Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms and Emotions in the Baltic Sea Region: The Production of Loss 9004430385, 9789004430389

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: The Production of Loss
Part 1: The Production of Loss Organising Thought
Chapter 1. Loss, Emotion, and Transformation of a National Idea: Poland 1795–1815
Chapter 2. Visions of the Nation and Feelings of Loss in the Works of Steen Steensen Blicher
Chapter 3. Neglect, Grief, Revenge: Finland in Swedish Nineteenth-Century Literature
Chapter 4. How a Culture Was Almost Lost: The Sámi in Nineteenth-Century Conceptualisations of Finnish Nationhood
Part 2: Landscapes and Bodies Activating the Production of Loss
Chapter 5. Entrenchments and Escape Routes: Expressing a Sense of Loss in Danish Art 1848–1864
Chapter 6. Outreach, Invasion, Displacement: Denmark's Disputed Southern Borderland as Negotiated through Strategic and Affective Aspects of Space in Novels by Andersen and Bang
Chapter 7. Affective Bodies on the Move: Space, Emotions and Loss in Fredrika Runeberg's Historical Novel Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters
Chapter 8. Carl Larsson's Spadarfvet, My Little Farmstead: Paradise Regained or Lament for a Disappearing Agrarian Society?
Chapter 9. Sweden and Algeria in the Travel Writing of Anna Maria Roos, 1905–1909
Part 3: Personal Loss and Lived Nationalism
Chapter 10. ``Thus Shall Our Joy Be Solemn, and Our Pain Fruitful'': Nation, Loss and the Power of Emotions in Amalie von Helvig's Writings
Chapter 11. The Sense of Loss in the Context of Language Disputes in Finland: Reflections on E.F. Jahnsson's Authorship
Chapter 12. Nationalism, Emotions and Loss in Lilli Suburg's Short Story ``Liina''
Chapter 13. Alexandra Gripenberg and Lost Faith in National Belonging
Index

Citation preview

Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms and Emotions in the Baltic Sea Region

National Cultivation of Culture Edited by Joep Leerssen (University of Amsterdam)

Editorial Board John Breuilly (The London School of Economics and Political Science) Katharine Ellis (University of Cambridge) Ina Ferris (University of Ottawa) Patrick J. Geary (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) Tom Shippey (Saint Louis University) Anne-Marie Thiesse (CNRS, National Center for Scientific Research)

Volume 25

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ncc

Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms and Emotions in the Baltic Sea Region The Production of Loss

Edited by

Anna Bohlin Tiina Kinnunen Heidi Grönstrand

Cover illustration: Jørgen Sonne, Landlig scene (Rural Scene), 1848. Oil on canvas. Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS7485, www.smk.dk, public domain. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nation and Loss: Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms and Emotions in the Baltic Sea Region (Conference) (2018 : Stockholm, Sweden), author. | Bohlin, Anna, 1971- editor. | Kinnunen, Tiina, editor. | Grö nstrand, Heidi, editor. Title: Nineteenth-century nationalisms and emotions in the Baltic Sea region : the production of loss / edited by Anna Bohlin, Tiina Kinnunen, Heidi Grö nstrand. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: National cultivation of culture, 1876-5645 ; volume 25 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021023583 | ISBN 9789004430389 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004467323 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Nationalism and the arts–Baltic Sea Region–History–19th century–Congresses. | Loss (Psychology) in art–Congresses. | Arts, Northern European–19th century–Congresses. Classification: LCC NX180.N38 N375 2018 | DDC 700/.4581–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023583

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1876-5645 ISBN 978-90-04-43038-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-46732-3 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Illustrations viii Notes on Contributors xi Introduction: The Production of Loss 1 Anna Bohlin, Heidi Grönstrand and Tiina Kinnunen

Part 1 The Production of Loss Organising Thought 1

Loss, Emotion, and Transformation of a National Idea: Poland 1795–1815 25 Maciej Janowski

2

Visions of the Nation and Feelings of Loss in the Works of Steen Steensen Blicher 50 Jens Eike Schnall

3

Neglect, Grief, Revenge: Finland in Swedish Nineteenth-Century Literature 80 Anna Bohlin

4

How a Culture Was Almost Lost: The Sámi in Nineteenth-Century Conceptualisations of Finnish Nationhood 108 Jens Grandell

Part 2 Landscapes and Bodies Activating the Production of Loss 5

Entrenchments and Escape Routes: Expressing a Sense of Loss in Danish Art 1848–1864 137 Peter Nørgaard Larsen

6

Outreach, Invasion, Displacement: Denmark’s Disputed Southern Borderland as Negotiated through Strategic and Affective Aspects of Space in Novels by Andersen and Bang 164 Bjarne Thorup Thomsen

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Affective Bodies on the Move: Space, Emotions and Loss in Fredrika Runeberg’s Historical Novel Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters 192 Kristina Malmio

8

Carl Larsson’s Spadarfvet, My Little Farmstead: Paradise Regained or Lament for a Disappearing Agrarian Society? 219 Martin Olin

9

Sweden and Algeria in the Travel Writing of Anna Maria Roos, 1905–1909 237 Jenny Bergenmar

Part 3 Personal Loss and Lived Nationalism 10

“Thus Shall Our Joy Be Solemn, and Our Pain Fruitful”: Nation, Loss and the Power of Emotions in Amalie von Helvig’s Writings 263 Jules Kielmann

11

The Sense of Loss in the Context of Language Disputes in Finland: Reflections on E.F. Jahnsson’s Authorship 299 Heidi Grönstrand

12

Nationalism, Emotions and Loss in Lilli Suburg’s Short Story “Liina” 319 Eve Annuk

13

Alexandra Gripenberg and Lost Faith in National Belonging Tiina Kinnunen Index

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Acknowledgements This volume is the result of the international conference Nation and Loss: Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms and Emotions in the Baltic Sea Region, which took place in Stockholm on April 12–13, 2018, generously funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. We are also deeply grateful for financial support from The Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen. A special thanks to Helen Leslie-Jacobsen for invaluable support throughout the editing process with everything from proofreading to colouring maps, and to Martin Olin for much appreciated kind and professional support in editing the illustrations. Finally, we wish to express our most sincere gratitude to all the authors. Thank you for your hard work and for generously sharing your expertise in different fields of research to further our reflections on the production of loss!

Illustrations 2.1

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Nicolai Abildgaard, Ossian. Den gamle blinde skotske barde synger til harpen sin svanesang (Ossian Singing His Swan Song), 1780–1782. Oil on canvas. 42 × 35,5 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS395, www.smk.dk, public domain. 54 Johan Thomas Lundbye, En gravhøj fra oldtiden ved Raklev på Refsnæs (Dolmen at Raklev, Røsnæs), 1839. Oil on canvas. 66,7 × 88,9 cm. Thorvaldsens Museum, B255, www.thorvaldsensmuseum.dk, public domain. 58 Dankvart Dreyer, Udsigt mod Himmelbjerget. Aften (A View towards Himmelbjerget, Jutland. Evening), 1838. Oil on canvas. 95 × 126 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS355, www.smk.dk, public domain. 65 The front cover of the first edition of G.H. Mellin’s Sweriges Sista Strid: Fantastiskt Nattstycke (1840). Photo by Ann-Sofie Persson, Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm. 91 Lappkåta (Lapp cot). An illustration by Gunnar Berndtson in Finland i 19de seklet, Leo Mechelin (ed.), 1893. Courtesy of The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS). CC BY 4.0. 113 Zacharias Topelius by his writing desk. Courtesy of The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS, Historiska och litteraturhistoriskasamlingen). CC BY 4.0. 120 Luppiovaara at Torneå Elf. An illustration by Lennart Forstén in Zacharias Topelius, Finland framställdt i teckningar (1845–1852). Courtesy of The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS). CC BY 4.0. 129 Jørgen Sonne, Landlig scene (Rural Scene), 1848. Oil on canvas. 120,5 × 96 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS7485, www.smk.dk, public domain. 141 Otto Bache, Linjeskibet Skjold i dokken på Christianshavn (The Lineer Skjold at the Christianshavn Dockyards), 1860. Oil on canvas. 36,3 × 40,5 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NM 7362. Photo by Cecilia Heisser/ Nationalmuseum, public domain. 142 Frederik Vermehren, En jysk fårehyrde på heden (A Jutland Shepherd on the Moors), 1855. Oil on canvas. 59,5 × 80 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS1496, www.smk.dk, public domain. 144 Jørgen Sonne, Morgenen efter slaget ved Isted den 25 juli 1850 (The Morning after the Battle of Isted 25 July 1850), 1876. Oil on canvas. 79,5 × 135 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS1084, www.smk.dk, public domain. 146 Constantin Hansen, Badende og legende drenge (Boys Bathing and Playing), 1853. Oil on canvas. 39 × 54,4 cm. The Hirschsprung Collection, 63. Den Hirschsprungske Samling and SMK-Foto. 150

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Georg Emil Libert, View of Rosenvænget, 1863. Woodcut. Illustreret Tidende 31 May 1863. 152 5.7 Peter Christian Skovgaard, Bøgeskov i maj. Motiv fra Iselingen (A Beech Wood in May near Iselingen Manor, Zealand), 1857. Oil on canvas. 189,5 × 158,5 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS4580, www.smk.dk, public domain. 155 5.8 Peter Christian Skovgaard, Blegeplads under store træer (Bleaching Linen in a Clearing), 1858. Oil on canvas. 44,5 × 26,5 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS3772, www.smk.dk, public domain. 157 5.9 Peter Christian Skovgaard, Badende drenge ved Bondedammen (Boys Bathing), 1867. Oil on canvas. 97 × 126 cm. Skovgaard Museet, Viborg, inv. nr. 10.143. Skovgaard Museet and photographer Lars Guldager. 158 5.10 Peter Christian Skovgaard, En sjællandsk landevej (Country Road on Zealand), 1864. Oil on canvas. 28,9 × 54 cm. The Hirschsprung Collection, 457. Den Hirschsprungske Samling and SMK-Foto. 160 6.1 Oversigtskort over det historiske Sønderjylland. Published: https:// danmarkshistorien.dk/leksikon-og-kilder/vis/materiale/genforeningen-1920/. Courtesy of danmarkshistorien.dk, Aarhus Universitet. Colour markings by Helen Leslie-Jacobsen. 170 7.1 Kyro fors, 1846. Lithograph by Magnus von Wright in Zacharias Topelius, Finland framställdt i teckningar (1845–1852), http://www.topelius.fi/index.php?p= pictures. Courtesy of The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS). CC BY 4.0. 198 7.2 Johann Elias Lange, Neue Karte von den gegenwärtigen Kriegs-Schauplatze zwischen den Russisch. Kayserl: und Königl: Schwedischen Armeen und Flotten, welche vorzügl. ganz Finland, Liefland, Estland, Ingermanland, ein Theil von Pohlen und Rusland, Ost- und West-Preussen, die Ost See, Dännemark, Schweden, Norwegen, und ein Theil von Deutschland, nebst denen bisherigen Stellungen gedachter Armeen enthält, 1788, Leipzig. http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fd2017 -00011960, public domain. 213 8.1 Carl Larsson, Slakten (Slaughtering), watercolour for Spadarfvet, mitt lilla landtbruk (1906), Bonnier’s Collection, Stockholm. 220 8.2 Carl Larsson, Blomsterfönstret (The Flower Window), watercolour for Ett hem (1899), Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NMB 268. Photo by Cecilia Heisser/Nationalmuseum, public domain. 223 8.3 Carl Larsson, Gården (The Farm), watercolour for Spadarfvet, mitt lilla landtbruk (1906), Bonnier’s Collection, Stockholm. 224 8.4 Carl Larsson, Slåttern (Mowing), watercolour for Spadarfvet, mitt lilla landtbruk (1906), Bonnier’s Collection, Stockholm. 225 8.5 Carl Larsson, Gödselstaden (The Manure Heap), watercolour for Spadarfvet, mitt lilla landtbruk (1906), Bonnier’s Collection, Stockholm. 228

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Illustrations Carl Larsson, watercolour for the title page of Spadarfvet, mitt lilla landtbruk (1906), Bonnier’s Collection, Stockholm. 229 Propaganda against Swedish emigration to the USA. Nationalföreningen mot emigrationen (The National Association Against Emigration), c. 1910. Photo: Sverige Amerika Centret, Karlstad, 2011-12-08. CC BY-SA 3.0. 230 Illustration by Hedvig Björkman in Anna Maria Roos, Fyra barn i Biskra (1909). Gothenburg University Library. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/48409. 242 Illustration by Gunhild Facks in Anna Maria Roos, Fyra barn i Biskra (1909). Gothenburg University Library. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/48409. 246 The first volume of Amalie von Helvig’s and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s collection of Tales and Legends, Taschenbuch der Sagen und Legenden (1812). Photo: Uppsala University Library. 269 Illustration in Helvig’s translation of the Swedish poet Erik Gustaf Geijer’s ballad “Den siste skalden” (1811), published in the second volume of Taschenbuch der Sagen und Legenden (1817). Photo: Uppsala University Library. 285 Selection of a letter written by Amalie von Helvig to Erik Gustaf Geijer from Berlin, October 27, 1816. Uppsala University Library Carolina Rediviva, sign. Geijer G 85 j, 71. Photo: Uppsala University Library. 290 The front cover of E.F. Jahnsson’s Hatanpään Heikki ja hänen morsiamensa: Kertomus Tuomas piispan ajalta (1884). Cover illustration by Venny Soldan-Brofeldt. National Library of Finland. 312 Lilli Suburg at about the age of 25. Source: Estonian Cultural History Archives at Estonian Literary Museum. 325 The front cover of the first edition of “Liina”, 1877. Photo: Digital Archive Digar https://www.digar.ee/arhiiv/et/kollektsioonid/22541. 330 Alexandra Gripenberg with friends in restaurant Alppila in Helsinki (1906). Finnish Literature Society. Archive Materials on Literature and Cultural History (SKS KIA). Archive of Alexandra Gripenberg, KIAK2008:33:3. 346

Notes on Contributors Eve Annuk PhD, Senior Researcher at the Estonian Cultural History Archives at the Estonian Literary Museum, and the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies, has conducted research on Estonian modern literature and literary history, Estonian gender history and cultural history of the Soviet period in Estonia, focusing on biographical research. She has extensively studied the life and work of Lilli Suburg (1841–1923) – writer, journalist, pedagogue and the first Estonian feminist – and the female poet Ilmi Kolla (1933–1954). Her most recent publications include “Feminism in the Post-Soviet place: the geopolitics of Estonian feminism”, in Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography (2019), and together with dr. Marika Seigel (Michigan Technological University) “Pregnancy, Motherhood and/as/or Dissent: The Soviet Micro-rhetorics of Gender”, in Rhetoric Review (2020). Jenny Bergenmar PhD, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research concerns gender and late nineteenth-century literature and early twentieth-century literature, transnational reception history, and history of reading. Among her recent publications is the monograph Swedish Women’s Writing on Export: Tracing Transnational Reception in the Nineteenth Century (2019, with Åsa Arping, Gunilla Hermansson, Birgitta Johansson Lindh, and Yvonne Leffler). Anna Bohlin PhD, Associate Professor of Nordic Literature at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her research interests concern mainly the interrelation of politics and literature, more specifically the history of the women’s movement, religion, and early nationalism from a critical perspective. Her most recent research project is Enchanting Nations: Commodity Market, Folklore and Nationalism in Scandinavian Literature 1830–1850 (funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond 2016–2018), and her most recent publications include the co-edited volume Tracing the Jerusalem Code III. The Promised Land: Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920) (Walter de Gruyter, 2021). Jens Grandell PhD in the History of Ideas, researcher at the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office, has conducted research on nineteenth-century liberalism and republicanism,

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nation building, nationalism and historiography in the nineteenth century. His research is characterized by a biographical methodology and an interest in the individual as an exponent for ideologies in the margins. His most recent publications include Från ett årtionde i Finland: August Schauman, republikanism och liberalism 1855–1865 (Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 2020). Heidi Grönstrand PhD, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Slavic and Baltic languages, Finnish, Dutch and German at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her main research interests include literary multilingualism, language ideologies and literary history. In 2020, she published together with Markus Huss and Ralf Kauranen an edited volume, The Aesthetics and Politics of Linguistic Borders: Multilingualism in Northern European Literature (Routledge). Maciej Janowski PhD, Professor of History at the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw) and Visiting Associate Professor at the Central European University (Vienna/Budapest) works on Polish and Central European intellectual and social history from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century. His publications include The Birth of the Intelligentsia 1750–1831 (Peter Lang, 2014) and in co-operation with Balázs Trencsényi, Michal Kopeček, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Maria Falina, and Monika Baár A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe (vol. 1–2, Oxford University Press, 2016–2018). Jules Kielmann received the BA and MA-degree in Scandinavian and German literature from Freiburg University (GER), with a certain research interest in nineteenthcentury female writers. Jules is currently a PhD-candidate at the Department of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden, working on a dissertation on Amalie von Helvig as a writer and cultural transmitter between Germany and Sweden. Tiina Kinnunen PhD, Professor of Finnish and Northern European History at the University of Oulu, Finland, has conducted research on the history of European feminism in the long nineteenth century, cultural and social history of war in the twentieth century, and history of historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Methodologically, her focus is on gender history and biographical research. Her most recent publications include: “Feminist Biography in Finland and Sweden around 1900: Creation of Bonds of Gratitude and Admir-

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ation”, in Erinnern, vergessen, umdeuten? Europäische Frauenbewegungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Angelika Schaser et al. (Campus, 2019). Kristina Malmio PhD, Docent and University Lecturer in Nordic Literature at the University of Helsinki, Finland, has written extensively on Swedish literature in Finland in the early twentieth and twenty-first century. Her research areas include literary spatiality, theories on postmodernism and beyond, and sociology of literature. Among her recent publications are the co-edited Contemporary Nordic Literature and Spatiality (2020), together with Kaisa Kurikka, and the article “Finland-Swedish minority literature: social, economic, cultural and literary aspects” in Ways of Being in the World: Studies on Minority Literatures, ed. Johanna Laakso (2020). Peter Nørgaard Larsen PhD, chief curator and senior researcher at Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark. Primary spheres of interest: nineteenth-century art and the exchanges between Danish and European art, genre history and history painting with particular interest in the history of mentalities, Danish and European symbolism, vitalism, Danish impressionism and postimpressionism, the history of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and japonism in the Nordic countries. Editor of the research periodical SMK Art Journal 2003–2012 and Perspective 2015–2019. His most recent publications include: “Sensory observation and divine inspiration”, in Anna Ancher: Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen, 2020). Martin Olin PhD, Associate Professor, Director of Research, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden. Olin’s research interests include Scandinavian painting around 1900 and seventeenth-century drawings and architecture in France, Italy and Sweden. In 2020, he curated the exhibition Arcadia – A Paradise Lost, on the ideal landscape from Claude Lorrain to the late nineteenth century. Jens Eike Schnall Associate Professor of Old Norse Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. He holds a DPhil in Scandinavian and German Studies from the University of Göttingen. His research interests lie predominantly in medieval and early modern studies and include encyclopedic literature; literature, science & technology; mapping and cartography; learned networks; medieval and early modern food cultures, as well as medievalism and nation building in nineteenth-

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and twentieth-century Scandinavia and Germany. His most recent publication on the latter field is “Halls Haunted by the Past: Old Germanic Heritage and ‘Völkisch’ Architecture in the German Empire”, in Quaestiones Medii Aevi Novae 24 (2019), 97–109. Bjarne Thorup Thomsen PhD, was formerly a Reader and is now an Honorary Fellow in the Scandinavian Studies section of the Department of European Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. He has published extensively on place and space in modern Scandinavian Literature. His work on Selma Lagerlöf includes the monograph Lagerlöfs litterære landvinding (2007) and the coedited volume Re-Mapping Lagerlöf (2014). His main current research project is entitled Roadmap to Geomodernism and focuses on Eyvind Johnson’s early writing.

Introduction: The Production of Loss Anna Bohlin, Heidi Grönstrand and Tiina Kinnunen

A sense of loss is a driving force in most nationalist movements. In the nineteenth century, nationalist thought regularly activated imaginings of a lost origin, or of the loss of traditions, culture, language, national virtues and characteristics, territory, a Golden Age. The imagined Viking era as a lost common origin, determining national virtues in Scandinavian nationalisms, or the language struggles characterizing Finnish and Estonian nationalisms are only a few examples. The spread of nationalism in our own time is equally frequently fuelled – and explained – by loss, although in reference to other kinds of losses, such as the loss of control or work opportunities. When writing this introduction, the loss of lives due to the corona pandemic increases nationalism across the world. Loss in nationalist discourse is ubiquitous and difficult to overlook; yet the notion of loss has hardly been targeted as an object of inquiry from a historical perspective in the growing field of Nationalism Studies. The Production of Loss provides the opportunity to address the genealogy of loss in nationalist discourses. Increasingly studies of nationalist mass movements emphasise feelings as an important part of the very definition of nationalism, or at the very least as a pivotal aspect of transforming nationalism from an elite project into a mass movement.1 Still, few have examined in detail how emotions were established, shaped, changed, and challenged, nor has the question of how emotions travelled across borders in nineteenth-century nationalisms been properly addressed. One exception is the newly issued anthology Emotions and Everyday Nationalism in Modern European History, which combines the study of emotions with a bottom-up analysis of national identifications. In contrast to the influential concept of “banal nationalism” coined by Michael Billig, Emotions and Everyday Nationalism puts emphasis on the agency of ordinary people and the concrete reproduction of nationhood in their daily

1 For a recent discussion on different conceptions of nationalism, see e.g. Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 14–17; Anthony D. Smith, The Nation Made Real: Art and National Identity in Western Europe, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5–9. On the transition from elite project to mass movement, see also Miroslav Hroch, “From National Movement to the Fullyformed Nation: The Nation-building Process in Europe”, in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (New York and London: Verso, 1996), 78–97.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_002

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lives – nationalism is approached as embodiment, encounters between bodies and objects.2 However, neither Billig nor Emotions and Everyday Nationalism focus on loss. And loss is equally absent in research on literary genres, such as the romance and the Gothic novel, engendering emotions in nation-building processes.3 Depressing emotions such as grief and nostalgia, normally associated with passivity, became a powerful means of creating affective agency in nineteenth-century nationalist discourse; emotions of deprivation were invoked in order to instigate an emotional turn with mobilizing force. The role of the sense of loss in the transformation of nationalism into a mass movement has yet to be scrutinised. Research on the development of nationalism in the nineteenth century following Benedict Anderson’s, Franco Moretti’s and Ernest Gellner’s seminal works invites us to think of expanding movements: the enlargement of structures of power, markets, communities, imaginary geographies. Benedict Anderson’s concept “imagined communities” understands the spread of nationalism through print media as a sense of belonging with those beyond our reach, an identification with those with whom we do not come in contact.4 In a similar vein, Franco Moretti argues that the novel was the symbolic 2 Andreas Stynen, Maarten van Ginderachter, and Xosé M. Núnez Seixas, “Introduction: Emotions and everyday nationalism in modern European history”, in Emotions and Everyday Nationalism in Modern European History, eds. Andreas Stynen, Maarten van Ginderachter and Xosé M. Núnez Seixas (London & New York: Routledge, 2020). See also Reetta Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi: Aate, tunteet ja sukupuoli Tengströmin perheessä 1800-luvun puolivälissä (Tampere: Tampereen yliopiston väitöskirjat 79, 2019). Michael Billig’s concept banal nationalism highlights nationhood as a process by which nation states are reproduced in daily, often unnoticed activities. Instead of the history of great men, such questions as how nation is called into existence in everyday language use and how ordinary people express their feelings to “their” nation, become important. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995); see also Marco Antonsich and Michael Skey, “Introduction: The Persistence of Banal Nationalism”, in Everyday Nationhood: Theorising Culture, Identity and Belonging after Banal Nationalism, eds. Michael Skey and Marco Antonsich (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 4–6. 3 See e.g. Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen, eds., Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia (Helsinki: The Finnish Literature Society, 2015); P.M. Mehtonen and Matti Savolainen, eds., Gothic Topographies: Language, Nation Building and “Race” (Ashgate: Farnham, 2013); Amelia Sanz, Francesca Scott, and Susan van Dijk, eds., Women Telling Nations: Women Writers in History 1 (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2014); Anna Bohlin, “The Novel Reconsidered: Emotions and Anti-Realism in Mid-19th-Century Scandinavian Literature”, Nations and Nationalism (published in early view 2021), https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12698. The forerunner in this respect is Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Los Angeles & Oxford: University of California Press, 1991). 4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 2006).

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form of the nation state precisely because the novel was able to add distant areas to the imaginary geography of the nation. Local, concrete power relations were replaced by the nation state, “quite unlike previous power relations; a wider, more abstract, more enigmatic dominion – that needed a new symbolic form in order to be understood”.5 Even those who follow Ernest Gellner in stressing the importance of the capitalist market economy for the emergence of nationalism are tapping into the model of accumulation.6 The basic model in these theories of the spread of nationalism thus rests on an adding process. By focussing on loss, we may problematize this accumulative model: investigating loss inserts an element of deprivation, of negativity, as fundamental for creating expansion. Our aim is to explore the notion of loss as a part of nationalisms and nation building in the long nineteenth-century Baltic Sea region. We address multiple aspects of the question of how loss was charged with emotions and set in motion in nationalist discourses and practices. The case studies are diverse both in terms of disciplinary approach and source material: historians, historians of ideas, art historians and historians of literature investigate material from Finland, Estonia, Poland, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, ranging from political writings, lectures, travel literature, novels, and paintings to “ego-documents” such as letters and diaries. Different scales of loss are thus confronted: the production of loss in public discourse is matched with how loss was experienced, negotiated, used, and enacted related to nationalist practices in people’s lives, that is in the lives of people promoting nationalist thought. Through history, the peoples across the Baltic Sea have affected one another in multiple ways, sharing a wider neighbourhood and a common water way. Ideas, people and goods – not to mention armies – have travelled over the shifting borders. The Baltic Sea region might not be a region in the sense of a shared identity, but there have been all kinds of exchanges and bonds, both tied and severed, over the centuries.7 The political origins of the present-day

5 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 17. 6 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). For an overview of the impact of Gellner’s work, see e.g. Dale J. Stahl, An Analysis of Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (London: Macat, 2017). 7 Max Engman problematizes the notion of regions in the Baltic Sea area, and notes that different regions have been created throughout the centuries depending on the current most dominant economic and military powers. Max Engman, Ett långt farväl: Finland mellan Sverige och Ryssland efter 1809 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2009), 52. On the idea of Estonian Nordic identity and regionalism as a dimension of Estonian nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalism, see Mart Kuldkepp “The Scandinavian Connection in Early Estonian Nationalism”, Journal of Baltic Studies (2013): 1–26, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2012.744911.

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nation states across the Baltic Sea differ considerably; their political situations during the nineteenth century were vastly different. Parts of Poland, the Baltic States, and Finland (from 1809) were included in the Russian Empire, but with varying degrees of relative autonomy. The Grand Duchy of Finland was anxious to keep its quite extensive autonomy, but the implications for Finnish nationalism in obtaining that objective changed. Russian authorities initially supported the incipient Finnish nationalism in order to cut its former ties with Sweden, whereas the late-nineteenth-century Finnish nationalism had to face Russification campaigns – as indeed Finnish-speaking and Sámi people on the other side of the Swedish border suffered from corresponding campaigns from Swedish authorities.8 This is only one example to suggest how shifting political conditions over time and space affected nationalist discourse. Nevertheless, there is a strong convergence in relation to the sense of loss. These discrepancies amount to an interesting case for testing the notion of loss as a focus for analysis, and strengthen the importance of a transnational and crossdisciplinary approach. We argue that there is an on-going production of loss in nationalist ideology; the production of loss is indeed a distinguishing feature of modern nationalism in contrast to earlier forms of patriotism. In the eighteenth century the traditional patriotic praise of king and state were accompanied by a new ideal of citizenship, emphasising economic and cultural contributions to one’s country (cf. Maciej Janowski’s and Jens Eike Schnall’s chapters in the present volume). The ensuing Romantic nationalism, on the other hand, initiated modern nationalist thought by introducing the idea of a national people connected to a national landscape and defined by a national history, one whose origin was lost and yet essential for the new concept of national identity.9 The function of loss in nationalist ideology is in fact an effect of time as 8 See e.g. Lars Elenius, Både finsk och svensk: modernisering, nationalism och språkförändring i Tornedalen 1850–1939 (Umeå: Kulturgräns norr, 2001); Lars Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik: samer och finskspråkiga minoriteter i ett jämförande nordiskt perspektiv (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2006). 9 On the eighteenth-century idea of patriotic citizenship in the Nordic countries, see e.g. Bo Lindberg, Den antika skevheten: Politiska ord och begrepp i det tidig-moderna Sverige (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 2006); Jakob Christensson, Lyckoriket: Studier i svensk upplysning (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1996), 105–69; Mikael Alm, Kungsord i elfte timmen: språk och självbild i det gustavianska enväldets legitimtetskamp 1772–1809 (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2002), 116–30, 319–28; Tine Damsholt, Fædrelandskærlighed og borgerdyd: Patriotisk diskurs og militære reformer i Danmark i sidste del af 1700-tallet (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2000). On the distinction between patriotism and nationalism, see Tine Damsholt, “En national turist i det patriotiske landskab”, Fortid og Nutid (March 1999): 3–26.

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a defining feature of the nationalist myth. The three-dimensional temporality of nationalism rests on the fantasy of a past that will be re-enacted, thus forming the present to ensure a prosperous future. But in order for the past to be re-enacted, it has to be lost. Nationalist ideology necessarily works through a production of loss. Different losses were charged with different emotions such as nostalgia, grief, melancholy, shame, fear, anger, and revenge – emotions that also changed over time, displacing the function of loss. Nevertheless, to argue that a sense of loss is produced, and thus adopting a constructivist perspective, certainly does not rule out the fact that real losses did occur. A very real and undisputable loss was the nineteenth-century territorial losses that characterized several of the Baltic Sea region nationalisms. Empires were more or less erased from the map: the final dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire was effectuated in 1806 with the defeat of the Prussian and Saxon troops in Jena and Auerstedt, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth disappeared with the partitions of Poland between Russia, Prussia and the Habsburg Monarchy, completed in 1795. Denmark and Sweden, the Nordic countries with an imperial past, took their current form during the nineteenth century as a result of territorial losses. These losses have been conceived of as traumatic experiences that instigated nationalism.10 Still, shifting borders had been a recurrent experience for the peoples populating the shores of the Baltic Sea for ages past. The pivotal change was nationalist thought, investing the territorial losses with emotions, which is the topic of Maciej Janowski’s, Anna Bohlin’s and Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s contributions to this volume. The partition of Poland had repercussions all over Europe, and may be regarded as a foundational trope for territorial loss in nineteenth-century nationalisms in the Baltic Sea region. Poland’s fate, the dissolution of the state conceived of as a threat of a vanishing of the nation, echoed in other nationalisms. Conversely, the Polish uprisings were a cause for identifica-

10

For a critical discussion on Denmark’s and Sweden’s territorial losses in nationalist historiography, see e.g. Rasmus Glenthøj, “Historier om et nederlag”, in Konfliktzonen Danmark: stridende fortællinger om nyere dansk historie, eds. Sissel Bjerrum Fossat, Rasmus Glenthøj and Lone Kølle Martinsen (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2018), 88–115; Henrik Edgren, “Traumakonstruktionen: Svensk historieskrivning om rikssprängningen 1809”, Scandia 76, no. 1 (2010): 9–39; Åke Sandström, “Sökandet efter en ny svensk identitet: Om svensk självsyn och synen på Finland 1808–1860”, in Maktens mosaik: Enhet, särart och självbild i det svenska riket, eds. Max Engman and Nils Erik Villstrand (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2008), 381–402; Åke Sandström, “Sveriges 1809: Föreställningar om finska kriget under 200 år”, in Fänrikens marknadsminne: Finska kriget 1808–1809 och dess följder i eftervärldens ögon, ed. Max Engman (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2009), 27–96.

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tion and evoked intense emotions in all the Nordic countries. While Finnish troops were part of the Russian military campaign repressing the rebellion in 1830, revolutionary Finnish students in Helsinki raised a toast for the Poles in December the same year – a daring action in the Russian Grand Duchy, which caused inquiries and started civil unrest and repressions.11 In Sweden and Norway, liberal authors such as the Swedish Carl Fredrik Ridderstad and the Norwegian Henrik Wergeland published poems celebrating the Polish uprisings, whereas the Swedish students demonstrated for liberty and for Poland.12 After the defeat, feasts of mourning were arranged in Uppsala to glorify Poland while a giant, blood-red doll portraying the Tsar was hung up in the street.13 The territorial loss of one nation had a transnational bearing; the sense of loss was circulated in what Anne-Marie Thiesse has called the “identity trade between nations”.14 Still, territorial loss has had different functions in different nationalisms. The emotions connected to the Swedish loss of Finland in 1809, one-third of the territory, varied considerably during the nineteenth century – a fact that Anna Bohlin addresses in chapter three. Today, the loss of Finland has practically no significance for the Swedish self-image whatsoever.15 In a similar vein, the Danish loss of Norway in 1814 was thoroughly lamented in the nineteenth century, among others by the writer Steen Steensen Blicher (1782–1848), whose works Jens Eike Schnall analyses in chapter two. After the nineteenth century, though, the loss of Norway has received little attention, whereas the losses in the Second Schleswig Wars in 1864, on the contrary, remain to this day an important memory site for national self-understanding, which Peter Nørgaard Larsen highlights in chapter five.16 Bjarne Thorup Thomsen analyses in chapter six the conflicting nationalist – and anti-nationalist – emotions 11

12

13 14

15 16

Johan Wrede, Världen enligt Runeberg: En biografisk och idéhistorisk studie (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2005), 169–71, 316; Matti Klinge, Den politiske Runeberg (Helsingfors: Söderströms & Co. & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2004), 145–51. Klinge notes that the Polish Catholicism was a reason for compassion in Catholic France, but had the opposite effect in Lutheran Finland. Klinge, Den politiske Runeberg, 151. See K.G. Fellenius, ed., Polen i svensk lyrik (Stockholm: A.B. Seelig & Co., 1935); Elin Stengrundet, “Opprørets variasjoner: Autoritetstematikk i fire dikt av Henrik Wergeland” (PhD diss., Høgskolen i Innlandet, 2018). Klinge, Den politiske Runeberg, 148. Anne-Marie Thiesse, “National Identities: A Transnational Paradigm”, in Revisiting Nationalism: Theories and Processes, eds. Alain Dieckhoff and Christophe Jaffrelot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 125. Edgren, “Traumakonstruktionen”; Sandström, “Sveriges 1809: Föreställningar om finska kriget under 200 år”. Glenthøj, “Historier om et nederlag”.

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connected to the loss of Schleswig in late-nineteenth-century Danish literature. Territorial losses are undeniably real, but they have no stable significance and the affective responses vary. The emotionally charged notion of loss is produced by nationalist discourse. The “gaining” sides of territorial conflicts – nationalist movements in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, that would proclaim independence at the time of the First World War – still relied on a production of loss, most importantly losses of language and of history, which is the topic of Kristina Malmio’s, Eve Annuk’s, Heidi Grönstrand’s and Tiina Kinnunen’s contributions. The cases analysed in this volume take their point of departure from the current day nation states: we investigate nineteenth-century nationalisms that ended up with statehood. The selection suggests a teleological argument that is unintentional, and anyhow an unhistorical, belated construction; there was no way of knowing in the nineteenth century what the twenty-first-century map of Northern Europe would look like. Nationalist movements took different forms and the concept of the nation had – and still has – different meanings. For instance, the Sámi people form a nation in terms of a national territory, Sápmi, a National Day on the 6th of February, and in terms of political representation, but the nation has no state. The Sámi’s nineteenth-century history within the nation-building projects in Finland, Sweden and Norway respectively is a history of loss of territory, language, and traditions, with unspeakable suffering as a consequence.17 Sometimes included, though often excluded, the ambivalent position of the Sámi population reveals the different constructions of the nation, as attested by one of the foremost creators of the Finnish people in the nineteenth century, Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898), analysed by Jens Grandell in chapter four. Exclusion as well as inclusion involves losses on all sides. The production of loss in nationalist discourse had material consequences, but in order to affect people’s lives and material circumstances, it required a rhetoric with a potential to circulate emotions.

1

Figures of Loss: Sacrifice

The figures of loss have a long history and were, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, absorbed in the service of the nation. The ultimate loss is to sacrifice your own life. As Tiina Kinnunen notes in chapter thirteen, sacrifice is a gendered concept, most conspicuously in wartime. The intersection

17

See e.g. Elenius, Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik; Elenius, Både finsk och svensk: modernisering, nationalism och språkförändring i Tornedalen 1850–1939.

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of bodies, emotions, and politics, places gender at the heart of the mechanisms of the production of loss. The justification for men to lose their lives in battle changed over the nineteenth century, transitioning from earlier ideas of obtaining personal glory to nationalist emotions, mobilizing mass-armies through, in George L. Mosse’s words, “the Myth of the War Experience”.18 This displacement of rationalizations and emotions did not happen over-night. For example, incipient nationalist feelings did not yet rule out other allegiances in 1830: the Finnish military who participated in the Russian army field train in Poland combined the idea of fighting for the Finnish nation and the Russian Empire simultaneously.19 But wartime also affected women, first and foremost by the loss of male members of their families. “Who did not lose someone they loved in this rich harvest of death?” the German writer Amalie von Helvig (1776–1831) asked in her pamphlet An Deutschlands Frauen: Von Einer ihrer Schwestern (To Germany’s Women: From One of Their Sisters, 1814) after the battle of Leipzig in 1813.20 Jules Kielmann points out in chapter ten that Helvig immediately turned the memory of the sacrifices into a generative promise of a better future: “Thus shall our joy be solemn, and our pain fruitful; otherwise, we truly would not deserve to feel either”.21 Kielmann analyses how Helvig used war sacrifices to define gender, citizenship and national identity through grief, shame, fear and pride. Narratives of war in peacetime also provided an incentive to intensify imagining

18

19

20 21

Mosse investigates nationalism as a civic religion and places the First World War cult of the fallen soldiers as its center: “The Myth of the War Experience was designed to mask war and to legitimize the war experience; it was meant to displace the reality of war. The Memory of the war was refashioned into a sacred experience which provided the nation with a new depth of religious feeling, putting at its disposal ever-present saints and martyrs, places of worship, and a heritage to emulate”. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 7. See also Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh, eds., Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2004); Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2000); Hugo Nordland, Känslor i krig: Sensibilitet och emotionella strategier bland svenska officerare 1788–1814 (Lund: Agerings bokförlag, 2015). On the cult of the national authors as incarnations of the national soul; a transference of the religious sphere to the cultural, see Anne-Marie Thiesse, La fabrique de l’écrivain national: Entre littérature et politique (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2019), 13, 156–92. Jussi Jalonen, On Behalf of the Emperor, On Behalf of the Fatherland: Finnish Officers and Soldiers of the Russian Imperial Life-Guard on the Battlefields of Poland, 1831 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2015); Engman, Ett långt farväl, 222–25. On “building the Myth”, see also Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 15–50. Amalie von Helvig quoted in Jules Kielmann’s chapter in the present volume. Amalie von Helvig quoted in Jules Kielmann’s chapter in the present volume.

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the nation and the good citizen – and an opportunity to allow women to take a more active role in the absence of men. Kristina Malmio discusses in chapter seven the war as a backdrop in the Finnish author Fredrika Runeberg’s (1807–1879) historical novel Fru Catharina Boije och hennes döttrar: en berättelse från stora ofredens tid (Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters: A Story from the Time of the Greater Wrath, 1858), set during the Great Northern War at the beginning of the eighteenth century. However, the trope of sacrifice is not restricted to losing lives for the country. In chapter twelve, Eve Annuk draws attention to loss construed as a sacrifice of love in order to gain national self-respect in her investigation of the short story “Liina” (1877) by the first Estonian feminist, Lilli Suburg (1841–1923). The title character chooses to marry an Estonian man instead of a German man, which amounts to a double loss. She sacrifices her personal love for the German and also her possibilities for personal freedom in terms of social climbing, motivated by love for the nation, understood as a national landscape and identification with other social classes based on language. A corresponding case of sacrifice of language, though under different political circumstances, is offered by Heidi Grönstrand in chapter eleven on the life and works of Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson (1844–1895), a lesser-known Finnish writer with roots outside the educated class. He actively promoted Finnish language and literature and supported the Finnish-language movement of the 1880s. The process of becoming a Finnish language writer was not uncomplicated; Jahnsson had difficulties in abandoning Swedish, but the Finnish-language movement required a disengagement from Swedish. Grönstrand’s view is inspired by theories, which approach nationality and nation building from below, from an everyday perspective.22 The concept of sacrifice was in the nineteenth century still firmly anchored in a religious discourse. To acknowledge that is not necessarily to argue that nationalism is a secularized religion – that may or may not be the case – but it is to claim that nationalist discourse in the early nineteenth century was articulated through Christian figures of thought and understood in relation to a Christian concept of evolution. The Messianic time is clearly the model for the three-dimensional temporality of nationalism, and Christian salvation history did make sense of sacrifice.23 Christian beliefs were also used to legitimize nationalism by many nineteenth-century nationalist thinkers including 22 23

Marco Antonsich and Michael Skey, “Introduction: The Persistence of Banal Nationalism”, 4–6; Billig, Banal Nationalism. Anna Bohlin and Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati, “Tracing the Jerusalem Code c.1750–c.1920: The Christian Storyworld Expanded and Fragmented”, in Tracing the Jerusalem Code III. The Promised Land: Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920), eds. Ragnhild J. Zorgati and Anna Bohlin (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021), 12–50.

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Steen Steensen Blicher (chapter two), Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865, chapter three), Zacharias Topelius (chapter four) – and were still significant to an early twentieth-century feminist such as Alexandra Gripenberg (1857–1913, chapter thirteen). All Nordic nationalisms in the nineteenth century apprehended the Lutheran faith as a core characteristic of the nation, which entailed a whole range of problems, given that the supposed origin of the nations was located in a heathen past, and that the many centuries of Catholicism had to be accounted for in some way.24 The zealous Lutheranism occasionally heightened to vocational nationalism, that is the idea that the nation in question was chosen by God to safeguard the true faith (Lutheranism) from the Orthodox Church in the East and the Roman-Catholic Church in the South.25 The Catholic South was no better in that respect: some Polish nationalists likewise entertained a notion of constituting a chosen nation.26 In chapter one, Maciej Janowski shows how not only Biblical, but also Classical Roman references structured the experience of loss in Poland at the turn of the nineteenth century. As Janowski notes, “a very traditional, classical

24

25

26

Peter Aronsson, Narve Fulsås, Pertti Haapala and Bernhard Eric Jensen, “Nordic National Histories”, in The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories, eds. Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 256–82; Pertti Anttonen, “Oral Traditions and the Making of the Finnish Nation”, in Folklore and Nationalism in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2012), 325–50. Matti Klinge, Idyll och hot: Zacharias Topelius – hans politik och idéer, trans. Nils Erik Forsgård (Helsingfors: Söderström & Co. & Stockholm: Atlantis, 2000) 28, 256; Wrede, Världen enligt Runeberg, 190; Alf Tergel, “Ungkyrkorörelsen och nationalismen”, in Kyrka och nationalism i Norden: Nationalism och skandinavism i de nordiska folkkyrkorna under 1800-talet, ed. Ingmar Brohed (Lund: Lund University Press, 1998), 343–55; Urban Claesson, Folkhemmets kyrka: Harald Hallén och folkkyrkans genombrott. En studie av socialdemokrati, kyrka och nationsbygge med särskild hänsyn till perioden 1905–1933 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2004), 105–06; Jes Fabricius Møller, “Grundtvig, Danmark og Norden”, in Skandinavismen: Vision og virkning, eds. Ruth Hemstad, Jes Fabricius Møller, and Dag Thorkildsen (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2018), 99–120; Dag Thorkildsen, “‘For Norge, kjempers fødeland’ – norsk nasjonalisme, skandinavisme og demokrati i det 19. århundre”, in Kyrka och nationalism i Norden: Nationalism och Skandinavism i de nordiska folkkyrkorna under 1800-talet, ed. Ingmar Brohed (Lund: Lund University Press, 1989), 129–55. See also Anthony D. Smith, “Biblical beliefs in the shaping of modern nations”, Nations and Nationalism 21 no. 3 (2015): 403–22; Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Klinge, Idyll och hot, 71; cf. Maciej Janowski, “A Marriage of Convenience: The Roman Catholic Church and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Europe”, Kwartalnik Historyczny CXXIV (2017): 43–90, http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/KH.2017.124.SI.2.02.

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imagery was instrumental in bringing about an essentially new, and intrinsically modern concept of nation”.27 The partition of Poland in 1795 occurred at a time when the concepts of “nation”, “state” and “citizen” did not yet have stable meanings; what was actually lost remained an open question to the political elite. Virgil’s Aeneid provided a language with which to conceive of the loss of a homeland, and how it may be preserved in exile. In 1797, the Polish author Józef Wybicki (1747–1822) interpreted the Penates, the urban deities that Aeneas rescued, as the Poles themselves in a song that subsequently became the Polish national anthem. In Janowski’s words: “Re-reading their Aeneid, the Poles understood that their nation still exists”.28 Furthermore, a sentimental mode of mourning predated and shaped the construction of territorial loss, just as James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, published in the 1760s, informed among many others the Danish Blicher’s nationalist writings, discussed by Jens Eike Schnall in chapter two.29 Figures of loss, such as sacrifice and exile, and literary tropes for grief formed nationalist emotions, established and circulated in public discourse. Literature and art were powerful means of making – in Sara Ahmed’s phrase – emotions “stick” to certain objects, bodies, and memories,30 but for these emotions to mobilize mass-movements, they had to affect the individual.

2

Scales of Loss: Emotional Communities and Personal Feelings

The idea of national loss implies the individual’s identification with the nation as an “imagined community”. However, our material indicates that personal losses, such as losing a child, frequently tapped into collective notions of loss, thus bringing about a re-evaluation by integration into a nationalist discourse of home and belonging. That was the case for both Amalie von Helvig at the beginning of the nineteenth century (chapter ten) and for the Swedish artist Carl Larsson (1853–1919, chapter eight) a hundred years later. Amalie

27

28 29 30

Maciej Janowski, “Ex ossibus ultor: Virgil, Ezekhiel and the Transformation of the Polish National Idea after 1795”, in Multiple Antiquities, Multiple Modernities: Ancient Histories in Nineteenth History European Cultures, eds. Gabor Klaniczay, Michael Werner, and Ottó Gecser (Frankfurt & New York: Campus Verlag, 2011), 538. Janowski, “Ex Ossibus Ultor”, 536. On the impact of Ossian in European nation building processes, see Thiesse, La fabrique de l’écrivain national, 33–130. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, [2004] 2014).

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von Helvig lost a child during her stay in Sweden, which contributed to her shifting emotional affiliation and idea of a “fatherland” between Germany and Sweden. Carl Larsson, on the other hand, as discussed by Martin Olin in chapter eight, invested the despair surrounding his son’s death into a nostalgic representation of vanishing agricultural traditions and landscapes – and also into contempt and sarcasm for the loss of Sweden’s personal union with Norway in 1905, as well as for the massive loss of population due to migration to the United States. The affective effort of nationalist discourse in forming identity politics clearly works both ways in bridging the individual experiences and cultural politics. Nationalist discourse produces loss motivating personal sacrifices, and simultaneously offers the means by which to assign significance to other kinds of personal losses, thereby accumulating emotional capital in the nationalist construction of loss, in Ahmed’s terminology. Nationalist emotions are the object of phenomenologist Sara Ahmed’s influential study The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Ahmed analyzes how fear, hate, and love, are part of the “affective economies” that establish nationalist ideas.31 Feminist research investigating emotions has mainly worked on contemporary material, and Ahmed is no exception.32 Feelings, Ahmed argues, circulate in social contexts, attach to different bodies and objects, charge them and accumulate – in that sense, emotions work as capital.33 Since Ahmed’s theory is relying on rhetoric, it has proven useful in unveiling how emotions charge the nationalist production of loss in nineteenth-century texts. For instance, Kristina Malmio asks which “exchanges and transfers take place” in the affective economy constituted in Fredrika Runeberg’s historical novel. Feelings are indeed personal, but the individual experience depends on collective and cultural norms changing over time, connected to gender and social class – emotionology in Peter and Carol Stearns’ classic article.34 Historian

31 32

33 34

Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. E.g. Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen, eds., Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences (London & New York: Routledge, 2010); Annelie Bränström Öhman, Maria Jönsson, and Ingeborg Svensson, eds., Att känna sig fram: Känslor i humanistisk genusforskning (Umeå: h:ström – Text & Kultur, 2011). The anthology Loss: The Politics of Mourning also deals only with twentieth-century and contemporary material. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2003). Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Cf. Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 183–84. Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards”, The American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813–36.

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Barbara H. Rosenwein has coined the term emotional communities to conceptualise how groups are bounded by “particular values, modes of feeling, and ways to express those feelings”.35 Different emotional communities may indeed overlap; the notion may refer to an entire social class at a specific moment in time or smaller groups – a family, a congregation, a social movement – constituting emotional communities of their own.36 Even though nationalist thinkers did not succeed in transforming the nation into an emotional community that was undoubtedly their goal. Rosenwein notes in Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700, that in dealing with historical material, there is no way to separate feeling from rhetoric, in fact, “emotional expression is always rhetorical to some degree”.37 Therefore the distinctions between the concepts of affects, feelings and emotions have no bearing on historical material.38 The Finnish-minded Fennoman community, originally mainly Swedishspeaking, exemplifies one type of emotional community with a focus on duty in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Finland – the elite was expected to civilize Finnish-speaking ordinary people. The chapter on the Fennoman feminist Alexandra Gripenberg by Tiina Kinnunen shows how Gripenberg lost her faith in the proper development of the Finnish nation due to the rising working class. After having invested heavily in promoting the Finnish language and the working class, their different values were demonstrated in particular in the revolutionary events of 1905, which made Gripenberg disillusioned. Furthermore, she felt that she had personally sacrificed too much, amongst other things her own identity as a Swedish-speaking person. In her case, the nationalist cause did not in the end motivate personal sacrifices. The Fennoman vision of an exclusively Finnish-speaking Finland posed a threat to the future of the Swedish language and culture in the country. This loss at a national level was, however, a vision to which Gripenberg could give a regenerative meaning. 35 36 37 38

Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 3. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 3. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 9. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, 7. The authors of Emotions and Everyday Nationalism in Modern European History agree: “a rigid separation of discourse and affect renders written and spoken texts, narratives and other familiar objects of qualitative social research useless”. Andreas Stynen, Maarten van Ginderachter, and Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, “Introduction: Emotions and everyday nationalism in modern European history”, 1–15. Neither does Ahmed distinguish between “emotions” and “affects”, see Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, 5–6. For a thorough discussion of the terminology of the history of emotions, see Boddice, The History of Emotions.

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Temporal Displacements: From Loss of Virtues to Loss of Justice

It comes as no surprise that the things lost in nationalist discourse were displaced from early Romantic nationalist thought at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century on the verge of the First World War. A hundred years of industrialisation, European imperialism and migration had changed the historical circumstances. Nationalist thought developed and so did the production of loss. Not only did lost Viking virtues go out of fashion to be replaced by loss of equality and justice; the ideas of loss connected to the very same objects were displaced. The national landscape for instance, a foundational element of nationalist thought, was inscribed with different kinds of loss and shifting emotions throughout the nineteenth century. The Danish national landscape may illustrate this point. Jens Eike Schnall shows how the Danish landscape in Blicher’s nationalist writings was in fact the sublime Ossian landscape, transposed from Macpherson’s poems to the Danish soil, imbued with melancholy. The Danish territory is actually peopled both on and underneath the earth, as the characters in the story Røverstuen (The Robbers’ Den) from 1827 live in a burial mound; the living and the dead ancestors occupy the same space inside the earth in a depiction of a lost harmonious community. A couple of decades later, though, the idyllic landscape provided an escape precisely from death. The cholera pandemic hit Copenhagen hard in 1853; it offers a historical perspective on the present-day corona pandemic. Peter Nørgaard Larsen argues in chapter five that the pandemic had a decisive impact on the idyllic and nostalgic framing of the Danish national landscape paintings in the following years. His inquiry into the specific conditions for the creation of lively Arcadian landscapes reveal an overcrowded Copenhagen plagued by a deadly disease as the background against which a dream of a lost, near past, barred by a pandemic, appear. Bjarne Thorup Thomsen studies the national landscape in Danish literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, and discovers a landscape increasingly embedded with more complex emotions. H.C. Andersen’s De to Baronesser (The Two Baronesses, 1848) reflects the Danish geopolitics in the ongoing First Schleswig War, although the hybridity of the borderlands is celebrated, whereas the territorial loss in the Second Schleswig War has more complicated effects in Herman Bang’s authorship at the turn of the twentieth century. The borderlands engender a critique of the loss of morals as a consequence of war, and the celebration of hybridity now mounts to a critique of exclusionary, inward-facing nationalism. Loss is constant, even though the emotions and the elements lost have exchanged.

