) from the Kalevala's Lemminkäinen. In this fairy-story play Topelius links north and south, Finland and Greece, in a surprising way: the island on which the events take place becomes Cyprus, where Lemminkäinen arrives to seize a bride for himself. Topelius also reserved space for the Kalevala in his later, hugely popular, book Boken om våri land ('The book of our land', 1875), in which he gives a knowledgeable account of the contents of the Kalevala and stresses the work's quality and significance.

Ill

J. H. Erkko's Kalevala-inspired plays belong to a new period of Finnish literary history, known as national neo-Romanticism. One could equally well call it national symbolism, for in it love of the Kalevala and the Karelian landscape in which the poems were collected combines with enthusiasm for the motifs with which Karelian houses, textiles and household objects were decorated, and European symbolism and Art Nouveau. It reached its high point in the last five years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when many writers and artists made the journey to Karelia (the phenomenon is, indeed, sometimes known as Karelianism). It took with it writers who had begun as realists and social critics, like Juhani Aho, whose historical novel Panu (1897) describes the struggle between Christianity and paganism in a remote part of eastern Finland and makes free use of 'national Kalevala material and sometimes also of its characteristic modes of expression.

The most significant representative of the new school, and at the same time and interesting writer in terms of the direct influence of the Kalevala, was the poet Eino Leino. The lyrical poem-drama Tuonelan jousten ('Swan of Tuonela'), a youthful work, takes its subject from the Kalevala and its timbre from the world of European symbolism. Verlaine's direction 'De la musique avant tout chose!' was clearly very much in Leino's mind, and the Kalevala, with its alliteration, vowel harmony and parallelism, lends itself to such treatment. Leino drew from the same material again in his play Sota volosta ('War for light', 1902), whose theme is political, the defence of a national culture against an external threat.

Later, however, Leino came to the conclusion that using the Kalevala as a direct source was not very fruitful: its characters 'are already, just as they are, complete, crystallised works of art, and as such they do not need extension or polishing at the hands of literature'. All the same, the Kalevala remained close to him in many ways: he adapted it for the theatre in 1911—the quotation is from his foreword—but above all, he used its stimuli in a new way. The result was Leino's most powerful work, the collection of poetry entitled Helkavirsiä, published in 1903. A second volume appeared as late as 1916. (A selection of the poems appeared in English in 1978 in a translation by Keith Bosley, with a foreword by Michael Branch, under the title Whitsongs.)

Helkavirsiä uses the stylistic apparatus of the Kalevala—its metre, the way in which the characters express themselves, metaphors in the Kalevala style—but not its subject matter. Leino creates his own myth in the spirit of the Kalevala. For his heroes are mythical, growing to a poetic stature; most often they are defiant figures, whose destinies show the qualities of Nietzche's Übermensch or a kind of tragic optimism. They defy their enemies, society, convention, even death—and die unbowed, open-eyed, unafraid of their fates. The poems of Helkavirsiä contain the most memorable of Leino's characters. In the second series of ballads, defiance has softened to resignation, the tone has become more melancholy and the scope widened to include cosmic visions and myths.

Eino Leino's work shows how an artist of genius can best make use of the Kalevala: not by copying it, or following it closely, but by developing the stimuli it gives in the artist's own direction. Leino modified the style of expression, reducing the number of repeated verses, varying the rhythm and using more concise and immediate language. His poems are, in their origin and inspiration, close to the Kalevala; but they are not overshadowed by it—their strength gives them an independent life.

IV

Since Eino Leino, many writers have used subjects from the Kalevala or tried to adapt its style for themselves, but few of them have achieved such impressive results. In the end the enthusiasm for the Kalevala resulted in a retreat from it. In newly independent Finland more writers avoided it than followed its inspiration. There are very few subjects taken from the Kalevala, for instance, and no Kalevala style or metre whatsoever, in the work of V. A. Koskenniemi, the leading poet of the time. This reaction is also apparent in prose. Joel Lehtonen's novel Kerran kesällä ('Once in summer', 1917) has a character named Bongman who quotes the Kalevala at all times and in all places, worships all things nationalistic with such enthusiasm that the description of him inevitably turns to parody.

Nevertheless, the Kalevala was not entirely abandoned. It had earlier been used in the aims of realism and social criticism (J. H. Erkko) and in the spirit of Karelianism and symbolism (Eino Leino), so it is hardly surprising that it should also become involved with the new current of expressionism. This happened in Lauri Haarla's play Lemmin poika ('Lemmi's son', 1922), in which the Kalevala's carefree youth develops into a tragic hero. Later, too, Haarla used subjects connected with the Kalevala or attempted an imagined 'ancient Finnish', pathetic style; but he was almost alone in his time. Only a very few poets succeeded in combining patriotic fervour and the Kalevala. In ceremonial speeches and newspaper articles between the two World Wars, of course, this combination did appear, and often; but in literature it proved difficult to achieve.

The Kalevala made its reappearance in Finnish literature much later, and from an unexpected quarter, in the work of Paavo Haavikko, the leading poet of the lyrical modernism of the 1950s. Some of the same subject matter is to be found in the work of contemporary prose writers (Anu Kaipainen, Erkki Mäkinen), but Haavikko was the writer who really brought the Kalevala back as a living inspiration for literature. His early works show a keen interest in motifs from Russian history and Byzantium. The subject of his extended poem Kaksikymmentä ja yksi ("Twenty and one', 1974) is nothing more nor less than the Kalevala story of the stealing of the Sampo. The Sampo is a mysterious object of power which dozens, perhaps hundreds, of theories have attempted to explain. In Haavikko's hands it receives a new interpretation with an economic slant: the Sampo is a Byzantine coin-minting machine that the men of the north steal in the belief that it will bring them prosperity and happiness.

Later Haavikko returned to the Kalevala in his work Rauta-aika ('Age of Iron', 1982), which also formed the script for a television series that attracted a great deal of attention in Finland. It began with this exhortation: 'Forget! Forget the Kalevala, its heroes, words, phrases, forget what you have heard about them, the pictures you have seen.' But at the same time out of the work grows a new, suggestive variation, a picture of the characters and events that we know from the Kalevala stressed and coloured in a new way. At the end of the work the characters are tired and resigned; they have had enough of life. Ilmari says, 'It wasn't a bad life. . . . It's certainly taken back everything it's given. We're quite. . . . Let death do its work now. I want to sleep, well and long.' The powerful heroes of the Kalevala, shamans who know the secret forces of existence, have become people again; weak, uncertain, tired—people like ourselves.

v

The Kalevala at first provided the belief in the right of the Finnish people to their independent existence, created for it a rich history and the illusion of a splendid cultural past. Later it became a fruitful source of material for other artists. Each of them found in it something different: Kivi his Kullervo, Erkko his social problems and differences, Leino his myth-creating fantasies, Haavikko his demythified anti-heroes. The Kalevala has been a mirror in which each time has seen, in the light of its own interests, that which it has found most interesting and absorbing: itself.

Without the visions to which the Kalevala, directly or indirectly, gave birth, Finnish-language literature would be very different from what it is today. It's even worth asking whether it would exist at all?