Må vi blicka tillbaka mot det förflutna: Svenskt och finskt hos åtta finlandssvenska författare 1899–1944 by Michel Ekman (review)

Michel Ekman added, mirabile dictu, something new to the J. L. Runeberg literature in his Kaos-ordning-kaos (Schildt 2004; Chaos-order-chaos), reviewed in Scandinavian Studies (78:198–203, 2006). Now he has chosen a topic even more deserving of attention: how an octet of Finland-Swedish authors regarded the country in which they lived, and in which, not so slowly but very surely, their minority, once cock of the walk, was being marginalized. Yet, in a dollop of divine justice, their literature burgeoned, giving the lie to the predictions of doom after the twin demises of the grand old man Topelius, on March 12, 1898, and the great white hope Tavaststjerna, on March 28, 1898.

Ekman starts the next year. His introduction describes the familiar push of Fennomania and shove of an embattled Swedish Finland; the latter turned to “offensive” and “defensive” strategies by creating a distinct Finland-Swedish literary history, and discovering (before Seamus Heaney) “The Sense of Place.” (Ekman is not parochial in his allusions.) “De svenska skären” (The Swedish Skerries), an apparently impregnable bastion, are handed over to Arvid Mörne in the collection’s longest essay. The production of Mörne, always fascinating but frustrating in its simultaneous devotion to the traditional and the modern, “är fullt av olösliga konflikter, också inom de enskilda böckerna” (p. 107) [is full of insoluble conflicts, even in (his) individual books]. “I Österbotten” (In Ostrobothnia) moves on to the “threatened idyll” of Jakob Tegengren, homebody and diligent student of his region’s Nordic roots and archaeological finds, whose worries were alleviated by his devotion to its nature and his religious faith. Tegengren provides the quotation in the collection’s title: “May we look back to the past.” A third “chapter,” comprised of four sub-divisions, is called “Gemeinschaft och Gesellschaft” (Community and Society), in Swedish-Finland, the distinction made by the Schleswig sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936). Jarl Hemmer’s “happy society” fits both bills, but exists only in Hemmer’s poetic imagination. “Han tycks drivas av drömmen om världen som en bygdegemenskap, byggd på informella och personliga strukturer” (p. 187) [He seems to be driven by the dream of the world as a village community, built on informal and personal structures]. No need to worry about encroaching Finnish neighbors here, in this “closed and isolated” realm.

A memorable section concerns “The Small Town in the Big Town,” shaped by Guss Mattsson in his “I dag” (Today) columns. (Mattsson had a wonderful gift for evoking Swedish Helsingfors’s essence, in nuances, anecdotes, and gossip, in the twentieth century’s first decade, a gift something like that of his American contemporaries O. Henry and James Gibbons Huneker, both Gotham newspapermen.) Ekman’s next stop is Helsingfors once more, provided by two short novels (1922 (1926) of Sigrid Backman, about a vanishing social layer, the capital’s dwindling, hard-pressed Suecophone working-class.

The finale is “Among Finns,” on three authors nestled in the heart of the linguistic majority’s territory. Bertel Gripenberg spent much of his adult life as a gentleman farmer in darkest Tavastland. Elmer Diktonius wiled away many a summer in the Finnish-speaking reaches of Nyland. Rabbe Enckell, classified 4-F during the Continuation War, was dispatched as a minor manager to Savolax. As to linguistic competence: Gripenberg was an industrious translator of Finnish belles lettres and doubtless spoke fluent Finnish with his stablehands. Diktonius, from far down the social ladder, was wholly (if at times zanily) bilingual. Of the three, Rabbe Enckell may have been the most challenged linguistically, and was surely the most uncomfortable. An inveterate snob, Gripenberg maintained an unshakable faith in “cultural Swedishness”; the Civil War, though, in which he served, nattily uninformed, as an overage junior officer in Nyland’s Dragoons, impelled him to address his Finnish...