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Another case in point is the national people, a central category of nationalist discourse – and probably the most debated category in the nineteenth century as well as today. The exclusionary nature of the idea of a national people has repeatedly led to disasters; the many forms of exclusionary mechanisms range from laws to feelings. An important theme in this anthology is the emotional construction of different kinds for criteria for exclusion: Eve Annuk highlights language as the excluding mechanism in Estonian nationalism, while the language strife in Finland amounted to a complex history of personal sacrifices and collective losses, as is shown in Heidi Grönstrand’s and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters. Topelius’ unwillingness to conceive of the nation in terms of language precisely because he wanted to include both Finnish and Swedish in the Finnish nation, as discussed by Jens Grandell, made it impossible for him to use language as an exclusionary criterium for the Sámi people, and instead settled for nomadism. However, the actively affected losses constructing national peoples that shifted over time and place are only one aspect of changing productions of loss with regard to the people. The peasant was closely connected to the notion of the people in nationalist discourse, but the function of the peasant changed radically over the nineteenth century, which had an impact on ideas and experiences of loss. The people as the subject of the narrative of the nation was displaced – as Anne-Marie Thiesse notes: “The cultural integration of the people into the national community prefigures and invokes the political integration”.39 In the early nineteenth century, the peasant was understood as a carrier of lost traditions, folk beliefs and languages, while the peasant in the late nineteenth century was becoming an aesthetic ideal – a motif for Carl Larsson to preserve, in Martin Olin’s words in chapter eight, as “the updated mythos of the peasant as the incarnation of a national spirit”. However, by the late nineteenth century, the peasant had also become a political power base. The latter would in fact expose the loss of an imagined community – at least for Alexandra Gripenberg in Tiina Kinnunen’s analysis. The people’s legitimizing power shifted from a subject of history to a subject of representational politics, which 39

“L’intégration culturelle du peuple dans la communauté nationale préfigure et appelle son intégration politique”. Thiesse, La fabrique de l’écrivain national, 55. Homi K. Bhabha points out in “DissemiNation” that “the people” functions simultaneously as the subject of the narrative of the nation and the object of nationalist pedagogy, which leads to a paradoxical temporality structuring nationalist discourse, but our argument concerns another temporal aspect: a displacement of the subject position of the people in the narrative of the nation. Cf. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291–322.

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turned out to be something else entirely in terms of loss. The anthology tracks this displacement not only in Sweden, but also in Poland (Maciej Janowski’s chapter), Estonia (Eve Annuk’s chapter), and Finland (Kristina Malmio’s and Heidi Grönstrand’s chapters). The late-nineteenth-century nationalist understanding of peasant culture shows yet another paradoxical feature in establishing the Orient as a counter-image by producing loss in an opposite way, which Jenny Bergenmar discusses in chapter nine. The nostalgia for the national agricultural landscape, vanishing in the wake of industrialism, was countered by imagining the Oriental society as traditional, lacking in industry. Imperialist discourse thus conceived of two opposing losses, charged with contradicting emotions, to be mutually filled in by each other. Finally, the metaphors for imagining the nation, and most specifically the people, changed with implications for the production of loss. Corporeal metaphors have proved to be particularly important for how loss was articulated. Portraying nations as family relations were not unusual at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For instance the Finnish poet Frans Michael Franzén depicted in 1809 (when the war between Sweden and Russia was still on-going) Finland as an orphan “child of the East”, taken into custody by the generous foster-father Russia.40 However, as several of the contributions show (chapters three, six, seven and twelve), the nineteenth-century novel elaborated on that imagery, on the one hand by means of fictive characters representing nations or discussing national identity, and on the other hand by imagining the national territory as a body, vulnerable, bleeding, raped (chapters six and seven). The novelistic treatment of the corporeal metaphor endowed the nation as body with an inner life. At the turn of the century, Carl Larsson portrayed a real family and a real home – his own – as an exemplary national family, as Martin Olin points out. The financial success of IKEA, which has adopted a lot of aesthetic inspiration from Karin and Carl Larsson’s home, has secured a prevailing influence on the idea of Swedish aesthetics; it is fair to say that the Larsson family still occupy the same position in Swedish nationalist discourse. However, to the early nineteenth century understanding of nations 40

Klinge, Den politiske Runeberg, 42. Cf. Pär Alexandersson and Johanna Valenius who have studied the Swedish and Finnish personifications of the respective nations. Alexandersson shows that it was not until the nineteenth century that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century heraldic Svea became a national mother, whereas Valenius traces the development of the sexually vulnerable Maiden of Finland in the nineteenth century. Pär Alexandersson, Moder Sveas historia: Den svenska nationspersonifikationen under fem sekler (Stockholm: Förlag BoD, 2017), 107–55; Johanna Valenius, Undressing the Maid: Gender, Sexuality and the Body in the Construction of the Finnish Nation (Helsinki: The Finnish Literature Society, 2004).

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as family relations, a real exemplary national family on public display would be unthinkable. Apparently, the corporeal metaphors have transformed over a hundred years and acquired real flesh and blood.

4

The Structure of the Book

Focussing on loss is a new analytical point of departure within research on nationalism, and the anthology will therefore map out different themes in relation to three lines of inquiry, indicated by the structure of the book. The first part investigates how the production of loss organises thought. Maciej Janowski’s chapter “Loss, Emotion, and Transformation of a National Idea: Poland 1795–1815” and Jens Eike Schnall’s “Visions of the Nation and Feelings of Loss in the Works of Steen Steensen Blicher” analyse how earlier literary expressions of loss were claimed and incorporated into nationalist agendas; loss as a pre-existing rhetorical figure was re-connected to other objects and sites. Anna Bohlin addresses how different emotions, changing over time, constructed the perception of territorial loss in “Neglect, Grief, Revenge: Finland in Swedish Nineteenth-Century Literature”. The production of loss may also organise nationalist thinking by explicitly excluding – and simultaneously mourning – an entire culture from the nationalist narrative, as Jens Grandell shows in “How a Culture Was Almost Lost: The Sámi in Nineteenth-Century Conceptualisations of Finnish Nationhood”. The contributions in the first part of this volume will thus uncover mechanisms at work in the production of loss. The second part studies how landscapes and bodies become sites for the production of loss. Two contributions examine different aspects of the landscape in Danish culture of the second half of the nineteenth century. Peter Nørgaard Larsen’s chapter “Entrenchments and Escape Routes: Expressing a Sense of Loss in Danish Art 1848–1864” analyses the nostalgia of nationalist landscape paintings, whereas Bjarne Thorup Thomsen shows how islands provide the imagery for representing conflicting emotions connected to the nation in “Outreach, Invasion, Displacement: Denmark’s Disputed Southern Borderland as Negotiated through Strategic and Affective Aspects of Space in Novels by Andersen and Bang”. Kristina Malmio’s chapter “Affective Bodies on the Move: Space, Emotions and Loss in Fredrika Runeberg’s Historical Novel Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters” investigates how the depiction of the nation as a bleeding, wounded body deprived of protection increases the emotional investment. The objects and phenomena connected to loss changed over time, as did the emotions that were activated by loss. By 1900 the agrarian

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culture connected to an enchanted world-view were widely perceived as being lost to modernity. Two contributions, Martin Olin’s “Carl Larsson’s Spadarfvet, My Little Farmstead: Paradise Regained or Lament for a Disappearing Agrarian Society?” and Jenny Bergenmar’s “Sweden and Algeria in the Travel Writing of Anna Maria Roos, 1905–1909”, study how these fantasies were politically informed and played out in an Algerian setting and in the Swedish countryside, respectively. Finally, the third part concerns lived nationalism and individual agency. The material in this part mainly consists of letters and diaries, but also of literature on personal loss caused by, or feeding into, nationalist movements. Jules Kielmann’s contribution, “‘Thus Shall our Joy be Solemn, and our Pain Fruitful’: Nation, Loss and the Power of Emotions in Amalie von Helvig’s Writings”, analyses the grief for a lost child leading to expanding the homeland to a transnational project, while Heidi Grönstrand, on the other hand, studies loss of language turned into creativity in “The Sense of Loss in the Context of Language Disputes in Finland: Reflections on E.F. Jahnsson’s Authorship”. Eve Annuk discusses the demand to give up a love relationship for the love of the nation in “Nationalism, Emotions and Loss in Lilli Suburg’s Short Story ‘Liina’”. The emotional sequence in all these cases invariably turns bereavement into positively loaded agency. The last contribution, “Alexandra Gripenberg and Lost Faith in National Belonging”, by Tiina Kinnunen provides an example of the exception to this rule: coping with the loss of the fantasy of national unity has no positive outcomes. Still, the production of loss continues to structure the nationalist project in people’s conflicting emotions.

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Part 1 The Production of Loss Organising Thought

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Chapter 1

Loss, Emotion, and Transformation of a National Idea: Poland 1795–1815 Maciej Janowski

The emotion of loss is obviously an important factor in the development of various national and nationalist movements. Whether there was any “real” loss is less important than the ways in which the alleged loss is perceived and ideologized. For a historian of any broader problem, no local case is interesting “in itself”. Its interest is measured by its usefulness for the general picture. The topic of this chapter is to show, in rough outline, the emotional expressions of loss after the partitions of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It seems to me that this case study may be of broader interest within, for instance, Nationalism Studies. The case presented here, however, is one of a loss as real as anybody could wish. With the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between Russia, Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, a state vanished from maps of Europe in 1795. This loss was probably not noticed by a huge majority of its inhabitants. Those who cared, the political and intellectual elites of the defunct polity, had to deal with it somehow. They conceptualised their loss in various ways. The collapse of the state happened just at the moment of cultural and political transformation undertaken by the generation of the Enlightenment. What is a nation, what is a state, who are “citizens”, what constitutes political community? It was a situation of uncertainty, in politics as well as in language, strengthened by the radical change of political situation. As readers of Reinhart Koselleck know, the transformation of political language was happening everywhere and was an important aspect of the growth of the modern national movements.1 In the Polish case, the political cataclysm made this change more violent and perhaps more reflected upon. It may make a good case study as the same processes that took place everywhere were made more visible due to the emotion of loss. Numerous literary historians have analysed 1 Cf. among others, Reinhart Koselleck, “Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Einleitung”, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 1, eds. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1972), XIII–XXVII.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_003

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literary works from various angles from the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth century.2 The literary means of expression have been analysed in terms of various characteristics, putting them in contexts of Classicism, Rococo, Sentimentalism or nascent Romanticism. What literary analyses usually do not ask is the fundamental question: What, actually, was lost? Moving to the problem of emotions in history, let me start with a personal recollection. One of my first experiences as a history undergraduate at Warsaw University in the early 1980s was to take a class taught by Jerzy Jedlicki, entitled “Collective emotions in history”. Jedlicki, set free after seven months in an internment camp, put there by General Jaruzelski’s government after the introduction of martial law in December 1981, presented a topic that seemed to me – and, I believe, to most of my fellow-undergraduates – fascinating by its originality. A graduate of sociology, and a long-time activist of the Polish Sociological Association, he was fascinated on the one hand by American social psychology, by works of Eliot Aronson, Philipp Zimbardo and Gordon Allport, and on the other hand by French history of mentalities, developed by the later generation of the Annales school, notably by Jean Delumeau. Basing his class on this theoretical background, he first presented the example of witchhunting in early modern Europe and then turned to nineteenth-century Polish history to show how the category of collective emotions can be used to explain various phenomena – from revolutionary and insurrectionary movements to the growth of modern mass politics on the eve of the First World War. From that moment on, the idea of the historical study of the emotions seemed to me an important and fascinating topic. However, I would like to look at the problem from a slightly different angle. Jedlicki was interested mainly in “violent” collective emotions. I am rather interested in a certain emotional state of mind that does not necessarily manifest itself violently, for instance as an uprising, a demonstration, witch burning or a pogrom. It is a more latent state of mind. It is collective, but not in the sense that it infects a group that takes part in a single highly emotional violent act. It spreads slowly, through readings, talks and reflection, until it creates what Barbara Rosenwein calls an “emotional community”,3 and what probably could be called an “emotional subculture”, too. When we talk, as we do here, about the sense of loss, we have to do with an emotion that is both highly 2 See e.g. Marek Nalepa, Takie życie dziś nasze, gdy Polska ustaje… Pisarze staropolscy a upadek Rzeczypospolitej (Wrocław: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, 2002); Piotr Żbikowski, …bolem smiertelnym ściśnione mam serce… Rozpacz oświeconych u źródeł przełomu w poezji polskiej w latach 1793–1805 (Wrocław: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, 1998). 3 Cf. Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History”, The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2001): 821–45.

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internalized and deeply embedded in a given historical setting. The individuals who feel this emotion may well not realize the existence of that setting. They often are surprised at finding that other people share this type of inner feeling. It is this type of emotion – private, even intimate, and at the same time belonging to a cultural climate of an epoch – that interests me here. Man is a mediated being. This means that most biologically determined types of behaviour can be manifested only through the medium of culture. We cannot discern the “cultural” from the “natural” element in grief, joy, sadness or fear, as we never witness these emotions in their purely biological form. The same goes for “higher” emotions, as love, and also for such sophisticated emotional states as, say, the enjoyment of literature, painting or music. Nature and culture cannot be clearly discerned. I would even argue that literary texts and other cultural products in a certain sense define the limits of the possibility to feel emotions in a given cultural setting: I suppose that with the exception of basic “physical” emotions like hunger or pain, one can feel only what one can conceptualise. Thus, I would opt for blurring the distinction between “emotionology” and “emotions”, as proposed by Peter and Carol Stearns.4 In this sense I subscribe to Barbara Rosenwein’s view that words matter as much as “real” emotions – but with some reservation. Patterns of writing about emotions do influence, perhaps even determine, emotions themselves. Apart from that, there are simple conventions (“Dear Sir” in a letterhead, to use Rosenwein’s example) that are in many cases reduced only to signs. Rosenwein is right that there is always a choice between the various formulae of starting a letter and this choice does have something in common with emotions. Nevertheless, I would rather try to discern between patterns or topoi that influence real emotions and simple conventional signs or phraseological clusters that do not or do so only marginally. These general reflections have important implications as regards the problem of “authenticity”. No historians, no literary students can avoid asking whether any given emotion is authentic or whether it is just a convention. Especially for the period of late Enlightenment, we cannot help seeing that the emotions expressed by bucolic shepherds with Greek names are conventional. By contrast, the emotions of the Romantic period seem to us (at least to my generation, perhaps not to people socialized in the modern social media of last twenty years) much more natural – as it is the great poetry of Polish Romanticism that created the Polish idiom of expressing emotions that

4 Cf. Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards”, The American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813–36.

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was valid at least until the 1990s. In fact, both are conventions, and at the same time sincere. As an eminent Polish literary historian Stefan Treugutt once wrote: Since the epoch of romanticism we know that […] original sincerity of emotional experience […] is a fundament of a good poetry. A conventional poem written according to a normative rule – so an insincere one. […] It was, however, very different in the times of learned poetry, obeying norms and organised on a supraindividual principle. […] There is [before Romanticism] no hiatus between one’s individual emotions and one’s poetic professionalism.5

1

Historical Outline

In the 1760s, we encounter the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as still one of the biggest countries of Europe, but at the same time, however, completely dysfunctional and coming close to what was later called a “failed state”. The elective monarch was practically devoid of power and the central diet was paralyzed by the requirement of unanimity; whatever administration there was, was placed in the local assemblies of the nobles, sejmiki (dietines). LateBaroque aesthetics were accompanied by an ideology of noble liberties, decentralization and anarchy (nierząd, literally “non-government”) as fundaments of Poland’s greatness. By the middle of the century, a consciousness of crisis was slowly growing in parts of the intellectual and political elites. The King, Stanislaw Poniatowski, elected in 1764 with the military support of Russia and against the will of the majority of the nobility, initiated, his weak position notwithstanding, an ambitious programme of modernization. This programme was to start with mental transformation – to awaken a human being in a Sarmatian, as the King was reported to have said. The term “Sarmatian” meant more or less “traditionalnoble”, and it could be either pejorative or laudatory. When used today by researchers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it usually refers to a version of Baroque culture adapted by the nobility of the Commonwealth. The idea itself comes from the idea that the Polish nobility were descendants of the Sarmatians.

5 Stefan Treugutt, “Ody napoleońskie Kajetana Koźmiana”, Pamiętnik Literacki 57, no. 1 (1966): 51–52. My translation.

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Ascending the throne, Poniatowski assumed “Augustus” as his second name, with two clear ideological connotations. One aimed at renovating what was considered the Polish “Golden Age” – the reign of Sigismund Augustus in the sixteenth century. Another, as important, referred to the Augustan Age of ancient Rome – an ideal so dominant in the culture of Classicism. The king chose not to stress the utilitarian moment, as was important in the ideology of Enlightened Absolutism as propagated by Joseph II, Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great. The reason is simple: what the anarchic republic of the gentry needed was the strengthening of the central state power and this required a creation of a monarchic ideology, hitherto non-existent and highly unpopular with the gentry. An “Augustan” model was obviously more fitting for this monarchist ideology than the sober, matter-of-fact utilitarianism of Frederick or Joseph. The reformist politics reached a short-lived triumph with the Four Years Diet (1788–1792), which culminated in the Constitution of May 3, 1791, reforming the political system, introducing majority vote and hereditary monarchy. A year later, in spring 1792, a Russian invasion destroyed the reforms and paved the way for the second partition of Poland (in 1793, through Prussia and Russia, without Austria this time). The uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko came as a result in 1794, an event of great importance in Polish patriotic mythology, followed by the final partition, the King’s abdication and abolishment of the statehood in 1795. Now the scene was set for loss and mourning. It is important to add that in the decade or so before the catastrophe, parallel with royal Augustan Classicism, another important cultural trend was stirring: sentimentalism, fostered mainly by authors dependent on the patronage of the aristocratic Czartoryski family. This sentimentalism is of central importance for us here, as it provided an idiom for mourning after 1795 and in a certain way prepared the ground for the later triumph of Romanticism. Before this triumph happened, however, there was one more wave of Classicism in Polish culture, starting with the entry of Napoleon to the Polish territories and the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw, a state composed of the central lands of former Poland as a part of the Napoleonic power system of Europe (1807–1815). Again, Classicism was the artistic idiom of the new state, whose leaders were mostly the same people who were active in the reforms of the early 1790s. After the collapse of Napoleon, the political status of the Polish territories was transformed once again. The western part of the Duchy of Warsaw was passed over to Prussia, and the rest was made into a “Polish Kingdom” with a separate constitution, army and administration, in personal union with the Russian Empire. This constitutional experiment lasted until November 1830 when a new anti-Russian

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uprising started. After it was defeated, in autumn 1831, the constitution was abolished. By then, Classicism was long dead; Romanticism, having gained strength through the 1820s, turned of age.

2

The Commonwealth of the Gentry

There was, in Polish political thinking from the Renaissance, a strong thread in public discourse that stressed the importance of the “amor patriae” and contrasted the “public” matters with a “private” vested interest (“prywata”). This opposition documents the existence of a state consciousness, at least among the elites. This consciousness is of course an aspect of the broader trend of what was in the eighteenth century called patriotism, or Vaterlandsliebe in German-speaking countries, manifested by a leading Habsburg representative of the Polizeiwissenschaft, Josef von Sonnenfels, in his book Ueber die Vaterlandsliebe. What interests me, however, is something slightly different from the Habsburg type of state patriotism. In the Commonwealth, it was not just a state patriotism. There existed an idea of a nation, although a very fuzzy one. The nation usually meant the bearers of the political rights, i.e. the nobility. It could have various other meanings too, and in the second half of the eighteenth century it more and more often designated something broader than just nobility, as all inhabitants of the state, sometimes even including the peasants (cf. the Danish case, Jens Eike Schnall’s chapter in the present volume). This interrelation of elements of a (para?) national identity with state patriotism makes the question interesting, since it makes the problem of the relation of state and nation appear after the third partition. Were it just the enlightened patriotism, there would be no problem, as the object of the patriotism would have vanished. At the same time, however, the Commonwealth of the gentry preserved very strong local identities that in absolutist states (but not in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth) were being weakened by bureaucratic centralization from the early eighteenth century at the latest. Some historians wrote about “decentralization of sovereignty” in order to depict the legal and mental situation in which the county was the centre of politics and a local universe. The sociologist Andrzej Zajączkowski called the Commonwealth a “federation of neighbourhoods”.6 6 Cf. Andrzej Zajączkowski, Szlachta polska: Kultura i struktura, (Warsaw: Semper, 1993). A German translation of the earlier version of this book exists: A. Zajączkowski, Hauptelemente der Adelskultur in Polen (Marburg/Lahn: Herder-Institut, 1967).

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Two levels can be discerned. On the first level, the consciousness of the “public matter” (Commonwealth, Res Publica, Rzecz Pospolita) could not fail to feel the loss of the body politic. On the second level, the local one, the consciousness of the local centres of power could be hurt through another process – not by losing independence but by centralization. The most traditional “republicans” mutinied against the reformatory efforts of the Four Years Diet precisely in the name of the ancient liberty – any attempt at centralization, however feeble, was to them tantamount to destroying Poland, epitomized in the old system. We may say that in 1795, with the final partition of the Commonwealth, two distinct processes accumulated, logically independent, but somehow merging into one: on the one hand, the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth collapsed and the partitioning powers started integrating the new acquisitions into their countries. Obviously, this created tension, and the elites of the Commonwealth had to redefine their position in the new situation – which could mean both collaboration and resistance. On the other hand, the old decentralized polity was slowly giving way to the modern (in a nineteenth-century sense) bureaucratic state. This process started already before the partitions. The Constitution of May 3, 1791 was a step in the direction of building central, and partially also local, administrative institutions – initiating a fundamental transformation of the federation of gentry neighbourhoods into a unitary, centrally administered state. This process was in a very early phase when the final catastrophe came in 1795. It is important to remember that the Enlightenment reforms gave birth to strong resistance, first in the patriotic and at the same time anti-reformist Confederation of Bar (1768–1772), then in anti-royalist opposition during the Four Years Diet, and finally, in the so called Targowica Confederation in 1792, which invoked Russian military assistance to preserve the old political system. In spite of the intents of its leaders, this provided a pretext for the second partition of the Commonwealth in 1793. The tradition of gentry resistance was present in Polish culture and politics from the sixteenth century at the latest. After 1795, when the Polish central royal power no longer existed, this tradition became – automatically, so to say – a potent force of struggle for independence against the external enemy. The enmity towards etatist modernization became enmity towards the partitioning powers. The loss of independence and the loss of an old way of life coincided and were perceived as closely interwoven. At this moment, i.e. after 1795, at least some among the enlightened reformists started to look with a more benevolent eye at the remnants of the old gentry’s mentalities and attitudes. As they ceased to be a political adversary, they started to be an object of sentimental memory. Two sides merged after the fall of the

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state, although never completely: the rivalry between occidentalist modernizers and “nativists” continued to be one of the most important cleavages in Polish political life. The partitioning powers, in a traditional way, demanded from the nobility a homage – homagium, a feudal ceremonial oath of a vassal to a senior. The nobility obliged, without enthusiasm, but without strong protests, either. The traditional ritual of homagium aroused in many noblemen a hope that the partitioning powers were, after all, no different from the old Commonwealth; that their monarchs too had to rely on the corporate loyalty of the noble estate and that they had to buy this loyalty at a traditional price – the confirmation of old noble privileges and the granting of new ones. There exist some “addresses” of the nobility to their new monarchs, expressing hope that their loyalty be rewarded by confirmation, perhaps even strengthening, of the noble liberties. Soon they learned that the situation was brand new; that the absolutist bureaucratic state was built on principles quite different from those to which they were accustomed. From the perspective of later history, when the Polish national ideology assumed a strongly antiRussian form, it is interesting that it was precisely the Russian Empire that was relatively the most tolerant of Polish culture and local political institutions. The Russian Empire’s absolutist bureaucratic structures were, at that time, still relatively less developed than those of Prussia or of the Habsburg Monarchy. It still relied on the co-optation of the local elites of the various regions that it absorbed; let us only remember the careers of the Baltic German nobility and of the Cossack nobility from the former Hetmanate at the Russian court. In the Russian partition, i.e. the present countries of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, the old institutions of the gentry local government were kept, as well as the legal system (so called Third Lithuanian Statute of 1588). Some Polish aristocrats were accepted within the governing ranks of the Empire. Seweryn Potocki as the curator of the Kharkiv educational district in southern Russia (today Ukraine) is one example, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski another, and probably the most important. A member of the younger generation (born in 1770) of the most powerful magnate family (called simply the Familia), one that at certain moments of their political career was strongly anti-Russian (at other moments, to the contrary, they counted on Russia’s help), Czartoryski was sent with his brother to St. Petersburg, as a token of the family’s loyalty. The Familia wanted to avoid their goods being confiscated. Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, in a position somewhere between guest and hostage, through a friendship with the heir apparent and later Emperor Alexander, rose to the incredibly high position of the head of the Russian ministry of foreign affairs (although only with title of deputy minister). This was

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the highest post of a Pole in the Russian Empire and a clear example of the policy of assimilating the local elites applied to the Polish case. The Polish uprising of 1831 and the repressions that followed ended this possibility and besides, the gradual nationalization of the Russian Empire was slowly closing this way of advancement for imperial subjects of non-Russian ethnic origin (although it was never closed completely). Under the Prussian and Habsburg rule, to the contrary, the enlightened-absolutist bureaucratic state was forcing the obedience of the nobility and state administrative structures replaced the local self-government institutions of the gentry. At the same time, the daily life of the nobility was affected only to a very small degree. The subjection of peasants remained in force, and the Prussian or Austrian state, irritating by its taxes and bureaucratic rules as it was, did not enter the nobleman’s manor (cf. the peasantry in Estonia and Denmark respectively, Eve Annuk’s and Jens Eike Schnall’s chapters in the present volume). Only after 1831 did the repressions reach a level that could be noticeable in the every-day life of nobility. Therefore, the experience of loss was not a personal experience of expulsions from home, of confiscation and forced emigration; it was not, to use a helpful German term, a Heimatverlust. It was a “mediated” experience, but nevertheless – as I try to argue – in a certain sense “real”, because it was felt as such.

3

Literary Responses to the Sense of Loss

All this was happening in a cultural situation in which sentimentalism was a dominant mood. This sentimentalism merged with traditional cultural layers. Rousseau’s apology of primitive virtue resembled two elements of the gentry culture: One is the apology of rural life,7 another is the religious understanding of vanity of the secular world which saw the “village” as a repository of virtue. In the Polish culture of the period, ‘village’ almost always meant a nobleman’s manor, not peasants’ huts. A nobleman could always return to his manor – this privatization of public activities became common after the third partition and was perhaps the first way to overcome grief. Rousseau offers a mood for expressing it: Cyprian Godebski, a poet and soldier, sympathiser of the Jacobins and one of the so-called Polish Republicans, in a short novel presents a virtuous Savoy shepherd who gives shelter to Polish wanderers in his unspoiled

7 Cf. Teresa Kostkiewiczowa, Polski wiek świateł: Obszary swoistości (Wrocław: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, 2002), 253–71.

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rural homeland.8 Godebski was one of the leading authors writing in a sentimentalist mood and his book provides an excellent example of connecting Rousseauism with the Polish emotional situation after 1795. One of the central features of this emotional situation at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries was what we could call a “Virgilian moment”: around 1800, Godebski quoted Jacques Delille, the French Classicist poet and translator of Virgil: “Woe to one who can read Maro [Publius Vergilius Maro, i.e. Virgil] without being moved!” Godebski comments: If the Aeneid, through its incomparable beauties, infuses delight and admiration into every reader endowed with feeling and taste, it should act infinitely stronger on the mind of a Pole, presenting to him, on almost every page, a striking analogy of his fate with the fate of Aeneas’ homeland.9 The problem was noticed by the eminent literary historian Ignacy Chrzanowski more than a century ago.10 The main argument of Chrzanowski still holds today as it did a hundred years ago: Polish high culture possessed, from Jan Kochanowski’s sixteenth-century lamentations for the death of his daughter, adequate linguistic and stylistic means to express individual grief. What it did not possess, was means to express collective grief. This was acquired only with the outburst of the great Polish Romantic poetry of the 1830s. So after 1795, when the emotion of loss was seeking, so to say, a literary form with which to express itself, Virgil’s works, the Aeneid in particular, turned out to be a perfect candidate. The central element of the analogy stressed by Godebski is the following: Poland is lost – what remains? A general intuition was that being a Pole was in some way connected with the existence of Poland, in one way or another. When Poland is no more – what then? We will become Russians, Prussians, Austrians. Such voices were heard. What they meant, however, was never very clear. Obviously, nobody envisaged quick linguistic or cultural assimilation –

8 9

10

Cyprian Godebski, Grenadier-Filozof: Powieść prawdziwa, wyjęta z dziennika podróży roku 1799 (Cracow: Universitas, 2002), 19–24. “Jeżeli Eneida, przez swoje nieporównane piękności, tchnie rozkosz i podziw w każdego czytelnika obdarzonego czuciem i smakiem, nierównie działać powinna mocniej na umyśle Polaka, wystawiając mu prawie na każdej karcie rażący stosunek jego losu z losem ojczyzny Eneasza”. Godebski, Grenadier-Filozof, 47 (Author’s endnote 6). My translation. Ignacy Chrzanowski, “Czym był Wirgiliusz dla Polaków po utracie niepodległości”, in idem, Optymizm i pesymizm polski (Warsaw: PWN, 1979), 229–49.

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but they meant more than just a new political allegiance. In the long run a fear evolved that the language might disappear, unsupported by political institutions. In this situation, Virgil provided a helpful hand. Aeneas managed to take the urban deities – the Penates – from the burning city, and thus, Troy did not, in essence, collapse. It did not die, it existed so long as Aeneas and his co-exiles were alive and protecting the ancestral shrines. “Poland is not yet lost, so long as we are alive”11 – this is the first sentence of a patriotic song written in 1797 in Italy by Józef Wybicki, which became the Polish national anthem in 1927. “We” are the Poles, people, not a polity that is destroyed. Aeneas bears the real Troy and the Poles in the same way bear the real Poland with them. They do not have the “physical” Penates, the figures of deities, as Aeneas did; they have them in their hearts. Their penates is their national consciousness, if we can use a term that was only being slowly born in the period. The Virgilian connotation is not marked explicitly by Wybicki, but only alluded to; nevertheless, it must have been obvious for Wybicki’s contemporaries, although it was lost for future generations. In the late twentieth century, the classical philologist Jerzy Starnawski reminded us about it. The Aeneid helped the Polish elites to formulate the idea that the nation exists even without a polity. The first Polish military unit after the partitions were the Polish Legions, organised in Italy in 1797, recruited from the Poles who were soldiers of the Austrian army, taken as prisoners of war by the French. The very name “Legions” directs us to the Roman associations.12 Of course, Virgil was popular everywhere in the eighteenth century; it is not by chance that some of the best translations of the Aeneid, such as that of Dryden, appeared just then. The role of ancient Rome, or of ancient Roman costume, in the national ideologies of various countries, such as Britain or France, is well known. It would demand a detailed comparative study to establish how far the Polish importance of Virgil was original (or typical). It was relatively short-lived: ancient Roman connotations do not play a central role in Polish national imagery after 1830. An eminent US-Ukrainian historian Roman Szporluk has recently hinted at one such possible sphere of comparison: the Ukrainian national movement, or rather the very early manifestations of what was to develop into the Ukrainian national movement. In 1795, there appeared a Ukrainian parody of the Aeneid; something not special in itself, as such parodies appeared in various languages, due to the broad popularity of Virgil in 11 12

“Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła, kiedy my żyjemy”. On the importance of Virgil in the Polish Enlightenment, including the topics discussed here, cf. Kostkiewiczowa, Polski wiek świateł, 172–85.

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the period. What is important is that it retrospectively played a key role in the development of the Ukrainian literary language and national identity. It was one of the “texts that can produce peoples”, as Szporluk puts it.13 As he assumes, the author, Ivan Kotliarevs’kyi (1769–1838), must have known about the role Virgil played in the Polish culture of his lifetime. In his mock-heroic poem, he described the Cossacs in such a way that “their characters are likeable and they display certain positive virtues – courage, individualism, and love of freedom – which later would become associated with the mythic Cossack past”.14 Let us move to further forms of expressing grief, emotion and loss. The Sentimentalist enthusiasm for ruins is well known, whether we mention Volney, Gibbon, or numerous artificial ruins, the ruined amphitheatre in the royal park of Łazienki near Warsaw included. The collapse of a state fitted very well into this story of the passing of empires. As Shelley wrote in his famous sonnet about a pharaoh’s monument: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings…” This attitude, popular after 1795 among educated Poles, did not offer any solution. For some authors, the melancholy was enough; others connected it with Virgilian or Biblical reminiscences that permitted the introduction of some hope. Literary historians stress the popularity of Ovid and of elegy as a form in Polish literature after 1795.15 It is of course sheer coincidence that the old PolandLithuanian Commonwealth collapsed just at the very moment in European history when Enlightenment Classicism was giving way to Sentimentalism, and – in a longer perspective – to Romanticism. Nevertheless, this coincidence was momentous. Poetics of the dream gained popularity; Ossianist poetry introduced a figure of the bard-prophet and it opened the way for the fascination with folklore (cf. Jens Eike Schnall’s chapter in the present volume). All these can be seen as harbingers of Romanticism; and they certainly were, if we think teleologically. Various elements of Polish Messianism can be discerned already in the Napoleonic era, as a form of sublimation of national suffering.16

13 14 15 16

A phrase of Adrian Hastings, quoted by Roman Szporluk, “Publish or Perish: Texts and Peoples”, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 32, no. 1–4 (2010/2011), 1–20, quote p.1. Szporluk, “Publish or Perish”, 7. Cf Zofia Rejman, “Żale, sny i smutki – o poezji patriotycznej 1795 roku”, Napis, Seria III (1997): 101–13; Bazhum.muzhp.pl. On the genesis of Polish Messianism the book by Ujejski, although already ninety years old, is still very much worth reading: Józef Ujejski, Dzieje polskiego mesjanizmu do powstania listopadowego włącznie (Lwów: Wyd. Zakładu Nar. im. Ossolińskich, 1931). As regards the Polish Messianism after 1831 the works by Andrzej Walicki provide the best possible introduction. Andrzej Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

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It seems to me, however, that those literary historians are right that – without denying the proto-Romantic elements – stress that literature of the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries should be understood in its own right, without using the later Romantic generation as a yardstick.17 There is another important aspect of Polish Sentimentalism already alluded to – the rebirth of the Sarmatian canon immediately after the third partition. This goes hand in hand with the start of the Gothic revival in Poland – in architecture, but also with such phenomena as “Gothic” novels by Countess Anna Mostowska. According to specialists, their setting in Polish history is only very superficial, her novels being to a high degree paraphrases of Western examples (Ann Radcliffe, M.G. Lewis). Nevertheless, although not dealing principally with “loss”, her novels were instrumental in effecting a deep transformation of feelings, perceptions and values. It is always difficult, often impossible, to discern “modern” from “traditional” elements (whatever these terms may mean) in any historical phenomenon. So it is here too. Most historians, myself included, consider it obvious that the “Virgilian” transformation – arriving at a conclusion that a nation is independent from a polity – was a crucial step in building a modern Polish national consciousness. At the same time, various traditional elements may have been helpful. One was a noble dislike of urban life, which, as mentioned above, may have appeared in a new garb as Rousseauism. Another was the belief of the nobility that in certain situations the Rzeczpospolita is a Personenverband, a body of nobility itself rather than a territory or institutions. The “Rzeczpospolita” could physically gather on the fields of village Wola close to Warsaw in order to elect the new King. Even one of the most important Enlightenment reformists, Hugo Kołłątaj, bowed before traditional images and contrasted the “Rzeczpospolita through its representatives locked in the capital” (i.e. the Diet) with the “Rzeczpospolita remaining in the provinces”18 – i.e. the nobility as such. This belief in “personal” rather than “territorial” Commonwealth as a community of nobility is, obviously, very ancient. In the new situation, 17

18

Cf. Paweł Pluta, “Dlaczego preromantyzm? Literatura przełomu XVIII i XIX wieku w terminologii historyka literatury”, Roczniki Humanistyczne LXVII, no. 1 (2019): 39–52, http:// dx.doi.org/10.18290/rh.2019.67.1-4; Anna Jończyk, “Sentymentalizm a preromantyzm”, Konteksty Kultury. Pismo Kolegium Nauczycielskiego w Bielsku-Białej 11, no. 3 (2014): 205–16. http://www.ejournals.eu/Konteksty_Kultury/. “Rzeczpospolita przez swych reprezentantów w stolicy zamknięta” and “Rzeczpospolita po prowincjach zostająca”. Quotes from Kołłątaj after Jerzy Michalski, “‘Warszawa’, czyli o antystołecznych nastrojach w czasach Stanisława Augusta”, in: idem, Studia historyczne z XVIII i XIX wieku, vol. 1–2, ed. Wojciech Kriegseisen and Zofia Zielińska (Warsaw: Stentor, 2007), vol. 2, 60. My translation.

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it could lead to something very modern: if the Commonwealth is embodied in the nobility, why could Poland not be embodied in the dispersed groups of Polish patriots, whether in exile in Italy, or in their manors “remaining in the provinces”?

4

Conceptualisations of Citizen

We may mention here as a marginal note the fortunes of the concept of “citizen” in Polish. Słownik języka polskiego (The Dictionary of the Polish Language) by Samuel Bogumił Linde, published in 1809, notes two meanings of this term: one is “inhabitant”, another is “a member of a politically and civilly free common wealth”.19 This second meaning is illustrated by some quotations. One comes from a novel “Pan Podstoli” (1778), by Ignacy Krasicki, considered the most important author of the Polish Enlightenment: “An honest citizen should in every issue have the good of his country before his eyes”.20 Another quotation derives from a handbook of “Political law of the Polish nation”, originally published in 1782, written by a Piarist priest and teacher Wincenty Skrzetuski. It is very different: “Only the nobility was understood as citizens by our laws, and therefore whatever is said about citizen’s rights, freedoms, liberties, pertains only to the nobility”.21 It is worth adding that Linde also included the female form “obywatelka” with the same meanings: inhabitant of a state and “she who participates in the civil and political liberty of the state”.22 The only phrase to illustrate this interesting meaning is “matka-obywatelka” (“mothercitizen”) from the sentimentalist poet Kniaźnin (on conceptions of female citizenship cf. Jules Kielmann’s, Eve Annuk’s, and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume).23 We have here actually three, not two, meanings of “citizen”: the first meaning is simply “inhabitant”: it was becoming obsolete in the Polish language through the course of the nineteenth century. The second meaning of “citizen” 19 20 21

22 23

The original reads: “mieszkaniec”; “członek cywilnie i politycznie wolnej pospolitej rzeczy”. “Prawy obywatel w każdej sprawie dobro kraju powinien mieć przed oczyma”. “Samę szlachtę prawa nasze rozumiały właściwie przez obywatelów, tak dalece, że cokolwiek się mówi o prawach, swobodach, wolnościach obywatelskich, sciśle należy do samej szlachty”. My translation. The original reads: “dzieląca wolność cywilną i polityczną państwa”. Samuel Bogumił Linde, Słownik języka polskiego, vol. II, p. I: M-O (Warsaw, 1809), 400 (online: https://kpbc.umk.pl/dlibra/publication/8179/edition/13036/content accessed April 29, 2020).

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is “nobleman”, the third – “one who enjoys civil and political rights within a country”. Until 1795, the second and third meanings overlapped, as the nobility had political rights. After 1795, the rights and privileges of the nobility were curtailed, if not outright abolished, and the meanings became separate: on the one hand, the term “obywatel” more and more often acquired the meaning of a landowner (whether noble or not). On the other hand, the meaning “person who enjoys civil and political rights” became independent from noble status. This is the clear influence of French revolutionary ideas: in Linde’s dictionary, when the meaning of “inhabitant” is discussed, Linde gives the German equivalent: “Einwohner”. When the second, politicized meaning is discussed, he gives in first place a French – not German – equivalent: “Citoyen” (and only later German: “Staatsbürger”). This clearly indicates the route of cultural influences. Through the whole nineteenth century there existed also an adjective “obywatelski” which had both descriptive (related to a citizen) and normative meaning (obywatelskie cnoty, civic virtues; obywatelska postawa, citizen-like behaviour). It was those “citizens”, first mainly noble, and then more and more often non-noble who, after the third partition, were transforming the old patriotic ideal, whether they realized it or not.

5

The Use of the Bible in Negotiations of Loss

Apart from Virgil, there was another traditional repository of images and patterns of emotional reaction: the Bible. Biblical influence existed in Polish culture since the Middle Ages. This partially questions the thesis of Ignacy Chrzanowski about the lack of means to express public grief. However, another literary historian, Józef Ujejski, noted that the Biblical topics of decline were so exploited through their continuous use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they partially lost their emotional appeal,24 although the collapse of the state gave new meaning to old warnings. Ezekiel’s vision of words of the prophet awakening the warriors was often quoted, and a characteristic contamination happened. The warriors that will grow out from our bones – if we find such a phrase in a contemporary text, it can be an allusion to Ezekiel, to Virgil or to both, or an unconscious echo of various readings, thoughts or images. It seems that the Old Testament prevailed as a source of inspiration for the Polish national idea until 1831 and since then the New Testament. The Old Testament, especially the Prophets and Psalms, fit the early period after the partitions when – as I have been arguing – the unclearness 24

Ujejski, Dzieje polskiego mesjanizmu, 34–35.

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about the nature of the loss dominated. After 1830, with the Romantic national idea more or less fully crystalized, the Messianist atmosphere favoured the adaptation of the New Testament imagery and vocabulary. A rather blasphemous appellation of Poland as “the Christ of nations” meant that Poland was to be sacrificed for the sake of the whole of humanity and thus to initiate a universal redemption on earth, birth of a new world of free nations. This means that no compromise with the partitioning powers, as was hoped for in 1815 after the Vienna Congress, was possible. Full independence became the program of all Polish émigré political groups after 1831, and thus the metaphor of resurrection took central place. Thus, the New Testament gained the upper hand in Polish national imagery. Coming back to the period before 1830: After Ezekiel, the most important source of inspiration included the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Jacek Idzi Przybylski, Catholic priest and learned librarian of Cracow University, translated among others the Lamentations (1820). Przybylski was an important person in Cracow’s cultural life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a prolific and controversial translator of ancient literature (because of his neologisms). In the first sentence of the Lamentations “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!” (here in King James’ Bible) the “city” is rendered by Rzeczpospolita25 – a term (“Commonwealth”) that was used as the proper name of the old Polish-Lithuanian state. A problem, however, arises here. We know too little of the semantic fields of the term “Rzeczpospolita”. Obviously, its meaning was much broader than now, meaning any sort of polity, somehow like the Latin “Res publica”, of which it is a calque. It is hard to judge whether the readers in 1820 associated the term with Poland. If they did, another question appears concerning the function of the Biblical text: was it a vehicle of patriotic emotion? Putting aside the possible attempt to evade the censorship two other answers should be considered. First, as suggested above, the Biblical costume provides categories to understand and to express the sense of loss. A second possibility is more prosaic: after the Napoleonic Wars, one can argue, the idea of Polish independence was more or less clear and understood by the educated elite. So it could have been expressed without Biblical symbolism. The Biblical medium was needed to add dignity and sacral character to the national idea, but not to express it (cf. the late-nineteenthcentury feminist Alexandra Gripenberg in Tiina Kinnunen’s chapter in the present volume). If so, the situation was basically the same as it has been 25

“Jak rzeczpospolita owa sama siedzi, ludna wprzódy”. Example taken from Tomasz Chachulski, “Biblia a język poezji religijnej w XVIII wieku”, in idem, Edytorstwo jako historia literatury i inne studia o poezji XVIII wieku (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2019), 342.

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until now: various national or nationalist movements use religious phraseology to express their ideas – not because they cannot express them otherwise but because the Biblical allusions make the national idea more sublime.

6

History and Language Creating National Consciousness

The reforming elites around King Stanislaus Augustus formed a view of Polish history that was very critical of the nobility and its preponderance. The most important historian, and collaborator of the King, who underlined the importance of the strong central power and criticised the gentry republic as anarchy which brought about the collapse, was an ex-Jesuit Adam Naruszewicz, often considered the first “modern” (in terms of rational, enlightened) Polish historian. His main work, a History of the Polish Nation, published in seven thick volumes, which he managed to complete up until the year of 1386, is organised around the struggle of reforming and benevolent monarchic power with the centrifugal tendencies of the nobility and magnates. He recognized the same pattern in every epoch from the beginning of Polish history in the tenth century. Now, in the early nineteenth century the pendulum started to swing to the other side and the picture of the old Commonwealth was acquiring more and more positive traits, however, not with everybody. In the governmental structures of the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw (1807–1815) and the constitutional Kingdom of Poland (1815–1831) there were still some old Enlightenment reformers who shunned the “anarchy” of the gentry. The general attitude, however, and even people with very “Enlightenment” frames of mind, favoured a more benign interpretation of Polish history. The evolution of Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, in the 1790s one of the journalists and authors supporting the May 3 Constitution, is a case in point. Without changing his moderately liberal political opinions, he won popularity with his Śpiewy historyczne (Historical lays, first published in a single volume in 1816, but written some years earlier). This volume of ballad-like historical poems illustrated the whole of Polish history. Niemcewicz did not renounce the Enlightenment criticism of various aspects of Poland’s past, of “broken form of government and nobility blinded in their excesses”.26 At the same time, he was much more outspoken in praising the glories of the past.

26

The original reads: “zepsutego rządu i zaślepionej w nadużyciach szlachty”. Quote from the author’s prose commentary to the lay “Władysław IV” (Ladislas IV, King 1632–1748), in Julian U. Niemcewicz, Śpiewy Historyczne (Petersburg: W.M. Wolff, 1862), 327. My translation.

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In this sentimentalist atmosphere another important shift occurred. It was the stress on language. The Enlightenment Classicism was very sensitive to linguistic purity. Purging the language from at least some foreign borrowings, developing vocabulary, taking care of simplicity, clarity and communicativeness – these were ideas constantly repeated in press and in literature. There was a strong ideological element, but it is clear that for the Classicist generation the reform of language was to be a tool, and an integral part of the political reform. Reformed language would support clear thinking, facilitate interpersonal communication and help to discern reason from prejudice, bigotry and demagoguery. This type of thinking still existed after 1795. Various authors stressed that it was not by chance that the deepest political decline of the old Commonwealth (i.e. the first half of the eighteenth century, before the Enlightenment reforms) went hand in hand with what they considered contamination of the language with Latin and other influences. The language defence, however, was slowly taking a new form. Language was hence not only a vehicle of clear and rational thinking; it became a core of national identity, the only remnant of defunct polity, a central element of collective soul. The Society of Friends of Learning, established in the Prussian Warsaw in 1800, was, as regards its ideology, an amalgam of this older Classicist with new Romantic attitude. The Enlightenment emphasis on the importance of scientific spirit for the nation’s future combined with the belief about emotional value of language and folklore for the nation’s identity. “As long as the Polish language exists, the Polish name exists”, a Piarist priest Onufry Kopczyński wrote in 1804 – a veteran of the educational activities of the late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment and author of a well-known handbook of Polish grammar.27 These two aspects merged in the most famous scientific monument of the epoch, a work of an individual who was somehow an outsider to Polish intellectual elites – Samuel Bogumił Linde (he translated his second name “Gottlieb” into Polish), a polonized German burgher of the Pomeranian city of Thorn (Toruń). Between 1807 and 1814 he published his six-volume dictionary of the Polish language, as mentioned earlier. There was a debate about the desired shape of the dictionary and many advisers, mainly from the “Classicist” generation, would have liked to see the dictionary as a normative work, defining the proper usage and vocabulary, purging the language of alleged barbarisms and vulgarisms. Linde, though, was a researcher rather than a philosopher, and he decided for the dictionary that it

27

“Póki języka, póty i imienia polskiego”. Quoted after Jerzy Michalski, “Spór o koncepcję słownika Lindego”, in: Michalski, Studia historyczne, vol. II, 248. My translation.

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had to register as much from the actual written and spoken language as possible. He was as far as possible from any Romantic emotions, sober and hard working as he was. With his education in Leipzig, he was closer to the German Enlightenment historiography than to the Romantic love of the people. His decision was motivated by the maximalist scientific ambition to exhaust the lexicographical material, not by any Romantic influences. Nevertheless, precisely through his antiquarian stance he decided on a formula that made his dictionary indispensable for all scholars of the Polish language up until now – and that made it important for the future Romantic generation, due to those popular and “barbarous” terms that he included. The Society of the Friends of Learning was calling on its members to collect folk songs; some intellectuals started to produce texts about the cultural flourishing of the pre-Christian Slavonic communities. The interest in Slavonic cultures, rare in Poland until then, was born. Thus, preconditions for something that later would be called linguistic nationalism were being laid in the first years after the third partition – and they were taking form as emotional reaction to the loss of independent statehood. Of course, linguistic nationalism would have appeared anyway, as it did everywhere, even without the partitions – but as it were, in given historical circumstances, it appeared as emotional reaction to loss (cf. language conflicts in Estonia and Finland respectively, Eve Annuk’s, Jens Grandell’s, Heidi Grönstrand’s, and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume).

7

The Sense of Loss within Later Generations

The reactions to loss have their chronological dimensions. What I want to stress is uncertainty – not just uncertainty as regarded the future political constellations but intellectual uncertainty: is a nation possible without state? What would happen to those “New Trojans” after they managed to save their home deities from the storm? Nobody knew for sure, but there was some hope. Now, in 1807 Napoleon established the Duchy of Warsaw – a Polish state within the Napoleonic European system, supervised by the French but run by the Polish elites, mainly of noble origins. This, in turn, was replaced by the Polish Kingdom created at the Vienna Congress – even smaller than the Duchy but symbolically important because of the revival of the name. The official ideology of both these states was the “Revival” of Poland.28 The sympathies 28

On this “Revival” ideology cf. Mikołaj Getka-Kenig, Pomniki publiczne i dyskurs zasługi w dobie “wskrzeszonej” Polski lat 1807–1830 (Cracow: Universitas, 2017).

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for Napoleon in 1807 were probably more sincere, for Alexander in 1815 more restrained and tainted with resignation; still, the parallelism of the two ideologies is striking. This ideology of state revival is important from the point of view of this chapter, as it provides an important chronological mark. In 1809 a Classicist poet, Kajetan Koźmian, under the impression of Napoleonic victory over Austria wrote about Poland’s resurrection: “We will build a great Troy”.29 Six years passed, Russian Emperor Alexander entered Poland in 1815 and at a triumphal gate in Lublin (south east from Warsaw) Koźmian inserted an appropriate quote: “Exspectate venis,/ Sacra suosque tibi commendat Troia penates” (“You came expected and Troy commends to you its holy Penates”).30 This is a contamination of two Virgilian quotes (Aen II 283 and 293), the second of which is what Hector as a ghost says to Aeneas. Here they are addressed to Alexander, who – a new Aeneas – rebuilds a Polish state. Both these instances of Virgilian rhetoric applied by the same author subsequently to two conflicted leaders illustrate one thing: from 1807, twelve years after the final partition, the possibility of Poland’s independence appeared as real, though far from certain. It was to remain so, more or less, through the whole of the nineteenth century (with an exception of some twenty years between mid1860s and mid-1880s). The feeling of loss existed; the emotional ways to cope with it were still needed. But the situation was different; the state of uncertainty, this “Virgilian moment” when Aeneas served as a guide, came to a close. The group we are dealing with was very small. The readership of all Polishlanguage journals and newspapers did not exceed a few thousand. The circle of people who cared about politics was probably broader – but still, not more than tens of thousands, whereas the population before the first partition was about ten million. We put aside the majority of at least eighty per cent of the inhabitants of the Commonwealth who, as peasants, probably did not notice any difference, and if they did, they did not articulate it in political terms. We also put aside those who belonged to the elites, but whose consciousness evolved, through generations, to a non-Polish national identity. I mean here the German-speaking patricians of the Pomeranian cities Gdańsk (Danzig) and Toruń (Thorn), as well as – with some hesitation – the milieu of Greek Catholic higher clergy who were to become a cradle of the Ukrainian national movement. We deal only with the political elites of the Commonwealth as such – and even within them, the perception of loss varied. Some mourned for 29

30

“Postawimy wielką Troję”. Kajetan Koźmian, “Do Księcia jenerała Czartoryskiego w imieniu kadetów roku 1809”, in idem, Wybór poezji, ed. Roman Dąbrowski (Cracow: Universitas, 2002), 31. Treugutt, “Ody napoleońskie”, 31.

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the destruction of “neighbourhood”, some others for the Rzeczpospolita understood in a personal way, as a corporation of nobility, or for the enlightened state created by the reforms of the Four Years Diet and especially the May 3 Constitution. I want to argue that their emotions about the loss were probably often unclear to themselves. Were we to draw, only in most general lines, the later developments, after the fall of Napoleon, we could present a long process of including new social groups within the community of those who felt the emotion of loss. The oscillation between insurrectionary enthusiasm and despair continued to be present in Polish politics, art and literature. At the same time, the democratization of the national idea was taking place, although relatively late, only at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. The newly politicized strata, mainly peasantry, but also the urban artisan and industrial workers, were inventing their own versions of national past, re-using various ideas discussed in the present chapter. The descendants of the serf peasants – at least some of them – entering the political life in the early twentieth century started to feel with a hundred years delay the loss that was essentially neither theirs nor their ancestors’ but one of the nobility. The peasant parties started to develop first in Galicia (Austrian partition). Their favourite hero became Tadeusz Kościuszko, the leader of the 1794 uprising. During the insurrection Kościuszko issued a law that diminished the serfs’ obligations by half and supported the voluntary peasant military units (he allegedly appeared once in a peasant coat himself, to honour the peasant soldiers) – so he was an ideal hero.31 The loss was redefined as one pertaining to the whole of society, including the descendants of those groups that were absent from the public life at the time of the partitions. The same concerned the proponents of women’s emancipation and the intelligentsia with Jewish roots. They, too, retrospectively embraced the story of national loss as their own. One of the leading Polish historians of the twentieth century, Henryk Wereszycki, recollected that a map depicting Poland before 1772 was hanging in his parents’ flat in Lviv (Lwów) before 1914. He added that it was present in practically every flat of the Lviv Polish intelligentsia at that time. Wereszycki came from an assimilated Jewish family and he exemplifies how intelligentsia that did not have any genealogical connection with the historical elites of the 31

Among the rich body of literature on the Kościuszko-cult, cf. Magdalena Micińska, Gołąb i orzeł: Obchody rocznic kościuszkowskich w latach 1894 i 1917 (Warsaw: Neriton – IH PAN, 1997); Krzysztof Karol Daszyk, “Bo imię jego jest Polska”: Tadeusz Kościuszko w patriotycznej legendzie i politycznym micie czasów porozbiorowych: Esej historyczny (Cracow: Historia Iagellonica, 2018).

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late eighteenth century adopted retrospectively the emotions of loss of independence. In the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the expressions of emotions concerned with loss were more and more ritualized, if not ossified in various sets of cultural practices. Loss became ritualized through various stereotypical scenes and heroes, and finally through schoolbooks – partially in self-governing Galicia within the Habsburg Monarchy, and fully in the interwar Polish Republic. The process of transformation of “Peasants into Frenchmen”, to invoke the title of a famous book by Eugen Weber32 (or Germans, or Poles, or Ruritanians) was happening everywhere in Europe. In the Polish case it was not complete for a long time. Until the 1960s, as the sociologist Michał Łuczewski convincingly argued,33 a part of the rural population in central Poland did not share the Polish national consciousness. Needless to say, it makes a great difference whether any individual or group was socialized into Polish national consciousness in, say, 1810, 1910 or 1960; Polishness meant something very different in each of these cases.

8

Concluding Remarks

We have seen in this chapter dealing with the Polish case from the late eighteenth century onwards how the vague feeling of loss transformed more and more into a modern national consciousness. What I want to argue is that as nationalism developed, the emotion of loss remained important, but its meaning changed. There is a certain uneasy relation between sentiment and aggression. On the one hand: “non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco” (“not alien to defeat, I know how to support the unhappy”). These are the words of Dido (Aen I, 630), when she receives Aeneas. Various Polish authors quoted these words in the early nineteenth century in order to show that one’s misfortune makes one compassionate to the misfortunes of others. This was the attitude of Polish Romantic thought too, different as it was from the Enlightenment. The Romantic generation believed in the community of free and oppressed peoples fighting the reactionary governments: the emotion of loss resulted in international solidarity. With the late nineteenth century, and with

32 33

Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford University Press, 1976). Michał Łuczewski, Odwieczny naród: Polak i katolik w Żmiącej (Toruń: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, 2012).

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radicalization of nationalism, however, the emotion of loss became a tool to imbue the population with fear and hate. Unlike some other national movements, Polish radical ideological nationalism in the early twentieth century had to start by overcoming the Romantic tradition. It was too internationalist, too individualist and too idealist for the taste of a new national Realpolitik. It is only later that various Romantic elements, expurgated from any internationalist idealism, slowly infiltrated the nationalist doctrine and propaganda. The liberty of Poland, for the Romantic intellectuals, went hand in hand with the liberty of oppressed “peoples” united against the reactionary “governments”. In the new nationalism, by contrast, it was the nations or ethnicities living in the same territory as the Poles that were now the enemy: first of all, the Jews, but also the Germans, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians, and in certain regions the Czechs, too. In traditional, Romantic national discourse, the Polish suffering was interpreted in a paraChristological way, as a suffering that preceded redemption. A new social Darwinist paradigm changed this: struggle was seen as a natural situation between various nations and states.34 Therefore, we could perhaps risk the following thesis: the loss that was to create nationalist emotions became a future loss. Whereas up until that point the centre of gravity was in the past, in the loss “we” suffered in history, the situation changed: the future loss would now threaten us if we do not act against it, namely if we do not fight the Others. Of course, the contrast between the traditional Romantic (and preRomantic) and new, social Darwinist understanding of loss is schematic. On the one hand, the old, more democratic and international nationalism did not die out, on the other hand – elements of the “new” “national-egoist” picture were growing through the nineteenth century. The evolution of various models of interrelation between nation, emotion, and loss through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a fascinating topic. This, however, is another story.

Bibliography Chachulski, Tomasz. “Biblia a język poezji religijnej w XVIII wieku”. In Tomasz Chachulski, Edytorstwo jako historia literatury i inne studia o poezji XVIII wieku, 289–346. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, 2019.

34

On this whole process of transformation cf. Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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Chrzanowski, Ignacy. “Czym był Wirgiliusz dla Polaków po utracie niepodległości”. In Ignacy Chrzanowski, Optymizm i pesymizm polski, 229–49. Warsaw: PWN, 1979. Daszyk, Krzysztof Karol. “Bo imię jego jest Polska”: Tadeusz Kościuszko w patriotycznej legendzie i politycznym micie czasów porozbiorowych: Esej historyczny. Cracow: Historia Iagellonica, 2018. Getka-Kenig, Mikołaj. Pomniki publiczne i dyskurs zasługi w dobie “wskrzeszonej” Polski lat 1807–1830. Cracow: Universitas, 2017. Godebski, Cyprian. Grenadier-Filozof: Powieść prawdziwa, wyjęta z dziennika podróży roku 1799. Cracow: Universitas, 2002. Jończyk, Anna. “Sentymentalizm a preromantyzm”. In Konteksty Kultury: Pismo Kolegium Nauczycielskiego w Bielsku-Białej 11, no. 3 (2014): 205–16. http://www.ejournals .eu/Konteksty_Kultury/. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Einleitung”. In Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 1, edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, XIII–XXVII. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972. Kostkiewiczowa, Teresa. Polski wiek świateł: Obszary swoistości. Wrocław: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, 2002. Koźmian, Kajetan. “Do Księcia jenerała Czartoryskiego w imieniu kadetów roku 1809”. In Wybór poezji, edited by Roman Dąbrowski, 31. Cracow: Universitas, 2002. Linde, Samuel Bogumił. Słownik języka polskiego, vol. II, p. I: M-O. Warsaw: 1809. https://kpbc.umk.pl/dlibra/publication/8179/edition/13036/content. Łuczewski, Michał. Odwieczny naród: Polak i katolik w Żmiącej. Toruń: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, 2012. Michalski, Jerzy. Studia historyczne z XVIII i XIX wieku. Vol. 1–2, edited by Wojciech Kriegseisen and Zofia Zielińska. Warsaw: Stentor, 2007. Micińska, Magdalena. Gołąb i orzeł: Obchody rocznic kościuszkowskich w latach 1894 i 1917. Warsaw: Neriton – IH PAN, 1997. Nalepa, Marek. Takie życie dziś nasze, gdy Polska ustaje… Pisarze staropolscy a upadek Rzeczypospolitej. Wrocław: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, 2002. Niemcewicz, Julian Ursyn. Śpiewy Historyczne. Petersburg: W.M. Wolff, 1862. Pluta, Paweł. “Dlaczego preromantyzm? Literatura przełomu XVIII i XIX wieku w terminologii historyka literatury”. Roczniki Humanistyczne LXVII, no. 1 (2019): 39–52. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18290/rh.2019.67.1-4. Porter, Brian. When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Rejman, Zofia. “Żale, sny i smutki – o poezji patriotycznej 1795 roku”. Napis, Seria III, 1997: 101–13. Bazhum.muzhp.pl. Rosenwein, Barbara H. “Worrying about Emotions in History”. The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2001): 821–45.

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Stearns, Peter N. and Carol Z. Stearns. “Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards”. The American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813–36. Szporluk, Roman. “Publish or Perish: Texts and Peoples”. Harvard Ukrainian Studies 32, no. 1–4 (2010/2011): 1–20. Treugutt, Stefan. “Ody napoleońskie Kajetana Koźmiana”. Pamiętnik Literacki 57, no. 1 (1966): 31–82. Ujejski, Józef. Dzieje polskiego mesjanizmu do powstania listopadowego włącznie. Lwów: Wyd. Zakładu Nar. im. Ossolińskich, 1931. Walicki, Andrzej. Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Weber, Eugen. Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976. Zajączkowski, Andrzej. Szlachta polska: Kultura i struktura. Warsaw: Sempter 1993. Żbikowski, Piotr. …bolem smiertelnym ściśnione mam serce… Rozpacz oświeconych u źródeł przełomu w poezji polskiej w latach 1793–1805. Wrocław: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, 1998.

Chapter 2

Visions of the Nation and Feelings of Loss in the Works of Steen Steensen Blicher Jens Eike Schnall

The Napoleonic Wars represented a turning point for the Danish realm due to the loss of its fleet in 1801 and 1807, the destruction of three-quarters of its capital city in the British bombardment in 1807, resulting in nearly a thousand of its inhabitants injured or dead, and the loss of many of its overseas connections, many of its markets and ultimately leading to a declaration of national bankruptcy in 1813.1 The composite state of Denmark had to cede Norway to Sweden in 1814, which was a severe blow, not least due to Norway’s importance as a market for agricultural products. One of the eye-witnesses to the bombardment of Copenhagen was Danish writer Steen Steensen Blicher (1782–1848). He summarizes the losses in his booklet Danmarks nærværende Tilstand (The Present State of Denmark) – actually a tribute to the royal couple Prince Frederick and Princess Wilhelmine Marie on occasion of their wedding in 18282 – in the following manner: Only when cunning in association with violence attacked the peaceful, innocent country with vastly superior forces, it was drawn – very much against its will – into the millstream that so far just had roared in the distance, and powerlessly streamed past the levee, which the monarch’s wisdom and love for his people had erected and protected. – In the course of seven years, our many mighty enemies did everything to tear down this beautiful work of centuries: the fleet was robbed, the ship traffic was put to a halt, and trade and trust in our valuta destroyed; and not before our unlucky ally was toppled could peace be bought by severing a bond that was more precious because of its old age, due to the mutual friendship, the likeness in language, customs, and mindset, which had tied and 1 See also Peter Nørgaard Larsen’s chapter in the present volume. 2 Blicher, “Danmarks nærværende Tilstand”, SSkr. 13, 170–89. The complete title is: Danmarks nærværende Tilstand kortelig framstillet i Anledning af Deres kongelige Højheders, Prinds Frederik Carl Christians og Princesse Wilhelmine Maries, Formæling, den første November 1828, cf. ibid., 229.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_004

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strengthened it, than it was important in economic or military perspective. – Now, according to sound consideration, Denmark could certainly be regarded by our enemies as ruined, and even many disconsolate of our own predicted nothing less for it than national bankruptcy.3 Blicher was directly affected by these calamities which he relates from a more general perspective (for the shaping of individual and collective bodies through emotions, see Jules Kielmann’s chapter in the present volume). In the bombardment, he lost his lodging and all his possessions and had to leave the ruined city for Randlev, Jutland, to stay with his father. It is clear from his autobiography that he had aspired to be and wished to remain a member of the learned circles and urban middle-class of the Danish capital, but the downturn of the economy put an end to these ambitions.4 In addition, when the war was over, he was directly affected by the agricultural crisis, as he had invested in a farm estate called Ødegaardsjorden.5 Blicher would never again succeed in becoming established in Copenhagen, and therefore had to follow family tradition and sustain himself and his growing family as a parish clerk in Jutland. Located in the periphery, he became one of the most prolific writers of the Biedermeier period, today mostly known for his Jutish stories such as Røverstuen (1827, The Robbers’ Den), Hosekræmmeren (1829, The Hosier and his Daughter), the canonized crime-story Præsten i Vejlbye (1829, The Rector of Veilbye) and for his poems, some of which were put to music. In 1824, his story Brudstykker af en Landsbydegns Dagbog (The

3 “[F]ørst da List i Forening med Vold med uhyre Overvægt angreb det fredelige, uskyldige Land, henreves det – haardelig mod sin Villie – i den Malstrøm, der hidtil kun brusede fjernt, og magtesløs skyllede forbi den Dæmning, Monarkens Viisdom og Kjerlighed til sit Folk havde opført og bevogtet. – I syv Aar gjorde vore mange mægtige Fjender Alt for at nedrive Aarhundreders skjønne Værk: Floden ranedes, Skibsfarten standsedes og Handelen og Creditten tilintetgjordes; og først da vor ulykkelige Allierede var styrtet, kunde Freden gjenkjøbes ved Sønderrivelsen af et Baand, der var mere dyrebart for sin Ælde, formedelst det gjensidige Venskab, den Lighed i Sprog, Sæder og Tænkemaade, der havde knyttet og befæstet Samme, end vigtigt i oeconomisk eller militair Henseende. – Danmark kunde vel nu, efter rimelig Calcule, af vore Fjender ansees for ruineret, og selv mange Mistrøstige af vor[e] Egne spaaede det intet ringere, end nærforestaaende Nationalbankerot”. Blicher, “Danmarks nærværende Tilstand”, SSkr. 13, 179–80. My translation. 4 Cf. Blicher, “Steen Steensen Blicher”, SSkr. 25, 83–137. He returned to Copenhagen for his exam in 1808, but had to rush it due to economic difficulties, and when he once more had to move in at his father’s, he points to the continuing inflation as the reason (“den nu stedse stigende Forringelse af Coursen”), ibid. 89–91. 5 Knud Sørensen, St. St. Blicher: Digter og samfundsborger (København: Gydendal, 1985), 57–58, 217.

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Journal [or Diary] of a Parish Clerk) marks the breakthrough of realism in Danish literature.6 Still, his work includes many other genres such as articles in newspapers and journals on various topics including agriculture and political matters, travel accounts and topographical writings, translations and theatrical plays. In the context of the topic nation and loss, a case study on Blicher is especially rewarding in three aspects: (1) Blicher is an ever-active contributor to the nationalist discourses of his time and focuses on a variety of related issues, such as Danish identity and cultural history, Danish language and dialects, the loss of territory after 1814, the Schleswig-Holstein Question, and Pan-Scandinavism. (2) The themes of loss, change, and alienation are highly prominent in his work, in both his fictional stories and his political writings.7 The theme of loss is frequently treated in combination with “nation” and “Danishness”.8 (3) Blicher adds a distinctive regional perspective to the discussion. Being dependent on and confined to his parish in Jutland for most of his life, he writes from the periphery, far away from the Danish capital of Copenhagen, although from a central position with regard to the conflict around the disputed Danish-German borderlands (see Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s chapter in the present volume). This article focuses on the intersection of hybrid discourses around national and regional identities on the one hand and negotiations of feelings of loss within discourses around cultural history on the other hand. It shows how this thread evolves and develops from Blicher’s early works and onwards.

6 Cf. Sven H. Rossell, “From Romanticism to Realism”, in A History of Danish Literature, ed. Sven H. Rossel, A history of Scandinavian Literatures 1 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 219–20. 7 Blicher’s stories are usually tagged as “tragic” and as being characterized by the role of destiny, cf. e.g. Søren Baggesen, Den blicherske novelle (København: Gyldendal, 1965); Sune Auken, “Den moderne tragiker – Steen Steensen Blicher”, in Dansk litteraturs historie, eds. Klaus P. Mortensen and May Schack, vol. 2: 1800–1870 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2008), 328–31. As they apply techniques of documentary literature, they create the appearance of authenticity, cf. Thomas Bredsdorff, “Documentarism as a Formal Category in Nineteenth-Century Danish Literature: Structure and Rhethoric in the Classic Novella”, in Documentarism in Scandinavian Literature: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, eds. Poul Houe and Sven Hakon Rossel (Amsterdam: Rhodopi, 1997), 183–98. For a recent discussion of the complex of destiny, theatricality and melancholy, see Claus Esmann Andersen, “Lutherdom og teatralitet i Blichers ‘Præsten i Vejlbye’”, Danske Studier (2014): 168–99. 8 For a combination of “loss” and “nation”, see e.g. the hits when doing a search of “fædreland” + “tab” and similar searches in the corpus of Arkiv for Dansk Litteratur (http://adl .dk), which does not even contain the complete edition Samlede Skrifter (33 vols., 1920–1934), but the selected works from Udvalgte Værker (4 vols., 1982–1983).

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1

53

Ossianic Landscape

When Blicher entered the literary scene in his mid-twenties, he stood under the fresh spell of a most seminal work that already had had an immense impact on European literates for half a century, and which would also make a lasting impression on him: James Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian.9 The importance of Blicher’s encounter with this work can hardly be overestimated. It seems to have sparked his own literary production. He mentions it in an autobiographical sketch and the printed autobiography;10 he translated and published it in two volumes (Ossians Digte, 1807–1809, Ossian’s Poems) and immediately composed some poetry of his own which adopted the somber tone and the imagery of the Nordic sublime, with some works even directly referring to Ossian such as Ossians Svanesang (Ossian’s Swan Song) and Ossianske Elegier (Ossianic Elegies).11 The Nordic landscape in the Ossianic works is characterized by stereotype elements – “the grave, the memorial stones, the moss, the tree, the whistling wind – all shot through with a profound sense of the tragic mutability of human affairs”, and the heroes of the works, despite of being portrayed as Gaelic people of the Old, are “all too obviously late eighteenth-century ‘men of feeling’”, as Harry D. Watson puts it.12 The melancholic, elegiac tone resounded well with young Blicher; it remained a source of inspiration throughout his production, and one component became an ostinato in Blicher’s poetry and novels, that is, the lamenting of a changed world and a lost past, in the

9

10

11

12

Cf. Harry D. Watson, “Steen Steensen Blicher and Macpherson’s Ossian”, Northern Studies 17 (1981): 28–29. On the enormous impact of Ossian and its international reception, see e.g. the detailed timeline (up to 2004) by Paul Barnaby in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, ed. Howard Gaskill, The Reception of British Authors in Europe 5 (London New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), xii–lxviii, and Howard Gaskill, “Introduction: Genuine Poetry … like gold”, ibid., 1–20. “[F]ra 1de Nov. 1801 til 1803 […] conditionerede han paa Falster, hvor Fritimerne deltes mellem Jagten og – Ossian”. Blicher, SSkr. 32, 51. The mentioning of Ossian as a source of inspiration is the more remarkable as the sketch was sent on the demand of Christian Molbech in 1839 who complained in a letter to N.F.S. Grundtvig that it did so to say “not contain a word about his education [Bildung] in his youth or about his academic studies, or a clarification of how he became a poet in the first place, from what time his first works were &c”. (Blicher, SSkr. 32, 208–09). In the printed autobiographical sketch from 1840, Blicher mentions Ossian as a lifelong friend (“Morvens kongelige skald”) and his work on the Ossian-translation, Blicher, SSkr. 25, 86–88. Cf. Joep Leerssen, “The North: A Cultural Stereotype between Metaphor and Racial Essentialism”, in Northern Myths, Modern Identities: The Nationalisation of Northern Mythologies since 1800, ed. Simon Halink, National Cultivation of Culture 19 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 18–19. Watson, “Steen Steensen Blicher”, 28–30.

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Figure 2.1

Ossian Singing His Swan Song (1780–1782) by Nicolai Abildgaard, Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS395

form of a sad farewell and Abgesang. In the preface to Ossian’s Poems, Blicher addresses Ossian’s loss of his love Everallin, his friends, brothers, and only son Oscar, and leaves the reader with the picture: “Only the old blind man was left, alone among the graves of all his friends, and he the remnant of his family. So Ossian sang, and down through the centuries the mountains of Scotland resounded with his song”.13 13

“Ene var den blinde Olding tilbage, ene blant alle sine Venners Grave, og han den sidste af sin Slægt. Da sang Ossian, og gjennem Aarhundrede gjenløde Scotlands Bjerge af hans

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A key element of the Ossianic poetry is the agency of the landscape as such: Yet even when used for the purposes of the Ossianic simile, the landscape tends to become an end in itself […]. And it is perhaps not so much a question of sympathetic imagery which serves to integrate the landscape into the action, but rather that the landscape often is the action, dwarfing the merely human into pale parasitic insignificance. It does not merely echo the desolate mood of the characters, but it is the characters themselves who are a reflection of the landscape […].14 Indeed, Ossian remained a companion for Blicher throughout his entire life. When his father died in 1839, Blicher wrote Psalmer ved Oldingen Niels Blichers Jordefærd (Psalms at the Funeral of the Old Man Niels Blicher). These short psalms, to be performed at the home and in the church, make use of rather conventional Christian metaphors. Still, Blicher added a note to the poem: “My father died in his 91st year after having been completely blind for 6”.15 Anyone receptive to Ossianic imagery and tone could not have missed the resemblance to the figure of Ossian, whose blindness is a core element of his conception as a literary figure, connecting him to the blind seer of the classical tradition.

2

Sentimental Journey and National Peregrination

Blicher was not the first writer to take up Ossian as a source of inspiration and relate it to a landscape within the Danish realm.16 Both Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg had already done so in German in their bardic poetry of the 1760s, and there were plans to send the likewise Ossian-inspired Danish writer Johannes Ewald to Scotland in order

14 15 16

Kvad”. Blicher, “Fortale: Om Ægtheden af Ossians Digte”, in Ossians Digte, SSkr. 1, 8. Trans. Joel D.S. Rasmussen in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn & al., “Aesthetica.Older”, in Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks 11: 1: Loose Papers, 1830–1843, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn & al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 414. Gaskill, “Introduction: Genuine Poetry … like gold”, 5–6. Blicher, “Psalmer ved Oldingen Niels Blichers Jordefærd”, SSkr. 23, 44–45. Cf. Anna H. Harwell Celenza, “Efterklange af Ossian: The Reception of James Macpherson’s ‘Poems of Ossian’ in Denmark’s Literature, Art, and Music”, Scandinavian Studies 70 (1998): 359–96.

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to bring home sheet music to Ossianic poetry.17 In 1772 and again in the following years, the Selskab til de skiønne og nyttige Videnskabers Forfremmelse (“Society for the Advancement of Fine and Useful Arts”) had announced a prize for the best loco-descriptive poem about a Danish or Norwegian landscape, finally awarded in 1776. In 1777, the anonymous poem “Horneelen, et Bierg Nordenfields i Norge”, supposedly composed by Peter Harboe Frimann, was published together with others of the submitted poems.18 The patriotic Selbskab had invited submissions for “poetry of landscape” (Landschaftsdichtung): more precisely, poems on places in the Danish realm which stand out because of their pleasant or, in contrast, their horrific nature. Peter Frimann’s Hornelen-poem clearly delivered on the latter and provided Gothic or Ossianic aesthetics in the description and characterization of the Norwegian site, in combination with a bardic attitude.19 One generation later, Blicher’s early works included a poetic travel account, Jyllandsrejse i sex døgn (1817, Travel Through Jutland in Six Days), this one also heavily inspired by Ossian. The opening poem (“Forsang”) sets the tone with heather-clad hills, mossy grave monuments, roaring storms and the like and promises a “deep, sombre song”.20 The stanzas at the end of the work round

17

18

19

20

Cf. Anne-Bitt Gerecke, Transkulturalität als literarisches Programm: Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenbergs Poetik und Poesie, Palaestra 317 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); Wolf Gerhard Schmidt, “Homer des Nordens” und “Mutter der Romantik”: James Macphersons Ossian und seine Rezeption in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2003), vol. 1, 502–42, on the German bards 543–87. Schmidt emphasizes the intertextual character of the processes that can make it difficult to relate specific traits exclusively to Ossian, as the Poems of Ossian themselves are “an intertextual collage” (514), and that neither Klopstock nor Gerstenberg would indeed be fully valid representatives of literary genre of bardic poetry (527). Harald Næss, “Peter Harboe Frimann and the ‘Hornelen’ Affair”, Scandinavian Studies 38 (1966): 26–35; Joachim Grage, Chaotischer Abgrund und erhabene Weite: Das Meer in der skandinavischen Dichtung des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Palaestra 311 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 198–99, 204–05. Næss, “Peter Harboe Frimann and the ‘Hornelen’ Affair”, 26–35; Grage, Chaotischer Abgrund und erhabene Weite, 224–26. Both emphasize P. Frimann’s use of iambic pentameter which brings out the “gothic mood” (Næss, 33) and connect to the English examples – Alexander Pope and Thomas Tickell – in the announcement of the prize (Grage, 198–99 and 223). “Eensom jeg laae paa min lynggro‘de Bakke, / Stormenes Brusen hen over mig gik, / Mossede Gravsteen var under min Nakke, / Oppe i Skyerne dvælte mit Blik. / […] / Følte, at Oldtidens dybeste Rune / Hugges i Stenen og er ikke meer; / Ossians Harpe og Shakespears Basune / Ak! ere begge kun Aske og Leer! / […] / Elsk meg min Ven! naar på Aandernes Hede / Lyder min dybe, tungsindige Sang, / […] / Skummel og graae er min Fædrene Hede; / Dog under Lyngtoppen Blomsterne staaer; /Lærken blandt Gravene

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it off in the same way, and in both cases, Ossian is explicitly addressed. In addition, the final fifteen stanzas are one long series of apostrophes (Selma, Morven, Fingal, Oscar, Cona, Toscar, Ossian).21 The work as such stands clearly in the tradition of sentimental journeys in the wake of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1775), Danish examples being e.g. Jens Baggesen’s Labyrinten (1792–1793, The Labyrinth) and, later, Hans Christian Andersen’s Fodreise fra Holmens Canal til Østpynten af Amager i Aarene 1828 og 1829 (1829, Peregrination from Holmens Canal to the East Point of Amager). In these works, factual events are combined with fictive ones in a humorous way, focusing on the subjective experience, on feelings and emotions in contrast to rationalistic and descriptive travelogues.22 This connection is, again, very prominent in the “Forsang” with its emphasis on strong feelings23 including tears of joy and vertigo in the encounter with the holy and the sublime.24 One feeling particularly prominent in the work is the feeling of loss within the context of vanitas. Ossian’s harp and Shakespeare’s trombone are gone, laments the “Forsang”, and the people and places from the Poems of Ossian listed in the final stanzas of the Travel Through Jutland appear in a lament of loss in form of an ubi sunt catalogue. While Blicher introduces himself as the literary character “S.S. Blicher”, who is not just the lyrical “I” in some poems but also plays a role in the dialogue, humor and (self-) irony are mostly generated by the dynamics between “Blicher” on the one side and the playful alter ego “S.S. Barbeer i Nibe” on the other. While several features thus point back to the eighteenth century, others are in line with the gradual ideological shift from a patriotic towards a nationalist attitude about history and the state. The rise of the nation as a dominant frame of reference in identity discourses after the

21 22 23

24

bygger sit Rede, / Og sine Triller i Ørkenen slaaer”. Blicher, “Jyllandsrejse i sex Døgn”, SSkr. 4, 120–24. “Selma, Selma! hvor er din Skjald?” etc. Blicher, “Jyllandsrejse i sex Døgn”, SSkr. 4, 126–28. Andreas Keller and Winfried Siebers, Reiseliteratur (Darmstadt: WBG, 2017), 99. “Mægtig jeg følte: den stærkere Flamme / Blev ved hans Ord med den svagere Gnist: / Følte, at Lærken er skabt af den Samme, / Som satte Midnattens Sanger paa Kvist. // Frydede mig, at de tusinde Tunger / Kvæde i evigt, uendeligt Chor; / […] // Ak! men jeg følte, at jordiske Sjæle / Drømme kun dunkelt om Himlenes Fryd / Og at selv Digterens stærkeste Mæle / Er kun en fage hendøende Lyd. // Følte, at Oldtidens dybeste Rune / Hugges i Stenen og er ikke meer; / […] // Følte, at Skjalderøst svagt ikkun hylder / Ham, som bag Solen og Stjernerne boer”. Blicher, “Jyllandsrejse i sex Døgn”, SSkr. 4, 121–22. “Da svam en Taare af Fryd i mit Øje […]” and “Følte, at Skjalderøst svagt ikkun hylder / Ham, som bag Solen og Stjernerne boer, / Tiden og Rummet alene udfylder – / Svimlende Dyb for en Skabning af Jord! // Rystet som af den Almægtiges Torden, / Svimlende ved hans Uendelighed / Skalv jeg […]”. Blicher, “Jyllandsrejse i sex Døgn”, SSkr. 4, 121–22.

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Figure 2.2

Dolmen at Raklev, Røsnæs (1839) by Johan Thomas Lundbye, Thorvaldsens Museum, B255, Denmark

Napoleonic Wars also changed the perception of landscape and historic monuments. Travelogues and poetic topographies reacted to this shift by adjusting the focus of the feelings: the fear of losing one’s identity due to foreign influence triggers a national reinterpretation of the landscape and its monuments. Journeys and travels within the nation become peregrinations of national self-assurance, leading the travelling subject to its nationally defined self.25 Tine Damsholt has shown how this shift played out in Christian Molbech’s travelogue Ungdomsvandringer i mit Fødeland (Peregrinations as a Young Man in the Country of my Birth) which appeared in print in two volumes 1811 and 1815,26 and Robert William Rix has recently discussed how travelogues from the beginning of the nineteenth century deal with monuments of the Nordic past, specifically looking at Molbech’s travelogue and those of Adam Oehlenschläger, Rasmus Nyerup, and N.F.S. Grundtvig.27 Molbech was 25 26

27

Cf. Keller and Siebers, Reiseliteratur, 107–08. Christian Molbech, Ungdomsvandringer i mit Fødeland. 2 Vols. Kiøbenhavn: A. Seidelin, 1811 and 1815; Tine Damsholt, “En national turist i det patriotiske landskab”, Fortid og Nutid 1 (1999): 3–26. Robert William Rix, “Visiting the Nordic Past: Domestic Travels in Early NineteenthCentury Denmark”, Scandinavian Studies 90 (2018): 211–36.

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Blicher’s contemporary, they shared many interests and attitudes and were later even travel companions on a journey to Sweden in 1836.28 This dynamic shift is also observable in Blicher’s works. He belonged to the first generation which received proper schooling in the patriotic spirit with works such as Ove Malling’s Store og gode Handlinger af Danske, Norske og Holstenere (Great and Good Deeds of Danes, Norwegians, and Holsteinians, 1777), but even if he was in many ways a man of the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, the logic of nationalist thought began to play out from his earliest works onwards. The national spirit and character, the nationalised and emotionalised landscape, the individuals’ strong ties to their nation through their landscape of childhood and mother tongue – and the fear of losing this essentially national identity and of being overpowered by foreign influence are motifs and lines of thought which get stronger over time. Already in Travel Through Jutland, one finds e.g. verses about how, in a clash with Saxons, doubt extinguished Danish courage, and Danish hearts opened for fear and sorrow so that Denmark was on the brink of being enslaved by the enemy from the South and poised to lose both its world-famous name and its ancient language.29 The strong ties of the nationally conceptualised individual to the landscape of childhood and “home” is dealt with in a clear-cut way in Hiemvee (Homesickness, 1814), which Blicher published as part of a collection of poetry.30 In this poem, “the Swiss in Paris”, “the Provencale in England”, “the Arab in

28

29

30

Cf. Blicher’s poetic memory from 1837, “Svithiod: Efteraarserindringer fra en Sommerreise i Sverrig i Aaret 1836”, SSkr. 20, 178–216 and his prose account from 1840, “Sommerreise i Sverrig Aar 1836”, SSkr. 25, 145–220; Damsholt, “En national turist i det patriotiske landskab”, 3–26; Tine Damsholt, “Fædrelandskærlighed og borgerdyd: Om borgerrolle, moralitet og følelse”, in Borgerrolle og borgerrett, ed. Kirsti Strøm Bull (Oslo: Dreyersforlag, 2015), 53–66; Tine Damsholt, Fædrelandskærlighed og borgerdyd: Patriotisk diskurs og militære reformer i Danmark i sidste del af 1700-tallet, Ethnologiske Studier 6 (København: Museum Tusculanum, 2000). Blicher, “Jyllandsrejse i sex Døgn”, SSkr. 4, 163–64, e.g. “Dit stolte Navn, der lød gjennem Seklerne vældigt / Fra Blaamænds solsvedne Marker til isbundne Gandvik – / Dit herlige Navn begyndte at slukke sin Straale; / Dit gode Sprog, hiint Maal for mægtige Aser, / Snart skulle det kvæles af Sydens fremmede Tunger” (164). Concerning the idea of an “old language”, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London, New York: Verso, 2006), 44: “print capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation”. Blicher, “Digte”, SSkr. 4, 91–171, 130–37; cf. also Anker Gemzøe, “Tyske piger synger bedre, men … – Den sammenlignende nationalfølelse hos Adam Oehlenschläger med særligt henblik på ‘Hiemvee’ (1805) og med sideblik på St.St. Blicher og N.F.S. Grundtvig m.fl”, in Der Norden im Ausland – das Ausland im Norden. […], ed. Sven Hakon Rossel (Wien: Praesens Verlag, 2006), 269–80, 275–76.

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Switzerland”, “the Huron in Arabia”, “the Norwegian in the Netherlands” – they all long for the place they naturally belong,31 rounded off by verses in which a lyrical “I” states: “The sun of my childhood has smiled upon the dark heather”, and his bones one day will rest among the heather-clad graves of his ancestors.

3

Of Danes and Dens: In Search of the Past

In many of his stories, Blicher negotiates the themes of change, alienation and loss, often in an overall melancholic mood, as in The Journal of a Parish Clerk, Sildig Opvaagnen (1828, Tardy Awakening), Ak, hvor forandret (1828, Alas How Changed), and The Hosier and his Daughter.32 As Cecil in the latter story concludes: “The greatest sorrow, or far or near, / is to be parted from him you hold dear”.33 At the end of his story The Robbers’ Den, Blicher recreates the scene of a feast for the reader’s eye, as he evokes the traditional summer festival held by the inhabitants of the parish Vium in Jutland and some neighbouring parishes. Blicher’s father Niels had already related the custom in his Topographie over Vium Præstekald (1795, Topography of the Parish of Vium): On the afternoon of Whitsunday, young and old alike gather in a clearing in the forest – the horse pasture – and enjoy themselves with music, singing and dancing until the evening. In The Robbers’ Den, the feast is described and then turned into a harmonious tableau: Ten years after the main plot has played out, one sees former adversaries at peace with each other, differences in social class no longer matter, a stranger of Hungarian descent has settled permanently in the village, has married a local bride and is well-integrated. The former poacher Black Mads, now a ranger, sits side by side with the gamekeeper; the owner of an estate, who had disowned his daughter ten years prior after she had eloped with her lover, takes a stroll together with that very daughter, her husband and their children.34

31 32

33

34

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 141–43; cf. Jules Kielmann’s chapter in the present volume. See e.g. Sven H. Rossell, “Steen Steensen Blicher: The Melancholy Poet of the Jutland Heath”, in Kierkegaard and His Danish Contemporaries. Tome III: Literature, Drama and Aesthetics, ed. Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources 7 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 49–65. St. St. Blicher, Twelve Stories, trans. Hanna Astrup Larsen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), 236. The original reads: “Den største sorg i verden her / Er dog at miste den man har kær”. Blicher, “Hosekræmmeren”, SSkr. 14, 33. Blicher, Twelve Stories, 118–19; cf. Blicher, “Røverstuen”, SSkr. 10, 52–112, 108–12.

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With this countryside idyll, Blicher elaborates his own nostalgic Utopia, an idealized childhood memory35 – here, there is no vision for the future that takes into account the real problems of his time. Nobody is missing. Nothing challenges the mostly homogenous community, neither internal tensions of a private or social nature nor any other intervention from the outside. In addition, the social external boundaries of the local community converge in a striking way to the spatial ones, that is, the edges of the clearing. Thus, the community is defined by nature. When compared to Blicher’s own characterization of the Himmelbjerg festival of 1839 in a newspaper article, it becomes clear that the final idyllic tableau in The Robbers’ Den conjures up the image of an ideal community, or society. Blichers eyewitness report of the festival reads as follows: Here, joy was not an imagination, and hope not a dream. – Here, no class difference could be observed – not even in clothing – all was citizen, male and female. He, who has rank and titles for daily use, had on this true folk festival no other than Dane […]. In this – mostly, one says mixed, but I call this uniform – congregation, there was not the slightest disorder, […] and not one ambiguous word or crooked expression was to be seen for the whole long, wonderful day. May it return every year for eternity!36 It is fair to assume that this eyewitness report is to be understood as an expression of Blicher’s wishful thinking rather than as an objective factual account,37 and the eternal perspective of his wish links it even more closely to the Whitsun festival which he portrays as being as eternal as the cycles of nature (see below). The longing for social harmony and reliability, which shines through, is quite understandable: Already the core of the idyll, the summer festival of a stable local community, the members of which are firmly tied to that place, belongs to the past after Bernstorff’s reforms and the lifting

35 36

37

Steffen Auring & al., Dansk litteratur historie 5: Borgerlig enhedskultur 1807–48 (København: Gyldendal, 1990), 440. The original reads: “her var Glæden ingen Indbildning og Haabet ingen Drøm. – Her saaes ingen Standsforskjæl – ei engang i Klæderne – Alt var Borger – og Borgerinde. Den, der til daglig Brug har Rang og Titler, havde paa denne sande Folkefest ingen anden end ‘Dannemand’ […]. Der var i denne – ellers siger Man ‘blandede’, men herom siger jeg ‘eensformige’ – Forsamling ikke den ringeste Uorden, […] og ikke et tvetydigt Ord, eller en skjæv Mine at mærke den hele lange, herlige Dag. Den komme igjen hvert evige Aar!” Blicher, “Den første Folkefest paa Himmelbjerget”, SSkr. 23, 171. My translation. Sørensen, St. St. Blicher, 217.

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of the residential obligation for the peasants,38 which led to greater mobility and progress (cf. the peasantry in Poland and Estonia respectively, Maciej Janowski’s and Eve Annuk’s chapters in the present volume). What was lost were the positive aspects of a rather fixed and immovable society, the comforting predictability of life in a local community, the feeling of belonging and stable traditions. When Blicher writes: “Every year, on the afternoon of Whitsunday”, he thinks of traditions reaching far back in time and deeply rooted in nature, as becomes clear shortly afterwards: You are in the horse pasture. This is the vespers of Whitsunday in Lysgaard district, the day of homage to beautiful and ever-young Nature, the levee of the forest, the triumph of summer. Thus it is celebrated till the sun goes down, and the forest is once more left to the birds and animals that have been for a time frightened away. Formerly only the peasants in the two or three nearest parishes assembled here. But the innocent, joyous feast itself is surely an old custom, perhaps as old as the forest itself.39 For once, the Ossianic landscape is replaced by a bright and sunlit Danish locus amoenus, a vibrant, lively and colourful earthly paradise (cf. Peter Nørgaard Larsen’s chapter in the present volume).40 But Blicher would not be Blicher if he didn’t add a coda in a minor key, i.e. a return to the melancholic lament of loss and forgetting, the breaking up of what belonged together and the distortion of tradition, as he ends his story by reconnecting it to its topographic beginning: And so the story is at an end. Several generations lie between it and us. Bells have rung and hymns been sung over many of their descendants since the persons I have written about went to rest. Both the old squire 38

39

40

Cf. Uffe Østergaard, “The Nation as Event: The Dissolution of the Oldenburg Monarchy and Grundtvig’s Nationalism”, in Building the Nation: N.F.S. Grundtvig and Danish National Identity, eds. John A. Hall, Ove Korsgaard, and Ove K. Pedersen (Montreal & Kingston, Ithaca: MQUP, 2015), 112–13. Blicher, Twelve Stories, 119; cf. Blicher, “Røverstuen”, SSkr. 10, 109: “Du er i Hestehaven. Dette er Pintsefestens Aftensang i Lysgaard Herred, den skjønne, evig unge Naturs Hyldingsdag, Skovens Courdag, Sommerens Triumph. Saaledes fejres den nu til Solen daler, og Skoven atter overlades til de forjagede Fugle og Dyr; men tilforn samledes her kun de to eller tre nærmeste Sognes Almue. Dog er denne uskyldige Glædesfest sikkerlig en gammel Skik, og ligealdrende med Skoven selv”. As for the perception of these types of landscape, their representation in art and their relation, see ch. 2.5 in Schmidt, “Homer des Nordens” und “Mutter der Romantik”, 132–51.

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and the young master have long since been forgotten, and no one knows anything about Black Mads. The manor has often changed hands, the land has been sold and divided. Only the robbers’ den lives on in a dark and confused tradition. In the great heath, miles west of Karup river, there are some heather-grown hills which are still called, and always will be called by that sinister name. But no one remembers that it was once a refuge for tender and faithful love, a heaven under the earth.41 Moreover, in this scene he adds an element of religious teleological thought to the landscape and its elements as he charges the horse pasture and the robbers’ den with religious symbolism: the gathering place for the community is visited by all who can see – “even the lame and the cripples […] must at least once a year enjoy the forest newly in leaf and bring home a light green beech bough – like Noah’s dove – to the dark dwelling which is often a Noah’s ark in miniature”,42 and the den, in which the lovers hid, was to them “a heaven under the earth”. Thus, Blicher gives us his ideal of the Danish nation in a nutshell, people and land, history and tradition all united under the beech tree – and then again, in contrast, the rough landscape of the great heath as an archive of a lost past. The lovers’ hideaway looks very much like a genre painting, with walls of large stones, a log ceiling, some furniture, and in the middle, the family of the de facto most honest, helpful and generous poacher Mads with the mother knitting a stocking, three children in a bed, and their friend Renard Foxtail at the table. Mads says about their modest home: “Renard thinks it may have been a robbers’ den once upon a time, but it may have been a burial mound, for we found some black pots with ashes and bones in them”.43 41

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Blicher, Twelve Stories, 121; cf. Blicher, “Røverstuen”, SSkr. 10, 112: “Og saa er da Historien reent ude. Flere Menneskealdre ligge mellem den og os. Der er ringet og sunget over adskillige Slægter, siden de omskrevne Personer gik til Hvile. Baade den gamle og den unge Herre ere forlængst glemte der i Egnen, og sorte Mads veed nu Ingen mere af at sige. Gaarden har ofte skiftet Ejermænd; Godset er frasolgt og adsplittet. Kun om Røverstuen har et mørkt og forvirret Sagn holdt sig vedlige. I den store Hede, en Halvmiilsvej Vesten for Karup Aae, ligge nogle Lynghøje, som endnu bære og stedse ville bære hiint skumle Navn; men Ingen tænker paa, at der engang har været et Fristed for øm og trofast Kjærlighed [, en Himmel under Jorden]”. The last words do not appear in the first edition and SSkr. Blicher, Twelve Stories, 118; cf. Blicher, “Røverstuen”, SSkr. 10, 108: “Halte og Krøblinger […] maae dog een Gang om Aaret forlyste sig i den nys udsprungne Skov, og hjembringe en lysgrøn Bøgeqvist – som Noahs Due fordum – til den mørke Vaaning, ofte en Noahs Ark i det mindre”. Blicher, Twelve Stories, 116; in the Danish original, Renard’s name is Mikkel, as the translator has kept the fox’s traditional name in beast epic and fable. Cf. Blicher, “Røverstuen”,

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The heather with the ancient burial mound connects with the beginning of the story, which opens with a panorama over the islands of Denmark and then zooms in on the gentle landscape of the islands and finally pans over to Jutland: the farther inland we get the more the landscape changes: the valleys become deeper, the hills more precipitous; the forests look older and more decrepit; many a rush-grown bog, many a bit of ground covered with low heather, great rocks on the high backs of the fields […]. When at last we reach the backbone of Jutland, immense flat plains are spread out before our eyes; at first they are strewn with grave-mounds, but gradually the number is lessened, which would indicate that this region was never cultivated in olden times.44 Thus, the landscape is far more than just a framing element or a stage for the events, it resembles, precisely as Gaskill pointed out in the earlier quoted passage,45 the general characteristics of the Ossianic landscape, an end in itself, the action itself, and the characters themselves. The poacher Mads pops up as an “apparition” and an elemental force of nature as he comes riding on a stag “like a storm” – or one might say, like a master of animals in ancient myth.46 The connection to the elements is strengthened by him doing several tricks with fire in the course of the story, also in addition to setting the heather on fire, when required in order to ensure an escape. He and his family live literally inside the earth, i.e. the burial mound from and into which he appears and disappears. All in all, the poacher is portrayed almost as the genius or spirit of the land. This means that he figures as a parallel to the characterization of the Celts in Blicher’s “Fortale” to Ossian’s Poems.47 The stratigraphy of the physical nature with its explicitly addressed elements such as the sea-level from

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SSkr. 10, 105: “Mikkel mener, det har været en Røverstue i gamle Dage; men kanskee har det ogsaa været en Kjæmpebegravelse, for her stod et Par sorte Potter med Aske og Been i”. Blicher, Twelve Stories, 79–80; cf. Blicher, “Røverstuen”, SSkr. 10, 53–54: “Men jo længere Man nu kommer ind, jo mere forandres Egnen: Dalene blive dybere; Bakkerne brattere; Skovene see ældre og mere affældige ud; mangt sivgroet Kjær, mangen med kort Lyng bevoxet Jordplet; store Stene paa de højryggede Agre […]. Naaer Man omsider Rygningen af Jylland, udbreder sig for Øjet de uhyre, flade Heder, i Førstningen bestrøede med Gravhøje, hvis Antal dog stedse aftager, saa at Man med Rimelighed kan formode, at denne Strækning aldrig tilforn har været opdyrket”. Gaskill, “Introduction”, 5–6. Blicher, Twelve Stories, 80–81; cf. Blicher, “Røverstuen”, SSkr. 10, 55. Ossians Digte, “Fortale”, transl. Blicher, SSkr. 1, 4–5.

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Figure 2.3

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A View towards Himmelbjerget, Jutland. Evening (1838) by Dankvart Dreyer, Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS355

which the islands have risen, the den or grave-mound, the plains and hills and the heaven above is paralleled and intimately connected with a horizontally layered complex of culture and time. Prehistory is dug out and brought to light by the poachers, symbolized by the burial mound itself and the grave goods they found. The poachers show an archetypical way of life close to nature and completely dependent on the wildlife of the heather-grown plains. After the individual stories are told, there is another layer, that is, the summer festival ten years after the events, and in the last paragraph, the narrator lets the stories glide into the mists of oblivion, separated from “us” by several generations. Bells and hymns as well as the references “Noah’s ark” and the “heaven under earth” point to an overarching time frame: Biblical time and salvation. The land forms the people and partly their character, The Robbers’ Den says of the great heath: “No hedges, no rows of willows make division between man and man; one might think that all was held in common”.48 The individual sto-

48

Blicher, Twelve Stories, 80; cf. Blicher, “Røverstuen”, SSkr. 10, 53: “Intet Markhegn, ingen Pileplantning gjør mere Skjæl mellem Mand og Mand; Man skulde troe, at Alt endnu var i Fællekskab”.

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ries within The Robbers’ Den create the impression of a collective novel. In this way, the spatial and temporal elements form the chronotope of Blicher’s short novels, one key element being the ever-present retrospective gaze into the past.

4

The Loss of Identity and the National Character

Both in the idyll at the end of the story The Robbers’ Den and the report on the first Himmelbjerg festival, Blicher conjures the image of a community of Danes where the differences and borders are obliterated – including the mostly uniform clothing. This aspect is to be viewed in the light of his revolutionary propaganda for a Danish national costume which goes back at least to the year 1816 (see below).49 Ideas like this one were a reaction to the national identity crisis after the loss of Norway in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, and one of the more exotic attempts to deal with the far-reaching impacts of that national trauma. Suddenly, the Danish realm was reduced to that of a smaller European middle-sized power, which triggered Denmark’s need to redefine and reassure itself in this new situation. The status was a driver behind the ideological shift from a patriotic stance towards a national attitude toward the state. A specific identity of the Danish-speaking citizens within the Danish realm developed gradually from the middle of the eighteenth century and onwards, and this process gained momentum after the 16-month period of Struenseerule (1770–1772) that worked as a catalyser within the transformation of the patriotic self-perception towards a more nationalist self-conception of the Danish population.50 Less than twenty years later, the national confrontation under the “German Feud” (“Tyskerfejden”, 1789–1790),51 directed against the

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Cf. Björn von Törne, Zwischen Loyalität und Servilität: Steen Steensen Blichers politische Publizistik und ihre Voraussetzungen. Skandinavistische Studien 12 (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1980), 66. Cf. Ole Feldbæk and Vibeke Winge, “Tyskerfejden 1789–1790: Den første nationale konfrontation”, in Dansk Identitetshistorie vol. 2, passim; Gerecke, Transkulturalität als literarisches Programm, 54–62; Nikolaj Bijleveld, “Germans making Danes: Germans and the German Language in Copenhagen and the Construction of Danish Culture 1750–1880”, in Battles and Borders: Perspectives on Cultural Transmission and Literature in Minor Language Areas, eds. Petra Broomans & al., Studies on cultural transfer and transmission 7 (Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing, 2015), 47–51. By the contemporaries, it went under “Holger Feud” as it was sparked off by the criticism of the opera Holger Danske by Jens Baggesen (libretto) and F.L. Ae. Kunzen (music) after it was first performed in 1789. Baggesen had adapted Chr. M. Wieland’s Oberon and

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German-speaking fellow citizens of the multicultural realm, was triggered by a wave of urban middle-class excitement about the French Revolution and the prevailing irritation about the political, societal and cultural influence of the “Germans” among the Danish citizens who felt side-lined by them. The increasing anti-Germanism and the construction of a bourgeois Danish identity were both a way of legitimizing the claim of acquiring greater political influence and equal economic opportunities. Anne-Bitt Gerecke argues that this construction is the expression of unfulfilled emotional needs, an “emotional vacuum” resulting from an enlightened focus on reason and the accompanying gradual secularization.52 By the 1830s, when Blicher steps up his criticism of foreign cultural influence, the situation had changed substantially, as perceptions of a threat and anti-German sentiments had been additionally charged by the experience of catastrophic events during the Napoleonic Wars, especially the seven-year period of 1807–1814. In search for a scapegoat after the national bankruptcy in 1813, the writer Thomas Thaarup turned against the Jews, whom he accused of having pulled strings, and this sparked a literary feud between antisemitic and moderate voices (“Jødefejden”).53 Blicher participates in the debate on the moderate side and writes his first political article, Bør Jøderne taales i Staten? (1813, Should Jews Be Tolerated in the State?), followed by another, considerably longer article, Bedømmelse over Skrivtet Moses og Jesus (Judgement of the Text Moses and Jesus) the same year.54 In this debate, Blicher adopts a prointegrational position and argues for enhanced rights for Jews in the state and the permission to choose professions from which they had been excluded up until this point. His argument fits in a line of argumentation where general flaws are attributed to the Jews as a people, but these are interpreted in the light of their difficult situation, as they are excluded from the society in many ways. The flaws would be mitigated, if not vanish completely, if they were allowed to participate in society with rights equal to those of the other cit-

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replaced the hero Hüon de Bordeaux by Ogier le Danois (Holger Danske), the opera was criticized for its eroticism, e.g. by Knud Lyhne Rahbek who condemned it for the “sissifying” effect it would have on the nation and for its “poisoning” of the national character, cf. Anna Sandberg, “Die ‘Holger-Danske’-Oper 1789: Kosmopolitismus und Körperlichkeit”, in Kosmopolitismus und Körperlichkeit im europäischen Theater des 18. Jahrhunderts, eds. Katharina Müller and Stephan Michael Schröder (München: Herbert Utz, 2016), 213–14. Gerecke, Transkulturalität als literarisches Programm, 59. Cf. Kristoffer Kjærgaard, “St. St. Blicher og jøderne”, K&K [Kultur & Klasse] 39, no. 111 (2011): 51, see also note 3. Blicher, SSkr. 3, 26–33, 34–90.

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izens, while they now live in “a segregated community” and it is “to a lesser degree seen to their education”.55 One of the interesting aspects in Blicher’s article is that he defends the Jews against the accusation of being non-national by stating that, to the contrary, “they keep being a nation” in spite of centuries of diaspora, persecution and all the other forms of suppression and hardship. In Blicher’s view, the basis for the Jews still being a nation is that they have maintained their national character – “and what is attacked? Their national character”.56 Others, by contrast, have lost it: All other peoples, when they were defeated, have lost their religion, or language, or character, or all of these together. The Jews have kept everything, apart from the native country.57 These lines are as much about the Jews as they are about the Danish majority – the true danger for a people lies in losing its national character, and thus ceasing to exist. Here and on other issues, Blicher’s attitudes and ideas oscillate between “civic” and “ethnic” conceptions of the nation, of citizenship, of common culture. Kjærgaard has pointed to this paradox: Blicher demands throughout his works that the individual “ethnic” groups of the realm respect each other, he makes an argument for giving the Jews rights as fellow human beings – and yet, just few years later, he advocates complete elimination of the “natmænd”, literally “people of the night”, that is, travellers including Roma, beggars, migrant workers, criminals and other indigent people whom Blicher deals with as if they were a nation. His suggestions are chillingly radical – he clearly states that they must not be killed; however, he does not hesitate to discuss camps and confined areas, and the removal of the children from their parents. In short,

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Blicher, “Bedømmelse over Skrivtet Moses og Jesus”, SSkr. 3, 89–90. Cf. Kjærgaard, “St. St. Blicher og jøderne”, 52–53, and Katharina Bock, “Un-unheimliche Juden oder: Warum spukt es im Schloss? Steen Steensen Blichers Novelle über eine jüdische Familie in Jütland”, in Beschreibungsversuche der Judenfeindschaft II: Antisemitismus in Text und Bild – zwischen Kritik, Reflexion und Ambivalenz, eds. Hans-Joachim Hahn and Olaf Kistenmacher. Europäisch-jüdische Studien. Beiträge 37 (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2019), 83–107. The original reads: “og hvad er det egentlig man angriber? Deres Nationalcharakter”. Blicher, “Bør Jøderne taales i Staten?” SSkr. 3, 28. “Alle andre Nationer have, naar de bleve betvungne, mistet Religion, eller Sprog, eller Karakter, eller alt tilsammen. Jøderne have beholdt Alt, uden Fødelandet”. Blicher, “Bør Jøderne taales i Staten?” SSkr. 3, 27.

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he applies a farmer’s conception of breeding (breeding out what is unwanted; keeping the “natmænd” from having children) and recommends a biopolitical policy to get rid of them completely in the course of 40 years.58 Directly before the above quoted lines of The Present State of Denmark in which Blicher relates the catastrophic events in years 1807–1814, he paints the brightest picture of what was lost: Before 1807, Denmark had been lifted up to a level of Culture and Prosperity which had to arouse all foreigners’ admiration and the envy of many. The sciences, arts, trade, industry, agriculture were blooming under the aegis of wise laws and a mild government in such splendid way, that the Golden Age as invented by the poets seemed to rise in reality, and the Saturnian period indeed to return to Denmark.59 In spite of this characterization being part of a panegyric booklet made for a royal wedding, it is not just hyperbolic praise of the pre-war state of the realm and, further on in the text, of the royal efforts to reestablish a well-functioning state, e.g. by a large-scale administration reform. Blicher inserts one of his basic convictions that is beyond pure rhethoric: If ranked directly, Blicher puts the values of national identity and tradition even above those of economic prosperity or military power – thus, he indicates that the loss of Norway was worse in terms of the separation of what belonged together due to the age-old similarity in the national character, than in terms of the economic or military consequences.60 In The Present State of Denmark, the Golden Age (“Guldalderen”) is clearly referenced as a lost age, more precisely: as primeval and lost according to classical myth, and then as seemingly having returned up until 1807 and now, in the subsequent years, having been lost a second time – a structure of thought that resembled the overall structure of the most influential of all Romantic Danish poems, Oehlenschläger’s Guldhornene (The Golden Horns) 58 59

60

Cf. Kjærgaard, “St. St. Blicher og jøderne”, 61–63. “Før 1807 var Danmark hævet til et Trin af Cultur og Velstand, som maatte opvække alle Fremmedes Beundring og Manges Misundelse. Videnskaber, Kunster, Handel, Industrie, Agerdyrkning blomstrede under vise Loves og en mild Regjerings Ægide saa herligt, at Digternes fabulerede Guldalder syntes at vorde til i Virkeligheden, og den saturniske Periode for Alvor at være vendt tilbage i Danmark”. Blicher, “Danmarks nærværende Tilstand”, SSkr. 13, 179. My translation. Cf. “[…] Sønderrivelsen af et Baand, der var mere dyrebart for sin Ælde, […] det gjensidige Venskab, den Lighed i Sprog, Sæder og Tænkemaade […], end vigtigt i oeconomisk eller militair Henseende”, see above. Blicher, “Danmarks nærværende Tilstand”, SSkr. 13, 179.

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from 1802/03, with the significant difference that the downfall of Denmark addressed by Blicher is the result of envy, cunning and violence exerted by enemies from outside, and that in his panegyrics, he emphasizes the post-war achievements of the monarch. This parallel is additionally supported by the element of “gold” in both names. One has to assume that Blicher was aware of it, as he himself uses it in a close stretto in his Vestlig Profil af den Cimbriske Halvøe fra Hamborg til Skagen (1839, The Western Profile of the Cimbrian Peninsula from Hamburg to Skagen): “I rather praise the Age of the Golden Horns, it was at least the Golden Age of the women”.61 Blicher criticizes “foreign domination” as it leads to the loss of national identity, which he writes about in his article “Danskhed” (“Danishness”) from November 26, 1838: Long enough, far too long, it has been worked on the erasing of the old character. […] Danish costume has been altered or cast down to the peasants. […] [T]he great Danish mother tongue has been despised as the language of the plebs and has been cast, as the Danish costume, before the commoners and servants. One “spreche-d” German and “parler-d” French. […] Even our games and amusements had to be exchanged. We do not even know our dances from old times any more – perhaps the Faroese ones belong to them; but we have had Polish dances, German waltzes, French dances, English dances, Scottish dances. […] [W]e are other nations’ monkeys – human monkeys.62 As this polemical stance shows, Blicher views language, mentality, costume, mores and customs, and last but not least history and literature as belonging

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“Da priser jeg Guldhornenes Tid; den var, i det mindste Kvindernes Guldalder. – Vistnok kjendte disse hverken Kniplinger eller Blonder; vistnok bedækkede de deres skjønne Legemer med selvvævede Uldsærke, og selvsyede Skindklokker, men deres Omfavnelser frembragte Helte”. Blicher, Sskr. 23, 100. For the Golden Horns, cf. e.g. Robert W. Rix, “‘In darkness they grope:’ Ancient Remains and Romanticism in Denmark”, European Romantic Review 26 (2015): 435–51. “Længe nok, altfor længe er der arbejdet paa at udslette det gamle Præg. […] Dansk Dragt blev omskaaren, eller hensmidt til Bonden. […] det danske herlige Modersmaal foragtedes som Pøbelsprog, og henslængtes, ligesom de danske Klædemon, til Almuen og Tjenestefolk. Man sprekkede tydsk og parlerede fransk […]. Endogsaa vore Lege og Forlystelser skulde ombyttes med fremmede. Vi kjende ej engang mere vore Oldtids-Dandse – maaskee den færøiske hører til disse; men vi have havt polske Dandse, tydske Valtser, franske Dandse, engelske Dandse, scotske Dandse. […] vi ere andre Nationers Abekatte – menneskelige Abekatte […]”. Blicher, “Danskhed”, SSkr. 21, 190–91. My translation.

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to a people in an essential way. Therefore, they have to be preserved, and he declares that returning to them is progress.63 This preservation also contains the active collection of folklore and heritage, even abroad in the former territories of the Danelaw, if one has reason to believe there would still be traces of it.64 Criteria used to define one’s own nation can ex negativo be used to identify the foreign, the threatening other. In his journal articles, Blicher takes up the issue of garb and national costume several times (cf. Jules Kielmann’s chapter in the present volume), and his ideas go back at least to 1816 when he concluded an article otherwise devoted to the economics of keeping sheep with the wish, that “we one day, dressed in Danish national costume of Danish wool, could do without foreign countries products, and [without having to] pay for them”.65 In an article in Jyllandsposten dated October 22, 1838, and published shortly before the above quoted piece on Danishness, Blicher writes that he would like to be able to distinguish a Dane from a foreigner already at first sight, by their dress. In the city, he says, one sees foreign people: “We do not know, whether they are Frenchmen or Englishmen or their monkeys. Would it not be better if we could distinguish: ‘That’s a real Dane!’ And not like now: ‘That could be a Dane, or a foreigner, or a mix’”.66 Blicher’s focus on, if not obsession with the national costume has its roots in a debate during the eighteenth century, as the question had been raised both in terms of creating a garb that was suitable to be worn for work, that was rather simple and would reduce unnecessary display of wealth and thus save resources, and would be made of home-grown resources to keep money in the country.67

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Blicher, “Danskhed”, SSkr. 21, 191–92. Cf. Blicher’s letter to the King from December 1845 in which he asks for a travel grant to visit Richard Cleasby and collect remnants of Danish lore in Westmoreland, “here unknown and perhaps soon vanishing”– Blicher, “No. 372”, SSkr. 32, 177–79, and his advertisement in Randers Avis from April 29, 1846 where he addresses the public for funding, see Blicher, “Westmoreland”, SSkr. 30, 116–17, 258. The original reads: “til vi engang, iførte dansk Nationaldragt af dansk Uld, kunne undvære fremmede landes produkter, eller betale disse”. Blicher, “Faarefolding”, SSkr. 4, 113. “Vi vide ikke, enten det er Franskmænd eller Engelskmænd, eller deres Abekatte. Var det dog ikke bedre, om vi kunde kjende: ‘Det er en rigtig Dansk!’ Og ikke som nu: ‘Det kan være en Dansk, eller Fremmed, eller en Blænding’”. Blicher, “Nationaldragt”, SSkr. 21, 170. Cf. Damsholt, Fædrelandskærlighed og borgerdyd, 136–44.

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Wars of Words: Perspectives on the State and Propaganda

In “Danskhed”, Blicher warns against the dangers of the loss of identity resulting from adopting elements belonging to foreign cultures. The punishment would work from the inside, but in the case of smaller nations first be felt from the outside, in other words: The loss of national identity leads to the imminent danger of the loss of territory (cf. Maciej Janowski’s and Anna Bohlin’s chapters in the present volume).68 He is especially suspicious of the Germans and German culture, as he also attributes the dissolution of the empire of Canute the Great to German influence.69 Blicher contributes his share to the rising national tensions by writing his national propaganda in capital letters and does not shy away from insinuating images and all sorts of literary devices – he draws a dire picture of Denmark’s future if German influence should prevail: What shall we do with Germanness up here? Haven’t we already got enough of it? Are we not already full after four hundred years of Germanisation? What has it profited us? Mixed and messed up the pure, strong language of our fathers, confused, confounded the Nordic national character, pestered us with foreign, for us unnatural customs and habits. Is this still not enough? Shall Old Denmark become parcelled and chopped up in the same way as poor Germany which, divided up into two hundred parcels of land, is its neighbours’ hunting ground? That is their affair! but we Danes must stand for our unity, our autonomy!70 North and South become symbolic oppositions; the latter poses the threat of dominance and fragmentation. Holstein, especially the city of Kiel, plays a major role. Kiel as the place of the fatal peace treaty, is synonymous with the loss of Norway in 1814 and becomes in Blicher’s writings a symbol of the threat

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Blicher, “Dankshed”, SSkr. 21, 192. Blicher, “Nationaldragt”, SSkr. 21, 171. “Hvad skulle vi heroppe med Tydskheden? Have vi endnu ikke havt nok af den? Har fire Hundrede Aars Fortydskning endnu ikke mættet os? Hvad har den gavnet os? Klinket, kludret paa vort rene, kraftige Fædrenemaal, forvirret, forplumret den nordiske Folkeaand, belæmret os med fremmede, for os unaturlige Sæder og Skikke. Er dette endnu ikke nok? Skal gamle Danmark udparcelleres, søndersplittes, ligesom det stakkels Tydskland, der, deelt i to Hundrede Jordlodder, er Naboernes Jagtrevier? Dem derom! men vi Danske om vor Heelhed, vor Selvstændighed!” Blicher, “En Tale til alle danske Mænd”, SSkr. 26, 24. My translation.

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of a future dissolution of the Danish realm. He engages in word play, as “Kiel” sounds like Danish “kil”, meaning “wedge”: “When we made peace in Kiel, we allowed Norway to be wedged away”.71 In another instance, he uses the same word play to address the Danish resilience: “So, the German wedges from Kiel have not yet cloven our peninsula! No! The Danish wood is hard and robust, it spits the wedges out and sticks together”.72 In the 1840s, as tensions were rising to new heights (see Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s chapter in the present volume), the influence of countries other than Germany is hardly mentioned; Blicher’s focus is exclusively on Germany. In his propaganda, he uses collective symbols and forceful images such as the “inundation” and “pests”, all too well known from nationalist discourse. Comparing Germans with insects, Germany would look like an anthill or a beehive through a looking glass: with their hills or hives constantly disturbed from the outside, the inhabitants would be ever-busy to build them up again, yet, they would not thrive and would swarm out in masses.73 Blicher’s political writings are full of metaphors and images, such as the Dannevirke as a dyke against the (storm)floods from the South.74 As he praises the linguistic map of Southern Jutland by P. Chr. Koch in 1840, he comments: “It shows us the scene of the language war. It defines the terrain of the Danes and that of the Germans”.75

6

Concluding Remarks

Blicher deals with Danish history, heroes of the Old, local traditions and folktales, and he does so in an elegiac tone informed by Ossian and the Nordic sublime – the portrayal of the distant national past is in itself a tale of loss of origin and unity. In his construction and imagination of communities, Blicher shows a mythicized and culturally loaded landscape, nostalgic utopias, ideals of – ostensibly lost – homogeneity, and political visions of the Danish composite state (Helstaten) and a united North. A recurrent thought in his works is

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The original reads: “sluttede Freden til Kiel, ved hvilken man lod sig kile Norge fra”. Blicher, “Min Tidsalder”, SSkr. 26, 234. “Saa de tydske Kiler har endnu ikke kløvet vor Halvø! Nei! det danske Veed er haardt og seigt: det spøtter Kilerne fra sig, og holder sammen”. Blicher, “Himmelbjergfesten 1843”, SSkr. 27, 116–17. Blicher, “Min Tidsalder”, SSkr. 26, 182–83. Cf. e.g. Blicher, “Opfordring”, SSkr. 24, 3. “Det viser os Sprog Krigens Skueplads. Det bestemmer os det Danskes Terrain, og det Tydskes”. Blicher, “Kochs Sprog-Kort over Sønderjylland”, SSkr. 32 [No. 277], 87.

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that the past gives access to the authentic, unaltered Volksgeist,76 the national character of the Danes, and that the preservation of the national character is a precondition for the future existence of a Danish people. Thus, Blicher repeatedly ranks the preservation of the true national character higher than, for example, economic growth. As a priest, he is inclined to charge his texts with references to Christian mythology, which adds authority and additional layers of meaning. At the same time, Blicher adds a distinctively regional perspective to the discourse. Both his stories and his topographic writings map the province of Jutland and construct it as a separate community within the nation.77 Like Molbech, who describes the Jutish landscape as sublime, Funen as picturesque and Zealand as beautiful,78 Blicher emphasizes the sublime character of Jutland, and he gives it a voice by also writing in the Jutish dialect and by including dialect in the form of direct speech in his stories. He emphasizes that Jutland deserves to be regarded not as a somehow inferior province, but as a Danish heartland, preserving ancient traces of “Danishness”, national character and features of a common Northern identity, as opposed to the threatening “Germanness” in the South. Blicher uses the idea of a tripartite Danish nation to charge it with religious sentiment and authority and to make the claim for unity on a higher level by conceptualising it as a God-given holy trinity.79 Like Molbech, in his travel accounts and other works, he textualizes feelings connected to elements in the landscape80 – among these the repeatedly invoked feeling of loss, or the fear of imminent loss. This fear is stirred up and exploited in political propaganda, e.g. in a newspaper contribution from 1843, in which he personifies Denmark and attributes sensations and feelings to the land itself in the context of his Pan-Scandinavistic engagement: Denmark is in pain and needs support from her sisters Norway and Sweden, as the “cure” provided 76

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Also the focus on the Volksgeist is connected to the “rediscovery” of Ossian on a European level, cf. John Hutchinson, “Cultural Nationalism”, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, ed. John Breuilly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 81–82. See also Jules Kielmann’s chapter in the present volume. For a comparable phenomenon in Sweden see Anna Bohlin, “Den svenska 1840talsromanen som nationell kartografi”, Samlaren 137 (2016): 58–86 and her chapter in the present volume. Karina Lykke Grand, “Visionen for Danmark: En politisk landskabskunst […]”, in Guld: skatte fra den danske guldalder. Gold: Treasures from the Danish Golden Age, eds. Karina Lykke Grand, Lise Pennington, and Anne Mette Thomsen (Aarhus: Systime Academic, 2013), 96–98. Cf. e.g. Blicher’s letter to N.F.S. Grundtvig: “Øerne, Nørrejylland, og Sønderjylland ere, eller skulde være, tre som eet, Danmark, Sverig og Norge ligesaa (foederativt), og Symboliken kan udføres baade videre og højere”. Blicher, “Breve [255]”, SSkr. 32, 66. Cf. Damsholt, “En national turist i det patriotiske landskab”, 16.

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by the German doctor would be the amputation of both her legs, that is, the loss of Schleswig and Holstein.81 In the minds and works of Blicher and his nationally-minded contemporaries, landscape, nature, the people, narratives, arts and politics were interconnected. Landscape and nature were treated as a national archive of a lost past in which traces of times of greatness were sought out, highlighted, and used within a national agenda, not least by the visual arts in Golden Age Denmark (cf. Peter Nørgaard Larsen’s chapter in the present volume).82 The view on landscape meets the view on history, in the case of Blicher’s Jutland especially prehistory, the Viking Age and the Middle Ages. The act of actualisation of these times of greatness – as forms of prehistoricism and medievalism – serves several functions, as Valentin Groebner has pointed out: It helps to establish a “we” through roots, ancestors, territory, origin, and tradition. At the same time, prehistory or the Middle Ages are a “chiffre of difference”, as they have what we lack and long for, be it primordiality, authenticity, true feelings, or the like – they provide an idea of essential life. Nevertheless, the history is lost and gone for good, it has to be reconstructed from fragments of the past. Herein, there lies an appeal, a desideratum for the future – and the potential for these charged images of history to be used, and misused.83 Outside of the texts, in the physical world, Blicher tried to apply certain practices in nation-building endeavours, the most well-known of which were the Himmelbjerg festivals.84 These can be conceptualised not just as festivals here and now, but as rituals of reenactment of the past, linking them to the 81

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“Ja den Forkrympning udi mine Lemmer, / Den gamle Skade rigtig meget slem er: / En uophørlig Trækken, Strækken / I orthopædisk Institut / Naturligviis forøger Skrækken / For snart at blive reent caput. / Paa egne Been jeg ei maae staae; / Paa Krykker skal jeg stændigt gaae. / Hvis Du og Søster din endda [i.e., Norway and Sweden] / Mig under Arme kunde ta’e: / Jeg kom maaskee endnu til Kræfter, / Som jeg alvorligt længes efter, / (Den tydske Doctor er en grummere: / Han raaber paa – o Vok og Vee! / At mine Been skal sættes af. / Skeer det, saa kan man kaste mig min Grav)”. Blicher, “En Røst fra Danmark”, SSkr. 27, 136–37. For the political thought behind and in these works of art, see Grand, “Visionen for Danmark: En politisk landskabskunst”. Cf. Valentin Groebner, Das Mittelalter hört nicht auf: Über historisches Erzählen (München: C.H. Beck, 2008), 104. The striking aspect here is that Blicher seems to have a notion of what today would be called “national identification”, and he seems to understand the role of feelings in this individual process. Thus, he wants to create situations where Danes would experience a “corporeal ‘feeling of belonging’” as a step towards the feeling of national identity, cf. Jonathan Heaney, “Emotions and Nationalism: A Reappraisal”, in Emotions in Politics: The Affect Dimension in Political Tension, ed. Nicolas Demertzis (London, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 243–63, 249, 260–61. Cf. also Dieter Langewiesche, “Gefühlsraum Nation […]”, Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 15 (2012): 195–215.

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national landscape in which they were taking part. To Blicher, the past is not a foreign country – it is the true, indigenous, promised land, a paradise lost, to be regained.

Bibliography Andersen, Claus Esmann. “Lutherdom og teatralitet i Blichers ‘Præsten i Vejlbye’”. Danske Studier (2014): 168–99. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition. London, New York: Verso, 2006. Auken, Sune. “Den moderne tragiker – Steen Steensen Blicher”. In Dansk litteraturs historie, edited by Klaus P. Mortensen and May Schack. 5 vols. Vol. 2: 1800–1870 (2008), 312–31. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2006–2009. Auring, Steffen et al. Dansk litteratur historie 5: Borgerlig enhedskultur 1807–48. København: Gyldendal, 1990. Baggesen, Søren. Den blicherske novelle. København: Gyldendal, 1965. Barnaby, Paul. “Timeline”. In The Reception of Ossian in Europe, edited by Howard Gaskill, xii–lxviii. The Reception of British Authors in Europe 5. London, New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. Bijleveld, Nikolaj. “Germans making Danes: Germans and the German Language in Copenhagen and the Construction of Danish Culture 1750–1880”. In Battles and Borders: Perspectives on Cultural Transmission and Literature in Minor Language Areas, edited by Petra Broomans & al., 40–57. Studies on cultural transfer and transmission 7. Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing, 2015. Blicher, Steen Steensen. Steen Steensen Blichers Samlede Skrifter [SSkr.], edited by Jeppe Aakjær and Henrik Ussing. 33 vols. København: Gyldendal, 1920–1934. Blicher, Steen Steensen. Twelve Stories, translated by Hanna Astrup Larsen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945. [New York: Kraus Reprint, 1972]. Bock, Katharina. “Un-unheimliche Juden oder: Warum spukt es im Schloss? Steen Steensen Blichers Novelle über eine jüdische Familie in Jütland”. In Beschreibungsversuche der Judenfeindschaft II: Antisemitismus in Text und Bild– zwischen Kritik, Reflexion und Ambivalenz, edited by Hans-Joachim Hahn and Olaf Kistenmacher, 83–107. Europäisch-jüdische Studien. Beiträge 37. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2019. Bohlin, Anna. “Den svenska 1840-talsromanen som nationell kartografi”. Samlaren 137 (2016): 58–86. Bredsdorff, Thomas. “Documentarism as a Formal Category in Nineteenth-Century Danish Literature: Structure and Rhethoric in the Classic Novella”. In Documentarism in Scandinavian Literature: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und

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Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, edited by Poul Houe and Sven Hakon Rossel, 183–98. Amsterdam: Rhodopi, 1997. Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen & al. “Aesthetica.Older”. In Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks 11: 1: Loose Papers, 1830–1843, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn & al., 411–78. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Damsholt, Tine. Fædrelandskærlighed og borgerdyd: Patriotisk diskurs og militære reformer i Danmark i sidste del af 1700-tallet. Ethnologiske Studier 6. København: Museum Tusculanum, 2000. Damsholt, Tine. “Fædrelandskærlighed og borgerdyd: Om borgerrolle, moralitet og følelse”. In Borgerrolle og borgerrett, edited by Kirsti Strøm Bull, 53–66. Oslo: Dreyersforlag, 2015. Damsholt, Tine. “En national turist i det patriotiske landskab”. Fortid og Nutid 1 (1999): 3–26. Feldbæk, Ole and Vibeke Winge. “Tyskerfejden 1789–1790: Den første nationale confrontation”. In Dansk Identitetshistorie, vol. 2: Et yndigt land 1789–1848, edited by Ole Feldbæk, 9–110. København: Reitzel, 1991. Gaskill, Howard. “Introduction: Genuine Poetry … like gold”. In The Reception of Ossian in Europe, edited by Howard Gaskill, 1–20. The Reception of British Authors in Europe 5. London New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004. Gemzøe, Anker. “Tyske piger synger bedre, men … – Den sammenlignende nationalfølelse hos Adam Oehlenschläger med særligt henblik på ‘Hiemvee’ (1805) og med sideblik på St.St. Blicher og N.F.S. Grundtvig m.fl”. In Der Norden im Ausland – das Ausland im Norden: Formung und Transformation von Konzepten und Bildern des Anderen vom Mittelalter bis heute, edited by Sven Hakon Rossel, 269–80. Wien: Praesens Verlag, 2006. Gerecke, Anne-Bitt. Transkulturalität als literarisches Programm: Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenbergs Poetik und Poesie. Palaestra 317. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. Grage, Joachim. Chaotischer Abgrund und erhabene Weite: Das Meer in der skandinavischen Dichtung des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Palaestra 311. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Grand, Karina Lykke. “Visionen for Danmark: en politisk landskabskunst: The vision for Denmark: a political landscape painting”. In Guld: skatte fra den danske guldalder. Gold: Treasures from the Danish Golden Age, edited by Karina Lykke Grand, Lise Pennington, and Anne Mette Thomsen, 94–125. Aarhus: Systime Academic, 2013. Groebner, Valentin. Das Mittelalter hört nicht auf: Über historisches Erzählen. München: C.H. Beck, 2008. Harwell Celenza, Anna H. “Efterklange af Ossian: The Reception of James Macpherson’s ‘Poems of Ossian’ in Denmark’s Literature, Art, and Music”. Scandinavian Studies 70 (1998): 359–96.

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Heaney, Jonathan. “Emotions and Nationalism: A Reappraisal”. In Emotions in Politics: The Affect Dimension in Political Tension, edited by Nicolas Demertzis, 243–63. London, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. Hutchinson, John. “Cultural Nationalism”. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, edited by John Breuilly, 75–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Keller, Andreas and Winfried Siebers. Reiseliteratur. Darmstadt: WBG, 2017. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks 11: 1: Loose Papers, 1830–1843, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn & al. Princeton University Press, 2019. Kjærgaard, Kristoffer. “St. St. Blicher og jøderne: Blichers politiske forfatterskab”. K&K [Kultur & Klasse] 39, no. 111: Æstetik og virkelighed i klassiske og moderne værker, edited by Claus Esmann Andersen et al. (2011): 49–65. Langewiesche, Dieter. “Gefühlsraum Nation: Eine Emotionsgeschichte der Nation, die Grenzen zwischen öffentlichem und privatem Gefühlsraum nicht einebnet”. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 15 (2012): 195–215. Leerssen, Joep. “The North: A Cultural Stereotype between Metaphor and Racial Essentialism”. In Northern Myths, Modern Identities: The Nationalisation of Northern Mythologies since 1800, edited by Simon Halink, 13–32. National Cultivation of Culture 19. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Molbech, Christian. Ungdomsvandringer i mit Fødeland. 2 Vols. Kiøbenhavn: A. Seidelin, 1811 and 1815. Næss, Harald. “Peter Harboe Frimann and the ‘Hornelen’ Affair”. Scandinavian Studies 38 (1966): 26–35. Østergård, Uffe. “The Nation as Event: The Dissolution of the Oldenburg Monarchy and Grundtvig’s Nationalism”. In Building the Nation: N.F.S. Grundtvig and Danish National Identity, edited by John A. Hall, Ove Korsgaard, and Ove K. Pedersen, 110–33. Montreal & Kingston, Ithaca: MQUP, 2015. Rix, Robert W. “‘In darkness they grope’: Ancient Remains and Romanticism in Denmark”. European Romantic Review 26 (2015), 435–51. Rix, Robert William. “Visiting the Nordic Past: Domestic Travels in Early NineteenthCentury Denmark”. Scandinavian Studies 90 (2018): 211–36. Rossell, Sven H. “From Romanticism to Realism”. In A History of Danish Literature, edited by Sven H. Rossel, 167–259. A history of Scandinavian Literatures 1. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Rossell, Sven H. “Steen Steensen Blicher: The Melancholy Poet of the Jutland Heath”. In Kierkegaard and His Danish Contemporaries. Tome III: Literature, Drama and Aesthetics, edited by Jon Stewart, 49–65. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources 7. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Sandberg, Anna. “Die ‘Holger-Danske’-Oper 1789: Kosmopolitismus und Körperlichkeit”. In Kosmopolitismus und Körperlichkeit im europäischen Theater des 18.

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Jahrhunderts, edited by Katharina Müller, Stephan Michael Schröder, 197–219. Münchner Nordistische Studien 20. München: Herbert Utz, 2016. Schmidt, Wolf Gerhard. “Homer des Nordens” und “Mutter der Romantik”: James Macphersons Ossian und seine Rezeption in der deutschsprachigen Literatur. 2 vols. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2003. Sørensen, Knud. St. St. Blicher: Digter og samfundsborger. København: Gyldendal, 1985. von Törne, Björn. Zwischen Loyalität und Servilität: Steen Steensen Blichers politische Publizistik und ihre Voraussetzungen. Skandinavistische Studien 12. Neumünster 1980. Watson, Harry D. “Steen Steensen Blicher and Macpherson’s Ossian”. Northern Studies 17 (1981): 27–35.

Chapter 3

Neglect, Grief, Revenge: Finland in Swedish Nineteenth-Century Literature Anna Bohlin

What does it mean to lose territory? What is lost and to whom? How does one make sense of the lost parts and what is the appropriate emotional reaction? There are no definite answers to these questions; the practices of making sense of territorial loss have varied over time. Perhaps the most dramatic shift in responses in European history took place in the nineteenth century as a result of the spread of Romantic nationalism. Territorial loss obviously affects those people living in the so-called lost area – the change of governmental rule is likely to have an impact on their everyday lives. However, it is much less clear how territorial loss affects the people living in the remaining parts, i.e. in the area losing size. To experience a sense of loss, a certain identification with the lost territory is needed, an imaginary geography encompassing the lost parts, that somehow identifies you as a person. As an ideological construct, these imaginary geographies belong to modern nationalism. Nationalist temporalities rest on the notion of loss (see the Introduction): if nineteenth-century nationalist thought argued that national characteristics should be revived, the premise is that they were lost in the first place. The three-dimensional temporality of nationalist ideology – an imagined past, providing prerequisites for the present and a promise of future prosperity – necessitated that the past had been lost. That operation is easy enough to spot when it is a matter of lost virtues or lost Golden Ages, or even lost languages, but it also applies to contemporary, real losses of territory. A case in point is Sweden’s loss of Finland. In the Peace Treaty of Fredrikshamn on September 17 1809, Sweden lost one-third of the territory and a fourth of the population, amounting to one million people. The loss of Finland is often regarded as the trauma that fuelled Swedish nationalism.1 It would be more correct, though, to put it the other way around: Romantic nationalism produced the emotionally charged loss of Finland. 1 See e.g. Ingmar Stenroth, Sveriges rötter: En nations födelse (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2005), 13, 17; Bo Grandien, Rönndruvans glöd: Nygöticistiskt i tanke, konst och miljö under 1800talet (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1987), 45.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_005

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Finland had been part of Sweden since the thirteenth century, since before there even was a Swedish realm, and several hundred years before the former Danish and Norwegian provinces in the South and West of present-day Sweden, were incorporated in the seventeenth century.2 On September 17 1809, the main geographical axis of the realm turned 90 degrees overnight; the horizontal line of Västerås – Stockholm – Åland – Sveaborg – Vyborg became a vertical line extending from Stockholm to Malmö.3 Nevertheless, Sweden had repeatedly suffered territorial losses in the many eighteenth-century wars, after which most of the seventeenth-century conquests had to be ceded. None of them were the cause of debate or the object of nationalist emotions in nineteenth-century Sweden. Furthermore, the significance attributed to the loss of Finland in Swedish historiography and public debate swayed over time. Historians Henrik Edgren and Åke Sandström have shown remarkably shifting attitudes in the press and in historiography from the early nineteenth century to the present day.4 Unlike Denmark’s loss of Schleswig later in the century (see Peter Nørgaard Larsen’s and Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s chapters in the present volume), the loss of Finland had no stable function for Swedish national self-understanding.5 In fact, the construction of a trauma did not take place until the late nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century, the loss of Finland might be portrayed as an “amputation” leaving the Swedish body bleeding from still unhealed wounds.6 Literature provides the opportunity to 2 See e.g. Max Engman, Ett långt farväl: Finland mellan Sverige och Ryssland efter 1809 (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2009), 23. 3 Heikki Talvitie, “Sverige och 1812 års politik”, in Sverige i fred: Statsmannakonst eller opportunism? En antologi om 1812 års politik, ed. Tapani Suominen (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2002), 18. 4 Henrik Edgren, “Traumakonstruktionen: Svensk historieskrivning om rikssprängningen 1809”, Scandia 76, no. 1 (2010): 9–39; Åke Sandström, “Sökandet efter en ny svensk identitet: Om svensk självsyn och synen på Finland 1808–1860”, in Maktens mosaik: Enhet, särart och självbild i det svenska riket, eds. Max Engman and Nils Erik Villstrand (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2008), 381–402; Åke Sandström, “Sveriges 1809: Föreställningar om finska kriget under 200 år”, in Fänrikens marknadsminne: Finska kriget 1808–1809 och dess följder i eftervärldens ögon, ed. Max Engman (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2009), 27–96. 5 On the loss of Schleswig in Danish historiography, see Rasmus Glenthøj, “Historier om et nederlag”, in Konfliktzonen Danmark: stridende fortællinger om nyere dansk historie, eds. Sissel Bjerrum Fossat, Rasmus Glenthøj and Lone Kølle Martinsen (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2018), 88–115. Glenthøj shows that even though different political camps made sense of the Peace Treaty of 1864 in different ways and drew different lessons from the defeat, there is still today an agreement on the loss of Schleswig as an important memory site for national self-understanding. 6 Torvald T:son Höjer quoted in Edgren, “Traumakonstruktionen”, 22.

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investigate more thoroughly the figures of thought that engender emotions, and thereby clarify how the production of loss in nationalist discourse organises thought over time. The present chapter will trace the emotional history of the loss of Finland in Swedish literature by analysing four examples from different historical periods. The poem “Svea” penned by Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846) was awarded a prize by the Swedish Academy in 1811 and is usually acknowledged as the poem that sparked off Swedish nationalism. It is also famous for being censored: Tegnér was awarded the prize on condition that he softened the poem’s revanchism with the explicit objective of regaining Finland. This example from the very inception of nationalist thought in Sweden will be compared to two literary works from the mid-nineteenth century by two Finnish-born authors. Gustaf Henrik Mellin (1803–1876) and Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865) both came to Sweden as small children because of the Finnish War, even though Bremer’s father sold his holdings in Finland and moved to Stockholm a few years before the war, whereas Mellin fled his home with his father in 1808, and finally left Finland in 1810.7 Both became prominent Swedish writers, and Mellin’s pamphlet Sweriges Sista Strid: Fantastiskt Nattstycke (Sweden’s Last Battle: Fantasmagoric Night Piece, 1840) was part of a heated debate over the possible benefits for the Finnish people of being under Russian rule.8 Bremer’s novel Syskonlif (Engl. trans. Brothers and Sisters the same year), issued a few years later in 1848 – the year of revolutions – depicts the construction of a model society informed by Utopian Socialism with a Liberal touch. The loss of Finland turns up in a side story, although it is a key to the overall message of promoting a better world for mankind. Finally, a coda provides a brief glimpse into the future after Finland’s independence in 1917. In Selma Lagerlöf’s (1858–1940) biography on the Finnish national author Zacharias Topelius (on Topelius, see Jens Grandell’s chapter in the present volume), published in 1920, she looks back on her own emotions regarding the loss of Finland as a young girl reading Topelius’ historical novels. The aim of the analysis is to study the displacement of the construction of loss by asking: how is territorial loss imagined? In other words, what exactly is lost? What are the emotions associated with loss and how do they circulate in these literary works? These examples belong to different genres – 7 On Bremer, see Carina Burman, Bremer: En biografi (Stockholm: Bonnier, 2001). On Mellin, see Emilie Flygare-Carlén, Minnen af svenskt författarlif 1840–1860 II (Stockholm: Adolf Bonnier, 1878), 3–65; Rickard Berghorn, “Inledning”, in Gustaf Henrik Mellin, Sveriges sista strid: Fantastiskt nattstycke (Stockaryd: Timaios Press, 2016), 7–10. 8 Flygare-Carlén, Minnen af svenskt författarlif 1840–1860, 9–10; Berghorn, “Inledning”, 7–10.

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poetry, a pamphlet, a sentimental novel, and a biography – entailing different prerequisites for structuring emotions and organising nationalist thought. The exploration of the shifting emotions attached to Sweden’s loss of Finland uncovers the mechanisms at work in the production of loss in changing figurative repertoires. Featuring the nation as an amputated body, using a corporeal metaphor, will also be of special interest. Bodies make emotions “stick”, and embodiment offer opportunities for imagining loss in different ways. Sara Ahmed’s concept of “affective economies” suggests that emotions circulate and accumulate in a way resembling the Marxian analysis of capital, increasing by circulation. Affect does not reside in an object or sign, but as an effect of the circulation between objects and signs (=the accumulation of affective value). Signs increase in affective value as an effect of the movement between signs: the more signs circulate, the more affective they become.9 She uses the word “sticky” to articulate how objects become “saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension”, transferring emotions.10 Barbara H. Rosenwein’s notion of “emotional sequences” will also be important in the analysis. Rosenwein points out that emotions seldom are experienced one by one, but rather in a cohesive sequence, defining each other: Sequences are important because they tell us how emotions are felt differently according to the company they keep. If I feel angry and then guilty, that is a very different feeling of anger than if I feel angry and then euphoric. The sequence reveals how an emotion is valued.11 The sequences of “emotion words” that Rosenwein is working on reveal the evaluations and expressions of emotions mainly in medieval and early modern communities through personal documents or spiritual guidebooks. The emotional sequences that my analysis will highlight pertain to literary works of the nineteenth century with a conscious nationalist agenda, using skilfully crafted emotional sequences to produce nationalist affects. Still, the relevance of the sequence, formulated by Rosenwein, is the same. 9 10 11

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, [2004] 2014), 45. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 11. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 8.

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The foundational trope of territorial loss in European nineteenth-century nationalist discourse was Poland (see the Introduction and Maciej Janowski’s chapter in the present volume). Another people’s loss was used as a warning evoking terror.12 Poland’s loss of territory was indeed the ultimate threat envisioned by Esaias Tegnér in “Svea” (1811) – it put forward the most compelling argument for revenge. However, the general opinion in Sweden concerning the loss of Finland at the time of the actual loss is a subject with divergent interpretations. Obviously, there is no way of telling how the Swedish common people felt – if they had any opinion on the matter at all. There are those who suppose that Tegnér’s poem expressed a general feeling among the public, based on accounts of the recital of parts of Tegnér’s poem at a public meeting of the Swedish Academy in December 1811.13 A “stifled rumbling” was reported from the hall, suggesting that the audience had to “restrain their feelings” of approval.14 This view is contradicted by Edgren’s research, which shows that the press was curiously silent on the loss of Finland in the 1810s and 1820s.15 A contributing factor was no doubt the so-called “policy of 1812”. Swedish King Gustaf IV Adolf was forced to abdicate as a result of the defeat in the war, and a new Constitution was proclaimed in 1809. After the coup d’état, the new Crown Prince Jean Baptist Bernadotte, later King Karl XIV Johan, changed allegiance from France to Russia. “The policy of 1812” meant that Sweden’s revanchist interests were redirected from East to West: to Norway. Little room was left for revenge. Still, in 1811, the Geatish Society was formed and the “engineers” behind “the invention” of the Swedish nation, in Sandström’s words, certainly shared Tegnér’s enthusiasm for revanchism.16 Some of the members contributed to poetic revanchism along the line of Tegnér’s “Svea”, most notably Pehr Henrik Ling in his poem Gylfe (1814).17 Tegnér himself, subsequently a bishop and a prolific poet, would join the society the following year. While the other members swiftly adjusted their opinions to coincide with the new geopolitics

12

13 14

15 16 17

Anne-Marie Thiesse’s notion of the “identity trade between nations” thus applies to territorial loss as well. Anne-Marie Thiesse, “National Identities: A Transnational Paradigm”, in Revisiting Nationalism: Theories and Processes, eds. Alain Dieckhoff and Christophe Jaffrelot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 125. Stenroth, Sveriges rötter, 42. Peter Wieselgren quoted in Åke K.G. Lundquist, “Kommentar”, in Esaias Tegnér, Samlade dikter II: 1809–1816, edited by Fredrik Böök and Åke K.G. Lundquist (Lund: Tegnérsamfundet, 1968), 232; Stenroth, Sveriges rötter, 42. Edgren, “Traumakonstruktionen”, 12. Sandström, “Sökandet efter en ny svensk identitet”, 390. Grandien, Rönndruvans glöd, 46; Stenroth, Sveriges rötter, 28.

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of 1812, Tegnér did not.18 He remained hostile to the Crown Prince, whereas another distinguished member of the Geatish Society, Erik Gustaf Geijer, the founder of history as a modern discipline in Sweden, showed an “active disinterest” in Finland when constructing Swedish national history in the following decades, according to Sandström.19 The emotions expressed by the cultural elite in the Geatish Society who introduced nationalist ideas in Sweden most likely did not represent the public in general, though. They were the pioneers of the new ideas, constructing a national identity connected to the national territory. At the beginning of 1809, when large parts of the country were occupied and the Russian army was approaching Stockholm from the archipelago, the inhabitants of the capital were busy celebrating the new Constitution. Social life, feasting and partying continued as usual.20 The public mourning for Finland did not start until thirty years later, when cries for revenge were raised in the Liberal press.21 Some agree with the Finnish historian Matti Klinge that one reason for the Swedish lack of response to the loss of Finland in 1809 was due to the fear of suffering the same fate as Poland: a general feeling was that Sweden was so weakened that the country might have disappeared from the map. A complete partition of Sweden between Russia and Denmark was a real possibility.22 People were simply relieved that there was some land left. But then again, it has been suggested that this analysis of the situation was in fact the result of the new Crown Prince Karl Johan’s propaganda.23 Nevertheless, neglect and silence were probably the backdrop against which “Svea” appeared.

1

Dead Bodies and Lost Virtues in “Svea”

Tegnér’s “Svea” is all about virtues. The basic idea is that lost virtues were the cause of Sweden’s territorial loss, and consequently, the predominant emotion is shame. At the end of the poem, the poet has a vision of a future battle and the metre changes from Alexandrines to Dithyrambs, inspired by the Eddic 18 19 20 21 22 23

Grandien, Rönndruvans glöd, 46; Erik Lönnroth, “Fänrik Ståls Sverige”, Historiska och litteraturhistoriska studier 50 (1975): 47. Quotation in Sandström, “Sökandet efter en ny svensk identitet”, 392; Sandström, “Sveriges 1809”, 36. Sandström, “Sökandet efter en ny svensk identitet”, 386–88. Sandström, “Sökandet efter en ny svensk identitet”, 381–402; Matti Klinge, Den politiske Runeberg (Helsingfors: Söderströms & Stockholm: Atlantis, 2004), 150, 259. Klinge, Den politiske Runeberg, 30–31; Nils Holmberg, “Från Svea till Frithiofs saga”, Scandia no. 4 (1933): 211; Sandström, “Sveriges 1809”, 84. Lönnroth, “Fänrik Ståls Sverige”, 48–50.

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“Voluspá”. The ghosts of the Viking forbears rise from their burial mounds (on burial mounds cf. Jens Eike Schnall’s chapter in the present volume), accompanied by riding Valkyries, to bring revenge and regain honour. The message is clear: the lost virtues of dead ancestors are needed to secure future glory and escape shame. The Swedish Academy had remarks on formal aspects of the verse as well as on the politics of the poems. The rewritten version mainly reflects minor changes in the rhymes, but twelve lines have been deleted and 26 lines were newly composed in 1812.24 Revenge is replaced with grief. Presumably, the poem was well known in both versions, however, because Tegnér’s poems and speeches were usually quickly copied and circulated in manuscripts.25 In the original version, a “Giant” – easily recognised as Russia – is closing in on “us” devouring the plain with his eye, and the poet asks: “What will soon be left to us?”26 Even nature reacts emotionally as the iron taken out of the cliffs “blush with indignation to be forged for his defence”.27 Finland is a “grave”, the poet contends, and apostrophizes “the spilled blood of the Fathers”: “What happens to the soil defended by thy courage?”28 In the original version, the reader is encouraged to take up arms – “Thou Man, where is thy sword?”29 – whereas in the printed version, the poet takes farewell of “the land of Heroes”, and the reader is urged to weep. The Baltic Sea will carry “our tears” to “thy strand”.30 In accordance with a speech made by Crown Prince Karl Johan to the Parliament in 1810, attention is redirected to the land that is left to love and protect, and to help prosper in economic growth, summarized in the famous line: “And within Sweden’s borders regain Finland anew”.31 (Cf. Bjarne Thorup 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31

Lundquist, “Kommentar”, 231–43. Lundquist, “Kommentar”, 189, 233; Stenroth, Sveriges rötter, 44. “Hvad återstår oss snart? Allt närmre tränger Jätten. / Han står på fjellets spets, och ögat slukar slätten”. Esaias Tegnér, Samlade dikter II: 1809–1816, eds. Fredrik Böök and Åke K.G. Lundquist (Lund: Tegnérsamfundet, 1968), 54. My translation. “En annan skär vår skörd och upptar klippans jern, / som rodna utaf harm att smidas till hans värn”. Tegnér, Samlade dikter, 54. “O Finlands vida graf! O Fädrens spillda blod! / Hvad blir det af den jord som värjdes av ert mod?” Tegnér, Samlade dikter, 54. “Du Man, hvar är ditt svärd?” Tegnér, Samlade dikter, 54. Esaias Tegnér, Axel, and Svea, trans. Oscar Baker (London: James Carpenter, 1840), 91. “Farväl, du Sveas värn, farväl, du Hjeltars land! / Se, Bottnens bölja för vår gråt intill din strand! […] Gråt, Svea, hvad du mist; men skydda hvad du äger”. Esaias Tegnér, “Svea: Skaldestycke”, in Svenska Akademiens Handlingar Ifrån År 1796: Sjette delen (Stockholm: Carl Deleen, 1817), 162. “Och inom Sverges [sic] gräns eröfra Finland åter”. Tegnér, “Svea”, 162. The English translation of this verse is not literal. The translation is therefore my own. On the inspiration from Karl Johan’s speech, see Holmberg, “Från Svea till Frithiofs saga”, 211; Lundquist, “Kommentar”, 234.

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Thomsen’s chapter in the present volume on “reclaiming” the loss of Schleswig within Denmark’s new borders after 1864.) This peaceful message, however, is contradicted by the Viking ghosts’ battle, a passage left untouched. There could be no doubt about the political message even in the published version. Since the printed version has been reprinted over the years, the following analysis will be based on the version of 1812, subsequently published in 1817.32 Writing at the dawn of modern nationalism, Tegnér had to perform two tasks: he had to create an emotional connection to the soil of the Swedish territory, and he had to construct a sense of loss in order to inspire revenge. The poem establishes several different relations between the earth and bodies. Firstly, Tegnér repeatedly stresses that the soil feeds bodies. Secondly, the soil consists of bodies, as in the ashes and blood of the ancestors. Both of these bonds to the earth relate to what geographer Jan Penrose calls the “emotional power of territory”.33 She claims that the success of the nation state rests on the combination of two different territorialities, the practice of “bounding space”.34 In the first, “identity is culturally defined” and significance is attributed to a territory as “emotional power”, for instance by bonds “cemented through birth and nurturing” or by buried or cremated bodies becoming “indistinguishable from the soil itself”.35 In the second, “identity is territorially defined”, and significance is primarily attributed in terms of “material resources of a territory”.36 Tegnér’s “Svea” firmly rests on the first kind of territoriality; the poem bounds space by depicting the national territory as a grave. The very first line of the poem starts with the word “earth”: Earth, which has fostered me and which hides the ashes of our forbears, People, who have inherited a land of heroes and forgotten their virtues! From the shadow of my valley, I dedicate a song to you.37 Tegnér returns on several occasions to this idea of the soil actually consisting of the deceased. These first lines also refer to a third topos permeating the 32 33 34 35 36

37

Tegnér, “Svea”, 155–69. On the different versions of the poem, see Lundquist, “Kommentar”, 231–52. Jan Penrose, “Nations, States and Homelands: Territory and Territoriality in Nationalist Thought”, Nations and Nationalism 8, no. 3 (July 2002): 281. Penrose, “Nations, States and Homelands”, 279. Penrose, “Nations, States and Homelands”, 281–84. “Penrose, Nations, States and Homelands”, 284. For a discussion on nationalist territorialities the Swedish novel of the 1840s, see Anna Bohlin, “Den svenska 1840-talsromanen som nationell kartografi”, Samlaren 137 (2016): 58–86. “Jord, som mig fostrat har och fädrens aska gömmer, / Folk, som ärft hjeltars land och deras dygder glömmer! / Ur skuggan af min dal jag egnar dig en sång”. Tegnér, “Svea”, 157. Oscar Baker’s English translation is not literal, therefore this prose translation is my own.

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entire poem, namely the idea that the soil fosters not only bodily qualities but also inner characteristics, informed by the climate theories of Montesquieu and Herder. The personification of Sweden, referred to in the title of the poem, Svea, is indeed depicted as a female body with golden hair sitting on a throne in the mountains, but not until the end of the poem, and only very briefly.38 Actually, Svea has an unclear reference, and the poem plays on this uncertainty to make emotions stick to the territory. The “you” that is apostrophized as “Svea” sometimes refers to the people, sometimes to the old territory of the former kings, “the earth of the Vasa kings”, sometimes to the territory of the present, and importantly, “you” sometimes refers to the reader, who is then by association implicated in all of these categories: the people, the history of the territory and the present territory. The soil is then connected to bodies in multiple ways, nurturing, fostering, and even occupying the same apostrophized position. Above all, the soil consists of bodies – the sticky objects charging the national territory with emotions in Tegnér’s “Svea” are dead bodies. The poem rests on a fundamental irony: on the one hand, the logos argument hails male virtues, defined as anti-sentimental, fostered by an unfruitful soil, and untarnished by external influence. On the other hand, the rhetorical success is entirely dependent on very strong and indeed very unstable sentiments, as the invoked emotions rapidly change. The carefully worked-out structure of pathos in the poem presents an emotional sequence, ordered according to a belligerent logic in a complex interplay with the threedimensional time of nationalism: past, present, future. The poem starts by rubbing in nostalgia for past times and lost virtues, based on the idea that Nature (with a capital N) has destined the peoples of the North to simplicity, duty, freedom and pride. The memories of past days are gone, according to the poet: “Through the long nights of ages that are run, / Ye gleam a moment, and again are gone”.39 By the time Tegnér moves on, it seems reasonable to treat the present time with nothing but utter contempt, which he then regrets, addressing God, the soil, and the former royal dynasty in the

38

39

Pär Alexandersson comments on the evasive portrait of Svea in Tegnér’s poem, and points out that she is stripped of her traditional attributes in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury depictions: the sceptre, the sword, the coat of arms, and the heraldic lion. The role of mother, that would characterize Svea throughout the nineteenth century, is only vaguely suggested. Pär Alexandersson, Moder Sveas historia: Den svenska nationspersonifikationen under fem sekler (Stockholm: BoD, 2017), 107–15. Tegnér, Axel, and Svea, 88. “O! Sveas fordna dar, o! Fädrens gudaminnen! / I seklers långa natt J skymten och försvinnen”. Tegnér, “Svea”, 159.

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same sentence: “What say I? Oh God, Oh Sweden, the Vasa earth!”40 The poet asks forgiveness for his “wild grief” and pleads with the “sleeping” people of Svea to wake up and look around: “Now the sun shines o’er lands that thou hast lost”.41 The loss of land leads to the deleted lines, where the 1812 version of the poem exchanged revenge with pride in what is left of the country. They still end up where the original version ended: in the threat of complete dissolution, which sets the tone for the rest of the poem. Tegnér does not mention Poland in “Svea”, but he is undoubtedly activating the Poland trope. Horror is invoked by a personification of Destiny, ready to wipe Sweden’s name from the records of history: Thoughtfully destiny stands with raised pencil To write our doom, the eternal, and the last!42 That is an incentive to egg on – and to evoke hope. Even though the poem deals with territorial loss, the printed version refers to the land to be defended as one of “graves” in second place after king and the state: “Yet thou hast King and State and Graves to defend / And the ghost of a name, the pride of memory”.43 Tegnér still understands the nation in terms of older patriotic ideals of the king and the state (cf. Maciej Janowski’s and Jens Eike Schnall’s chapters in the present volume); it is not a question of defending a national people, other than those who are already dead and who earned bygone glory. Hope, of course, leads to the future, and to the Dithyrambic vision of the battle, which turns out to be a re-enactment of Old Norse myth. As the battle is won, the vision inspires awe, holiness, virtue and prosperity, which in its turn create a longing to sacrifice oneself, to avenge and die in order to join the glorious dead. To ensure that actions will be taken, the poem’s last lines are devoted to fear and threats:

40 41 42

43

“Hvad säger jag? O Gud, o Sverge, Vasars jord!” Tegnér, “Svea”, 161. My own translation, since the English translation is not literal. Tegnér, Axel, and Svea, 90. “Och morgonsoln går opp i land som du förlorat”. Tegnér, “Svea”, 161. Tegnér, Axel, and Svea, 92. The first line is amended since the English translation has omitted the personification of destiny. “Betänksamt ödet står, med griffeln höjd, att rista / I kopparn in vår dom, den eviga, den sista”. Tegnér, “Svea”, 163. “Än har du Kung och Stat och Grafvar till att värja / Och vålnan af ett namn som minnets stolthet gör”. Tegnér, “Svea”, 163. Oscar Baker’s English translation is not literal, therefore this prose translation is mine. The original version has “fatherland” (“fosterland”). Tegnér, Samlade dikter, 54.

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Will Svea fall, here at the autumn of Times A slave among the peoples without name, and will Thy hero’s beacon suffocate for ever in its chest; – […] Give that with our land, our shame may perish, Let no one know where Svea stood!44 If Svea loses the territory, the poet hopes that the shame of the people will be lost together with the territory as the name of Svea will vanish forever. The emotion of shame will ultimately lead to complete annihilation even of the memory, in Tegnér’s account. The significance of territorial loss in “Svea” is lost honour, which is explained by lost virtues. The sequence of emotions, the logic of pathos so to speak, makes a convincing argument for regaining the lost territory of Finland. The rhetoric calls for self-sacrifice and signals the dissolution of the nation. The emotional connection to the soil is made by means of dead bodies that constitute a perfect illustration of the three-dimensional temporality of nationalism: the lost virtues of the past rise in the present to engender the future. The Romantic poets would only rarely return to territorial loss in the subsequent decades. However, the Polish uprising caused Finland to resurface in the Swedish debate, especially as the official politics were still pro-Russian, while the newly established oppositional Liberal press and the cultural elite were fiercely pro-Polish.45 In the autumn of 1831, Finland disappeared again from the public agenda for some years, until the controversial Professor of medicine Israel Hwasser started an agitated debate, arguing that Finland had no wish to be reincorporated with Sweden and was in fact better off in its present circumstances.46 Gustaf Henrik Mellin reacted with rage to this statement.

44

45 46

The English translation has not translated the entire poem, it ends before the vision of the Viking battle and the quoted lines are thus not included. “Skall Svea falla här i Tidens höst / En slaf bland folken utan namn, och qväfves / Er hjeltelåga evigt i dess bröst; – / […] Att med vår jord vår skam må bli förgången, / Och ingen veta hvar ert Svea stod!” Tegnér, “Svea”, 169. My translation. Sandström, “Sökandet efter en ny svensk identitet”, 395–96; Klinge, Den politiske Runeberg, 144–50. Edgren, “Traumakonstruktionen”, 13–17; Jyrki Paaskoski, “‘Åt sådana män, som Duncker, uppreste fornverlden ärestoder’: Fredrik Cygnæus biografi över J.Z. Duncker och mottagandet av den”, in Fänrikens marknadsminne: Finska kriget 1808–1809 och dess följder i eftervärldens ögon, ed. Max Engman (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2009), 212; Klinge, Den politiske Runeberg, 150.

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Figure 3.1 The cover of the first edition of G.H. Mellin’s Sweden’s Last Battle (1840) with mixed Roman and Gothic styles. Photo by Ann-Sofie Persson, Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm

2

Buildings and Feelings in Sweden’s Last Battle

While Tegnér’s poem did not specifically address the population in Finland, the Finnish people was the centre of attention in Mellin’s and Bremer’s works, although with different narrative techniques. Thirty years as a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire and a burgeoning Finnish nationalism meant that there was a Finnish people to address in the first place, but changing historical circumstances also entailed a different construction of loss transforming nationalist thought. Mellin was mostly known as a writer of historical short stories. He was, in fact, the first to publish a literary work set during the Finnish War in Pavo Nissinen: Scener ur sista finska kriget (Pavo Nissinen: Scenes from the Last Finnish War, 1838).47 His furious response as to whether Finland was

47

Paaskoski, ‘“Å sådana män, som Duncker”,’ 200; Johan Wrede, Världen enligt Runeberg: En biografisk och idéhistorisk studie (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2005), 216–17.

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better off without Sweden is a pamphlet of approximately hundred pages. Sweden’s Last Battle: Fantasmagoric Night Piece (1840) takes place in the imagined near future, when the entire Swedish territory is under Russian rule. Surprisingly, the story starts out in India, where the unnamed narrator tells the story of how Sweden was lost and decides to go back to organise an uprising, which eventually succeeds, and the Russian Emperor is killed. The publication was bound in an ominous black cover and the story printed in Gothic types (fig. 3.1), which suggests that the intended readers were a mixed group. At the time, reader circuits were still somewhat divided according to social class. Poetry and novels – read mostly by the upper classes – were usually printed in Roman types in Sweden, whereas the literature of the common people – mostly religious literature – was printed in Gothic types.48 To be sure, the pamphlet caused a heated debate that engaged all layers of society and quickly sold out, and was immediately followed by a new edition.49 The preface to the third edition 27 years later in 1867 is an apology; the tense emotionality now had to be explained, retrospectively, as the result of an earlier historical situation.50 Mellin takes his cue from “Svea”, and revanchism is the objective of the story, though with a different construction of what is lost, linked with slightly different feelings, and portrayed with a very different literary technique. The basic argument in Mellin’s pamphlet – to prove that Finland suffers from being part of the Russian Empire – is engineered to entice the reader to identify with the Finnish people by making them imagine the same fate happening to Sweden. Tegnér’s nostalgic portrayal of lost Viking virtues was no longer a viable rhetoric. Mellin even indirectly refutes Tegnér’s claim that the nation was lost when customs were softened and minds were weakened by influences from the South. The forbears in “Svea” were “not clad by Asia, nor fed by Indians”.51 In contrast, Mellin’s narrator is indeed fed by Indians, as he has fled Sweden after the Russian invasion and since then become a wealthy merchant in Bombay. In Mellin’s novelistic version, the climate theory on morals has a different function in terms of the main characters’ qualities and as a driving element in 48

49 50 51

Gunnel Furuland, Romanen som vardagsvara: Förläggare, författare och skönlitterära häftesserier i Sverige 1833–1851 från Lars Johan Hierta till Albert Bonnier (Stockholm: LaGun, 2007), 48–49. Flygare-Carlén, Minnen af svenskt författarlif, 9. G.H. Mellin, Sveriges sista strid: Fantastiskt nattstycke (Stockaryd: Timaios Press, 2016), 13–14. “Ej Asien klädde än, ej Indier honom födde”. Tegnér, “Svea”, 159. Oscar Baker’s English translation is not literal, therefore the translation is mine.

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the plot line. Southern customs and warmth in Mellin’s story add beauty and comfort to the Northern cold, displayed in and through the narrator’s IndianSwedish daughter. Equally important, the fortune amassed in India is used to finance the Swedish rebellion against Russia. The dead forbears do indeed come alive and take part in the battle when Sweden is lost in Sweden’s Last Battle, as they do in the vision of the future in “Svea”, but in a decidedly more comical and theatrical fashion: the fight takes place in the old royal armoury, where the armour of the old kings and queens are put to use by the intelligentia who are forming the resistance movement. Viking virtues and ghosts from the past had lost their allure and were apparently not sufficiently sticky objects to trigger revanchist feelings in 1840 but changing city skylines were. Nature has no voice; what is lost and regained are the cities. The production of loss in Mellin’s pamphlet is an urban affair. The pathos rhetoric in Sweden’s Last Battle rests on buildings. The narrative elaborates repeatedly on detailed reports on the transformation of views and lost landmarks of Stockholm and other major cities. On the narrator’s return to Stockholm, his first view of the city from the sea, “so familiar and yet so changed and foreign”, prompts an extraordinary sequence of emotions: I was seized by a deep resentment and felt a peculiar pleasure in nourishing this resentment by observing the very objects that would hurt my national feelings the most. The more I saw my fatherland violated by the conquering barbarians, the more I experienced a kind of wild, horrible joy that caused me to shiver myself. A burning desire to harm the insolent victors was kindled within me, and revenge, the deep thirst for revenge, began to eat away at my insides. But I concealed the hateful feelings deep, deep inside, or at least tried to hide them with a scornful smile, while clenching my teeth.52 52

“[M]in blick flög ut öfwer den dyrbara fädernebygden, som nu låg framför mig, på en gång så wäl bekant och dock så förändrad och främmande. Jag kände mig betagen af en djup harm, och det war mig en egen wällust att nära denna genom betraktandet af just de föremål, som mest skulle såra min fosterlandskänsla. Ju djupare jag såg mitt fädernesland kränkt af de eröfrande barbarerna, desto mera erfor jag en slags wild, hemsk glädje, för hwilken jag sjelf ryste. Ett lågande begär att göra de fräcka segrarena illa upptändes inom mig, och hämndens, den djupa hämndens törst begynte att tära mitt innersta. Men jag gömde djupt, djupt de hatfulla känslorna, eller försökte åtminstone att med ett hånfullt leende dölja dem, medan jag bet mina tänder tillsammans”. Gustaf Henrik Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid: Fantastiskt Nattstycke (Stockholm: A.G. Hellsten, 1840), 34. There is no English translation of Mellin’s pamphlet, therefore the translation of the quotations is my own with the help from Tim Challman. I’m grateful to Tim for his careful proofreading throughout this chapter!

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This careful description of a sequence of conflicting emotions functions as an exposition of the emotional pattern explored by the story and prescribes the reader’s emotional response. Resentment caused by hurt national feelings engenders pleasure and wild joy, which in turn are horrifying because they emanate from a lust for revenge, but the hatred is masked by a scornful smile – this formulates the emotional range of the narrative arousing revanchism in Sweden’s Last Battle. The skyline of Stockholm has changed since the Riddarholm Church, the royal burial site in Stockholm, burnt down. In real life, the church tower did collapse after a fire caused by a strike of lightning in 1835 and was rebuilt during the years 1838–1841, when Mellin’s pamphlet was issued. In the story, the church is completely destroyed and the ground put to military use. Burial sites are specifically pointed out: the ancestors’ bones in the earth still hold emotional value. At the former churchyard in Gothenburg, the gravestones with the names still visible make up the enemy’s defensive wall. Architectural constructions containing the nation’s memories, such as the library and the museum, also receive special attention; their purpose has likewise changed to serve the Russian military, which makes the narrator turn pale in “ice-cold horror”.53 Buildings are clearly sticky objects, disseminating horror and wrath; flags even more so. On several occasions in the story, flags – as well as the lack of “the dear old Swedish flag” – signalise lost independence, as do canons and walls blocking entrance to former recreation areas.54 Even though the narrator has to admit that the transformation of certain buildings has beautified the city, he objects to the foreign taste, and even mere perfection is perceived as terrifying. This is the case when the narrator approaches Uppsala and is met with an “unexpected view”: [T]he gigantic castle [was] no longer half in ruins as formerly, but terribly perfected, with spires on all the four towers […]. A Russian garrison filled the great halls. In front of the castle, facing the city […], a new fortress was built with canons, the hollow, voracious mouths of which threatened the city.55

53 54 55

The original reads: “iskall fasa”, “bleknade”. Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 43. Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 28, 33, 36, 83, 91. The entire quote reads: “Och då, om aftonen, wi anlände till den gamla staden wid Fyris, mötte oss den owäntade åsynen af det gigantiska slottet, icke såsom fordom halft i ruiner, utan fruktanswärdt fulländat, med höga spiror på de fyra tornen, och widsträckta wåningar, hwilkas glimmande fönster på alla sidor omslöto en praktfull, pelarbeprydd borggård. En talrik Rysk garnison uppfyllde de ofantliga salarna. Framför slottet, åt stadssidan till, reste sig, på den gamla skansen Styrbiskops plats, ett nytt fäst-

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Mellin depicts the castle of Uppsala as a kind of reversed Gothic ruin: the very restoration of the half-ruined building into a splendid palace evokes terror. These changes to the architectural identity of Swedish cities were clearly inspired by the imperial style of the new Finnish capital Helsinki, as are the accounts of the government, the administration, and the Russification of the universities.56 Furthermore, the battles of Stockholm when Sweden is lost and regained, respectively, are carefully located. An overwhelming number of place-names allow the reader familiar with Stockholm to follow the dramatic events step by step through the city like a cinematic panorama. If the adventures of the narrator and his daughter are fantastic, the depiction of Stockholm and Swedish society under Russian rule bear every mark of verisimilitude. The long sequence of emotions in Tegnér’s poem is abbreviated by means of realistic, visual impressions designed to evoke resentment as prescribed in the initial sequence of emotions. The realistic horror is combined with the fantastic story of the success of the resistance movement, restoring honour and joy – with a fair amount of laughter. A large number of real personal names appear in the story; the leaders of the resistance movement are, somewhat jokingly, contemporary authors and journalists, mostly Mellin’s real-life friends. For example, Fredrika Bremer and two of her female authors colleagues, Sophie von Knorring and Emilie FlygareCarlén, are depicted throwing hand grenades, wearing the armour of former queens.57 However, this unrealistic comic feature serves to make a point about what is lost with independence. Tegnér was still alive when Mellin’s story was published, but in the story itself, he is dead, murdered by the Russians, as are many other prominent Swedish men.58 The fate of the cultural elite including restrictions in their businesses, censorship, imprisonment, and exile, evoke fright. The loss of the nation’s memories, suggested by the transformation of the use of buildings, is reinforced by the fate of persons representing learning and the arts. Familiar sights and well-known persons representing the nation’s memory and culture become the sticky objects, accumulating and circulating

56

57 58

ningswerk, hwars kanoner, med ihåliga, rofgiriga gap, hotande wände sig emot staden”. Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 65. On the imperial aesthetics of Helsinki, see Klinge, Den politiske Runeberg, 120; Rainer Knapas, “Alexander I:s Finland”, in 1809 – rikssprängning och begynnelse: 200-årsminnet av Finska kriget, ed. Per Sandin (Stockholm: Livrustkammaren); Rainer Knapas, “Eastern and Western Neoclassicism in Finland”, in “Proceedings of the Seminar on Architecture and Historic Preservation in Central and Eastern Europe. New York, 28–30 November 1975”, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38, no. 2 (May 1979): 124–29. Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 18. Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 72. “Svea” is quoted as a motto to the last, short chapter, added in the last edition of 1875. Mellin, Sveriges sista strid, 94.

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feelings of horror and wrath, underscored by the black cover of the original edition. The tension between surface and content of the buildings is paralleled in the narrator’s daughter. Hindiah, “my Hindustani Swede”, as her father calls her, proves the case in point in reverse.59 In contrast to the transformed buildings, her brown skin and black eyes distinguish her body as foreign, but her inner qualities vouch for her true nationality (cf. Jens Grandell’s, Jenny Bergenmar’s and Eve Annuk’s chapters in the present volume). In the introduction to the novel, the narrator recognises his beloved Hindustani family – “his own” – as foreign (on hybridity see Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s chapter in the present volume). Still, his daughter is “the most beautiful flower of my inner being”, specified in terms of her Nordic melancholic state of mind and her ability to express “feelings of the heart” in her father’s language.60 Most important though, is her love of the “fatherland”, which in her case is literally a “fatherland”, since her “motherland” is India (cf. changing conceptions of the “fatherland” in Jules Kielmann’s chapter in the present volume). The narrator explains that his love for the fatherland has a different quality than the love for his wife and daughter – in a man’s heart, love for a woman can never compete with love for the native territory.61 It is “a violent force [he] cannot resist”.62 Hindiah shares this love: she too is drawn to the North with an irresistible force and joins her father on his journey.63 Nationalist feelings have become essential in Mellin’s account, as have feelings in general. The Russian Emperor’s despotism is characterised by indifference towards his subjects’ feelings: his lack of compassion, explained by absolutist rule, makes him, in Mellin’s pamphlet, unfit to govern.64 The narrator explains his own readiness to sacrifice everything for the liberation of his fatherland: he is “excited by the great thought that all true human Bildung must emanate from a noble and independent nationality”.65 Tegnér’s manly Viking virtues are replaced in Mellin’s account by emotions. The necessary inner qualities to liberate the territory and to build the future, according to Mellin’s story, are emotions, especially love and compassion, from which noble 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 5. The original reads: “hon är också mitt wäsendes skönaste blomma!” “Jag hade lärt henne att tyda sitt hjertas känslor med mina ord […]”. Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 4. Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 5. “Med ett wåld, som jag icke förmår emotstå, emedan dess kraft är ifrån himmelen, drages mitt hjerta till mitt nordiska hem”. Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 8. Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 28. Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 84–85. “Wi kände oss båda eldade af den stora tanken, att all sann mensklig bildning måste utgå från en ädel och sjelfständig nationalitet […]”. Mellin, Sweriges Sista Strid, 75.

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virtues supposedly will spring. However, exactly what love of the fatherland means is the cause of conflict in Fredrika Bremer’s novel Brothers and Sisters, published eight years later. Whereas what is lost with independence in Mellin’s Sweden’s Last Battle is the cultural memory and learning of the nation; loss in Bremer’s novel is first and foremost the loss of the Finnish people.

3

A Sentimental Novel of Lost Siblings: Fredrika Bremer’s Brothers and Sisters

As the title of Bremer’s novel denotes, Brothers and Sisters is a tale of siblings, and the family metaphor is transferred to nations. In this case, the territorial loss is transposed into a sentimental novel and thus portrayed as a family conflict.66 The beginning of the novel presents the vision that all nations of the earth should be regarded as one family that will be united in the future (on the representation of nations as families, cf. Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s, Kristina Malmio’s, and Jules Kielmann’s chapters in the present volume).67 The notion that the characters in the novel may conversely be understood as representatives of a nation is likewise anchored in Scandinavist rhetoric. Early on in the novel, the siblings and their uncle receive an Icelandic/Danish artist, who is invited to regard the family as her own relatives out of respect for Scandinavist ideas of brotherhood between the nations.68 In this sentimental novel, the relation between Sweden and Finland is subsequently portrayed as personal relations of three kinds: firstly, between half-brothers, secondly, between two friends and brothers in arms, and thirdly as marriage. The two latter relations depend on “the General” and his halfbrother, and all three relations are intimate indeed. The two friends, allegorically named Proud and Happy, are servants of the two brothers: “He was like my 66

67

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For a discussion on the nineteenth-century sentimental novel and its political impact, see Jane P. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Fredrika Bremer, Nya teckningar ur hvardagslifvet XIII: Syskonlif I (Stockholm: L.J. Hjerta, 1848), 18. On Bremer’s take on Utopian Socialism, see Eva Heggestad, En bättre och lyckligare värld: Kvinnliga författares utopiska visioner 1850–1950 (Eslöv: Symposion, 2003), 33–58; Burman, Bremer, 249–60. On Bremer’s nationalist vision and idea of female citizenship, see Anna Bohlin, “Geography of the Soul – History of Humankind: the Jerusalem Code in Bremer and Almqvist”, in Tracing the Jerusalem Code III. The Promised Land: Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920), eds. Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati and Anna Bohlin (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021), 360–89; Anna Bohlin, “Female Citizenship in Scandinavian Literature in the 1840s”, Rethinking Scandinavia – CSS Publications Web Quarterly 2, no. 1 (2018). Bremer, Syskonlif I, 27.

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other self”, Proud says, “since he parted from me, I have never been in a right good humour”.69 The loss of the Finnish counterpart is formulated as a loss of identity and a bereavement of happiness. Undoubtedly the loss of Finland is the conflict with the longest emotional consequences in the novel. The General states that he has never loved another person as much as he loved his half-brother, described as “calm, firm, mild, and generous”, stubborn in a good way, like “a rock in a storm”.70 After fighting in the Finnish War together, the two brothers have parted from each other in a dispute over how to conceive of the nation: territory or government? That was a real question many Finns had to face.71 The General would leave everything behind rather than become a subject of the Russian Emperor, whereas his brother chooses the territory, or as he later explains: After I ceased to bear arms for Sweden, I never bore them more. I have lived as a peaceable citizen upon my paternal state, cultivated the soil of Finland, and have sown the seeds of cultivation in Finnish hearts. I have been faithful to God and my Fatherland, and I have peace with my own conscience.72 Being faithful to the homeland in the Finnish brother’s account, is to stay true to the territory and to contribute to the future of the population on that territory (on Finnish nation building, see Jens Grandell’s, Kristina Malmio’s, Heidi Grönstrand’s and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volum). In the General’s mind, this is treason.73

69

70 71 72

73

Fredrika Bremer, Brothers and Sisters: A Tale of Domestic Life I, trans. Mary Howitt (London: Henry Colburn, Publisher, 1848), 296. “Och han var som mitt andra jag. […] [S]’en han skiljdes vid mig, har jag aldrig haft rätt godt humör”. Bremer, Syskonlif I, 216. Bremer, Brothers and Sisters I, 197–98. The original reads: “lugn, fast, mild, storsinnad. […] Envis […]. Han var som en klippa i stormen”. Bremer, Syskonlif I, 146, 151. Engman, Ett långt farväl, 226–27. Fredrika Bremer, Brothers and Sisters: A Tale of Domestic Life III, trans. Mary Howitt (London: Henry Colburn, Publisher, 1848), 271. “Sedan jag upphörde att bära vapen för Sverige, har jag icke burit vapen mer. Jag har lefvat som en fredlig borgare på mitt fädernegods, odlat Finlands jord, och utsått odlingens frön i finska hjertan. Jag har varit Gud och mitt fosterland trogen, och har med mitt samvete frid”. Fredrika Bremer, Nya teckningar ur hvardagslifvet XIII: Syskonlif II (Stockholm: L.J. Hjerta, 1848), 241. The view that the Finns committed treason during the Finnish War was not uncommon in the Swedish press, especially at the middle of the nineteenth century, and the feeling of being betrayed was mutual on both sides of the Baltic Sea. Sandström, “Sveriges 1809”, 60–69; Engman, Ett långt farväl, 226–30.

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The difference of opinions ripped the heart apart, according to the General, as convictions are “fixed” to “the roots of our heart”.74 This highly emotionally charged conflict is underscored as the narrative plays out the metaphors of the heart in physical action. Thirty years later, in the present time of the narrative, the General tells the story of how he unsuccessfully pleaded with his brother to change his mind, begged, and cried “tears of blood”.75 Overcome with rage, he called his brother “friend of Russia” and “a traitor to his country”, and ended up wounding him in the chest with a sword.76 He “did not pause before I saw a great bloody mouth gape against me in his chest, and felt his blood spirt in my face”.77 It is the novel’s task to reconcile this emotionally and physically violent conflict over the concept of the nation, literally tearing hearts apart. The General cannot forgive his brother for his betrayal – although Bremer specifically points out that strictly speaking, there was no betrayal – and for not being moved by the Swedish brother’s grief. He contends that the Finnish brother’s physical wound may have healed, but the spiritual wound inflicted on the General will bleed forever: “It remains still in the marrow of the soul”.78 His bad conscience over nearly having killed his brother and his sorrow has “put an enemy into my bosom” – the loss of the Finnish brother is once again formulated as a split identity: he “has put division between me and my better self”.79 The ideological conflict is resolved in two opposite ways through the marriage on the one hand, and on the other through the reconciliation between the brothers. The General’s niece from the Swedish family, Göthilda, marries his nephew, Jarl, from the Finnish family, but the match requires some political adjustments. Göthilda expresses a burning hatred of the Russian Emperor for “the evil that they did to Sweden”, and she thus hates Jarl for being a Russian

74 75 76 77

78 79

Bremer, Brothers and Sisters I, 203. “Och hjertrötterna sutto så fast i [våra öfvertygelser] […]”. Bremer, Syskonlif I, 150. Bremer, Brothers and Sisters I, 201. The original reads: “blodstårar”. Bremer, Syskonlif I, 149. Bremer, Brothers and Sisters I, 202. Bremer, Brothers and Sisters I, 202. “Jag kallade honom ‘ryssvän’, ‘landsförrädare’ […]. Han blott försvarade sig, ville slå värjan ur handen på mig, men jag var ursinnig, högg in på honom, och stadnade ej förr än då jag såg en stor, blodig mun gapa mot mig ur hans bröst, och kände hans blod spruta i mitt ansigte”. Bremer, Syskonlif I, 149. Bremer, Brothers and Sisters I, 205. “Det sitter ända i märgen af själen”. Bremer, Syskonlif I, 151. Bremer, Brothers and Sisters I, 205. “Han har satt split emellan mig och mitt bättre sjelf; han har satt en fiende in i mitt bröst, hvars svärdsudd än i dag der aggar och skär”. Bremer, Syskonlif I, 151–52.

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subject and for speaking up for the Emperor.80 Once he has agreed to become a Swedish citizen, though, she has no objections to the marriage. Doris Sommer has shown in Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America that the Latin American national novels of the nineteenth century united the nation over regional, racial, political and economic differences in romantic love.81 In this case, however, the marriage confirms a conception of the nation based on government, suggesting that the Finnish people under Russian rule can only be acknowledged if they, like Jarl, are “Swedish in soul and heart”.82 The highly emotional reconciliation between the brothers suggests otherwise. The meeting of the two brothers after 30 years of separation is a manual on how to settle conflicts and re-forge bonds of fellowship in acknowledging a split identity as two different nations. At first sight of his brother the General has a violent emotional and physical reaction, described in detail: The General turned pale, pale as if from fear. His eyes seemed as if they would start from their sockets, whilst they were fixedly riveted upon the other. He looked confounded, and an uncomfortable feeling oppressed every one who was witness of this scene. At length, the General raised his hand, and pressed it to his forehead; he then extended it towards his brother’s breast. It was seen that he trembled.83 The melodramatic body language exaggerates the intense fear and sorrow as the General opens his brother’s shirt “and revealed upon the naked breast a

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82 83

Fredrika Bremer, Brothers and Sisters: A Tale of Domestic Life II, trans. Mary Howitt (London: Henry Colburn, Publisher, 1848), 255. “Jag hatar ryska kejsaren, och hela hans folk, och önskar dem allt ondt i verlden för det onda de gjort Sverige”. Bremer, Syskonlif II, 36. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Los Angeles & Oxford: University of California Press, 1991). See also Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes and Ilona Pikkanen, eds., Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia (Helsinki: The Finnish Literature Society, 2015). Bremer, Brothers and Sisters III, 266. The original reads: “svensk i själ och hjerta”. Bremer, Syskonlif II, 237. Bremer, Brothers and Sisters III, 269. “Generalen bleknade, bleknade fruktansvärdt, i det han oafvändt fixerade den andre. Ögonen syntes vilja tränga ur sina hålor. Han såg förvirrad ut, och en hemsk spänning uppstod hos alla de omgifvande. Ändteligen höjde generalen handen och tryckte den mot sin panna; sedan räckte han den ut, och förde den mot brodrens bröst. Man såg att den skälfde”. Bremer, Syskonlif II, 240. On melodramatic body language, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

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large and deep scar”.84 The identity is thus established, and he is “violently overcome” by love as he was earlier overcome by rage.85 While crying and kissing his brother, he begs forgiveness and promises to honour his brother’s conviction even though he cannot share it. The wound in the Finnish brother’s chest has healed, and the thorn in the Swedish brother’s heart is suddenly gone out of love and respect. Accepting national affiliation to the territory under Russian rule is the key issue, but while the Russians themselves are the objects of hatred in Göthilda’s account, they are definitely portrayed in friendlier terms by the General. Russians make fine enemies, “and who can hate the brave?” he asks rhetorically.86 He had no objection to drinking with Russian officers between the battles, and tells the story of the battle of Leipzig, when the Swedish and the Russian armies joined forces against Napoleon.87 In contrast to Mellin’s pamphlet eight years earlier, the loss of Finland in Bremer’s novel does not call for revenge, but grief followed by recognition of another national identity. As opposed to grief in Tegnér’s and Mellin’s different sequences of emotions, grief takes on another meaning in Bremer’s account. Since loss is depicted in a sentimental novel as family relations, grief over betrayal may be remedied by forgiveness, mutual love and respect. Grief and fear follow anger, instead of the other way around, and may thus prepare the ground for reconciliation and mutual respect. The shame connected with territorial loss in Tegnér’s “Svea” is replaced by feelings hurt by betrayal. The loss of the Finnish people tore the Swedish heart and soul apart in Brothers and Sisters, but it is the sentimental novel’s business to mend hearts by recognizing differences in forming new kinds of unions. Loss is produced in a complicated emotional operation transforming Swedish as well as Finnish national identity.

4

Coda: Celebrating the Independent Finland in 1920

The Crimean War (1853–1856) presented the last opportunity for Sweden to play a role on the international stage, and the last chance for revanchism. This time even the Conservative press argued that Finland was a lost limb of the

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85 86 87

Bremer, Brothers and Sisters III, 269. The original reads: “i det hans hand öppnade skjortans veck, syntes på det blottade bröstet ett stort, djupt ärr”. Bremer, Syskonlif II, 240. Bremer, Brothers and Sisters III, 269–70. Bremer, Syskonlif II, 240–42. Bremer, Brothers and Sisters I, 203. Bremer, Syskonlif I, 150. Bremer, Syskonlif II, 244.

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Swedish body, a bleeding wound that had to be healed by revenge. That did not happen, and Finland once again became invisible in the Swedish press. However, during the second half of the nineteenth century, the Finnish national authors J.L. Runeberg and Zacharias Topelius (see Jens Grandell’s chapter in the present volume) became extremely popular in Sweden; the Swedish readers tended to overlook the Finnish nation-building project and perceived Finnish nationalist history as a contribution to Swedish nationalism.88 Nevertheless, Finland was invested with emotions, which is fully acknowledged in Selma Lagerlöf’s biography of Topelius. As a member of the Swedish Academy, Lagerlöf was required to write a biography, and chose Topelius. She truthfully presented her work as a popularization of the Finnish literary historian Valfrid Vasenius’ three-volume work, and happily admitted to having borrowed extensively from Topelius’ own novels.89 However, she did add some aspects, most notably an elaboration on nationalism. Lagerlöf’s biography is a celebration of Finnish nationalism, the Finnish independent state, and in particular of Topelius’ nationalist responsibilities as a writer – responsibilities that she herself assumed in relation to the Swedish nation and with great success. She balanced on a thin line between celebrating an independent nation and grieving for a lost territory. Nationalism in Lagerlöf’s own time, and indeed in her own authorship, was firmly anchored in the soil. Thus the Finnish nation is portrayed in a fullfledged personification, awakened in 1840 by the noise of all the carriages going to Helsinki to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the university, established in 1640. Interestingly she has slept for only 30 years; that is, she fell asleep when most Finnish authors would have had her wake up as a result of the separation from Sweden in 1809. There is even an elaboration on the national territory as a paradoxical body: the homeland is a mistress, a goddess, a hostess that has given you everything, always present, but cannot be seen, the unborn that never dies, the dumb that teach her lovers to speak, drinking the blood of her sons and daughters.90 In other words: the nation is an evanescent, ungraspable form, a void that sets human bodies in motion, but a void that takes on the qualities of a body in order to bring about action and engender emotions.

88

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See e.g. Wrede, Världen enligt Runeberg, 19, 337; Klinge, Den politiske Runeberg, 301; Matti Klinge, Idyll och hot: Zacharias Topelius – hans politik och idéer, trans. Nils Erik Forsgård (Helsingfors: Söderström & Co. & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2000), 15. Selma Lagerlöf, Zachris Topelius: utveckling och mognad (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1920), 1–3. Lagerlöf, Zachris Topelius, 135.

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By the 1920s the Maiden of Finland was a well-established figure, and in Lagerlöf’s biography, she appears dressed in a cloak knitted of flowers and a crown of spruce cones, moss in her hair: the accumulation of affective value in the soil makes the territory in Lagerlöf’s work amount to nationalism itself.91 Furthermore, the Maiden of Finland is endowed not only with agency, but also with emotions herself. The Finnish poet Frans Michael Franzén, who moved to Sweden after the war, visited his former homeland for the university feast in 1840, and Lagerlöf makes the Maiden of Finland stretch her arms out to him asking: “How could you abandon me?” Lagerlöf explicitly states that the “earth is still mourning the loss of a great son”.92 Lagerlöf has thus reversed the position of the subject: it is not the people mourning a lost territory, but the territory mourning for lost peoples. For Tegnér, this would have been an unimaginable exchange of agency. For him, the soil engendered human actions; for Lagerlöf the soil is identified with emotionally loaded corporeality to such an extent that it acts on humans. Nevertheless, Lagerlöf also wanted to give credit to Topelius’ enormous impact on Sweden in terms of emotions attached to a shared history. Recalling her reading of the historical series of novels Fältskärns berättelser (The Surgeon’s Stories, 1853–1867) in her childhood, she emphasises the admiration, the hatred, the love aroused by Topelius’ depiction of history. They evoked “an almost painful tenderness” for Finland.93 And she goes on: We could never stop bewailing the fact that it was no longer Swedish, never stop hating that power that had robbed us of it, never do anything other than wish it well as a reward for the loyalty it used to show us in the old days.94 These are strong emotions indeed, and the grieving and hatred obviously had to be handled with care, as after all, her aim was to celebrate the independent Finland. In an earlier episode she renounced the Swedish revanchism of the 1840s. The Swedes, she claimed, unwisely declined to accept the idea that the 91

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Lagerlöf, Zachris Topelius, 144–45. On the Maiden of Finland, see Johanna Valenius, Undressing the Maid: Gender, Sexuality and the Body in the Construction of the Finnish Nation (Helsinki: The Finnish Literature Society, 2004). Lagerlöf, Zachris Topelius, 148. There is no English translation of Lagerlöf’s biography and the translations of the qotations are therefore my own. Lagerlöf, Zachris Topelius, 317. “Aldrig kunde vi sluta upp att begråta, att det inte mer var svenskt, aldrig kunde vi upphöra att hata den makt, som hade rövat det ifrån oss, aldrig kunde vi göra annat än önska det lycka till lön för den trohet, som det i forna dagar hade skänkt oss”. Lagerlöf, Zachris Topelius, 317.

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Finns could be happy with another government.95 By the 1920s, revanchism was a feeling that needed explaining; likewise mourning. The childhood scene was supposed to reflect an emotional history that was gone – nostalgia for a lost feeling of loss. Whereas revanchism was discarded, heightened emotions in relation to Finland were indeed promoted throughout the biography. Finland is no longer Tegnér’s dead bodies in the ground, nor is it Bremer’s dear brother lost and found in mutual forgiveness. To Lagerlöf, Finland is envisioned as a lovely body, evoking “an almost painful tenderness”.

5

Concluding Remarks

This chapter has registered the re-imagining of core concepts of nationalist thought over a hundred years in the production of loss. The perceptions of national territories, identities, virtues, feelings, were all subject to change. Sweden’s loss of Finland in 1809 was transformed during the nineteenth century both in terms of emotions associated with the territorial loss and in terms of what was lost, reorganising national thought. In Tegnér’s “Svea” from 1811, the loss of virtues engendered shame that called for revenge, whereas the loss in Bremer’s novel of 1848 was constituted by the Finnish people, causing grief over feelings of betrayal and a split identity. The “sticky” objects accumulating emotions shifted from Tegnér’s Viking virtues and dead ancestors to Mellin’s feelings of compassion, city skylines and buildings representing the national memories in 1840 – and again to the beautiful landscape itself in Lagerlöf’s account. The representations of territories and bodies were transposed from the notion of the soil consisting of dead ancestors at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to characters in the novel exposing their true nationality by their love for a territory, leading to a reversal of agency in Lagerlöf’s early-twentieth-century biography: the personification of the Finnish territory mourns for lost peoples rather than the other way around. The rhetorical success of Tegnér’s poem is due to a sequence of rapidly changing emotions that constitute a logic of pathos that concludes with revenge. Mellin’s pamphlet, on the other hand, initially prescribes the reader’s expected sequence of emotions as a response to the realistic, visual impressions advanced by the story. The novelistic treatment allowed for the elaboration of corporeal metaphors for nations. Bremer’s sentimental novel Brothers and Sisters provided a manual for how to re-imagine a split identity as two different national identities, an 95

Lagerlöf, Zachris Topelius, 234–35.

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emotional operation involving the transformation of the very meaning of the nation. The interrelation between genre and a corporeal metaphoric scheme proves to be an important mechanism at work in producing the emotionally charged loss of Finland in nineteenth-century Swedish nationalist discourse – emotions that history has today luckily rendered unintelligible.

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Rosenwein, Barbara H. Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Sandström, Åke. “Sökandet efter en ny svensk identitet: Om svensk självsyn och synen på Finland 1808–1860”. In Maktens mosaik: Enhet, särart och självbild i det svenska riket, edited by Max Engman and Nils Erik Villstrand, 381–402. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2008. Sandström, Åke. “Sveriges 1809: Föreställningar om finska kriget under 200 år”. In Fänrikens marknadsminne: Finska kriget 1808–1809 och dess följder i eftervärldens ögon, edited by Max Engman, 27–96. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2009. Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Los Angeles & Oxford: University of California Press, 1991. Stenroth, Ingmar. Sveriges rötter: En nations födelse. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2005. Talvitie, Heikki. “Sverige och 1812 års politik”. In Sverige i fred: Statsmannakonst eller opportunism? En antologi om 1812 års politik, edited by Tapani Suominen, 15–74. Stockholm: Atlantis, 2002. Tegnér, Esaias. “Svea: Skaldestycke”. In Svenska Akademiens Handlingar Ifrån År 1796. Sjette delen, 155–69. Stockholm: Carl Deleen, 1817. Tegnér, Esaias. Samlade dikter II. 1809–1816, edited by Fredrik Böök and Åke K.G. Lundquist. Lund: Tegnérsamfundet, 1968. Tegnér, Esaias. Axel, and Svea. Translated by Oscar Baker. London: James Carpenter, 1840. Thiesse, Anne-Marie. “National Identities: A Transnational Paradigm”. In Revisiting Nationalism: Theories and Processes, edited by Alain Dieckhoff and Christophe Jaffrelot, 122–43. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Tompkins, Jane P. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790– 1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Valenius, Johanna. Undressing the Maid: Gender, Sexuality and the Body in the Construction of the Finnish Nation. Helsinki: The Finnish Literature Society, 2004. Wrede, Johan. Världen enligt Runeberg: En biografisk och idéhistorisk studie. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2005.

Chapter 4

How a Culture Was Almost Lost: The Sámi in Nineteenth-Century Conceptualisations of Finnish Nationhood Jens Grandell

The Grand Duchy of Finland, ceded to Russia in 1809 after 600 years as part of Sweden, had to find its bearings in a novel situation as part of the Russian Empire. In the nation building that followed, the conceptualisation of the Finnish people rose to the fore. Scholar-patriots were keen to intellectually construct the Finnish nation, and to this end, themes such as history, statistics, ethnology and geography were explored. The idealistic preoccupation with the “people” (the Volk) and with traditions was a key component of Romantic nationalism. All things regarded as unique to the nation were emphasized, which signified a process of intellectual creation and innovation as the nation was constructed textually.1 In Finland, nation building was from early on concerned with fostering a common appreciation of what constituted the Finnish people and what this people was destined to become. At the same time as the builders of the nation set out to define Finnishness, it was necessary for them to relate to the culturally and linguistically heterogeneous elements within the population of the Grand Duchy. In this chapter, I study the loss and exclusion of the Sámi with regard to Finnish nation building and the rising affective economies of the nineteenth century. My point of departure is the influential historian, journalist and writer Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898). Of all the nineteenth-century nationalist writers, Topelius was no doubt the most focused on substantiating and popularising a common view of the Finnish people. To this end, he deployed a range of literary genres from historical novels and poems to newspapers and stories for children, effectively making emotions stick, to borrow Sara Ahmed’s vocabulary.2 One recurring theme in his writings was the land and the people. Mirroring a common view of the time, Topelius saw that history and geography 1 See John Coakley, “Mobilizing the past: Nationalist images of history”, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 10, no. 4 (2004): chapter “Packaging the past”, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13537110490900340. 2 On the stickiness of emotions, see Sara Ahmed, “Collective Feelings: Or The Impressions Left by Others”, Theory, Culture Society 21, no. 2 (2004): 26, 33. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_006

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had forged the Finnish people, who in line with the three-dimensional time of nationalism: past, present, future (see the Introduction) was on a predestined path towards statehood and the realization of its self-awareness. For Topelius it was important to demonstrate that the Finnish people belonged to the Western cultural sphere, which meant distancing oneself from elements not in touch with modernity. This undertaking encompassed different aspects of the contemporary academic discussion, not least the discussion on the human races. Topelius was central to the popularization of race theories in Finland. Of course, the concept of the Finnish people was a product of intellectual discussion, meaning that it is an artificial notion showcasing contemporary beliefs and values. The discussion on who was to be included and who was to be excluded from the Finnish people birthed different bodies and created mental borders within the physical borders of the nation. At stake was the third dimension of time – the future.3 For the Sámi people, who during the course of history had been victims of Southern territorial expansion, nineteenth-century conceptualisations of Finnishness meant cultural “otherness” and exclusion.4 This indicated loss in a philosophical sense, in addition to loss in a physical sense. The Sámi were stripped of a future as they were excluded from the construction of the Finnish nation. Lapland was a borderland in the nineteenth century in the same sense as the North American West was a borderland of non-colonized areas. For several centuries, the Sámi were pushed further north by an expanding Finnish culture, which is why their land was continually of socio-economic interest to the Finnish state as an outlet for a growing population. The same was true for Sweden and Norway.5 According to the historian-statistician Gabriel Rein’s calculations, only 1,245 Sámi remained in Finland in the 1840s.6 In the grand nationalist narrative of the Finnish people, Topelius maintained that the only way for the Sámi to continue their existence was to 3 Also see Jens Grandell, “Den Andre på egen mark: Zacharias Topelius, Finlands folk och samerna”, in Författaren Topelius – med historien mot strömmen, eds. Pia Forssell and Carola Herberts (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2018). 4 In the nineteenth century, the region inhabited by the Sámi people stretched over four countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. In the North, it was bounded by the Barents Sea, in the West by the Norwegian Sea and in the East by the White Sea. 5 Helge Salvesen, “Sami Æednan: Four states – One nation? Nordic minority policy and the history of the Sami”, in Ethnicity and Nation Building in the Nordic World, ed. Sven Tägil (London: Hurst, 1995), 126; Samuli Aikio, “1800-talet som brytningsperiod i samernas historia”, in Samesymposium, eds. Marjut Aikio and Kaisa Korpijaakko (Rovaniemi: Lapplands universitet, 1991), 4–5. 6 Gabriel Rein, Storfurstendömet Finlands statistik (Stockholm 1842), 17. Today it is estimated that Finland has a Sámi population of 8 000 and that the total population in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia is between 80 000 and 100 000, http://www.samer.se/samernaisiffror.

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abandon their nomadic way of life and become part of the Finnish people and of the nation’s future.7 This indicated a loss of future for the Sámi as a people. Interestingly enough, Topelius chose to exclude the Sámi from the Finnish people based on their way of life rather than their language, which can be explained by his positive view of bilingualism in Finland (see also Tiina Kinnunen’s chapter in the present volume). As nomads, the Sámi were not part of Finnish culture; rather, they were hierarchically ranked beneath it (cf. Eve Annuk’s chapter on Estonian nationalism in the present volume). This goes to show how the loss of a fabricated “otherness” was presupposed to fortify the image of a modern collective body. In the same vein, Pertti Anttonen has pointed out that “the possession of a non-modern periphery, and the power of its definition, makes the possessor modern and developed”.8 I approach my subject through the following research questions: How were the Sámi positioned in the three-dimensional time of nationalism and what does this say about nation building and the fabrication of loss? Which emotions were at play when the Sámi were made part of the national story (i.e. contempt, superiority and compassion)? What were the reasons for conjuring up these specific emotions and from where did they emanate? Emotions are interesting to consider following Sara Ahmed’s argument that the way we feel about others is what aligns us with a collective. Feelings and emotions help constitute the collective as a body, which is why it is fruitful to consider them in a discussion about nation building. As Ahmed has pointed out, emotions are crucial to the way bodies surface in relation to other bodies, or as she writes: “a surfacing that produces the very effect of collectives, which can be described as ‘felt’ as well as imagined and mediated”.9 As the Sámi in the nineteenth century were integrated into the national narrative, the view of them was developed in an ever more exclusive direction. They were marginalized not only in practice but also in theory.10 7

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9 10

The common view in the nineteenth century was that the Sámi faced an inevitable disappearance from history. It was furthermore a commonly held view that higher standing people had the right to “assist” the weak races in vanishing from the face of the earth. See Ritva Kylli, Kirkon ja saamelaisten kohtaaminen Utsjoella ja Inarissa 1742–1886 (Rovaniemi: Pohjois-Suomen historiallinen yhdistys, 2005), 442; Maria Ripenberg, Historiens vita fläckar: Om rasismens rötter i Sverige (Stockholm: Appell förlag, 2019), 28. Pertti Anttonen, “Oral Traditions and the Making of the Finnish Nation”, in Folklore and Nationalism in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2012), 348. Ahmed, “Collective Feelings”, 39. See Ahmed, “Collective Feelings”, 25, 27; Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 2. For the marginalization of the Sámi people, see also Anttonen, “Oral Traditions and the Making of the Finnish Nation”, 347.

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I begin by exploring how the Sámi were brought from the margins of Finnishness into textual nation building and the role played by folk tales and ancient beliefs collected and published in the nineteenth century. From here, I turn to the supposed scientific grounds for separating the Sámi from the Finnish people and the question of which race the Finns belonged to.11 Anatomy was mixed with archaeology and myth in order for science to produce convincing evidence for the theses needed to support nationalism.12 The last part of my chapter is concerned with the relations between the groundworks for collective emotions and the Sámi as part of the conceptualisation of Finnish modernity and future. My source material consists of Zacharias Topelius’ university lectures, important for laying the ground for the popular image of Finland in an academic sense. This material is enriched with his widespread reading book for schools, Boken om Vårt Land (The Book of Our Country) first published in 1875 and the monumental Finland framställdt i teckningar (Finland Presented in Drawings, 1845–1852) and Finland i 19de seklet (Finland in the Nineteenth Century, 1893). These texts were written for different audiences and therefore project a slightly different tone as regards the Sámi. It is also important to note the ambiguity in the view of the Sámi in these texts.13

1

The Sámi: From Obscurity to Text

Since the 1600s and up until recently, the view of the Sámi language and Sámi culture was divided. On one hand, it was thought that the Sámi ought to renounce their language and culture so as to assimilate with the majority population, and on the other hand, that the Sámi should be allowed to exist as a people separate from the majority population and that their language and

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The question of defining the Finnish people and the Finns is complex and relates to the nation building of the nineteenth century. The fact that the Finnish elite mostly spoke Swedish while the majority population spoke Finnish led to a comprehensive debate on nationhood and nationality from the 1840s and onward (see Heidi Grönstrand’s and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume). On one side, it was argued that language constituted nationality and that the true language of Finland was Finnish, while on the other side, intellectuals like Zacharias Topelius put forth the idea that it was shared history and tradition that constituted the people. Hence, the Finnish people comprised both Finnish and Swedish speaking individuals. Ripenberg, Historiens vita fläckar, 28. Even though my chapter focuses on Finland, the situation was largely comparable in Norway and Sweden. One thing that however separated the countries was an overwhelming focus on conceptualising the people in the young Grand Duchy of Finland.

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culture should be protected to reinforce their ethnic identity.14 Historically, the former approach has had greater impact and it came to influence the general view of the Sámi as a weak and inferior race during lengthy periods of the twentieth century. The ideology of assimilation is evident in ILO’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, whose first version from 1957 is largely based on the notion of integration. It was not before the new Treaty of 1989 that the policy of assimilating indigenous people was abandoned. In its place, the new policy held that indigenous peoples must be entitled to their natural resources and allowed to shape their own spiritual culture independently of the majority population.15 Following the ideas of Hegel, J.V. Snellman, the leading nineteenth-century philosopher of the Finnish nation, underscored the connection between the people and the state and furthermore between the people and language. Language as a part of the identity checklist, which according to Anne-Marie Thiesse is a set of common features for European national identities, was perhaps the most hotly debated issue of Finnish nationalism because of two major languages: Finnish and Swedish (see also Heidi Grönstrand’s and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume).16 Consequently, the academic debate about who was Finnish and who was not, continued throughout much of the nineteenth century. The discussion primarily concerned how the Swedish speaking population should be understood in respect to Finnishness, but at the same time, smaller minorities like the Sámi and the Romanies were also included in the discussion. When this occurred, it was typically done with deference to the majority population, often contrasting these minorities to the assumedly “more advanced” Finnish people. In this regard, minorities were essential for the construction of the common body.17 As the interest in the Finnish people and in its history grew during the 1830s, scholars began to focus their attention on the Sámi population in the North. When the Sámi were made part of the writing of history – paradoxically, in contrast to the Finns, the Sámi were considered to lack history – the view of the Sámi was rather bleak to start with. Throughout the nineteenth 14 15

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Salvesen, “Sami Æednan: Four states – One nation?” 121. Kaisa Korpijaakko-Labba, Saamelaisten oikeusasemasta Suomessa – kehityksen pääpiirteet Ruotsin vallan lopulta itsenäisyyden ajan alkuuun (Kautokeino: Sámi instituhtta, 2000), 206. Anne-Marie Thiesse, “National Identities: A Transnational Paradigm”, in Revisiting Nationalism: Theories and Processes, eds. Alain Dieckhoff and Christophe Jaffrelot (London: Hurst, 2005), 124–25. For the integration of Karelians and Ingrians into Finnish nation building, see Anttonen, “Oral Traditions and the Making of the Finnish Nation”, 347.

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Lapp cot Illustration by Gunnar Berndtson in Finland in the Nineteenth Century (1893)

century, this view was elaborated on and complemented with contemporary academic discussions that included, amongst other themes, scientific racism. The Sámi were ethnographized, in other words conceptualised as a primitive people having no history and no place among civilized nations. Together with language, history was an important part of the aforementioned identity checklist. Without a past, one cannot be modern, meaning that one lacks the prerequisite for any progress and is therefore doomed to vanish.18 This can be understood as loss of history and hence also a loss of destiny and future. The change of tone with respect to how influential historians treated the Sámi, from Zacharias Topelius via Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen (1830–1903) to Väinö Wallin (later Voionmaa, 1869–1947), shows an apparent trend towards the emergence of a distinctive hierarchy between the Finnish people and the Sámi. This illustrates how key intellectuals brought the Sámi into the academic discussion in order to theorize and legitimize the loss of Sámi culture and to emphasize Finnish cultural superiority and modernity.

18

For more about the Sámi and the lack of history, see Veli-Pekka Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset kohtaamisia 1896–1953 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2012), 13. Also see Aikio, “1800-talet som brytningsperiod i samernas historia”, 2; Anttonen, “Oral Traditions and the Making of the Finnish Nation”, 345–49.

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The Measure of Everything

During the eighteenth century, various theories of the evolution of mankind were articulated. The theories gradually cemented notions that different peoples stood at different stages of culture. The prevailing cultural perspective of the European empires was a conscious strategy to designate the Other in order to justify the civilizing mission of the colonial Self. This, in turn, was supported by the fabrications of scientific racism, as well as the belief that skull size was an indication of intelligence – i.e., inferior intelligence among people of colour, who were designated to play the role of the non-white Other (cf. Jenny Bergenmar’s chapter in the present volume).19 The so-called primitive peoples, to whom the Sámi were also ascribed in the nineteenth century, were considered to have remained at a lower stage of development. Attempts to advance scientific theories of race intensified in the nineteenth century when, among other developments, Anders Retzius invented the cephalic index. Mankind could now be divided into long and short skull types. Retzius’ work was a continuation of the theories of the archaeologist and natural scientist Sven Nilsson, who attempted to ascertain who the first inhabitants of Scandinavia were. Nilsson, who was an influential researcher and professor in Lund and the first to coin the concept of skull form, presented a theory of the gradual development of humankind from its primitive, wild origins via a nomadic lifestyle to the civilized farmer-settler living under organised societal forms.20 Nilsson and Retzius were active at the height of the Romantic era from roughly the 1820s to mid-century. The “ideoscape” of their times was very much about origin, roots, mythology and peoples (Volk).21 According to historians and philosophers, the Volksgeist manifested itself in mythical tales, which, even though they did not offer precise historical data, served as sources for the

19

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Alison Mountz, “The Other”, in Key Concepts in Political Geography, eds. Carolyn Gallaher et al. (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC: Sage, 2009), 332; John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 76–77. Maja Hagerman, Det rena landet: Om konsten att uppfinna sina föräldrar (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2006), 170–71; Lennart Lundmark, “Lappen är ostadig, ombytlig och obekväm …” Svenska statens samepolitik i rasismens tidevarv (Umeå: Norrlands universitetsförlag, 2002), 19. The term “ideoscape” refers to the movement of ideologies and a collection of beliefs, concepts and images with roots in the Enlightenment. Ideoscapes can be linked with the struggle for power and as such, they are political in nature. See Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, Theory Culture Society 7, no. 2–3 (1990): 299–301.

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long-term history of the peoples. Myths played an important role in the creation and consolidation of basic concepts from which the self-image of the nation derived.22 This view of history was introduced in Finland in the nineteenth century, and it influenced Zacharias Topelius in a significant way. This is how he illustrated the issue from the lecturer’s rostrum in 1862: Thus, as we seek out the oldest monuments of our country’s antiquity, we are compelled to turn to tradition exclusively. This again meets us either independently, as in the songs of Kalevala, or it is bound to certain localities: lakes, hills, mountains, ruins, etc., as a large number of as yet collected folk tales, most of which are of later, half pagan, half Christian origin. We begin with the independent tradition, with the Finnish myth of Kalevala.23 As a part of Romantic nationalism and the quest for a national history, epics and myths were highlighted as historical sources in the nineteenth century.24 In general, more room was prepared for emotions, and empathy was considered an important trait for historians. One recurrent notion that emerged in the lectures given by the Swedish professor of history Erik Gustaf Geijer is the fundamental Romantic idea that poetry is the original means of expression and that at least a grain of historical truth has been preserved in the sagas mediated through tradition.25 This appreciation for myths was brought to Finland mainly by Adolf Iwar Arwidsson, who had followed Geijer’s lectures.26 The epic Kalevala and various tales and stories with a connection to

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24 25 26

See Nancy M. Wingfield, “Introduction”, in Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict & Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe, ed. Nancy M. Wingfield (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 3. “Vi nödgas sålunda, när vi uppsöka de äldsta minnesmärkena från vårt lands forntid, uteslutande anlita traditionen. Denna åter möter oss antingen fristående, såsom Kalevalasångerna, eller bunden vid vissa orter: sjöar, kullar, berg, ruiner o.s.v., såsom ett stort antal ännu icke samlade folksägner, de flesta likväl af senare, halft hedniskt, halft kristligt ursprung. Vi börja med den fristående traditionen, med Finska mythen i Kalevala”. All translations are my own. Zacharias Topelius, Föreläsningar i geografi och historia, Första Föreläsningen February 8, 1862, ed. Jens Grandell, ZTS XV (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2017), 6, URN:NBN:fi:sls-6380-1508153226. Anttonen, “Oral Traditions and the Making of the Finnish Nation”, 325–28. Rolf Torstendahl, Källkritik och vetenskapssyn i svensk historisk forskning, 1820–1920 (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1964), 48. Kari Tarkiainen, “Arwidsson, Adolf Ivar”, Biografiskt lexikon för Finland: 2. Ryska tiden, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 710:2 (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland/Stockholm: Atlantis, 2009), http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:sls-4646 -1416928957252.

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localities and places in Finland became a cornerstone of Topelius’ examination of Finnish history prior to the Swedish colonization beginning in the thirteenth century. What these ancient tales conveyed about the people who were purported to be Sámi27 was more often than not laden with negative connotations. In the Finnish epic Kalevala, the people of southern Finland were often at odds with the Kvens and the Sámi living in the North. In his lectures at the university, Topelius spoke about the emergence of different tales about the enigmatic people in the North as the Finns made their way into Finland from the East and South-East. The notions of Hiisi28 and Hiisi’s people found in Kalevala were transferred to the Sámi – at times they were regarded as giants, at times as trolls; sometimes they were described as powerful, and sometimes as miserable and ignorant. Topelius mentions how these images birthed feelings of loathing and fear amongst the Finns.29 This indicates how emotions were present in epic tales to describe and designate the Other as opposed to Us. After the fighting between Finns, Kvens and Sámi had subsided, the earlier perceptions lived on in popular belief, thus reinforcing the division between the Finns and the Sámi. They were made “bodies out of place”, to use Sara Ahmed’s term.30 In Kalevala, the northern part of Finland was described as Pimentola, or the land of darkness. According to Topelius, symbolism derived from nature gave rise to the image of Lapland as the land of a hostile people; “it was a people of the midnight, and that alone was reason to view it with suspicion – for you were always accustomed to regarding the North as the home of darkness, of horror, of evil, and of torment”.31 Still today, the Ostrobothnian considers his neighbour in the North as the true sorcerer, Topelius concluded. This exemplifies how Lapland and Sámi, who always lived on the margins of Finnishness, were understood in folklore as the cultural Other. In addition to old beliefs about the Sámi, newer ones, originating from the medieval Catholic era and associated with Catholic mysticism as well as with monks, nuns “and all kinds 27 28

29 30 31

In contemporary literature the word lap/laps was commonly used, even though the Sámi referred to themselves as Sámi. Hiisi is one of the names with many meanings in Kalevala and can amongst other things refer to an evil being or a place. In a Christian context, Hiisi has been given the meaning “devil”. Topelius, Föreläsningar i geografi och historia, May 14, 1862, 79. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2. The original reads: “det var ett midnattens folk, och det var redan ett skäl att göra det misstänkt – ty i norr var man alltid van att tänka sig mörkrets, fasornas, ondskans och plågornas hemvist”. Topelius, Föreläsningar i geografi och historia, October 25, 1862, 41.

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of dark horrifying images” were intertwined. Topelius summed up this pecking order of peoples in a telling sentence: “In short, each people places itself in the sun and imagines the more northern peoples as having succumbed to the shadows of midnight”.32 As well as cultural othering, one might also speak of a spatial othering widening the divide between the Finnish “Us” and the Sámi “Them”. In his inaugural lecture, Topelius summed up by saying that the land of the Sámi is not Finland; it is Lapland.33 Sven Nilsson also looked for support in folk tales to prove his large-scale theory. He wanted to establish evidence that the dwarves and the manikins of the sagas were equivalent to the Sámi. To do this, he drew up nine parallels between them. He claimed: “The Laps are small and ugly with wide mouths and short legs. It is precisely thus that dwarves and manikins are portrayed in the ancient tales”. And furthermore: “The Laps are cowards; they are not good soldiers. The ancient dwarfs are often portrayed as extremely cowardly”. He continued in the same vein for another seven “parallels” referencing internal as well as external characteristics of the Sámi to make emotions stick more effectively, to use Ahmed’s terminology. The use of physical attributes was a common, racist method for supporting white-skin superiority.34 The arguments put forth by Topelius and Nilsson support the relationship between nationalistic interest in folk tales and the aim to more firmly substantiate a negative image of the Sámi. It was in this context that the Swedish professor Anders Retzius came into the picture to give Nilsson’s theories a more solid scientific basis. Based on his studies, he concluded that it was possible to divide the human races into two main categories: long-headed and short-headed. The shape of the head could be determined with the help of a cephalic index, which in all its mathematical simplicity became a popular element in the racial discourse for a long time to come. The fact that Retzius’ theory rested on the unproven assumption that a

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Topelius, Föreläsningar i geografi och historia, October 25, 1862, 41. Zacharias Topelius, “Om Finlands geografiska läge”, in Academica, eds. Katarina Pihlflyckt and Jens Grandell, ZTS XVI (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2020), 16, URN:NBN:fi:sls-7801-1586150595. Lundmark, “Lappen är ostadig, ombytlig och obekväm …”, 20; Shirley Better, Insitutional Racism: A Primer on Theory and Strategies for Social Change (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2008), 5; Ripenberg, Historiens vita fläckar, 28. “Lapparna äro små och fula med bred mun och korta ben. Precist sådana framställs dvergar och pyslingar i fornsagan”. “Lapparna äro fega; de duga ej till soldater. Fornsagans dvergar framställas som ytterst fega”. Sven Nilsson, Skandinaviska Nordens ur-invånare (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1866), 142.

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similar skull shape was a racial feature did not appear to be an obstacle to the advancement of craniology.35 Speaking of the Sámi, Anders Retzius asserted that they differed not only from Mongols and Eskimos, but also from Finns. The Finns originated from the Caucasus, while the Sámi origin was to be found in the Nordic region.36 He came to this conclusion in 1842 when he examined six skulls belonging to Finns, all skulls that were indeed short but not as short as those of the Sámi and the Slavs. According to Retzius, the richness of the Finnish language, the beauty of the Finnish folk tales and the brave and enduring character of the people spoke of powerful ancestors.37 In other words, the avant-garde of modern research had now established that the Finns and the Sámi were different people. This argument was further fortified by the fabrication of common positive perceptions of Finns and corresponding negative ones of the Sámi.

3

The Finns – Mongolians or Caucasians (or Something in Between)?

The intellectual undertaking to write national history marks a significant paradox, as it was the result of immense international exchanges.38 As part of this pursuit of history, the question of the Finnish people’s lineage was raised in the 1830s and 1840s. It was now possible, on a scientific basis, for the Finns to distance themselves from their nomadic neighbours in the North. The research rested on very feeble scientific grounds and had a strong emotional side to it. In Finland, the ethnologist, Professor Matthias Alexander Castrén (1813–1852) and his research defined the discussion on origins. His main interests were the Finno-Ugric peoples and the linguistics and ethnography of the FinnoUgric and Samoyedic peoples. His research was based on extensive research expeditions in Lapland, Russian Karelia and Siberia. The foremost of these expeditions was conducted in Siberia in 1845–1849. Castrén’s published results came to be of great importance to the Finns’ perception of their own place in history and in the contemporary world. Castrén’s published lecture “Hvar låg

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As late as in 1947 the Sámi are referred to as short sculled in a handbook published by the Swedish Tourist Association (Svenska Turistföreningen). Lundmark, “Lappen är ostadig, ombytlig och obekväm …”, 22. Lundmark, “Lappen är ostadig, ombytlig och obekväm …”, 23. Allan Tiitta, Harmaakiven maa: Zacharias Topelius ja Suomen maantiede (Helsinki: Suomen Tiedeseura, 1994), 239. Tiitta, Harmaakiven maa, 239; Thiesse, “National Identities”, 122.

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det finska folkets vagga?” (“Where Lay the Cradle of the Finnish People?”)39 served as a point of departure for Topelius’ view of how the Finns had migrated from Asia to the shores of the Baltic Sea. The discussion on the human races ran parallel to nation building. This discussion was largely based on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s (1752–1840) racial classification from 1775. In his research, Blumenbach divided humankind into five races based on the study of skulls. The races in question were the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the Malay, the Negro and the American. In the racial hierarchy, the Caucasian race ranked highest, while the Mongolian race came in at a weak second place. Following this reasoning, the Mongolian race was regarded as a lower-ranking race in comparison to the European Caucasians.40 The Caucasian race got its name from its supposed origin in the Caucasus, and Blumenbach argued that it included all Europeans (except for Lapps and Finns), and in part West Asians and North Africans. The Mongolian race (or the yellow race) comprised the hyperboreic or polar race which, according to Blumenbach, also included Finns and Lapps. Arthur de Gobineau had likewise ascribed the Finns to the Slavic race, in every aspect an opposite of the Germanic race. However, in the work Des Races ou Eléments d’Ethnographie (1845), the Belgian naturalist Jean Baptiste Julien d’Omalius d’Halloy attributed the Finns to the Scythian sub-branch of the white race.41 For the Finnish nation builders, like Zacharias Topelius, it was important to try to pinpoint the race to which the Finns actually belonged. In consequence, Topelius spent a considerable amount of time on the subject in his university lectures. Topelius’ position on the matter changed over time as the issue became ever more complicated with a steady stream of new research being published. For the Finnish nation builders, however, the different ethnic groups within the country presented them with a possibility to further the nationalist project. Were the Finns and the Sámi related? The fact that their languages were related was relatively clear, but was there a racial connection? And how was

39 40 41

M.A. Castrén, “Hvar låg det finska folkets vagga?” Litterära soiréer i Helsingfors under hösten 1849, andra soiréen (Helsingfors: Finska Litteratursällskapet, 1849). Aira Kemiläinen, Suomalaiset, outo Pohjolan kansa: Rotuteoriat ja kansallinen identiteetti, Historiallisia Tutkimuksia 177 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1994), 109. Jean Baptiste Julien d’Omalius d’Halloy, Encyclopédie populaire: Des races humaines ou élémentes d’ethnographie (Bruxelles, 1845), 44; Pekka Isaksson and Jouko Jokisalo, Kallonmittaajia ja skinejä: rasismin aatehistoriaa (Helsinki: Like, Suomen rauhanpuolustajat, 2005), 64.

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Figure 4.2 Zacharias Topelius by his writing desk Courtesy of The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS)

one to view a possible relationship? The question was critical, as the international research community seemed to agree that the Sámi belonged to the inferior Mongolian race. In Topelius’ first major work on the Finnish people, geography and history, Finland Presented in Drawings, he referred to the German zoologist and palaeontologist Andreas Wagner in whose work Geschichte der Urwelt (1845) a theory is put forward that there are various peoples who are intermediate links between the different races. One of these peoples was the Finns. According to Topelius, this explained how Finns and Sámi, who spoke related languages, could be of partially different races. Topelius also referred to “later naturalists” who had classified the Finns as a Caucasian race.42 In many respects, this was a theory that sat well with the creation of a Finnish identity; the Finns were not wholly Mongols, but not wholly Caucasian either. Instead,

42

Zacharias Topelius, Finland framställdt i teckningar, eds. Jens Grandell and Rainer Knapas, Zacharias Topelius Skrifter XII, SSLS 747 (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2011), 15.

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they were a link between these races, just as the country was a link between East and West. The general idea was that racial features were constant only when people lived under the same climatic conditions and shared the same degree of culture. As they began to move and adopt different lifestyles, racial characteristics changed.43 The Finns and the Sámi had initially belonged to the same race, but subsequent migrations and adopted ways of life had slowly transformed the Finns, and they began to resemble the Caucasian race. Topelius explained: With these facts, and since a close kinship between these peoples as well as between Lapps and Finns cannot be denied, in the disputed question regarding which race the Finns belong to, one comes to the result, that they, originally of Mongolian descent, after their permanent settlement and under the unified influence of a European way of life and European culture, have transformed to the Caucasian race, in whose physical and intelligent characteristics they now without a doubt belong.44 Zacharias Topelius was therefore not prepared to swallow Blumenbach’s theory that there would have been a polar race to which both the Sámi and Finns belonged. Instead, he looked for support in the concept that races are not constant, but are instead shaped by climate and culture. In addition, the Finns had mingled with Western elements for so long that the race could not be considered purely Mongolian. In a lecture given in the autumn of 1871, Topelius considered the arguments for his position on the question of race so compelling that no further consideration was necessary.45 This suggests that he no longer considered the question of race as relevant as it had been during the earlier days of Finnish identity construction. It had become apparent that the

43 44

45

Topelius, Föreläsningar i geografi och historia, October 11, 1862, 8. “Med dessa fakta, och då en nära slägtskap i öfrigt mellan dessa folk samt Lapparne och finnarne ej kan förnekas, kommer man i den omtvistade frågan, hken race finnarne egentl. tillhöra, till det resultat, att de, ursprungligen af mongolisk härkomst, efter sin nedsättning på fasta boningsplatser samt under den förenade inverkan af europeiskt lefnadssätt och europeisk bildning, öfvergått till den kaukasiska racen, i hvars fysiska och intelligenta företräden de numera icke låta disputera sin delaktighet”. Topelius, Föreläsningar i geografi och historia, October 11, 1862, 8. In addition Anders Warelius stated in his influential article “Bidrag till Finlands kännedom i ethnographiskt hänseende” that the difference between Finns and Sámi had been less evident in the past. Anders Warelius, “Bidrag till Finlands kännedom i ethnographiskt hänseende”, Suomi, Tidskrift i fosterländska ämnen 7 (1848): 54. Topelius, Föreläsningar i geografi och historia, December 5, 1871, 264.

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Sámi could be un-bodied from the Finnish body through other means than racial theories.

4

Loss of Culture as a Precondition for Survival

“His future is bleak, because the winter and the snowstorm will never ease their grip, the ice of the Pole will never melt, and only through the transition to a stationary way of life can the Lap save for himself the hope of civilization and a milder fate”.46 In Finland Presented in Drawings, Topelius voiced a cultural viewpoint that had been prevalent since at least the Middle Ages, when states began to emerge based on the economic principle of permanent settler peasants producing a surplus. It was easier for states to identify with such people than with nomadic hunter-gatherers. The structured agrarian culture was based on the intention that a stationary population and stable institutions would guarantee that the tax targets set by the state were met. It is thus easy to see that the state’s legal thinking was better adapted to the requirements of an agrarian society based on order and regulation.47 The permanent resident farmer was important not only for taxation purposes but also for the nation building of the nineteenth century – as he farmed the land and extracted food from it, he could be taught to invest in it emotionally. In Topelius’ organic view of history, the people and the land thus formed an indivisible whole – the people had an impact on the land and vice versa.48 The reasons for highlighting the Sámi as the non-white Other in this context were political and point at how the builders of the nation reinforced the portrayal of their own image as superior. The construction of superiority is the overriding theme of the majority view of the Sámi. In the same way that nationalism worked everywhere in the Western world, the Finnish nation state was constructed with the help of simplifications and the creation of opposites.

46

47

48

“Hans framtid är dyster, ty vintern och snöstormen släppa icke sitt tag, polens isar tina aldrig, och blott genom öfvergången till ett stationärt lefnadssätt kan Lappen rädda åt sig hoppet om en civilisation och ett mildare öde”. Topelius, Finland framställdt i teckningar, 25. Salvesen, “Sami Æednan: Four states – One nation?” 113. See also Kylli, Kirkon ja saamelaisten kohtaaminen Utsjoella ja Inarissa 1742–1886, 425–26; Urs Bitterli, Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-European Cultures, 1492–1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 7–8. For a discussion on this topic see Jens Grandell’s introduction to the digital edition of Topelius’ university lectures. URN:NBN:fi:sls-6282-1508152246.

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As part of this, the myth of a nationally unified Finland came to be an increasingly elemental part of the ideoscape as Fennomania gained ground in the mid-nineteenth century. In the same way intellectuals started to regard Jews and Romanies as foreign elements incompatible with the national ideal, they also began to write out the Sámi from the future of Finland. The creation of a group identity required the designation of the Other, who stood outside the ethnic or national group.49 As regards the so-called language issue, which was one of the defining debates in Finland during the second half of the nineteenth century, Topelius took an ambivalent view. The Finnish speakers and the Swedish speakers both had a natural place in Finland, and to forcefully rid the nation of the latter language would be to abolish the cultural and historical heritage on which the state of Finland stood and fell.50 According to Topelius, inclusion in the Finnish people did not depend on which language one spoke or where one came from. He voiced his patriotic and relatively open definition of who was Finnish in a lecture in 1871: We shall now seek to summarize the common essential features which can be recognized in the Finnish people in its entirety – this people, which independently of origin and language, is the work of historical tradition. To this Finnish people we count all those who live and dwell within the borders of Finland, with the exception of the Lapps, and all those who with their hearts or their interests have grown together with our country’s surrounding nature, our country’s political and social conditions – or all those, with one word, to whom Finland is a fatherland in the true sense of the word.51 49

50 51

Panu Pulma, ed., De finska romernas historia från svenska tiden till 2000-talet (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2015), 82; Gary B. Cohen, “Preface”, in Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict & Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe, vii. See also Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, “Introduction”. For more about minorities in a Finnish nineteenth-century context, see Pulma, ed., De finska romernas historia från svenska tiden till 2000-talet; Toivo Nygård, Erilaisten historia: Marginaaliryhmät Suomessa 1800-luvulla ja 1900-luvun alussa (Jyväskylä: Atena Kustannus, 1998). See Topelius, Finland framställdt i teckningar, 60–61. “Vi skola nu söka att sammanfatta de gemensama grunddrag, som kunna igenkännas hos det finska folket i sin totalitet, – detta folk, som oberoende af härkomst och språk, är ett verk af den historiska traditionen. Till detta finska folk räkna vi alla dem, som bo och bygga inom Finlands gränser, med undantag af Lapparne, och som invuxit med sitt hjerta eller sina intressen i vårt lands natur, vårt lands politiska och sociala förhållanden, – alla dem m. e. o., för hka Finland är ett fädernesland i ordets sanna betydelse”. Topelius, Föreläsningar i geografi och historia, December 5, 1871, 264.

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Almost anyone could claim to be part of the Finnish people, but it required that certain requirements be met – criteria that were not met by the Sámi, nor by the Jews or the Romanies.52 At the same time, it needs to be stressed that the Sámi themselves have never identified with the majority population of the states in which they have lived.53 Even though Topelius did not consider the Sámi as belonging to the Finnish people, he had reason to elaborate on the subject. The Sámi people served primarily as a contrast to the modern, progressive Finnish people. In a way, they were brought into the national narrative to help polish the shield of the Finnish people. In Finland, on its way to becoming a modern society, the Sámi were presented with two options: either give up their way of life and adapt to the demands of the modern nation state or, alternatively, fade away into the snowy mountain landscape of Lapland. For the Sámi culture, this was a lose-lose situation. In the statistical work, Storfurstendömet Finlands statistik (Statistics of The Grand Duchy of Finland, 1842) the professor of history Gabriel Rein demonstrated with numbers that the gradual integration of the Sámi people with the Finnish people had already began. Zacharias Topelius’ portrayals of the Sámi are to some extent ambivalent, which is a common trait for his time. Most often, he writes in a tone that, at least according to today’s understanding, appears highly negative, but there are also some mitigating aspects to be considered. Referring to M.A. Castrén, who had first hand experience of the inhabitants of Lapland based on his research expeditions, Topelius brought forth the more noble sides of the primitive peoples, resulting in a more ambivalent view of the Sámi. These included the popular eighteenth-century notion of the noble savage; according to Linnaeus, the happy “Lap” leads a life of contentment and innocence.54 In Finland Presented in Drawings, Topelius cites the following passage from Castrén’s article “Resa till Lappland, Norra Ryssland och Sibirien: Från November 1841 till Mars 1844” (“A Journey to Lapland, Northern Russia and Siberia: From November 1841 to March 1844): But beneath this grim surface, there is often a loving mind concealed, and Castrén met a man of this people, who for thirty years never exchanged

52 53 54

For a discussion on Topelius view of the Jews, see Nils Erik Forsgård, I det femte inseglets tecken (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 1998). Salvesen, “Sami Æednan: Four states – One nation?” 106. Ripenberg, Historiens vita fläckar, 177.

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an evil word with his wife, never addressed her other than with the loving word “loddadsham” (lintuiseni, my little bird).55 For Topelius, the question of the Sámi was primarily a matter of history and nation. He was influenced by Hegel in his philosophy of history, which is not least apparent in Topelius’ state-centred view of history. For Hegel, the state was the ultimate goal of historical development, and in his lecture in 1843, Topelius established that, “until 1809 we did not even possess the destination and end goal of history within itself, which is the state”.56 The groundwork for the history of the marginalization of the Sámi in the nineteenth century are, according to Pekka Isaksson, to be found in the question posed by Topelius as to whether the Finnish people have a history.57 The Sámi were perceived as part of neither the present nor the past. Topelius believed that the history of Finland before 1809 was cultural history – Finland’s Western civilization originated from this time, and that was when the different tribes had grown together to form the Finnish people.58 In the nineteenth century, much academic effort was put into separating the Sámi from the Finns on a national basis. While the latter had given up their nomadic lifestyle a long time ago, the Sámi were “still” engaged in reindeer husbandry, fishing and hunting, or in other words “primitive industries”. Such an archaic lifestyle did not fit into the Topelian image59 of the Finnish people as the accomplishers of their cultural mission to stand as the northernmost outpost of Western civilization. In this manner, the Sámi were depicted as the Other through a false dichotomy between “weak natives” and “strong colonialists”. Following this, the Other could easily be described as ugly, primitive, dirty, gloomy and strange (cf. Jenny Bergenmar’s chapter in the present volume).

55

56

57 58 59

“Men under denna bistra yta döljer sig ofta ett kärleksfullt sinne och Castrén träffade en man af detta folk, som i hela trettio åren aldrig vexlat ett ondt ord med sin hustru, aldrig tilltalat henne annorlunda, än med det vackra ordet “loddadsham” (lintuiseni, min lilla fågel)”. Topelius, Finland framställdt i teckningar, 23–24. Topelius retells this story in Boken om Vårt Land (1875) – an expression for his method of re-using specific themes in different genres. G.W.F. Hegel, Förnuftet i historien, trans. O. Möller (Lund: Daidalos, 1987), 11; Zacharias Topelius, “Äger Finska Folket en Historie?” Joukahainen, Ströskrift utgifven af Österbottniska Afdelningen, Andra Häftet (1845), 195. Pekka Isaksson, “Lainakieliset lappalaiset: Saamelaiset kansakunnan rakentamisen marginaalissa”, Kaltio 52, no. 6 (1996): XX. Isaksson, “Lainakieliset lappalaiset”, XX. The term Topelian refers to the common and enduring image of Finland birthed by Zacharias Topelius in his writings.

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A common trait for all representations of the Other is that they depict the Other as an opposite to the Self, which meant exclusion and hierarchizing.60 Or, as Topelius puts it in one of his lectures, summing up all the traits of contemporary racism and stressing Sámi weakness as opposed to Finnish strength: Still today the Lapps are far inferior to Finns […]. Their lower degree of intelligence is already expressed in their external physical character and in the shape of the skull, which is closer to the Mongolian type and leaves less room for the brain to develop. The intellectual abilities of the Lapps can develop to a certain degree of cunningness; but their weakness is revealed in their inability to maintain tradition. […] Without a share in the highest culture of their tribe, which is only attained by its most powerful branches, the Laps have probably never been farmers, not even from the beginning engaged in animal husbandry, but lived in the South on fruits, hunting and fishing, in the North exclusively on the latter, until they gradually became, in the beginning of our era, nomads with herds of reindeer.61 The same tendency to designate the Sámi as the Other also recurs in Topelius’ more popularly held works from the latter part of the nineteenth century. In The Book of Our Country, which was used as a reader in the schools of Finland well into the twentieth century, Topelius addresses the Sámi when he

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Isaksson, “Lainakieliset lappalaiset”, XX; Kemiläinen, Suomalaiset, outo Pohjolan kansa, 138; Isaksson and Jokisalo, Kallonmittaajia ja skinejä, 28, 55. The theme of the Sámi as living in dirt seems to have been a common way of describing their way of life. See letter, Jakob Fredrik Blank to Z. Topelius, September 6, 1838 in Zacharias Topelius, Korrespondens med förlag och översättare, ed. Carola Herberts, ZTS XX:1 (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2015), URN:NBN:fi:sls5817-1432660576280; Zacharias Topelius, Naturens Bok och Boken om Vårt Land, ed. Magnus Nylund, ZTS XVII (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2017), URN:NBN:fi:sls-6599-1508156379. “Lapparne äro ännu i dag betydligt underlägsne Finnarne […]. Lapparnes lägre grad af intelligens uttrycker sig redan i deras yttre kroppsbildning och i hufvudskålens form, som mera närmar sig den mongoliska urtypen och lemnar ett mindre utrymme för hjernans utveckling. Förståndsförmögenheterna kunna hos Lappen, utbildas till en viss grad af slughet; men deras svaghet visar sig just i oförmågan att fasthålla en tradition. […] Utan andel i sin stams högsta kultur, som tillföll endast dess kraftigaste folkgrenar, hafva Lapparne sannolikt aldrig varit åkerbrukare, icke ens från början idkat boskapsskötsel, utan lefvat i södern af frukter, jagt och fiske, i norden uteslutande af de sistnämnda, tilldess att de efterhand, och i början af vår tideräkning, blifvit nomader med renhjordar”. Topelius, Föreläsningar i geografi och historia, April 12, 1862, 60–61.

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writes about how the different tribes of Finland grew together into the Finnish people. He points out that the Sámi have remained separate from the Finnish people because of their remote place of residence. With reference to Castrén’s Reseminnen från åren 1838–1844 (Travel Memories from the Years 1838–1844) he puts forth a description of the Sámi in which, among other things, he refers to the dirt, their glumness and their slow temperament. The underlying tone is one of disgust and contempt. However, at the same time, Topelius mentions courtesy, hospitality, godliness and a moral way of life (provided that alcohol is kept away). “He considers himself happy and rich; he does not want to change his snowy mountains into a paradise on earth”, Topelius wrote, as he concluded his description of the Sámi in The Book of Our Country.62 Here the audience is different from that of the lecture hall and therefore the tone is more naïve and less categorical. However, the essence is the same; in the North lives a wild, weak and vanishing people of a lower cultural level than the progressive agrarian Finns. It is a depiction of modernism contra archaism, and when the targeted readers are schoolchildren, the message is highly likely to stick. As late as in 1893, Topelius wrote about the Sámi in one of his last works, Finland i 19de seklet (English translation Finland in the Nineteenth century, 1895). Here he states that the Sámi are probably not a Finnish-Ugric people, as he had claimed in the university lectures, but that they have merely adopted a Finnish-Ugric language. This view, which became more common towards the end of the nineteenth century, meant that the hierarchy between the Finns and the Sámi was further consolidated.63 The image of the Sámi from Finland Presented in Drawings is unchanged in this work published 40 years later. Topelius talks about how the Sámi regard kinship with the Finns an honour, while the Finn does not want to be recognized together with the Sámi. In the richly illustrated Finland in the Nineteenth century, which was an attempt to summarize the development of nineteenth-century Finland, Topelius’ view of the Sámi is condensed into a categorical disavowal: The Lapp is not a half-brother, he is hardly a cousin to the Finn. He is short-grown, slender, vigilant, dark-haired, brown-eyed, at times indifferently passive, at times fierce, lively and curious as a child, soft-hearted, naïve, easily deceived and easily frightened, a natural child who, both on

62 63

“Han anser sig lycklig och rik; han ville ej byta sina fjällar mot ett paradis på jorden”. Zacharias Topelius, Boken om Vårt Land (Helsingfors: Edlunds, 1875), 277–78, 120–22. Isaksson, “Lainakieliset lappalaiset”, XX.

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the inside and the outside, lacks the basic features and the depth of the Finnish type.64 The sentence encompasses all the trademarks of racism, combining internal and external attributes to underline white superiority and justify the forthcoming loss of the Sámi.65 The dominant theme in the depictions of the Sámi is that of Finnish superiority and Sámi inferiority, weakness being one of the main adjectives associated with the Sámi people in the nineteenth century. Even the reindeer of the Sámi were weaker than the horse of the Finns, Topelius maintained. At the same time as the Sámi are portrayed in a negative light, the feeling of superiority is enhanced amongst the Finns. Another important feature is the view of the Sámi as a people without a past and without a future. They were perceived as a “poor and vanishing remnant of a once vital people”. This also meant that they could not constitute a nation for themselves.66 One of the key elements associated with the Sámi was that of loss. They were out of touch with modernity and the modern way of life, and therefore they were destined to vanish from history altogether. This was a fabricated loss of future. Although the discourse on people and race of the nineteenth century was apt to create distance between us and them, not everyone was prepared to dismiss the Sámi as an inferior people. Those who had actually visited Lapland were more likely to speak favourably about the Sámi. The Swedish missionary and pastor Petrus Læstadius (1802–1841) and the Finnish priest Jacob Fellman are cases in point.67 It was in the texts of these clergymen that the Other was given a voice. When viewed from this perspective, a different perceptive arises;

64

65 66 67

“Lappen är icke en halfbroder, han är knapt en kusin till finnen. Han är kortvuxen, spenslig, vig, mörkhårig, brunögd, än likgiltigt passiv, än hetsig, liflig och nyfiken som ett barn, vekhjärtad, naiv, lätt bedragen och lätt skrämd, ett naturbarn, som både i yttre och inre saknar den finska typens grunddrag och djup”. Zacharias Topelius, Finland i 19de seklet, ed. Katarina Pihlflyckt, ZTS XIV (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2019), 49, 57, URN:NBN:fi:sls-9000-1550473610. See Better, Institutional Racism, 5–7. Ibid. Also see Thiesse’s identity checklist. Thiesse, “National Identities: A Transnational Paradigm”. Petrus Læstadius emphasized that the lower level of culture of the Sami was due to them having been forced into an inhospitable environment, which had forced them into a ceaseless struggle for survival. They were in no way less inclined to culture than their Finnish ancestors were. Petrus Læstadius, Fortsättning af Journalen öfver missionsresor i Lappmarken innefattande åren 1828–1832 (Stockholm: Henr. Gust. Nordstöm, 1833), 477–81.

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Figure 4.3

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Lapland romanticised Illustration by Lennart Forstén in Zacharias Topelius, Finland Presented in Drawings (1845–1852). Courtesy of The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS)

instead of seeing the Sámi as a contrast to the Finns, the focus is on the Sámi as a unique people influenced negatively by Southern influences.68

5

Concluding Remarks

“Every people call themselves human beings in their old sagas; but the surrounding peoples appear either as dwarfs or giants in their traditions”.69 This is how Topelius summed up the attitudes of the ancient peoples towards their neighbours. In the nineteenth century, it was no longer a question of calling other people dwarfs or giants, but despite this, remnants of the same attitude still existed. By means of archaeological surveys and the cephalic index, or 68 69

For more on this see Grandell, “Den Andre på egen mark”. “Hvarje folk kallar i sina gamla sagor sig sjelfva för menniskor; men de omgifvande folken framstå i deras traditioner antingen som dvergar eller jättar”. Topelius, Föreläsningar i geografi och historia, April 23, 1862, 69.

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scientific racism in short, the dwarves and the giants of ancient times were transformed into inferior archaic nomads living on the verge of extinction. For Zacharias Topelius, the concept of the people became a cornerstone of his historical and geographical image of Finland. The history of Finland was manifested in the Finnish people and since the country did not have a political history, it was essential to trace the development of the national consciousness of the people. In Topelian Finland, a Finnish people lived, who spoke Finnish and Swedish and needed to be taught to love the fatherland. The “people” was thus conceptualised through manipulating emotions. Additionally there were some other “visiting” peoples, who had not melted into the Finnish people, according to Topelius: Russians, Germans and Romanies.70 And then there were the Sámi, whom the nation builders consciously designated as the Other in their own country. Their way of life did not fit in with the modern state and its demands on an easily taxable population. They were the non-white savages in contrast to white superiority in the Nordic region. The reasons for discriminating against the Sámi were manifold. The roots of a discriminatory thought pattern lay far back in time, and thus there was an ideological legacy ripe for further development. During the nineteenth century, racial theories gained currency and a racial hierarchy was scientifically justified. For the historian and writer Topelius, who was one of the foremost creators of the image of the Finnish people, contemporary scientific theories regarding race became an inevitable source with respect to the Finnish people and their place amongst the nations of the world. Scientific racism was supplemented with emotionally charged depictions of the Sámi combining internal as well as external features. As the race theories left a door open for the possibility of the Finns and the Sámi belonging to the same race, it was not possible to rely exclusively on science for help in un-bodying the Sámi from the Finnish body. This is why Topelius used a battery of negatively charged adjectives to create distance between the Finns and the Sámi. The groundwork for these emotions was found in the folk tales, paramount for nineteenth-century understandings of history. The overriding theme in this strategy was that of depicting Finnish superiority and Sámi inferiority. Finnish nation building used the construction of the Other to highlight the progressivism of Finnish society and its connections to the Western cultural sphere. According to Topelius, there was a place for the Sámi in the future of Finland, but it required the abandonment of Sámi culture and a melting of the Sámi people into the Finnish people.

70

Topelius, Finland framställdt i teckningar, 61.

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Topelius’ view of the Sámi lived on in the works of his later colleagues Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen and Väinö Wallin. Over time, the negative image became more categorical and had repercussions and political implications in the young, independent Finland. Through his popular works and through his academic production as professor of history, Topelius had helped consolidate the image of the Sámi as the Other or the “body out of place” in Finland. At the same time, Topelius did not deny that there could be a future for the Sámi as well, but he held that it would require that they begin to live like the majority population. Following this line of thought, the Sámi possessed a possible future but paradoxically it would have meant the perishing of the Sámi as a distinct people and culture.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. “Collective Feelings: Or The Impressions Left by Others”. Theory, Culture Society 21, no. 2 (2004): 25–42. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Aikio, Samuli. “1800-talet som brytningsperiod i samernas historia”. In Samesymposium, edited by Marjut Aikio and Kaisa Korpijaakko, 1–8. Rovaniemi: Lapplands universitet, 1991. Anttonen, Pertti. “Oral Traditions and the Making of the Finnish Nation”. In Folklore and Nationalism in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin, 325–50. Leiden & Boston: Brill 2012. Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory Culture Society 7, no. 2–3 (1990): 295–310. Better, Shirley. Insitutional Racism: A Primer on Theory and Strategies for Social Change. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2008. Bitterli, Urs. Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-European Cultures, 1492–1800. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Castrén, M.A. “Hvar låg det finska folkets vagga?” Litterära soiréer i Helsingfors under hösten 1849, andra soiréen. Helsingfors: Finska Litteratursällskapet, 1849. Coakley, John. “Mobilizing the past: Nationalist images of history”. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 10, no. 4 (2004): 531–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537110490900340. Cohen, Gary B. “Preface”. Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict & Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe. New York: Berghahn, 2003. Forsgård, Nils Erik. I det femte inseglets tecken. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 1998.

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Grandell, Jens. “Den Andre på egen mark: Zacharias Topelius, Finlands folk och samerna”. In Författaren Topelius – med historien mot strömmen, edited by Pia Forssell and Carola Herberts, 65–86. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2018. Hagerman, Maja. Det rena landet: Om konsten att uppfinna sina föräldrar. Stockholm: Norstedts, 2006. Hegel, G.W.F. Förnuftet i historien, övers. O. Möller. Lund: Daidalos, 1987. Isaksson, Pekka and Jouko Jokisalo. Kallonmittaajia ja skinejä: rasismin aatehistoriaa. Helsinki: Like, Suomen rauhanpuolustajat, 2005. Isaksson, Pekka. “Lainakieliset lappalaiset: Saamelaiset kansakunnan rakentamisen marginaalissa”. Kaltio 52, no. 6 (1996): 162–65. Kemiläinen, Aira. Suomalaiset, outo Pohjolan kansa: Rotuteoriat ja kansallinen identiteetti. Historiallisia Tutkimuksia 177, Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1994. Korpijaakko-Labba, Kaisa. Saamelaisten oikeusasemasta Suomessa – kehityksen pääpiirteet Ruotsin vallan lopulta itsenäisyyden ajan alkuuun. Kautokeino: Sámi instituhtta, 2000. Kylli, Ritva. Kirkon ja saamelaisten kohtaaminen Utsjoella ja Inarissa 1742–1886. Rovaniemi: Pohjois-Suomen historiallinen yhdistys, 2005. Læstadius, Petrus. Fortsättning af Journalen öfver missions-resor i Lappmarken innefattande åren 1828–1832. Stockholm: Henr. Gust. Nordstöm, 1833. Lehtola, Veli-Pekka. Saamelaiset suomalaiset kohtaamisia 1896–1953. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2012. Lundmark, Lennart. “Lappen är ostadig, ombytlig och obekväm …” Svenska statens samepolitik i rasismens tidevarv. Umeå: Norrlands universitetsförlag, 2002. Mountz, Alison. “The Other”. In Key Concepts in Political Geography, edited by Carolyn Gallaher et al., 328–38. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC: Sage, 2009. Nilsson, Sven. Skandinaviska Nordens ur-invånare. Stockholm: Norstedts, 1866. Nygård, Toivo. Erilaisten historia: Marginaaliryhmät Suomessa 1800-luvulla ja 1900luvun alussa. Jyväskylä: Atena Kustannus, 1998. d’Omalius d’Halloy, Jean Baptiste Julien. Encyclopédie populaire: Des races humaines ou élémentes d’ethnographie. Bruxelles, 1845. Pulma, Panu, ed. De finska romernas historia från svenska tiden till 2000-talet. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2015. Rein, Gabriel. Storfurstendömet Finlands statistik. Stockholm, 1842. Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Ripenberg, Maria. Historiens vita fläckar: Om rasismens rötter i Sverige. Stockholm: Appell förlag, 2019.

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Salvesen, Helge. “Sami Æednan: Four states – One nation? Nordic minority policy and the history of the Sami”. In Ethnicity and Nation Building in the Nordic World, edited by Sven Tägil, 106–44. London: Hurst, 1995. Tarkiainen, Kari. “Arwidsson, Adolf Ivar”. Biografiskt lexikon för Finland. 2: Ryska tiden. Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 710:2, Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland/Stockholm: Atlantis, 2009, http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi: sls-4646-1416928957252. Thiesse, Ann-Marie. “National Identities: A Transnational Paradigm”. In Revisiting Nationalism Theories and Processes, edited by Alain Dieckhoff and Christophe Jaffrelot, 122–43. London: Hurst 2005. Tiitta, Allan. Harmaakiven maa: Zacharias Topelius ja Suomen maantiede. Helsinki: Suomen Tiedeseura, 1994. Topelius, Zacharias. Boken om Vårt Land, Helsingfors: Edlunds, 1875. Topelius, Zacharias. “Äger Finska Folket en Historie?” Joukahainen, Ströskrift utgifven af Österbottniska Afdelningen, Andra Häftet, (1845). Topelius, Zacharias. Finland framställdt i teckningar, edited by Jens Grandell and Rainer Knapas, Zacharias Topelius Skrifter XII, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 747, Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2011, URN:NBN:fi:sls-3975-1403530137050. Topelius, Zacharias. Korrespondens med förlag och översättare, edited by Carola Herberts, Zacharias Topelius Skrifter XX:1, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 835:1, Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2015, URN:NBN:fi:sls-5817-1432660576280. Topelius, Zacharias. Naturens Bok och Boken om Vårt Land, edited by Magnus Nylund, Zacharias Topelius Skrifter XVII, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 816, Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2017, URN:NBN:fi:sls-6597-1508156359. Topelius, Zacharias. Föreläsningar i geografi och historia, edited by Jens Grandell, Zacharias Topelius Skrifter XV, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 843, Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2017, 2020, URN:NBN:fi:sls-6283-1508152256. Topelius, Zacharias. Finland i 19de seklet, edited by Katarina Pihlflyckt, Zacharias Topelius Skrifter XIV, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 837, Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2019, URN:NBN:fi:sls-90001550473610. Topelius, Zacharias. “Om Finlands geografiska läge”. In Academica, edited by Katarina Pihlflyckt and Jens Grandell, Zacharias Topelius Skrifter XVI, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland 844, Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2020, URN:NBN:fi:sls-7801-1586150595.

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Torstendahl, Rolf. Källkritik och vetenskapssyn i svensk historisk forskning, 1820–1920. Stockholm: Norstedts, 1964. Warelius, Anders. “Bidrag till Finlands kännedom i ethnographiskt hänseende”. Suomi, Tidskrift i fosterländska ämnen 7, (1848): 47–130. Wingfield, Nancy M. “Introduction”. In Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict & Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe, edited by Nancy M. Wingfield, 1–18. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003.

Part 2 Landscapes and Bodies Activating the Production of Loss

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Chapter 5

Entrenchments and Escape Routes: Expressing a Sense of Loss in Danish Art 1848–1864 Peter Nørgaard Larsen

Within Danish art, the period 1848 to 1864 is poised between the two Schleswig wars: Denmark’s victory in the “Three Year’s War” 1848–1851, and subsequent defeat against Prussia in 1864, marking a definite break away from the culture of uniform, shared values that infuses the first half of the nineteenth century.1 The First Schleswig War did not resolve the Danish-German quarrels surrounding the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Headed by a National Liberal government, Denmark wanted to keep Schleswig as part of the Danish monarchy, a “Denmark to the Eider” without Holstein. Conversely, the SchleswigHolsteiners wanted their independence from Denmark and to become part of the German community instead. Both sides were inspired by the democratic and liberalising movements of contemporary Europe, which were bringing down absolute monarchies and giving rise to new kinds of states. On the battlefield and indeed on paper, Denmark won the war. The Schleswig-Holsteiners had to capitulate. Their government and constitution were abolished, and the Danish king took over again. However, the major powers dictated a solution that kept the disagreements alive: the old united monarchy (“helstat”) encompassing Denmark, Schleswig and Holstein was restored. But how can you make a state work when its citizens have been at war with each other? Matters were not improved by the fact that Denmark retained its political autonomy, while Schleswig and Holstein lost theirs. The war in 1864 was a consequence of this unresolved conflict, and in Danish art and culture its outcome has become synonymous with terrible defeat,

1 The chapter is based on a major study of the afterlife of the Danish Golden Age, first published in “The Afterlife of the Danish Golden Age c. 1850–75”, Statens Museum for Kunst Journal (2000): 94–121, later amended and reworked into the article “Backwards into the future” for the publication accompanying the exhibition Danish Golden Age: World-class art between disasters, ed. Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard (Copenhagen: Nationalmuseum and Statens Museum for Kunst, 2019), 295–305. For this anthology, the text has been reworked, adapted to the themes of the anthology and expanded to incorporate more examples of works and texts.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_007

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a traumatising disaster that cast long shadows on Danish history and influenced Denmark’s self-image and culture far into the twentieth century (see also Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s chapter in the present volume). Apart from the First Schleswig War, which is also seen as a cause for celebration in Denmark because the years 1848–1851 are associated with the abolition of absolute monarchy and the introduction of representative government, the history of nineteenth-century Denmark is largely a story of defeat and despondency. Although we still, for many good reasons, use the term “Golden Age” to describe the period from 1800 to 1864, the golden years for Danish art and culture, science and commerce are bookended by political and military disasters.2 Indeed, the dawn of the period was anything but glorious and began with a series of painful defeats. During the Napoleonic Wars, England forced Denmark out of neutrality. It began in 1801 with the first Battle of Copenhagen and reached its culmination with the English navy’s bombing of Copenhagen in 1807, subjecting the city and its inhabitants to the world’s first terrorist bombardment on a civilian population (see also Jens Eike Schnall’s chapter in the present volume). The Danish merchant navy, the foundation of the nation’s wealth, was destroyed, and a few years later, in 1813, the Danish state went bankrupt. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814, Denmark had to relinquish Norway to Sweden as part of the peace negotiations. Formerly a great power, Denmark had not only been humiliated militarily and reduced geographically, but also found itself in a state of dire economic crisis. Alongside this political history of defeat, which has been made the subject of a television series and several historical papers and publications, most recently in connection with the 150th anniversary of the war in 1864, we also find another and less well-known story of loss.3 A narrative about a shift in mentality and

2 Regarding the concept of a “Golden Age”, its history and its applicability, see Karina Lykke Grand, “Defining the Golden Age: The history of an epoch and a concept”, in Danish Golden Age: World-Class Art Between Disasters, particularly pages 27–32, and Peter Nørgaard Larsen’s and Magnus Olausson’s introduction to the same publication, “The Golden Age of Danish Art: World art between disasters”, 14–25. The exhibition and publication introduced a broader outlook and concept of the Danish Golden Age than has hitherto been prevalent. Instead of placing the end of the Golden Age around 1850 with the introduction of representative government in Denmark in 1848 and the First Schleswig War 1848–1851 (“The Three-Years’ War”), the publication and exhibition argued that it should be extended to 1864, where the defeat against Prussia marked an even more decisive shift in culture and mentality and a more pronounced break with the harmonising outlook on life and the world that infuses the Danish Golden Age. 3 The 150th anniversary of the war in 1864 saw the publication of several major studies of the war’s impact on Danish history, including Rasmus Glenthøj, Sønner af de slagne (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2014). The book outlines the events connecting the loss of

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art history, one about how Danish art, in the period 1848–1864, addresses and records a sense of loss which is more fundamental and existential in nature than the political narrative of defeat. A narrative about entrenchments and escape routes, about the fear of losing and letting go of the old world which was both symbolically and very tangibly shattered by the Prussian army in 1864. Many of the examples shown in what follows were created after the end of the cholera epidemic that ravaged Copenhagen in 1853 and which, in addition to spreading death and fear among its citizens, also prompted major visible changes in the form of an increased focus on hygiene and sanitary conditions as well as in the development of new residential districts and forms of housing. Inspired by the current pandemic, I would suggest that the impact of the cholera epidemic on Danish society, both mentally and physically, may be inscribed as an essential prerequisite for the withdrawal to a harmonious, almost Arcadian, sense of communion with nature that can be observed in Danish art after 1853. The present-day coronavirus pandemic has prompted greater awareness of how the great epidemics have shaped both history and art history and how we now interpret works of art from the distant past through lenses that are greatly tinted and illuminated by insights inextricably linked to the current situation. The significance of cholera and its impact on Danish art in the mid-1800s is an unexplored area, but I hope to be able to argue for the relevance of the connection through the interpretations of various works presented here.4 The chapter mainly examines examples from Danish art history supplemented by architecture, novels, letters and memoirs to add context for the works selected for interpretation.

Norway in 1814 to the defeat in 1864. Glenthøj emphasises the significance of the defeat in terms of the shift in mentality it occasioned, especially the national self-chastisement that followed, but also the war’s role as a catalyst for the great changes and modernisations that followed. Mention should also be made of Tom Buk-Swienty, whose three books: Slagtebænk Dybbøl (2008), Dommedag Als (2010) and 1864 i billeder (2012) very much helped to hone interest in the war and the general understanding of the sufferings to which the common man, the soldier, was subjects. In 2014, the Danish broadcasting corporation DR and director Ole Bornedal created an eight-episode TV series about the events of 1864, based on Swienty’s books. In 2016, the series was turned into a feature film, 1864 – Brødre i Krig. The series, which was funded by a special grant issued by the Danish Parliament, is the most expensive Danish television series ever made to date, was met with a mixed reception. The series was praised for its visually powerful portrayal of the horrors of war but criticised for a lack of nuance in its historical contextualisation. However, viewership was high and the series helped raise public awareness of the already high-profile events. 4 Lack of access to libraries and archives during the corona crisis has made it difficult to find new sources regarding the significance and impact of the cholera epidemic in relation to the period’s art and culture, but the existing sources appear to entirely adequately support the connection proposed and examined in this chapter.

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A Worldview in Transformation

Having obtained permission from the Ministry of War, the Danish artist Jørgen Sonne (1801–1890) followed the two Schleswig Wars as a civilian, depicting the soldier’s living conditions and the various battles, mainly in the form of studies in sketchbooks, which would later form the basis for larger paintings. At the same time he established himself as a National Romantic painter of folk scenes, creating a number of works that have inscribed themselves in Danish art history as quintessential examples of the genre. In Landlig scene (Rural Scene) from 1848 (fig. 5.1), Sonne portrays an idea of Denmark which encapsulates the vision of Denmark promoted at the time by the new dominant party, the National Liberals, and the cultural scene that supported their accentuation of national virtues, a shared language and a shared history.5 Although the painting was done before the war broke out, it might well have been an effective poster for drafting soldiers, depicting the Denmark – the people and the nation – that needed to be protected and defended. It represents a dream of coherence, clarity and closeness, highlighting the family and the landscape as the pillars propping up the National Liberal edifice. Dressed in the colours of the Danish flag, Dannebrog, the two women move through a mature cornfield complete with emblems of rural Denmark: storks, cows and burial mounds (on burial mounds cf. Jens Eike Schnall’s chapter in the present volume). In the distance, the view opens up on other national symbols such as gently rolling hills and the blue waters of the fjord. The blushing evening light and the women’s milk pails contribute to the palpable, poignant sense of animation – the presence of the spiritual is felt in nature as the fundamental premise illuminating all from within. However, this was a vision of Denmark – a worldview and an outlook on life – in a state of gradual transformation. The uniform, cohesive culture so typical of the Golden Age was increasingly challenged after the middle of the century, when new and more efficient forms of transport and communication such as the train and illustrated journals opened up the world to outside influences. It is true that the emergent industrialisation and the remarkable progress made within natural sciences certainly gave rise to a new optimism among many people. But while the cities expanded and the old ramparts of 5 Regarding notions about Denmark, one may usefully read Gertrud Oelsner, En fælles forestillet nation: Dansk landskabsmaleri 1807–1875 (PhD Diss., University of Aarhus, 2016); an introduction to the same topic can be found in Lykke Grand, “Danish golden age”, 27–32. In this article, the titles of paintings are modernized according to contemporary spelling and the titles used are the institutionalized titles following the museums catalogues.

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Figure 5.1

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Jørgen Sonne, Rural Scene (1848). Oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS7485

Copenhagen were pulled down after the cholera epidemic in order to make more room for its growing population, many were apprehensive about the changing living conditions. They saw a gradual breakdown of centuries of inherited structures, leaving many in an existential void. Responding to the changed conditions of life was no longer the exclusive reserve of seismographically sensitive individuals like the painter Johan Thomas Lundbye (1818–1848) or the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). The old world, rooted in a

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Otto Bache, The Liner Skjold in Christianshavn Dock (1860). Oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NM 7362

belief in a divinely ordained, meaningful world, was beginning to fall apart, and many artists evince different traces of what can be termed an incipient collapse of established values. When Otto Bache (1839–1927) painted Linjeskibet Skjold i dokken på Christianshavn (The Liner Skjold in Christianshavn Dock, fig. 5.2) in 1860, he clearly took Golden Age painting as his point of departure. Views from the Copenhagen harbour with ships in dockyards are commonplace among Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783–1853) and his pupils, but Bache’s painting is remarkable for several reasons.6 The point of view chosen, with the roof in the foreground, the mass of houses and the accumulation of details such

6 Cf. C.W. Eckersberg, En korvet på stabelen (A Corvette on the Slipway), SMK, KMS6439, reproduced alongside a compositional sketch and subsequent version in the exhibition catalogue Eckersberg, ed. Kasper Monrad (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2015), 168–69.

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as the many beams propping up the ship create a sense of chaos and disorder. We are far removed from the carefully composed harmony and clarity of the Golden Age predecessors. To this we may add the very special fate of the main focus of the scene, the ship of the line Skjold (Shield).7 Originally launched in 1833, the ship took part in the First and Second Schleswig Wars of 1849 and 1864, initially as a ship of the line and later, in 1864, as the only converted screw-propelled ship of the line in the Danish navy. Bache’s painting shows the ship during the conversion process where a steam engine was installed in the ship. In shipbuilding terms, this solution was vastly inferior to building a new screw-propelled frigate, but it was a fast and cheap way of adding a steam-powered battleship to the navy. The general developments seen in the European naval nations had shown that the age of sailing ships was coming to an end, and the navy needed fast solutions in response to the growing threat from Prussia. However, the remodelling impaired the vessel’s manoeuvrability and caused it to sit lower in the water, meaning that it lost the use of its bottom-deck battery in high seas. Skjold was part of the Baltic squadron in 1864 and helped block the German fleet in Swinemünde, preventing it from setting out to help the Prussian army in North Schleswig. After the war, Skjold lost its status and became regarded as a second-rate ship, and in 1876 it was sold to a reclamation yard in England. All this makes Bache’s painting and the history of the ship poignant symbols of the upheavals of the late Golden Age and the shifts that occur when the old world meets the new and well-meaning attempts are made to adapt to the changing conditions. The intentions are good, but there is something wrong with the fundamental structure; it dates from a different age and can only be converted and keep up for a little while. Soon it will be overtaken by new, upto-the-minute technologies and construction methods, at best surviving as a museum piece. The painter Frederik Vermehren (1823–1910), who lived long enough to become an anachronism himself, described his own experience of the shifts in culture and mentality in these terms: I myself am greatly prone to seeing our prospects as bleak, and I confess that ever since that unhappy year of 1864, the year of defeat, I have seen a steady descent into decadence because all buoyancy is gone and gross

7 The information regarding the repurposing of Skjold and its role in the Danish navy is based on Søren Düwel, “Skruelinjeskibet Skjold”, Marinehistorisk Tidsskrift 45, no. 1 (February 2012): 3–21.

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Figure 5.3

Frederik Vermehren, A Jutland Shepherd on the Moors (1855). Oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS1496

materialism runs rampant. There is no prospect for change, certainly not now that the Radicals and Socialists won the majority at the election yesterday, but whatever the state of things may be, my heart belongs to the old country and its people.8 Traces of this incipient collapse of values can be seen to crystallise in Vermehren’s works from the 1850s, such as in En jysk fårehyrde på heden (A Jutland Shepherd on the Moors) from 1855 (fig. 5.3), where Vermehren’s own fears of loss – and those of his entire generation – are writ large upon the face of the old shepherd. Here, a sense of trepidation in the face of a future that will

8 “Jeg er selv meget tilbøielig til at see sort paa vore Tilstande, og jeg tilstaaer, at der navnlig siden det ulykkelige Aar 1864, Nederlagets Aar, har været en stadig Dekadence, fordi Løftelsen er borte og Materialismen breder sig. Der er ingen Udsigt til Forandring, helst nu da ved Folketingsvalgene igaar Radicalismen og Socialismen er kommen i Majoritet; men hvordan Forholdene end ere, saa hører mit Hjerte det gamle Land og Folk til”. Letter, Vermehren to Helena Nyblom, April 10, 1895, published in Kunstmuseets Aarsskrift (1946–1947): 214. The quotations in this chapter are all translated by René Lauritsen.

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bring considerable changes to the moorlands and everyday life there meets a desire to maintain a simple life, one of material frugality, yet in keeping with the ideals of the Romantic era: a life lived in a state of communion with vast, unspoilt, divine nature. In 1855, the same year in which Vermehren completed and exhibited his painting of a shepherd on the Jutland moors, he also visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris and became acquainted with the latest developments within science and industry.9 In his letters from Paris, he reports his fascination with the barrage of sensory input in that city: the military parades, street life and the many new sounds and colours. But he finds this modern life superficial, far too hectic, and yearns for the world of the writer Steen Steensen Blicher (1782–1848, see Jens Eike Schnall’s chapter in the present volume) and his portrayals of rural life in Denmark, set against the grandeur of the Jutland moors. When Jørgen Sonne painted his picture memorialising Morgenen efter slaget ved Isted den 25 juli 1850 (The Morning After the Battle of Isted 25 July 1850) (fig. 5.4) in 1876, long after the battle took place, his portrayal was infused by a similar yearning for grand, national Romantic nature.10 After the battle, nature and the soldiers wake up to a Danish summer landscape not far removed from the vision of a national Romantic ideal landscape depicted in Rural Scene (fig. 5.1) more than thirty years previously. The Danish flag, the ripe fields, the ancient burial mound, birds in flight, the blue sky and the view of hilly Danish summer landscapes: it’s all there, and by shrouding everything in a morning fog Sonne establishes an idyllic, distancing framework for acts of war which seem infinitely far removed from the devastating, traumatic experiences that followed in the wake of the 1864 war. It feels as if the artist has harked back to “the good old days”, as if the soldiers are waking up from a nightmarish dream. Sonne turns away from a too-insistent reality, repressing the shame and discomfort associated with the collapse of National Liberal culture, which can be soothed only by conjuring up the memory of the happy years around 1850 when everything seemed possible and the idea of a Denmark, the national idyll, was alive as something

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10

The visit to the Exposition Universelle is mentioned in two letters from Vermehren to his brother Christian, dated Paris May 23 and June 3, 1855, published in Frederik Vermehren, Breve og Erindringer (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag, 1984), 62–64, 66–68. As has previously been mentioned, Jørgen Sonne took part in the Three Years’ War as a non-combatant artist, and the subject of this painting is based on a drawing now found in the Royal Collection of Graphic Art, SMK, KKS9327.

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Figure 5.4

Jørgen Sonne, The Morning after the Battle of Isted 25 July 1850 (1876). Oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS1084

more than the distant dream of immutability that infuses the painting from 1876.

2

The Cholera Epidemic of 1853

If the events of 1864 made artists like Vermehren and Sonne long for the old world, we may also point to another event, the cholera epidemic in Denmark in the summer of 1853, which had a decisive influence on the efforts made in the 1850s to preserve and uphold Golden Age culture. The epidemic had a profound impact on Danish society, both mentally and physically. Over the course of just a few days in June, the disease spread in Copenhagen, which was hit hardest. Denmark suffered a total of 6,688 deaths due to cholera: 4,737 of them in Copenhagen. Elderly citizens were particularly at risk, while only very few between the ages of 5 and 30 died of the disease. The epidemic culminated in July 1853, with cholera killing about 200 people a day. The epidemic hit Copenhagen so hard for several reasons: partly because the population density in the city was high and partly because hygiene was very poor. The city was surrounded by ramparts, and within those fortifications, the population had grown and grown over the years. Human faeces flowed in the streets, wastewater frequently entered the drinking water, and

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dead animals floated by in the canals. There were no sewers and no running water, offering excellent conditions for cholera to flourish.11 In his novel Fra Piazza del Popolo (From Piazza del Popolo) from 1866, the author and zoologist Vilhelm Bergsøe (1835–1911) provides a vivid and empathetic description of how cholera particularly attacked the poor part of Copenhagen’s population. In 1853, Bergsøe was a pupil at the “Borgerdyd” school in the Christianshavn district of Copenhagen, and on the way to school from his home at Den kongelige Porcelainsfabrik (The Royal Porcelain Factory) near the Round Tower he would pass by a common lodging house known as “The Thunder Cloud”, which lent its name to the novel’s section on cholera: “But surely, Copenhagen is a clean city”, I objected. My father stared at me with an expression of dumb-struck astonishment, shaking his head with a superior smile: “Clean, you say? – Yes, on the surface; but strip away the varnish, and you will find that it is like the whitewashed tombs, which are white and shining on the outside, but inwardly conceal death and decay. Go out into the streets of Adelgade or Borgergade, Poul, and tell me what you see there! Go down into the swampy basements, into the dilapidated rear buildings of Christianshavn, and then come back with just a cubicinch of clean air in your lungs, and I’ll cover you in gold. If you knew of ‘Little Copenhagen’, ‘White Rose’, ‘The Dinghy’, ‘The Thunder Cloud’ or ‘The Ship’, you would not speak as you do. Had you been a doctor to the poor for as long as I have, you would have seen these dwellings, where man knows only darkness, stench and debauchery, where every spot, indeed every inch right up to the very rafters under the roof are cramped, where children are born, not singly but in litters, where the poor lead a life worse than the Jews in the ghetto, where they know only straw rather than mattresses and rags instead of blankets, where chalk lines are the only walls separating men, women, half-grown girls and naked children from each other – verily, you would reach a different conclusion and shudder with me at the misery now at hand”.12

11

12

The information on the 1853 cholera epidemic is primarily gleaned from Gerda Bonderup, “Kolera i 1800-tallet – med særligt henblik på Danmark”, Tidsskrift for Forskning i Sygdom og Samfund 5, no. 8 (2008): 35–48. “‘Men Kjøbenhavn er dog en renlig By’, indvendte jeg. Min Fader stirrede paa mig med et Udryk af stum Forbauselse og rystede paa Hovedet med et overlegent Smiil: ‘Renlig, siger Du? – Ja paa Overfladen; men tag Fernissen bort, og Du skal see, at den er som

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Bergsøe later includes a doctor’s visit to “The Thunder Cloud”: “Do not be afraid!” I said in loud voice as I stepped closer. “This is the doctor come to see you”. No reply. “Are you in great pain? Have you had cramps?” I asked as I slowly approached the figure and bent down over it. Again I received no reply; but heard once more the same strange, halfwhimpering, half-moaning sound I had heard while out on the stairs. “Do not lose heart”, I said, bending down to feel the patient’s pulse. I got hold of a hand as stiff and cold as ice. At that moment, a blazing bolt of lightning struck across sky; making the measly hovel bright as day. On the floor, in front of me, lay a young girl, almost naked; her long yellow hair had come loose and lay twisted in disarray, entwined with straw and shavings, around a bluish pale, sunken face whose large, open eyes stared at me with no trace of life. I recoiled in a horror that I cannot describe; cold sweat burst from my forehead, and an ice-cold, flowing sensation rippled from my neck down my back, almost forcing me to stand up. At that moment all became clear to me – the house was entirely dead – here, at my feet, lay the last victim, departed in misery and despair, without a single loving hand to tend her, without a single word of comfort granted her in her hour of death.13

13

de kalkede Grave, der udvortes ere hvide og skinnende at see til, men indvortes skjule Død og Forraadnelse. Gaa ud i Adel- eller Borgergade, Poul, og fortæl mig, hvad Du seer der! Gaa ned i de sumpede Kjældere, i de faldefærdige Baghuse paa Christianshavn, og kom saa tilbage blot med en Cubiktomme reen Luft i Dine Lunger, og jeg vil forgylde Dig. Kjendte Du “Lille Kjøbenhavn”, “Hvide Ros”, “Jollen”, “Tordenskyen” eller “Skibet”, saa vilde Du ikke tale saaledes som Du gjør. Havde Du været Fattiglæge saalænge som jeg, havde Du seet disse Boliger, hvor man kun kjender Mørke, Stank og Uteerlighed, hvor hver Plads, ja hver Tomme ligetil Hanebjælkerne under Husets Tag er optaget, hvor Børnene fødes, ikke enkeltviis, men i hele Bylter, hvor de Fattige føre et Liv værre end Jøderne i Ghetto, hvor man kun kjender Halm istedetfor Madrasser og Klude istedetfor Tæpper, hvor Kridtstreger ere de eneste Vægge, der skille Mænd, Koner, halvvoxne Piger og nøgne Børn fra hverandre – sandelig, Du vilde komme til en anden Erkjendelse og med mig gyse for den Elendighed, som nu forestaaer’”. Vilhelm Bergsøe, Fra Piazza del Popolo: Novelle-Cyklus (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1866), 30–31. In his memoirs, Bergsøe relates how this fictional conversation took its point of departure in a real conversation between himself and his father at the outset of the epidemic. Vilhelm Bergsøe, Krigen og Koleraen (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1900), 143. “‘De skal ikke være bange!’ sagde jeg med høi Røst, idet jeg traadte nærmere. ‘Det er Lægen, der kommer for at see til Dem’. / Intet Svar. / ‘Lider De meget? Har De havt

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The fact that the epidemic proved particularly fatal for the poor population was not only due to population density, poor housing and poor hygiene; it also reflected the fact that the wealthy Copenhageners fled the city to take up residence in their country houses or moving in with friends and acquaintances at a safe distance from the ravaged city.14 In the summer of 1853, during the worst months of the cholera epidemic, the artist Constantin Hansen (1804–1880) was one of the many who had the opportunity to leave Copenhagen. The family was not wealthy, but like many other artist families with good connections to the privileged elite, he was offered a stay in a rural setting. Constantin Hansen and his family were invited to spend what would be the first of many summers in the idyllic Vejle valley (“Ådal”) with the dynamic county official, politician and one of the founding fathers of the Danish constitution Orla Lehmann (1810–1870).15 Like Lehmann, Hansen was a National Liberal, and in 1852 Lehmann had commissioned Hansen to create Ægirs gæstebud (Ægir’s Feast), a work that was overtly programmatic and subtly hostile to the Germans. Later, Lehmann would recommend Hansen for the commission of the monumental painting Den grundlovgivende Rigsforsamling (The Danish Constituent Assembly, 1860–1864), a scene from recent Danish history where Lehmann himself, being one of the main

14

15

Krampe?’ spurgte jeg, idet jeg langsomt nærmede mig Skikkelsen og bøiede mig ned over den. / Igjen intet Svar; men paany den samme underlige, halvt klynkende, halvt klagende Lyd, som jeg havde hørt, da jeg stod ude paa Trappen. / ‘De skal ikke tabe Modet’, sagde jeg og bøiede mig ned for at føle Patientens Puls. Jeg fik fat i en Haand, der var stiv og kold som Iis. / I det Samme slog et flammende Lyn hen over Himlen; det usle Hul blev klart som Dagen. Paa Gulvet, foran mig, laae en ung Pige, næsten nøgen; hendes lange, gule Haar var revet løs og snoede sig uordentligt, indfiltret med Halm og Høvlspaaner, omkring et blaaligblegt, sammensunket Ansigt, hvis store, aabne Øine stirrede paa mig uden Spor af Liv. Jeg foer tilbage med en Rædsel, som jeg ikke kan beskrive; den kolde Sved brast ud af min Pande, og en iiskold, strømmende Fornemmelse rislede fra min Nakke ned over Ryggen og tvang mig næsten til at rette mig i Veiret. I dette Øieblik stod Alting klart for mig – Huset var uddøet – her, ligefor mine Fødder, laae det sidste Offer, gaaet bort i Jammer og Fortvivlelse, uden at en eneste kjærlig Haand havde ydet hende Pleie, uden at et eneste trøstende Ord havde lydt til hende i hendes Dødsstund”. Bergsøe, Fra Piazza del Popolo, 78–79. This is the main theme of Meïr Aron Goldschmidt’s novel En roman i breve (A Novel in Letters), originally published under the title Breve fra Choleratiden, indeholdende en lille Begivenhed (Copenhagen: Chr. Christensens Bogtrykkeri, 1865), an epistolary novel which uses letters exchanged between the two friends Frants and Mathiesen to portray the cholera epidemic’s influence on everyday life and existence in Copenhagen. Regarding Lehmann’s significance as a patron of national art and the artists’ scene he built at his home in Vejle, see Nina Damsgaard, Orla Lehmann og den nationale kunst (Vejle: Vejle Kunstmuseum, 1986).

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Figure 5.5

Constantin Hansen, Boys Bathing and Playing (1853). Oil on canvas The Hirschsprung Collection, 63

architects behind the new constitution, was given a prominent position in the picture. In Vejle, at a safe distance from the events in Copenhagen, Constantin Hansen created some of the very few landscapes found in his oeuvre, including the almost proto-Vitalist painting Badende og legende drenge (Boys Bathing and Playing, fig. 5.5). Here he portrays a flock of boys and young men at the valley of Vejle gathered to play and bathe in an idyllic natural setting, very reminiscent of the ideas of the ancient Golden Age seen in German Romanticism and in French Salon art.16 It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to the contemporary horrors of Copenhagen, and it does not seem unlikely that the artist’s choice of subject matter and accentuation of uncomplicated being is a consequence of the situation from which the family had fled. The Romantic idea of rural landscape as a site of catharsis – a process of purification for man, corrupted by civilisation, here becomes an escape from the too-imminent, too-insistent present day and the looming threat of the future ahead, a flight into a timeless Arcadian dream.

16

Regarding this issue, see Petra Maisak, Arkadien: Genese und Typologie einer idyllischen Wunschwelt (Frankfurt: Lang, 1981).

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Entrenchments and Escape Routes

One of the consequences of the cholera was that, immediately following the end of the epidemic, the Danish Medical Association launched the initiative of building an entire residential area outside the ramparts, intended for the city’s poor. The new neighbourhood, located in the Østerbro and now known as Brumleby, was designed by the prominent architects Gottlieb Bindesbøll (1800–1856) and Vilhelm Klein (1835–1913), offering small, but good homes with plenty of space and air between the houses and access to green, rural surroundings. But Brumleby was not the only large residential area to emerge in the wake of the epidemic. Elsewhere on Østerbro, just outside the ramparts behind Classens Have and close to the Sound, a residential area of detached houses was built in 1857–1873. Known as “Rosenvænget”, this area inscribes itself in this chapter’s theme of entrenchments and escape routes in a different way. Built with locked gates barring entry from public roads, the neighbourhood had an insular feel. The residents were National Liberal officials such as Adolph Drewsen (1803–1885) and A.F. Krieger (1817–1893) and, importantly, artists such as Wilhelm Marstrand (1810–1873), Peter Christian Skovgaard (1817–1875), Carl Frederik Sørensen (1818–1879), Thorald Læssøe (1816–1878) and Carl Frederik Aagaard (1833–1895). Alongside the composer J.P.E. Hartmann (1805–1900) and actress Johanne Luise Heiberg (1812–1890) they all lived at a comfortable distance from modern city life. The deeds on the properties even included a clause banning the construction of noisy and dirty factories, steam chimneys and modern amusements that might disturb the peace of this domesticated and gated Arcadia.17 The newspaper Illustreret Tidende offered this description on 31 May 1863 (fig. 5.6): No inhabitant will bother any other, for the buildings are spaced wide apart and arranged in such a manner that everyone enjoys the same benefits; it is a small town unto itself with its own tradition, seeking only one goal – that of Beauty […]. One instinctively feels it; here one would never place amusements or beer gardens or all the other privileges of Vesterbro; here no-one would dream of building tenements intended for scores of small families, the privilege of Nørrebro. Here all is rural, beautiful and serene.18 17 18

The information concerning Rosenvænget is based on Hans Helge Madsen, Østerbro før og nu – og aldrig (Copenhagen: Fogtdal, 1993), 102–20. “Den ene Beboer generer ikke den anden, thi Bygningerne ligge langt fra hverandre og ere lagte saaledes, at Alle nyde de samme Goder; det er en lille By, som har sin egen Tradition,

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Figure 5.6

Georg Emil Libert, View of Rosenvænget (1863). Woodcut Illustreret Tidende 31 May 1863

In his novel Stavnsbaand: Fortælling (Literally “Ties to Home” or “Serfdom”, “A Tale”, 1888) the positivist thinker, writer and literary historian Valdemar Vedel (1865–1942) used his childhood at Rosenvænget as the point of departure for a very different representation of the claustrophobic, introvert stasis in which the novel’s male protagonist is mired and against which he seeks to revolt: [T]hen, up through the years, a powerless revolt against all this accumulated in me in fits and starts: against the boredom of this “civilised” life behind double-glazed windows – without excitement, without sorrows, without any struggle for life, – against this domesticised life where everything was subdued and monotonous, where mealtimes and sleeping times and socialising and every little step was arranged according to the house rules, where the same walls, the same faces – we never so much as moved – always put an oppressive, subduing damper on any fresh movement or new departure, forever directing one’s thoughts along the same well-worn furrows, seeming to threaten each new thought, for som kun søger et Maal – Skjønhedens […]. Man føler det paa sig, her kan der aldrig blive Tale om at anlægge Forlystelsessteder eller Ølhaller eller Alt hvad der hører til Vesterbroes Privilegier; her kan man ikke tænke paa at bygge Kaserner, beregnede paa Snese af smaa Familier, Nørrebroes Privilegium. Her er landligt, smukt og roligt”. Illustreret Tidende, May 31, 1863.

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they seemed to them like rebellion…. And I yearned for strong, free, new Life.19 Twenty-five years later, in 1912, at a conciliatory distance from events, Vedel’s memories are more positive, and in his “Memories from the Old Rosenvænge” he conjures up an idyllic and melancholy scenario not unlike the one presented in Illustreret Tidende in 1863: Cows and goats alike grazed in this neighbourhood, and foxes and martens cavorted there, and when it rained or snowed the roads, which were managed by the local board of homeowners, could only be navigated in greased boots or clogs, at least by us children. […] [A]nd old Sørensen, the marine painter, would take his morning walk around the roads in his dressing gown and fez, smoking his long pipe […]. This was the neighbourhood of the upper echelons of public service and of artists. Ensconced in her villa, the widowed Mrs. Heiberg held court for her old National Liberal devotees, and it was in her garden that Ibsen enjoyed the “Day at the Sound” recollected in his poem – back then, all that lay beyond the “red gate” was a green meadow leading out to the water. In Marstrand’s old villa, Krieger lived with his Norwegian aunts, who kept house for him, and in his drawing room with the large painting by Skovgaard and the statue by Jerichau, the venerable champions of the Eider Programme Scandinavism assembled […]. And there was the villa of the Drewsens, with their large extended family of Stampes and Collins who all came there, and the eye doctor Lehmann’s – Orla Lehmann’s brother – a home full of music; there was the house of the Skovgaards, of the landscape painters Læssøe and Aagaard, and several other artists’ homes.20

19

20

The original reads: “ – saa samlede sig gennem Aarene op i mig en stødvis frembrydende, afmægtig Revolte mod alt dette: mod Kedsomheden ved dette ‘dannede’ Liv bag dobbelte Vinduer – uden Spænding, uden Sorger, uden Kamp for Livet, – mod dette Hjemmeliv, hvor alt var afdæmpet og ensformigt, hvor Spisetider og Sovetider og Selskaber og hvert lille Skridt var regelret efter Husordenen, hvor de samme Vægge, de samme Ansigter – vi har aldrig saa meget som flyttet – altid laa trykkende og stilnende over enhver frisk Bevægelse og ledede Tankerne igen og igen i de samme Furer, og ligesom truede ad en hver ny Tanke, for de syntes dem ligesom Oprør…. Og jeg længtes mod stærkt, frit, nyt Liv”. Valdemar Vedel, Stavnsbaand: Fortælling (Copenhagen: P. Hauberg, 1888), 41–42. “Der græssede baade Køer og Geder i Vænget, og huserede baade Ræv og Mår, og Vejene, som laa under den stedlige Bestyrelse af Villaejere, kunde i Sneføre og Regntider kun befares med Transtøvler eller Træsko, ialfald af os Børn. […] og gamle Sørensen,

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If one had to live in the city, as did the rector of Borgerdydskolen in Copenhagen, Martin Hammerich (1811–1881), one could at least decorate one’s home to mimic rural settings. Peter Christian Skovgaard’s Bøgeskov i maj. Motiv fra Iselingen (A Beech Wood in May near Iselingen Manor, Zealand) from 1857 (fig. 5.7) was commissioned to fill in an imaginary window recess in the Hammerichs’ sitting room – like a window opening up on a world beyond the city.21 As Bergsøe relates in his memoirs, Hammerich had insisted on keeping the school open during the ravages of the cholera epidemic, even though the local district, Christianshavn, was hard hit: “now, people were quite literally dropping like flies around us. We neither read nor learned anything; all we could think and talk about was the epidemic, even during classes”.22 Hammerich’s wife grew up on the estate of Iselingen in the south of Zealand, near Vordingborg, and the Hammerichs later took over the estate from her father, Holger Halling Aagaard (1785–1866). In the woods of Iselingen,

21

22

Marinemaleren, vandrede sin Morgentur rundt paa Vejene i Slobrok og Fez og med lang Tobakspibe […]. Det var jo Embedsaristokratiets og Kunstnernes Rosenvænge. Fru Heiberg sad som Enkefrue og holdt Salon i sin Villa for sine gamle nationalliberale Tilbedere, og i hendes Have var det, Ibsen nød den “‘Dag ved Sundet’”, han mindes i sit Digt – den Gang laa der udenfor “den røde Laage” blot en grøn Eng ud til Vandet. I Marstrands gamle Villa boede Krieger med sine norske Tanter, der holdt Hus for ham, og i hans Dagligstue med det store Skovgaardske Maleri og den Jerichauske Statue samledes Ejderpolitikkens og Skandinavismens aldrende Koryfæer […]. Og der var Drewsenernes Villa, med den store Slægtskreds af Stamper og Colliner, som kom der, og Øjenlægen Lehmanns – Orla Lehmanns broders – musikdyrkende Hjem; der var Skovgaardernes Hus, Landskabsmalerne Læssøes og Aagaards og flere andre Kunstnerhjem”. The reference to Valdemar Vedel’s descriptions of his upbringing at Rosenvænget can be found in Madsen, Østerbro, 119, which includes a substantial excerpt of the two texts. Here, however, I quote from Vedel’s original texts (subsequently translated into English by Réne Lauritsen). Valdemar Vedel, “Minder fra det gamle Rosenvænge”, Mit Hjem, 2, (1912), 46–49, 46. Ida Dybdal, writing in her “Rosenvænget – et gammelt villakvarter og nogle af de første beboere”, Historiske meddelelser fra København, (1997): 123–57, provides a comprehensive description of the individual villas and of the residents’ background and relationship with each other. More about the importance of the educationalist, philologist, politician and patron Martin Hammerich as a key actor in the Golden Age and as the later owner of Iselingen can be found in Jesper Brandt Andersen (ed.), Martin Hammerich – Kunst og dannelse i Guldalderen (Copenhagen: Forlaget Vandkunsten, 2011). Regarding Skovgaard’s painting and the painter’s association with Hammerich and Iselingen, see especially Nils Ohrt, “En forsmag på Paradiset – P.C. Skovgaard på Iselingen”, in Martin Hammerich, 243–59. The original reads: “nu døde Folk bogstaveligt som Fluer rundt omkring os. Vi hverken læste eller lærte; vi tænkte og talte kun om Epidemien, selv midt i Timerne”. Bergsøe, Krigen og Koleraen, 198.

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Peter Christian Skovgaard, A Beech Wood in May near Iselingen Manor, Zealand (1857). Oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS4580

Skovgaard has arranged and portrayed a number of children of the Hammerich and Bartholin families, supplemented by the owner of the manor at the time, assessor Halling Aagaard, in the background. When Halling Aagaard took over Iselingen in 1810, the place became a regular haunt and rallying point for the artists, poets and politicians of the age, from Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) and Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850) to Christian Winther (1796–1876), Carsten Hauch (1790–1872) and Carl Ploug (1813–1894) as well as Jørgen

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Roed (1808–1888), Peter Christian Skovgaard, Constantin Hansen and Herman Wilhelm Bissen (1798–1868). Based on his studies of fellow artists such as French painters Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) and their classicising synthesised landscapes, Skovgaard created this idealised, monumental depiction of the relationship between man and nature. The scene is far removed from the earthshakingly dramatic depictions of nature seen in early Romanticism. Here, the religious sentiments come together in a national-Romantic apotheosis where the towering trunks reach up to the heavens like the pillars of a cathedral, carrying aloft the dense foliage of beech crowns, opening up in the middle to greet white clouds and a luminously blue sky. In this temple of nature with tree trunks reaching for the sky, Skovgaard has constructed a narrative about Danish spring, the innocence of childhood and budding puberty. Yet in spite of these elements associated with the cycle of life, linking the spring motif to childhood and youth, the main impression is one of stasis, of time stopped in its tracks. A glaring contrast to the world – 1850s Copenhagen – right outside rector Hammerich’s sitting room. The city had not only undergone one of the deadliest epidemics in Danish history; many symbols of the new age – such as the train and the Tivoli amusement park – had already heralded radical changes to living conditions and lifestyles. In this painting, Skovgaard and Hammerich choose to turn their back on the insistent, changeable world, freezing it in a harmonious ideal state where man, nature and religion can still be envisioned and visualised as a well-ordered, cultured whole. In Vilhelm Bergsøe’s memoirs the author describes how, in the midst of the epidemic, he and his father had the opportunity to spend a fortnight on the island of Lolland, visiting relatives in Maribo Ladegaard and Bergsøe describe their experience of the countryside and landscape as follows: In the quiet, clear summer evening I went walking in the idyllic Lyssemose forest, where everything was redolent with scent and freshness, and I felt like a prisoner who, quite unexpectedly, has had his freedom and his life restored to him. […] I was strangely gripped by the silence and peace of this sylvan solitude, I who had lived so many troubled days in a city in the grip death; it seemed to me that I had stepped into a better world where sickness and death had no power.23

23

“Da jeg i den stille, sommerklare Aften vandrede rundt i den idylliske Lyssemose-Skov, hvor Alt aandede Duft og Friskhed, følte jeg mig som en Livsfange, der ganske uformodet

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Peter Christian Skovgaard, Bleaching Linen in a Clearing (1858). Oil on canvas Statens Museum for Kunst, KMS3772

A world which, like Skovgaard’s painting, offers an escape away from the disease-ridden city and the memories of death and destruction, entering har faaet Friheden og Livet tilbage. […] Jeg blev underlig greben af Skovensomhedens Stilhed og Fred, jeg som havde levet saa mange urolige Dage i den til Døden viede By; det forekom mig, at jeg var traadt ind i en bedre Verden, hvor Sygdom og Død ikke havde Magt”. Bergsøe, Krigen og Koleraen, 199.

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Figure 5.9

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Peter Christian Skovgaard, Boys Bathing (1867). Oil on canvas Skovgaard Museet, Viborg, inv. nr. 10.143

instead a harmonious natural setting, a timeless Arcadia. Skovgaard’s art offers many examples of this kind, such as Blegeplads under store træer (Bleaching Linen in a Clearing) from 1858 (fig. 5.8). As in A Beech Wood in May, a space opens up inside the woods, surrounded by tall trees and characterised by an emphasis on an upward arching motion. In the clearing are two women, one carrying a child on her arm, absorbed in conversation and statuesque of form. In its totality, the painting conveys an impression of poignancy and perfection in the relationship between man and nature. Yet here, too, the viewer is relegated to the periphery of the scene, an uninitiated observer. The forest closes in protectively and definingly on this simple life, while we observers (and the artist himself) are barred from entering this earthly paradise. Two other Arcadian scenes created by Skovgaard a decade apart, Stille sommeraften ved en indsø. Bondedammen i Hellebæk, unge mødre vasker tøj (Quiet Summer Evening at a Lake in the Forest. Young Women are Washing Clothes in Bondedammen in Hellebaek) from 1857–1860 and Badende drenge ved Bondedammen (Boys Bathing) from 1867 (fig. 5.9), offer closely related representations of the nurturing, almost incubator-like healing properties of the forest. In the intervening years, Denmark had suffered through the events of 1864 and the traumatising acts of war, but Skovgaard’s answer is more of the same.

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An insistence on the harmony and cohesion he gave expression in the 1850s, reinforced here by the children and the water, which must carry the hope of rebirth and resurrection. The sheltered state conveyed in these works by Peter Christian Skovgaard is not specific to him, but seems to be a characteristic feature of many of the landscape paintings of the period. Indeed, Danish landscape painting of the first half of the nineteenth century was characterised by a very different sense of openness, wide vistas and an emphasis on the variations in the extensive Danish landscape, while the insular clearings and sheltered forest lakes seem to belong to the later period (for a discussion on Danish national landscapes in literature, see Jens Eike Schnall’s and Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s chapters in the present volume). Other examples of this category, where the ambitions to preserve a particular lifestyle and culture come together in a shared Arcadian dream of unchangeability – of historical security – include Jørgen Roed’s Fra Rosenvænget (From Rosenvænget, 1857), Jørgen Sonne’s Ved åen en varm sommerdag (By the Brook on a Hot Summer Day, 1865), Carl Frederik Aagaard’s Parti fra Liselunds have på Møn (View of the Gardens of Liselund Manor on the Island of Møn, 1863) and another Skovgaard-work, En skovsø. Sommeraften (A Forest Lake. Summer Evening, 1868). In each of these works, the central element is a sun-drenched Danish landscape in which one or more anonymous persons are placed. They are timeless representations of ideal states, focusing on man’s relationship with nature in a state of uncomplicated enjoyment, in complete harmony with nature and its lush and friendly embrace. The work eloquently expresses the ageing Golden Age generation’s dream of a paradise on earth – an escape from the too-imminent, too-insistent present day and the looming threat of the future ahead, a flight into a timeless Arcadian dream. Peter Christian Skovgaard’s landscape En sjællandsk landevej (Country Road on Zealand, fig. 5.10), painted in August of 1864, after the end of the war, but before the ongoing negotiations had determined the future fate of Denmark, can also be inscribed among the period’s many bids for escape. Skovgaard has depicted a landscape entirely in keeping with the period’s dominant ideas about Danishness and national identity. The winding road takes us through a lush Zealand landscape with ripe fields, flowers along the verges, past a farmhouse with a thatched roof and a large haystack outside, with wide vistas of fields and woods beyond. Clouds drift past above the panoramic landscape, offering generous glimpses of the bright blue sky. As has been demonstrated by Oelsner, Lundbye’s and Skovgaard’s Zealand landscapes became templates for the idea of the Danish nation emerging during the Golden Age; one that posterity has taken over as the quintessential depiction of old Denmark.24 24

Oelsner, En fælles forestillet nation.

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Figure 5.10

4

Peter Christian Skovgaard, Country Road on Zealand (1864). Oil on canvas The Hirschsprung Collection, 457

Concluding Remarks

To conclude this chapter’s invocation of how art can be used as a prism demonstrating the ways in which catastrophic events as well as shifts in mentality and breaks between tradition and modernity permeate Danish art of the period 1848–1864, I will return to Constantin Hansen. Through the years, Hansen maintained an extensive correspondence with the poet Christian Winther, and their letters contain several examples of how these two representatives of the old world’s culture – its ideas of proper education and refinement – struggled to accept the new and different terms arising within the arts and within society. In May of 1872, just after the publication of the writer and critic Georg Brandes’s (1842–1927) seminal Forklaring og Forsvar (Explanation and Defence), which asserted the greater validity of positivist science over religious dictum, Winther responds to Constantin Hansen’s laments regarding the difficult times: You call these times “hard”; I agree with you, but would add that they are dull, tasteless, revolting! […] The church is divided into factions, and the impunities of atheism thrive side by side with the harshest orthodox views. In philosophy and its sisters, truth is sublimated to such heights that common folk – such as myself – cannot reach it. Science has turned its attention entirely to matter and chemistry, to the natural sciences; the study of magnetism. Now, sugar beets and guano will soon rule all teacher’s pulpits and the entire world. Society dissolves into the most chaotic hubbub in order to achieve… what? And what about Beauty

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then? Beauty, which is no longer regarded as a power, but is at most used as a frivolous pastime – and rarely at that; – Beauty and its poor interpreters, Art and Poetry, where might they find shelter and thrive? The current times do not favour them, and can they find any nourishment here? Can these times prompt any enthusiasm? – You, Constantin Hansen! are far too gentle when you speak of “the restless, fermenting state of our current age, which suffocates all amiable, peaceful life!” Truer words were never spoken!25 For these two elderly gentlemen, who had seen the cholera epidemic in 1853 and the defeat in 1864, not much was left of the old world’s sense of security and “amiable, peaceful life”. It was no longer possible to maintain the old feeling of clarity and cohesion, the sense that was possible to conceive of and reconcile the world under God’s merciful eye. Modern life had stepped in, leaving them and many others of the time with a sense of living in a world without beauty, one where science and materialism had taken over. Their anxieties about this loss is reflected in their art, their letters and their memories of the good old days. Their fears emerge as insistent attempts to maintain their vision of the life that is crumbling and disappearing before their eyes, and as efforts to entrench themselves against changes seen as threatening and unmanageable. By deliberately turning its back on the world, the sense of loss felt in Danish art 1848–1864 offers a different take on how to approach one’s own age compared to the kind of art that exclusively seeks out the latest thing and responds to the new with something new. A take that is no less relevant and no less poignant.

25

“De kalder Tiderne ‘strenge’; jeg er enig med Dem, men jeg føier til, at de ere kjedelige, smagløse, modbydelige! […] Kirken er splittet i Partier og Gudsfornægtelsens Frækhed trives ved Siden af den crasseste Orthodoxie. Sandheden bliver i Philosophien og dennes Søstre saa sublimeret, at skikkelige Folk – som jeg f. Ex. – ikke kunne faae fat paa den. Videnskaben har vendt sig heel og holden til Materien og Chemie, Naturlære, Magnetisme, – Runkelroesukker – Guanogjødning nu snart beherske Cathedrene og Verden. Samfundet opløser sig i det vildeste Virvar for at opnaae – hvad? Og nu Skjønheden? som ikke mere agtes som en Magt, men i det Høieste bruges som lidt overflødigt Tidsfordriv – og dette ovenikjøbet – meget sparsomt, – Skjønheden og dens stakkels Tolker Kunsten og Poesien, hvor skulle de finde Læ og Trivsel? Tiden ynder dem ikke, og er Tiden skikket til at give dem Næringsstof? kan denne saaledes beskafne Tid vække Begeistring? – De, Constantin Hansen! er altfor mild i Deres Udtryk, naar De taler om ‘Nutidens urolige, gjærende Tilstand, som qvæler alt det gemytlige, fredelige Liv!’ Det var et sandt Ord!” Letter from Christian Winther to Constantin Hansen, dated Paris May 20, 1872, published in Morten Borup, Breve fra og til Christian Winther, III (Copenhagen: Reitzels Forlag, 1974), 185.

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Bibliography Bergsøe, Vilhelm. Fra Piazza del Popolo: Novelle-Cyklus. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1866. Bergsøe, Vilhelm. Krigen og Koleraen. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1900. Bonderup, Gerda. “Kolera i 1800-tallet – med særligt henblik på Danmark”. Tidsskrift for Forskning i Sygdom og Samfund 5, no. 8 (2008): 35–48. Borup, Morten. Breve fra og til Christian Winther. III. Copenhagen: Reitzels Forlag, 1974. Brandt Andersen, Jesper, ed. Martin Hammerich – Kunst og dannelse i Guldalderen. Copenhagen: Forlaget Vandkunsten, 2011. Damsgaard, Nina. Orla Lehmann og den nationale kunst. Vejle: Vejle Kunstmuseum, 1986. Düwel, Søren. “Skruelinjeskibet Skjold”. Marinehistorisk Tidsskrift 45, no. 1 (February 2012): 3–21. Dybdal, Ida. “Rosenvænget – et gammelt villakvarter og nogle af de første beboere”. Historiske meddelelser fra København (1997): 123–57. Glenthøj, Rasmus. Sønner af de slagne. Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2014. Goldschmidt, Meir Aron. Breve fra Choleratiden, indeholdende en lille Begivenhed. Copenhagen: Chr. Christensens Bogtrykkeri, 1865. Kunstmuseets Aarsskrift. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel/Nordisk Forlag, 1946– 1947. Larsen, Peter Nørgaard. “The Afterlife of the Danish Golden Age c. 1850–75”. Statens Museum for Kunst Journal (2000): 94–121. Larsen, Peter Nørgaard and Magnus Olausson. “World art between disasters”. In Danish Golden Age. World-class art between disasters, edited by Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard, 14–25. Copenhagen: Nationalmuseum and Statens Museum for Kunst, 2019. Larsen, Peter Nørgaard. “Backwards into the future: The late Golden Age”. In Danish Golden Age: World-Class Art Between Disasters, edited by Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard, 295–305. Copenhagen: Nationalmuseum and Statens Museum for Kunst, 2019. Lykke Grand, Karina. “Defining the Golden Age. The history of an epoch and a concept”. In Danish Golden Age: World-Class Art Between Disasters, edited by Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard, 27–67. Copenhagen: Nationalmuseum and Statens Museum for Kunst, 2019. Madsen, Hans Helge. Østerbro før og nu – og aldrig. Copenhagen: Fogtdal, 1993. Maisak, Petra. Arkadien: Genese und Typologie einer idyllischen Wunschwelt. Frankfurt: Lang, 1981. Monrad, Kasper, ed. Eckersberg. Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2015. Oelsner, Gertrud. En fælles forestillet nation: Dansk landskabsmaleri 1807–1875. PhD diss., University of Aarhus, 2016.

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Ohrt, Nils. “En forsmag på Paradiset – P.C. Skovgaard på Iselingen”. In Martin Hammerich – Kunst og dannelse i Guldalderen, edited by Jesper Brandt Andersen, 243–59. Copenhagen: Forlaget Vandkunsten, 2011. Vedel, Valdemar. Stavnsbaand: Fortælling. Copenhagen: P. Hauberg, 1888. Vedel, Valdemar. “Minder fra det gamle Rosenvænge”. Mit Hjem, 2, (1912). Vermehren, Frederik. Breve og Erindringer. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag, 1984.

Chapter 6

Outreach, Invasion, Displacement: Denmark’s Disputed Southern Borderland as Negotiated through Strategic and Affective Aspects of Space in Novels by Andersen and Bang Bjarne Thorup Thomsen

This chapter will offer a southern Scandinavian perspective on the anthology theme by discussing three novelistic responses – one by Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) and two by Herman Bang (1857–1912) – to issues and conflicts surrounding the disputed Danish-German borderland and, in the latter two instances, resultant losses. Although far from universally acclaimed by contemporaneous critics, Andersen’s and Bang’s bodies of novelistic work have since been acknowledged as crucial contributions in their respective periods to progressing and innovating the genre of the novel within a Danish literature undergoing gradual modernisation. In geographical terms, the two authors’ outputs were instrumental in pioneering and developing particularised uses of contemporary national settings in the Danish novel, methods which we shall document in this chapter. The novels to be considered are Hans Christian Andersen’s De to Baronesser (1848, The Two Baronesses) and Herman Bang’s interrelated texts Tine (1889, Tina) and De uden Fædreland – (1906, Those without a Nation). The chapter will approach the national and borderland settings showcased in these novels by exploring the role of both geo-ideology and emotionalised environments in the narratives in question. As for the pairing of Bang’s novels, the latter novel, which will receive the fullest appreciation of the three texts, will be read as investigating the longerterm effects produced by the territorial loss depicted in the former novel. Specifically, the three novels have been selected because they may each be situated in relation to distinctive phases in the development of the southern Danish border question from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. The novels are played out, respectively, before, during and after the loss of southern national space (cf. Peter Nørgaard Larsen’s chapter in the present volume for a discussion on Danish pictorial art in this period). The historical role of the Danish southern borderland could be said to have been twofold with regard to conceptualisations of the nation: it has served to both chal-

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_008

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lenge and give rise to essentialist or exclusionary notions of nationhood and national space and to both question and further hard distinctions between national self and the other. Such tensions feed into the subject matter of the three novels and inform their investigations. The novels all connect with national feelings, including, in Bang’s case, those strengthened by invasion and exile, but without, we shall argue, endorsing nationalism. The two novels focused on loss and post-loss may be approached, moreover, as critical enquiries into, in the first instance, certain domestic factors contributing to national loss and, in the second instance, subsequent domestic responses to loss. A significant common feature of the three novels is their use of borderland as well as island settings. The national borderland and the island environment may overlap or be distinct from each other in the texts. This chapter will compare the different realisations of the Danish-German borderland in the respective novels as well as discussing the role of the three islands configured in the texts: one Baltic-Sea-based, one North-Sea-based, and one that seems to “fall off” the map. While being state-of the-nation novels of sorts, all three novels also display strong interests in transnational, hybrid or foreign spaces. They may incline to hybridise the national space itself (cf. Jens Eike Schnall’s and Jules Kielmann’s chapters in the present volume), they may interconnect the national space with foreign, even faraway places thus making boundaries porous and fluid, or they may counterpoint the national space by a near or distant place of exile and loss. In analysing the function of space in the three novels, we shall take inspiration from a distinction suggested in a recent study by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu entitled Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative. The study differentiates between strategic space and emotional or affective space in narrative.1 Building on these concepts, strategic use of space signifies in the following examination of Andersen’s and Bang’s novels the macro configuration of spatial components that can be identified in a narrative and the ideological implications of this configuration and of the depiction and development of the constituent components. Affective space, in comparison, refers to embodied and psychological experience and emotional response articulated as aspects of environment. The latter use of space will be further illuminated by Frederik Tygstrup’s understanding of affect as a spatial phenomenon.2 In analysing the role of insular environments

1 Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu, Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2016), 39–43. 2 Frederik Tygstrup, “Affekt og rum”, K&K. Kultur og Klasse 116, no. II (2013): 17–32.

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in the narratives, this chapter will draw on, but also modify, Margaret Cohen’s argument that islands in literature will often be utilised to display utopian properties.3 As our readings will demonstrate, the novels to be discussed display developments of their island environments in both utopian-to-dystopian and dystopian-to-utopian directions. Further critical underpinnings informing the discussion will be provided by Fredric Jameson’s identification of the emotional drivers of utopian literature,4 elements of Bertrand Westphal’s geocriticism,5 and scholarship on the individual authors. In its appreciation of Andersen’s novel, this chapter will consider first to what extent the privileging of Schleswig over Holstein in contemporaneous Danish geopolitics is reflected in the strategic use of space in the novel, which was completed and published shortly after the outbreak of the first Schleswig War, 1848–1851. Secondly, it will approach the North-Frisian islands that form the setting of the novel’s middle, and most innovative, part as a transnational trope proposing the value of outreach. The chapter will then move on to Bang’s Tina, which commemorates the national loss suffered during the Second Schleswig War in 1864. The novel’s core theme of invasion, executed in relation its sole setting, the southern Danish island of Als, will be scrutinised by asking whether the invasion is of a national nature, too, and by considering it as a masculine rape of a feminised space. In its third part, the chapter will discuss the ways in which Bang’s final novel Those without a Nation explores the longing for, and absence of, a fatherland and a mother tongue. It will be shown how displacement and loss, including loss of language, is at the novel’s core, and how the narrative is bound up with heteroglossia and hybridity. The discussion will centre on the novel’s depiction of a visit to a Danish border community, whose location has become strategically charged after the territorial loss of 1864. Through readings of the novel’s representation of environments (primarily built but also natural) and the affects they produce, the narrative will be examined as an ambiguous and critical enquiry into what may be termed forms of loss management in post-defeat Denmark. Finally, the novel’s employment of an imaginary island, far removed from the national sphere, will be connected not only to displacement but also to a degree of national utopianism.

3 Margaret Cohen, “The Chronotopes of the Sea”, in The Novel, vol. 2: Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 647–66. 4 Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia”, New Left Review 25 (2004): 35–54. 5 Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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Outreach: The Two Baronesses

Standing somewhat removed from his novelistic breakthrough period of 1835–1837, Andersen’s fourth novel, The Two Baronesses, appeared on November 25, 1848 (but had “1849” on its title page).6 It traces the rise of two lowly girls of separate generations to the status of baronesses, while also investigating the spatial and cultural diversity of the contemporary Danish monarchy. The novel was published during (a ceasefire in) the First Schleswig War, which had broken out in the spring of 1848. The novel thus came into being at a time of highly disputed and unstable Danish territoriality. The war was essentially the result of a clash between growing German and Danish nationalisms. On the one hand, political forces in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein advocated full separation from Denmark and the formation of their own state with membership of the German Confederation (of which Holstein had been a member since 1815). On the other hand, the governing National Liberals in Denmark pursued a policy of the closer alignment of Schleswig (or Sønderjylland (South Jutland) as nationalist circles in Denmark increasingly preferred to term the region) with the rest of Denmark and the separating out of Holstein, which would enforce the river Eider as Denmark’s southern border. This policy prioritised what could be perceived as the more Danish-leaning of two duchies that both had the Danish monarch as their duke and both formed part of the so-called Danish “whole-state” (“helstat”). Positively conceived signs of this nationalistic climate surface in a passage from May 22, 1848 in Andersen’s diaries (written at the Glorup manor house on Funen, where Andersen stayed at a time when mobilised soldiers were also quartered there) which sketches a dynamic scene conjoining soldierly exercise and literary creativity: “It is particularly lovely weather and while they exercised on the road a whole section of the novel came to the fore – later in the day I got a title for it: The Two Baronesses. Today a real day in which

6 Erik Dal, “Efterskrift”, in Hans Christian Andersen, De to Baronesser, ed. Erik Dal (Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Borgen, 1997), 244. The fact that Andersen after an early flurry of producing three novels in quick succession – Improvisatoren (1835, The Improvisatore), O. T. (1836) and Kun en Spillemand (1837, Only a Fiddler) – did not publish another novel for more than a decade may be connected with philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s damning analysis of Andersen as a deficient, superficial novelist, with particular reference to Only a Fiddler, in his first published work, Af en endnu Levendes Papirer (1838, From the Papers of Someone Still Living). After The Two Baronesses, Andersen published two further novels at considerable intervals: At være eller ikke være (1857, To Be or Not to Be) and Lykke-Peer (1870, Lucky Peer).

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to get a novel”.7 While this passage reflects a state of national preparedness surrounding the final conception of the novel, a different question is clearly to what extent nationalistic sentiments are replicated in the novel itself. This is a broad and challenging question to answer exhaustively; in the following discussion we shall therefore concentrate on a more limited line of enquiry, by considering to what extent the novel’s strategic use of space could be argued to align itself with the priorities of the Danish National-Liberal geopolitics of its day. Various Andersen scholars have emphasised the significance of Danish geography in Andersen’s novelistic work, The Two Baronesses being a strong case in point. Klaus P. Mortensen observes that Andersen was instrumental in bringing the modern novel to fruition on Danish soil, and considers features such as multiplicity of plot and centrifugal form indicative of Andersen’s experimentation within the genre.8 Morten Borup characterises The Two Baronesses as “complete and utterly a Denmark novel, which even encompasses widely separated parts of the then monarchy”,9 while Erik Dal praises the novel’s artistic empathy with very different areas of Denmark and Schleswig.10 It is evident that the spatial ambition of The Two Baronesses is to delineate the realm in both “centre” and “periphery” terms, from its capital to its furthest fringes (cf. Kristina Malmio’s chapter in the present volume on imaginary geographies in Finnish literature). The novel consists of three parts, of which the first and the last prioritise Funen and Copenhagen, whereas the middle part follows a trajectory through the Danish borderland and takes as its destination and main setting the outermost limits of the realm in the shape of the North-Frisian islands of Halligerne, off the west coast of Schleswig. The middle part of The Two Baronesses thus reads as a radical execution of the 7

8

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In this section, all translations into English of quotations are by Peter Graves, including translations of passages from De to Baronesser. The original reads: “Det er et særdeles deiligt Veir, medens de excerserede paa Veien skjød deiligt et heelt Stykke Roman fremad, senere op ad Dagen fik jeg Tittelen for den: De to Baronesser, i Dag en rigtig Dag til at faae Roman i”. Hans Christian Andersen, H.C. Andersens dagbøger, vol. III, eds. Helga Vang Lauridsen and Tue Gad (Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, G.E.C Gads Forlag, 1995), 283. Klaus P. Mortensen, “H.C. Andersens romaner”, in H.C. Andersens samlede værker: Romaner, vol. I, ed. Klaus P. Mortensen (Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Gyldendal, 2004), 26. The original reads: “helt og holdent en Danmarksroman, der tilmed omspænder vidt skilte Dele af det daværende Monarki”. Morten Borup, “Indledning”, in Hans Christian Andersen, Romaner og Rejseskildringer, vol. IV, ed. Morten Borup (Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Gyldendal, 1943), XIII. Dal, “Efterskrift”, 231.

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centrifugal tendency Mortensen ascribes to Andersen’s novel writing, while it also allows the narrative to reach the furthest south into the borderland of the three texts under consideration. There seems to be critical consensus about the spatial originality of the novel’s middle segment. Borup sees it as standing “quite unparalleled in the author’s oeuvre”,11 Dal observes the newsworthiness of it,12 and even the otherwise dismissive prominent contemporaneous writer M.A. Goldschmidt has to acknowledge the portrayal of Halligerne as “a landscape painting which we are inclined to call masterly”.13 What, then, are the salient spatial features and the geopolitical implications of this novel’s most original component? First, it is worth noting that The Two Baronesses was highly topical in being drawn towards the liminal southern sphere at a time when it dominated (inter)national politics. A privileging of Schleswig is evident in the text in so far as the novel notably excludes Holstein from the domain it can access through direct or immediate description. To reach the North-Frisian archipelago where the foster carers (a pastor and his sister) of the novel’s younger protagonist, Elisabeth, reside and where she will spend her formative years, the family has to undertake a taxing journey that cuts right through Schleswig – from Flensburg in the east to Dagebüll in the west – and its heteroglossic mix: “Here through the whole stretch from Flensburg down to the North Sea, German, Danish and Frisian alternate; the three languages are intertwined”.14 The novel’s spatial rules of operation seem to dictate, however, that areas south of the Flensburg-Dagebüll line (along which Elisabeth likewise departs towards Copenhagen at the end of the novel’s middle part, after eight years in the archipelago) cannot function as a direct setting in the narrative. Thus, the topographical features of the Holstein homeland of Elisabeth’s foster carers can only be communicated as reflected in the Schleswig landscape encountered along the line in question (the following passage posits, moreover, that the affective imprint of the homeland is independent of variation in economic wealth):

11 12 13

14

The original reads: “helt for sig selv i Digterens Produktion”. Borup, “Indledning”, XV. Dal, “Efterskrift”, 236. The original reads: “et Landskabsmaleri, som vi troe at kunne kalde mesterligt”. M.A. Goldschmidt, Review of De to Baronesser, in Hans Christian Andersen, De to Baronesser, ed. Erik Dal (Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Borgen, 1997), 262. The original reads: “Her i hele Strækningen fra Flensborg ned mod Nordsøen, vexler Tydsk, Dansk og Frisisk; de tre Sprog slynge sig i hinanden”. Hans Christian Andersen, De to Baronesser, in H.C. Andersens samlede værker: Romaner, vol. II, ed. Klaus P. Mortensen (Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Gyldendal, 2004), 377.

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A colour-coded illumination of key settings in the three novels has been added to this historical map of the disputed Danish-German borderland. In violet, the North Frisian islands of Halligerne (The Two Baronesses). In orange-red, the island of Als (Tina). In turquoise, the railway town of Vamdrup by which the setting of Those without a Nation is supposed to be inspired. On the historical map, the 1864–1920 border between Denmark and Germany is indicated in red and the post-1920 border in blue.

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Everything made that living, moving impression that one’s childhood district always makes on an older person. Moritz and Hedevig [the foster carers] were, as we know, from the marshland, from the Holstein part at Itzehoe; certainly the land and the buildings there suggest greater affluence than in the Schleswig part through which the brother and sister were passing […]; but what they were seeing nevertheless had the character of home […].15 Therefore, in a formal sense, the novel appears to adhere to a main tenet of the dominant Danish geopolitical thought of the time, namely the separating out of Holstein from the coordinates of the national sphere of interest. Conversely, the contents of the cited passage work to subvert notions of essential difference between Holstein and Schleswig, instead employing mirror effects and asserting a continuum between the two disputed duchies. Notably, this continuum is of an emotional nature too, thereby running counter to the clashing nationalisms of the day that aimed for distinction along lines of allegiance and sympathy. This forms part of a broader tendency in The Two Baronesses towards celebrating the connectivity, malleability and hybridity of place. The negotiation between the novel’s spatial rules of engagement and its desire to reach out and connect – including its concerns for international areas of Andersen’s literary market – makes for arresting reading. Once the travellers have arrived in the North-Frisian archipelago, the narrative wastes no time in foregrounding both the ideal and the reality of countries “hanging together” or “donating” to each other, exploring these phenomena in its favoured axes across the North Sea or into the North-Atlantic. The gesturing towards England and, in particular, Scotland is pronounced. The novel calls upon both anthropological and geological fields of knowledge to assert strong, even solid, bonds between the Danish and the Scottish domains: “History, legend, old traditions and customs filled, so to speak, more and more of the furrow the sea had made between Scotland and the Cimbrian peninsula”.16 Similarly, a number of references to places past and present, proximate and distant, terrestrial and 15

16

The original reads: “Det hele gjorde det levende, rørende Indtryk, Barndoms-Egnen altid gjør paa den Ældre. Moritz og Hedevig vare, som vi vide, fra Marsklandet, fra den holstenske Deel ved Itzeho; rigtignok tyder Land og Bygninger der paa en større Velstand end denne Strækning i det Slesvigske, som Broder og Søster nu passerede […]; men det var dog Hjemmets Characteer, de saae […]”. Andersen, De to Baronesser, 378. The original reads: “Historie, Sagn, gamle Skikke og Brug ligesom fyldte mere og mere den Fure, Havet har gjort mellem Skotland og den cimbriske Halvø”. Andersen, De to Baronesser, 405.

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submarine, factual and mythical are brought to bear on the insular environment, rendering it a highly dynamic setting that unsettles notions of stable spatial, including national, boundaries. A minor, but symbolically charged case in point is this musing around the recurring phenomenon of a piece of marshland washing ashore: “According to folk belief this comes from Iceland or the coast of Scotland, but it is simpler to explain – and, moreover, the only correct explanation – that it is a piece of the sunken Friesland”.17 Furthermore, the islands as conceived in the novel are not only the objects of the influences of strong natural forces, but also the hub of a culture which, through shipping and whaling, spreads tentacularly to other countries and continents: Greenland, North America, etc. Travel impacts the islands in incoming ways, too, as the novel observes a growth in tourism during Elisabeth’s formative years in the Frisian environment. While the main current of this tourism is said, but not shown, to originate in Germany, the novel’s chief embodiment of the tourist is, perhaps not surprisingly, a Scot, Knox. He operates in the narrative in a further, strategic, capacity as a keen advocate of relations of resemblance between nations, whose mutual affective attachment is expressed through the trope of family: “he had studied the family bonds between them”.18 Although the narrative displays a westward drift, as observed, it should be acknowledged, however, that the connection between “Germany, Holland and Scandinavia”19 is cited as an instance of international family ties (cf. Anna Bohlin’s and Jules Kielmann’s chapters in the present volume on representing nations as family ties), the novel again resisting the lines of division that dominated domestic and international politics at the time. Overall, it can be argued that a role-model or utopian function is assigned to the peripheral islands on which Andersen’s novel centre: they may be read as a strategic space for the promotion of soft borders, cross-fertilisation and even solidarity between different national spheres. This reading would be in keeping with Margaret Cohen’s analysis in her study entitled “The Chronotopes of the Sea” that islands in literature can offer a utopian counterpart to injustices and problems and that “often, the island’s […] environment provides the occasion to construct an ideal society”20 (this latter perspective will be of 17

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The original reads: “Efter Folketroen kommer dette fra Island eller fra Skotlands Kyst, men det er simplere at forklare, og dertil det eneste Rigtige, at det er Dele af det undergaaede Friisland”. Andersen, De to Baronesser, 392. The original reads: “Familiebaandet mellem dem, var hans Studium”. Andersen, De to Baronesser, 413. The original reads: “Tydskland, Holland og det skandinaviske Norden”. Andersen, De to Baronessser, 413. Cohen, “The Chronotopes of the Sea”, 659.

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particular relevance to Bang’s novel Those without a Nation, as we shall document below). It can therefore be concluded that, while the prevailing Danish National-Liberal geo-ideology may have impacted on aspects of the spatial composition of The Two Baronesses, in particular the novel’s criteria for direct representational inclusion and exclusion, and may also be a contextual factor of relevance to understanding the north-western, rather than southern, domination of the novel’s international field of vision, the novel’s overarching spatial strategy remains firmly one of forging transnational bonds of solidarity and friendship between countries, including Denmark’s southern neighbours.

2

Invasion: Tina

Whereas The Two Baronesses came into being in an era of relative national optimism, and is indeed informed by its own spirit of optimism, albeit of a more transnational kind, Herman Bang’s novels Tina and Those without a Nation are preoccupied respectively with the emblematic Danish defeat of 1864 and the post-loss national atmosphere that ensued. The dominant tendency of these novels is much more pessimistic (but their register is clearly not devoid of intermittent satire and irony). In his influential monograph Impressionisten Herman Bang (Herman Bang, the Impressionist), Torbjörn Nilsson positions Bang as a writer rooted in an era of loss and loss management, which makes the author a representative of the national post-1864 zeitgeist in broad terms: Bang became more than most an author shaped by defeat. He considered the entire spiritual and material life of his generation marked by the war, when the illusion of being a great power collapsed and the hard waves of reality swept across a silenced Denmark that had dreamt and spoken so grandly. He was not alone in that view of 1864. In that regard, he was typical of his time.21 However, as we shall explore in this and the following section, Bang’s writing is not only an expression of, but also a powerful vehicle for critique of aspects

21

The original reads: “Bang blev framför andra nederlagets diktare. Hela sin generations andliga och materiella liv fann han präglat av detta krig, då stormaktsillusionen brast och verklighetens hårda brottsjöar slog in över ett Danmark i stiltje, där det drömts och talats så stort. Den synen på 1864 var han inte ensam om. I så måtto var han ett uttryck för sin tid”. Torbjörn Nilsson, Impressionisten Herman Bang: Studier i Herman Bangs författarskap till och med Tine (Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag, 1965), 228. My translation.

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of the post-loss zeitgeist. This is evident in Those without a Nation and more implicit in Tina (see below). Both novels communicate profound reservations regarding the implications of the National-Liberal “them-and-us” militaristic nationalism, which had seemed triumphant around the mid-century and in the interwar period and may even have impacted on certain formal aspects of Andersen’s novel, as shown. Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the defeat of 1864, Tina constitutes a stark warning against war and a study into the causal chains whereby war produces loss, and loss produces demoralisation.22 In Bang’s own words, the novel was aimed at demonstrating the demoralisation that accompanies defeat.23 Esther Kielberg identifies an interwar as well as postwar context for the anti-war sentiment expressed in Tina. She argues, firstly, that the novel reflects Bang’s aversion to the romanticised and unrealistic cult of armed conflict and victory that characterised an important segment of public and political opinion in the wake of the First Schleswig War, logically leading to the nationally traumatising defeat by a superior power in the Second Schleswig War. Secondly, she suggests that the novel is informed by Bang’s aversion to the glorifying thrust of the national commemoration of the 1864 war in 1889.24 As for the strategic spatial composition that enables the novel’s ideological enquiry along these lines, we can begin by observing that Tina conflates island, borderland and nation. Compared with the realisation of the borderland setting in Andersen’s novel, the location of Tina has moved diagonally north-east. The novel’s sole setting comprises the southern Danish island of Als, situated in the Baltic Sea in the immediate vicinity of the Dybbøl fortifications and trenches, on the far eastern part of the South Jutland mainland. Dybbøl became the main front line after the Danish army withdrew from the traditional fortified defence line at Dannevirke further south in Schleswig. The

22

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Ivy York Möller-Christensen views Bang’s work, and Tina in particular, as pioneering in Danish literature in decoupling war as a literary motif from a Romantic and idealistic discourse. The representation of war in Bang is innovative in being informed, Möller Christensen argues, by cultural pessimism and in allowing the exposure of a “crumbling national self-conception”. The original reads: “zerbröckelnden nationalen Selbstauffassung”. Ivy York Möller-Christensen, “Spiegelbilder des Krieges: Grenzverletzungen als literarische Katalysatoren der nationalen und existentiellen Selbstreflexion”, European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 44, no. 2 (2014): 239. My translation. The original reads: “Demoralisationen, som følger med Nederlaget”. Letter, Bang to Paul Langhoff, July 12, 1887, cited in Nilsson, Impressionisten Herman Bang, 241. See Esther Kielberg, “Efterskrift”, in Herman Bang, Tine, ed. Esther Kielberg, in Romaner og noveller, vol. 3, eds. Jesper Gehlert Nielsen and Jørgen Hunosøe (Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Peoples’s Press, 2008), 493.

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retreat from Dannevirke on February 5 and 6, 1864 is depicted indirectly in the novel’s second chapter, which was the first to be written25 and has a broader strategic remit in the narrative. It contains a compositional trajectory towards collapse that mirrors that of the entire novel. The chapter reads as a strong indictment of National-Liberal militarism and the naïve elevation of one’s own nation as divinely prioritised: “‘What is God’s will then for his Denmark?’”26 as one establishment figure asks incredulously after news of the retreat. As for the island environment in Tina, this functions as a synecdoche of the nation and is developed in a dystopian direction. Between the opening chapter’s retrospective perspectives and the novel’s ending, the island undergoes profound transformations: first from a patriotic, belief-based and peaceful local idyll with paradisiacal overtones to a national melting pot, as a result of the influx of soldiers from all corners of the country, and then to a hellish post-utopian and post-national zone, demolished by war and characterised by loss of meaning. Overall, and enabled by a series of topographical conspectuses that punctuate the narrative, the island changes from a transparent national idyll – “one could see almost the whole island in the clear air – hill and dale, so soft and green. […] ‘How lovely, how lovely it is’”27 – to an apocalyptic wasteland: ‘“The island is burning”’.28 The description of the landscape to be lost carries clear echoes of the Danish national anthem, “Der er et yndigt Land” (“There is a Lovely Country”), and especially its iconic line “It bends itself in hill and dale”.29 The island is, moreover, affectively associated with the body of the novel’s titular protagonist. Tine is characterised thus in the voice of a military officer in the Danish army: ‘“Hier we haff the soft Als country, the soft Als country”’.30 Throughout the narrative, the novel’s spatial orientation and limitation 25 26

27 28 29

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Nilsson, Impressionisten Herman Bang, 224. Herman Bang, Tina, trans. Paul Christophersen (London and Dover N.H.: The Athlone Press, 1984), 53. The original reads: “– Men – hvad vil da Gud med sit Danmark?” Herman Bang, Tine, ed. Esther Kielberg, in Romaner og noveller, vol. 3, 70. Bang, Tina, 16. The original reads: “Det var, som saá man den hele Ø idag i den klare Luft – Bakke og Dal – saa grøn og blød. […] – Saa dejligt, dejligt her er”. Bang, Tine, 38. Bang, Tina, 124. The original reads: “Det er Øen, der brænder”. Bang, Tine, 136. “Det bugter sig i Bakke, Dal”. My translation. The national anthem was written by Adam Oehlenschläger in 1819 and originally entitled “Fædrelands-Sang” (“Song of the Fatherland”). Music by Hans Ernst Krøyer, 1835. Bang, Tina, 91. The original reads: “– Det er det bløte Als, sagde han, det bløte Als”. Bang, Tine, 106. The officer’s connection to the Danish-German borderland, as expressed in the translated passage by “Hier” and “haff”, is indicated linguistically in the original text by the variant spelling of “bløt”, instead of standard Danish “blød” (“soft”), capturing a German-influenced pronunciation. Cf. furthermore the formulation “saa grøn og blød” (“so green and soft”) in the description of the uncorrupted island landscape cited in note 27 above.

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remain loyal to the horizons of those in the island village it centres on – women in particular – who do not go to the frontline and are therefore impacted by the nearby military hostilities indirectly rather than directly. Both the masculine “invasion” of the island by domestic troops and the masculine attack on it by foreign forces may be connected to a notion of the rape of a feminised space. Tine’s own tragedy is evidently linked to a sense of having been sexually misused by the man she falls in love with, the married local forest commissioner Berg, who as a reserve officer is summoned to serve in the Danish army and participates in the battles of Dybbøl, interrupted by brief stays in the home village: “He had taken her on an impulse – only a sudden impulse”,31 sums up Tine’s traumatic insight shortly before she decides to take her own life. Bang uses in his novel a spatio-affective language linked to the built environment and its interiors to express a spreading promiscuity – door hinges, for example, are characterised as “long-suffering” and a bed is described as “misused”32 – symbolic of the loss of moral compass and the destruction that war entails. Sensations of sexual “invasion” and contamination arguably surround the frequent depictions of how dirt has penetrated into houses or rooms: “the old bedroom, where the dirt lay thicker than anywhere else”.33 This leads Bang scholars such as Torben Krag Grodal to propose spatio-psychoanalytical readings.34 Other representations in Tina of (elements of) buildings serve more broadly to position the enormous strain felt by the invaded community as an affective dimension of material structures: “the shaking house”, “the trembling walls”,35 etc. Such deviation from standard collocation turn bodily and emotional hypertension into spatial atmosphere. 31 32 33 34

35

Bang, Tina, 154. The original reads: “Han havde kun taget hende – taget hende for ét Nu”. Bang, Tine, 166. Bang, Tina, 101. The original reads: “villige”, “misbrugte”. Bang, Tine, 115. Bang, Tina, 78. The original reads: “i det gamle Sovekammer – der var Snavset værst”. Bang, Tine, 93. Grodal offers the following analysis of the motif of dirt in relation to the built environment in Tine: “During the entire war, the women have faught against the dirt. Domestic work, cleaning, has increased dramatically. Nevertheless, it is impossible to keep the ego-alien element, the dirt, outside. Instead, the house, private sphere and vagina combined, which was earlier in harmony with organic nature, has now been flooded by an inorganic world”. The original reads: “Under hele krigen har kvinderne kæmpet mod snavset. Husarbejdet, rengøringen, har fået et voldsomt omfang, men alligevel kan det jeg-fremmede, snavset, ikke holdes uden døre, og huset, intimsfære og vagina i ét, der tidligere var i samklang med den organiske natur, er nu oversvømmet af en uorganisk verden”. Torben Krag Grodal, “Tine – det patriarkalske samfunds undergang”, in Dansk litteraturhistorie, vol. 6 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2000), 387. My translation. Bang, Tina, 108, 110. The original reads: “det rystende Hus”, “Væggen, der skælvede”. Bang, Tine, 122, 123.

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In his article “Affekt og rum” (“Affect and Space”), literary theorist Frederik Tygstrup emphasises the importance of recognising that material and social relational spaces have an affective dimension or “infrastructure”: If there are affects out there in the world surrounding us, even before they mature and become recognisable as inner spiritual states, it is because they exist spatially, as a virtual presence in the diagram of relational exchanges in which we realise our existence as spatial beings.36 Put in abstract terms, war is indeed a relational exchange in space that leaves an affective imprint on the place and the people it invades. As we have demonstrated above, Bang’s Tina imbues both its built environments and its landscapes with war- and loss-related affective content, which renders the novel well suited to a spatial analysis along the lines suggested by Tygstrup. This suitability is shared with Those without a Nation, as we shall explore in the next section. Although Tina is commemorative and retrospective in its conception, the strategic denouncement in the novel of militarism and exclusionary thought, both domestic and foreign, and its enquiry into the emotional economy of national loss are also implicitly, and perhaps not least, directed towards its contemporaneous context and of relevance to the nation’s future choices. This likewise makes the connection with Bang’s final novel strong.

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Displacement: Those without a Nation

In his article “Eksil og modernitet: Herman Bang mellem dekadence og vitalisme” (“Exile and Modernity: Herman Bang between Decadence and Vitalism”), Peer E. Sørensen demonstrates how Bang’s novel writing struggled to win critical acclaim from either the right wing or the radical wing of contemporaneous critical opinion in Denmark. While the conservatives found a lack of idealism in his novels, the progressives felt that the novels’ perceived decadence obscured the impact of their realism. Although the ideological foundations of the critique articulated by the two cultural camps thus diverged, the tenets of their assessment of compositional and stylistic features of the novels

36

The original reads: “Hvis der er affekter derude i verden omkring os, endnu før de modnes og bliver genkendelige som indre sjælelige tilstande, så er det fordi de eksisterer rumligt, som en virtuel tilstedeværelse i det diagram af relationelle udvekslinger, som vi udfolder vores eksistens i som rumlige væsner”. Tygstrup, “Affekt og rum”, 27. My translation.

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converged: Bang’s novels were considered structurally loose, and their style – the most consistent target of the criticism, according to Sørensen – was seen as affected, impure and un-Danish, and far too coloured by unfortunate foreign influences.37 In light of this type of critique, it may be argued that Bang’s last novel, Those without a Nation, not only takes linguistic hybridity and “impurity” as one of its topics but also turns into it into a trademark of sorts. The full naming, “Joán Aage Ujházy”,38 combining Hungarian and Danish elements, of the novel’s protagonist, a virtuoso violinist who has been invited to give a concert in a Danish border community, works as a linguistic emblem of his mixed origins and identity. He is the son of a Danish woman living in exile and a Hungarian nobleman and is educated in Paris. In the novel’s very first scene, set on board a train approaching Denmark’s new southern border, the protagonist code-switches from Danish to French, as indicated by italics, “– Ah, la pluie, cette pluie morne”.39 Similarly, the novel offers direct representation of English and German speech, mixed into its Danish voice: “– Why does mamma always feel cold?” and “– Dänische Lieder, sagde han: alte dänische Lieder – nicht wahr?”40 Furthermore, the novel’s international settings, represented through the protagonist’s memories as he travels towards the border, are multilingual by nature: “all tongues were heard”, “fragments of all languages swirled around”.41 The novel references a multitude of Slavonic languages, Serbian, Romanian, Ruthenian, Hungarian, all of them registered on the mysterious island, located in the Danube but not recognised on any map, from which Joán originates. The protagonist himself describes the linguistic landscape of the island – a truly liminal location “there on the borders of all countries” – as characterised by the intertwining of many languages but featuring no full command of any single language: “The languages were mixed together and nobody mastered one language”.42 His sense of loss and displacement, of belonging to no nation, is strongly bound up with a notion of language-less-ness, “He

37 38

39 40 41

42

Peer E. Sørensen, “Eksil og modernitet: Herman Bang mellem dekadence og vitalisme”, Norsk Litteraturvitenskapelig Tidsskrift no. 1 (2011): 84–85. Herman Bang, De uden Fædreland –, ed. Nicholai Reinseth, in Romaner og noveller, vol. 5, eds. Jesper Gehlert Nielsen and Jørgen Hunosøe (Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Peoples’s Press, 2008), 460. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 247. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 255, 464. The original reads: “alle Tungemaal lød”, “Brudstykker af alle Sprog hvirvlede rundt”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 325, 345. All translations into English of passages from De uden Fædreland – are by myself. The original reads: “dér paa alle de Landes Grænser”, “Sprogene […] blandedes og ingen kunde ét”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 420, 421.

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had no language”,43 of being deficient in any language. The representation and thematics of language difference, of proficiency and deficiency, of pronunciation and signification pervade the novel, with its romantic component no exception. The forging of a (trans)national, but temporary, emotional bond between Joán Ujházy and a young woman, Gerda Johansen, whom he meets in the Danish borderland (the daughter of the powerful local grocer) is couched in the tropes of language: from flawed, but improving, pronunciation of the partner’s name to Joán’s climactic sense of receiving Gerda’s Danish words like kisses: “catching them from her lips”.44 Language seems a potential gateway, however elusive, not only to national belonging but also to bodily and romantic reward. Turning our attention to the strategic spatial dimension of the novel’s engagement with the nation, it is observable that, compared with the realisation of the borderland setting in the previous two novels we have discussed, the border location in Those without a Nation has moved further north again. After the Danish defeat in the Second Schleswig War in 1864, Holstein and Schleswig, including what is now the southern part of the Danish mainland (and hence the island of Als), became a part of Prussia. The new international border between Denmark and Prussia, which remained in force until 1920, ran from south of Ribe in the west of Jutland to north of Christiansfeld in the east of Jutland, following the stream of Kongeåen in its middle part. Bang locates Those without a Nation in a small unnamed railway town situated immediately north of a stream, south of which lies the lost Danish land referred to as “Søndenaa” (literally “south of the stream”) in the novel, a designation that seems to presuppose the real-world name of Kongeåen, although this is not itself used in the text. Occasionally, “Søndenaa” also works as a reference to the diasporic Danes themselves. It is notable that, in terms of the direct use of setting in the depiction of the protagonist’s stay in the border community, the novel never ventures south of the border stream. In a letter dated March 10, 1905 to his publisher Peter Nansen, Bang describes the location of his planned novel thus: “its setting is a railway town at the border”.45 While the novel’s prime location remains unspecified in terms of naming, authentic border-proximate Danish places such as Ribe, Christiansfeld and Skibelund

43 44 45

The original reads: “Han havde intet Sprog”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 318. The original reads: “fangende dem fra hendes Læber”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 436. The original reads: “dens Skueplads er en Stationsby ved Grænsen”. Cited in Nicholai Reinseth, “Efterskrift”, in Herman Bang, De uden Fædreland –, ed. Nicholai Reinseth, in Romaner og noveller, vol. 5, 586. My translation.

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Krat are referenced in the novel.46 This contributes to a sense of the railway town itself being near-authentic to the extent that a segment of scholarship on the novel simply conflates it with the town of Vamdrup, the main railway border crossing between Denmark and Prussia in the period 1864–1920 (which Bang had visited and been inspired by on a reciting tour in 1904).47 In the aforementioned study Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative, it is argued that in fictional texts that combine real-world and imaginary or un-named locations, as is the case in both of the Bang novels discussed in the present chapter, “the storyworld superimposes the locations specific to the text onto the geography of the actual world”.48 This would explain why the combination of Danish real-world locations and an anonymous main setting in Those without a Nation results in such a compelling sense of the novel responding to the conditions prevailing in the actual post-1864 borderland (whereas the novel’s island maintains a largely imaginary status, in contrast to the islands represented in The Two Baronesses and Tina).49 Moving from the macro expression of the Danish borderland in Those without a Nation to its closer representation, it is notable that, like the protagonist’s romantic interest, the borderland is approached through the tropes of inhibited language. As the gaze of the protagonist pans across the terrain outside the train, he attempts to comprehend the landscape by means of a Danish word sequence that resembles a grammar drill in a foreign language: “– Field, fields, low field; a house, low house; two birds, two grey birds… and rain”.50 Peer E. Sørensen interprets the passage, and the fact that Joán subsequently seeks 46

47 48 49

50

Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 399, 423. Skibelund Krat, situated on a slope leading to the northern bank of Kongeåen and offering views of the area annexed by Prussia 1864–1920, is a memorial park and gathering place established in 1865 in response to the national loss of 1864. It contains in excess of 20 memorial stones, the first of which was erected in 1869. Prominent among the stones is the Art-Nouveau monument “Modersmaalet” (“The Mother Tongue”), by sculptor Niels Hansen Jacobsen, which war erected in 1903, and which Bang’s novel references in the following passage: “They [gathered local party guests] all talked about the summer, about excursions and Skibelund Krat and about ‘The Mother Tongue’”. The original reads: “De talte alle om Sommeren og om Udflugter og Skibelund Krat og om ‘Modersmaalet’”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 423. See Reinseth, “Efterskrift”, 590. Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu, Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative, 24. In discussing the importance of geographical exactness in the representation of the island of Als in Tina, Torbjörn Nilsson identifies a minor deviation from real-world topography: the location of the novel’s core village setting has been moved ca. 10 kilometres west, as compared with the location of Bang’s home village of Asserballe, on which the textual village is modelled, in order to facilitate a higher degree of proximity to the military frontline. Nilsson, Impressionisten Herman Bang, 239. The original reads: “– Mark, Marker, lav Mark; et Hus, lavt Hus; to Fugle, to graa Fugle… og Regn”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 247.

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refuge in the French language (see above), as indicative of the protagonist’s predicament whereby “the motherly sphere and the homeland only exist as the longing for a language”.51 The monotone, monochromatic and melancholic facets implied in the word sequence work, moreover, as a portent of the affective atmosphere that the novel goes on to reveal as dominating the borderland. Like Tina, Those without a Nation bears out Tygstryp’s argument that material and social relational spaces carry an affective “infrastructure”. While initially and superficially hospitable, even in awe of the visiting virtuoso, cosmopolitan but with Danish credentials, the emotional environment of the border community increasingly shows signs of regulation, control, surveillance, defensiveness, dismissiveness and darkness. As we shall demonstrate, representations of the built environment, of “deep” interiors and modern infrastructure combine to portray a post-loss national place that appears problematic, even uncanny at times. Similarly, we shall show how figurative spatial language contributes to a depiction of the diasporic Danes that seems less than sympathetic. At the same time, the novel recognises the reality and unsettling emotional force of the imposed border; and it acknowledges the national energy for internal reclaiming that has resulted from the external loss. Nevertheless, as conveyed through the novel’s predominantly critical lens, the Danish defeat in 1864 may have produced value-linked losses, in the form of declining societal openness and tolerance, that go beyond the territorial loss as such. An early sign of the prevailing atmosphere is the presentation (again channelled through Joán’s seeing and “reading”) of the nationally symbolic Hotel Denmark, in which the protagonist resides during his visit. This alerts the reader to the failings and sinister gaps in the national façade: The gable of the inn slanted slightly. “Hotel Denmark”, Joán read. It was written in red on white. But a couple of the letters had become a little incomplete because the whitewash had fallen down. Joán continued to fasten his eyes on the red on the white […]. […] Joán’s gaze glided further down across “Denmark”: There were hinges in the opening which should have been a gate – four large naked hinges…52

51 52

The original reads: “Det moderligt-hjemlige eksisterer kun som længslen efter et sprog”. Sørensen, “Eksil og modernitet”, 88. My translation. The original reads: “Kro-Gavlen var blevet lidt vind. ‘Hotel Danmark’ læste Joán. Det stod med Rødt paa Hvidt. Men et Par af Bogstaverne var blevet en Smule ufuldstændige, fordi Kalken var falden ned. Joán blev ved at fæste Øjnene paa det Rødt paa Hvidt […]. Joán’s Øjne gled videre ned over ‘Danmark’: / Der var Hængsler i den Aabning, der skulle have været Port – fire store nøgne Hængsler…” Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 368.

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Although the other building which Joán frequents during his visit, the extensive and affluent home cum store of the grocer Johansen (who hosts parties in Joán’s honour), might superficially suggest a different environment to that of the draughty and dilapidated hotel, this centre point in Bang’s carefully crafted townscape has a dark undercurrent, too. Whereas the front of the hotel has a revealing function, the façade of the grocer’s house evokes a sense of concealment: “Then he [Joán] crossed the road to Grocer Johansen’s red house. There was no name and no sign”.53 The description continues by employing those tropes of hard and heavy matter or force that typify the portrayal of this local stronghold and the firm grip on power over the border community and his own family exerted by the grocer: “The large long building stood broad and hard on the ground”.54 Gradually, a powerful notion of pollution is affectively associated with the grocer’s building. In Geocriticism, Bertrand Westphal emphasises the benefits of a polysensory approach to the representation of environment in literature and beyond, reminding us that “space is subject to the infinite variety of sensory perception”,55 including not only visual experience but also auditory, haptic and olfactory. Westphal’s argument is borne out by the role of odour in connecting the grocery store, and the local capitalism it represents, with contamination of the community. A recurring motif is Gerda’s compulsive use of a “Refraichisseur”56 to combat the bad air in the building. Furthermore, in a climactic scene Joán and a friend descend into the cellar of the store, conceived as a dark underworld, where they are overwhelmed by the near-poisonous smell (“– Here they mix the poison”)57 emanating from enormous casks of cheap spirits destined for the markets on both sides of the border (thus, when it comes to turning a profit, the Danish/Prussian binary does not overly trouble the grocer in his business strategy). This symbolic underground sphere and its odorous ongoings seem to reveal the less than benign state-of-affairs that prevails in post-loss Denmark.58

53 54 55 56 57

58

The original reads: “Saa skraaede han [Joán] over Vejen til Købmand Johansens røde Hus. Der var intet Navn og intet Skilt”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 365. The original reads: “Den store Længe laa bredt og haardt paa Jorden”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 365. Westphal, Geocriticism, 134. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 381, 472. The original reads: “– Her blandes s’gu Giften”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 489. The grocer himself is critically called “the poison mixer” (“Giftblanderen”) by some of the other characters in the novel. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 396, 482. Peer E. Sørensen argues that Bang’s style of representation develops increasingly during the course of his fictional output from impressionism to a form of “allegorical realism”. Sørensen, “Eksil og modernitet”, 88–89. This stylistic notion could offer a productive fur-

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This may be connected, moreover, to a Shakespearean sense that something is rotten in the state of Denmark (as per Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4). The contemplation, in a conversational scene involving Joán and the local vicar, of the figure of Hamlet and thereby the evocation of the eponymous play and its troubled environment have added impetus to a strand of scholarship that approaches the novel as a national critique.59 On this reading, the novel’s title60 relates as much to the Danes themselves, who may be regarded as lacking a “proper” national place of belonging, as to the protagonist. It is noteworthy that, on the original Danish-language title page of the novel, the pronoun “De” (“Those”) occupies its own line, as an invitation to the reader to consider carefully its field(s) of reference.61 In ways similar to the representation of the built environment, the modern infrastructure conveyed in Those without a Nation communicates tensions between first impression and a darker reality. Electric lighting, both of homes and streets, is a leitmotif of sorts in the characterisation of the borderland locality. It is designated as the pride of the place on several occasions, but the irony is that it is used very sparingly in the houses due to its cost; even the grocer resists it, in a further instance of concealment associated with his empire, to avoid exposing the cheapness of his commodities. Exterior electric light does nevertheless feature in the novel’s topography of the town, but combined with a sense of limitation – “They turned into the street in which the electric lamps hung”62 – and of minimal impact on the surrounding darkness and shadowy shapes that dominate the outdoor scenes. A related technological leitmotif are telephone poles and cables. They create a patterning of place that conveys not so much modernity and progress as stillness and melancholia: “The telephone wires […] hung slackly under the rain, as if they had little to talk about from pole to pole, mast to mast”.63 Alternatively, the regularity

59

60 61

62 63

ther illumination of the representation of built environments and infrastructure in Bang’s final novel as analysed above and in the following. For the scene in question, see Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 512–13. The referencing of Hamlet has furthermore fed into a strand of scholarship that focuses on the protagonist as a torn and troubled, noble or “superior” being, even a Christ figure, see Reinseth, “Efterskrift”, 597. A direct translation into English of the novel’s title is: Those without a Fatherland –. It may be argued that the hyphen with which the Danish title finishes contributes to a similar sense of ambiguity of interpretation. For further consideration of the implications of this title feature, see Reinseth, “Efterskrift”, 586. The original reads: “De bøjede ind i Gaden, hvor de elektriske Lamper hang”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 388. The original reads: “Telefonens Traade […] hang saa slappe under Regnen, som havde de ikke ret meget at tale om fra Pæl til Pæl, Stang til Stang”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 247.

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of this infrastructure interfaces in affective ways with the novel’s critique of mental rigidity: the grocer “looked straight ahead as if he wanted to gauge if the telephone poles stood straight”.64 While the novel’s main approach to borderland modernity is thus one of aligning it with an affective atmosphere of fixity and forlornness, it should be recognised, however, that the technological leitmotifs of electricity, telephone and also telegraph that inform the representation of the railway town may additionally be read as symbolic of a new era of productive interconnection beyond traditional spatial boundaries.65 Furthermore, the narrative clearly gestures, albeit retrospectively, towards the energetic building boom and enormous enterprise which went into forming the modern border settlement and its range of institutions and infrastructure in an area that had become strategically significant after the Danish defeat in 1864. The notion of “reclaiming” the loss of Schleswig within Denmark’s new borders is illuminated through the collective memory of assembled local party guests in one of the novel’s dynamic and complex scenes featuring multiple characters and showcasing a polyphonic technique, another hallmark of Bang’s style (cf. Anna Bohlin’s chapter in the present volume on Sweden’s loss of Finland). What emerges is a joyous picture of population growth, industrialisation, improved methods of land cultivation – as epitomised by the transformation of the barren Jutlandic heath into fertile land – and further economic, institutional and cultural consolidation. A multifaceted local topography indicative of a regenerative, modernising and expansive period is constructed collectively through conversation, asserting that national growth can take many forms.66 The enterprises and institutions mentioned include a spinning factory (that is said to have expanded from seven to 150 employees during the course of fifteen years and now includes a design studio as well as housing for the workers), an agricultural college with experimental fields, a gymnastics hall, a technical school, no fewer than four savings banks, and, in terms of possession

64 65

66

The original reads: “saá ret ud for sig som vilde han maale, om Telefonpælene stod lige”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 359. This reading dominates Martin Zerlang’s discussion of the novel in Herman Bang’s København (Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag, 2007), 186–95. Zerlang identifies in interesting ways the role of scenes featuring telephone and telegraph in positive and emotionally charged interactions between Joán and Gerda. Zerlang positions, moreover, Herman Bang as the first author in Danish literature to embrace the motif of the telephone. This sentiment is articulated by the principal of the local folk high school: “growth of the nation can be provided in so many forms”. The original reads: “der groer jo Vækst for Fædrelandet paa saa mange Maader”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 416.

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of cultural capital, an internationally renowned folk high school, strategically positioned as a stronghold of national values in close proximity to the lost land. A particularly prominent recollection of the interface between emotion and this new national economy, between uplifting, even romantic, feelings and building or cultivation processes, is provided by the voice of the vicar’s wife and is addressed to Joán. In the following passage that draws on keen visual as well as auditory memory in keeping with Westphal’s notion of polysensory representation of environment, an enchanted scene and soundscape of emergence (cf. the motif of awakening) and growth in both societal and marital terms are presented, culminating when the gaze captures the signs of the transformation of the heathland in the distance: – Oh yes, but what a delight it has been – we came here as newlyweds – living in the midst of where they hammered and laid bricks and dug in the ground and built. Waking up in the morning to see them raise roofs – tile by tile in red rows. And opening the window every morning that arrived to hear the ring of the trowels… You know, I find that there is no lovelier sound in the world than the small swift sound of a trowel… there it rings, don’t you think, of everything that is coming into being… […] – We have stood here many a morning, Henrik… my husband and I – because we have such a lovely window in the gable, even though it faces north – and seen how they nailed and plastered and hammered in the sun. And you know what, then farthest away the light patches that were turning green in the middle of the heather – that was the prettiest.67 Herman Bang was known to be a proponent of Danish economic regeneration as a response to the territorial loss and in awe of the results of the cultiva-

67

The original reads: “Aa, ja, men dejligt har det været – vi kom her som nygifte – at leve midt i det, hvor de hamrede og murede og gravede i Grunden og byggede. At vaagne om Morgenen og sé dem rejse Tag – – Teglsten ved Teglsten i de røde Rader. Og slaa Vinduet op hver Morgen der kom, og høre de klingende Murskeer… Véd De, jeg synes ikke, der i Verden er saa dejlig en Lyd som den lille hastige Lyd af en Murske… der li’esom klinger det, synes De ikke, alt det, der bliver til… / […] Vi har staaet mange Morgener, Henrik… min Mand og jeg – for vi har saadan et dejligt Vindu i Gavlen, skønt det vender mod Nord – og sét, hvor de spigrede og klinede og hamrede – midt i Solen. Og, véd De hvad, saa yderst ude de lyse Pletter, der grønnedes midt i Lyngen – – det var det kønneste”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 412–13.

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tion and forestation of the Jutlandic heath areas.68 Similar sentiments seem identifiable in the passages discussed above. It is notable, however, that in Those without a Nation the recognition of redirected and redoubled national energy as a form of loss management is focused on the past, focalised through the more labile lens of character memory, and given limited attention in the narrative overall. Within the composition of the novel, the sentiments in question flourish during the early, pre-concert part of Joán’s visit and are bound up with an upward curve in his appreciation of his mother’s native land – to the apex point that he believes he has found the “proper” Denmark and unlocked its utopian potential69 – and in the attraction between him and Gerda; however, these emotions and expectations are not sustained longer-term in the narrative. This suggests that the novel’s main strategic concern lies elsewhere. The novel prefers increasingly to investigate some of the negative identity- and mentality-related consequences which the national policy of inward compensatory effort and gathering of domestic power risks producing. The novel prioritises in its post-concert parts what it perceives as the cemented and exclusionary structures that have resulted from the policy of reclaiming. Its critique of a mentality that worships the reconstructed national “house” as a closed-off inward-facing unit and considers outside influences as something to be weeded out becomes manifest towards the end of the narrative, for example when it exposes high-flown but revealing formulations such as the following by the principal of the renowned local folk high school: “But the currents from outside, the principal said […], have made many seeds of weed sprout. However, we are now well under way to learn to close off our good Danish house and be faithful towards our own matters”.70 As for the nationally informed attitude to the protagonist himself, admiration of the visiting artist with domestic connections is replaced by discriminatory designations such as “upper-class gypsy”, which, sadly, correspond 68

69

70

See Nilsson, Impressionisten Herman Bang, 275. The notion that “what is lost outwards, shall be won inwards” (“hvad udad tabes, skal indad vindes”), coined by the Danish author Hans Peter Holst, is traditionally associated with the Danish national efforts of domestic economic “reclaiming” after the Second Schleswig War, the cultivation of the Jutlandic heath in particular, and also informs aspects of Those without a Nation, as we have shown. Cf. the following statements by Joán during the pre-concert gathering: “– I do find it so lovely here. […] – Here, I understand, Denmark is to be found”. “Here, madam, human beings could become happy”. The original reads: “– Jeg synes jo netop, her er saa dejligt. […] – Her, forstaar jeg, er jo Danmark”. “– Her, Frue, kunde Menneskene blive lykkelige”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 409, 421. The original reads: “– Men Strømningerne udefra, sagde Forstanderen […], har bragt mange Ukrudtsfrø til Spiring. Dog, vi er vel nu paa Veje til at lære at lukke til i vort gode danske Hus og være trofaste mod vort eget”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 524.

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with Joán’s own growing sense of being of a different “race” and displaced from dominant European in-groups: “A yellow person among whites”.71 While the novel critiques the exclusionary structures that have resulted from the territorial loss, it combines this with a perceptive depiction of experiencing the reality and the emotional impact of the imposed border demarcation. This serves as a reminder of the exertion of external power that was, after all, a fundamental factor in furthering and explaining an inward-facing Danish nationalism. The redrawn national borderline is pointed out literally when a mound near the railway station offers Joán and Gerda a vantage point from which to gain an overview of the surrounding flatlands. Through the use of Danish-realm nomenclature for areas both north and south of the border, an ongoing sense of a continuum cut through by an artificial borderline is conveyed. This sense of a desired, but disrupted or elusive closeness is supported affectively by gesture, voice and interpersonal intimacy in the following exchange that conflates the novel’s national and romantic themes: – Here is Denmark, he said. Miss Gerda raised her hand – she did not know what caused the quiver in her voice: – And there is South Jutland, she said: – They are the fields of South Jutland. – So close, Joán said?72 Since, as mentioned, the novel’s treatment of space does not accommodate the crossing of this debatable national boundary, it instead lets diasporic Danes travel north of the border to listen to Joán’s concert and take part in the social events that surround it. It is noteworthy, however, that the narrative directs no positivity towards the displaced Danes. On the contrary, they are consistently figured as solidified, dark and dehumanised entities, prime symbols of a rigid and exclusionary nationalism: “They […] looked […] like large black pil71

72

The original reads: “Salon-Zigeuner”, “En Gul mellem Hvide”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 513, 312. Commenting on the macro trajectory that informs the relationship between the protagonist and the national “home” in Those without a Nation, Nicholai Reinseth offers the interesting insight that the novel may be read as a Bildungsroman (which posits typically an improved homecoming after a rewarding journey out) in reverse, opening with a state of exile, followed by a hopeful but ultimately unsuccessful homecoming, and finishing with renewed exile. Reinseth, “Efterskrift”, 585–86. The original reads: “Her er Danmark, sagde han. / Frøken Gerda løftede sin Haand – hun vidste ikke, hvorfor hendes Stemme skælvede: / Og dér er Sønderjylland, sagde hun: / Det er Sønderjyllands Marker. / Saa nær? sagde Joán”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 386.

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lars”, “the two backs from south of the stream were turned against Joán like two black poles”.73 This type of dismissive attitude towards the visiting artist spreads as observed above through the local community (with a few exceptions, notably Gerda) during Joán’s stay in the borderland. Within the national essentialism and its emotional environment that the novel gradually uncovers, its hybrid hero cannot be accommodated. Like the island from which he originates, he himself is forced to “fall off” the map of national recognition. Bang’s last novel thus paints an ambiguous, but largely pessimistic picture of the Danish post-loss climate, emphasising national inwardness, defensiveness and “them-and-us” thought.74 This concluding finding should be counterbalanced, however, by revisiting the novel’s imaginary island. Whereas the relationship between island and nation in the two previous novels was one of spatial overlap or proximity, their primary relationship in Those without a Nation is one of major distance and difference. The imaginary island’s main application in the narrative is as a dystopian trope for homelessness and displacement, excluded as it is from any nation space: the island is a place “where everyone was an exile”.75 The main emotions that thrive in the soil of the island seem to be those linked to longing, ostracisation and isolation. However, towards the end of the novel the island is momentarily strategically reconstituted and emotionally recast as a utopian nation with soft borders and as a safe haven for the marginalised (taking over the role of a land of happiness from Joán’s temporary, “pre-concert” conception of Denmark itself, see note 69 above). This development represents a vision, briefly projected but powerfully articulated, of reversing the island’s status into a model environment that, notably, would maintain connections with the Danish nation. In the following passage, a sense of Danishness is created by places affectively connected with the east-Jutlandic home region of the protagonist’s exiled mother: […] Joán [spoke] again, about “the island” – about the island of the cursed, where he wanted to create happiness… And he spoke of how the island should become a sanctuary for the tormented; they would receive the unhappy beings and the criminals who had fled, and they would welcome the many whom life had afflicted with wounds… 73 74 75

The original reads: “De […] saá […] ud som store og sorte Støtter”, “de to Søndenaas-Rygge var vendt mod Joán som to sorte Stænger”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 382, 516. Peer E. Sørensen goes as far as characterising the novel as desperate. Sørensen, “Eksil og modernitet”, 88. The original reads: “hvor alle var landflygtige”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 421.

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He talked and did not know himself from where he got his many thoughts – about a hospital they would build close to mother’s mill and they would call it Munkebjerg… […] and we shall call the harbour Vejle – –76 This vision may recall Fredric Jameson’s identification in “The Politics of Utopia” of some of the energies and emotions that fuel utopian literature: alongside wish fulfilment and the elimination of evil, Jameson emphasises the creative stimulation of constructing models, cobbling together, and designing miniatures.77 The island briefly becomes a mini-Denmark that combines the longing for the past with a blueprint for the future. The temporarily reconstituted (trans)national island in Bang’s last novel thus represents an exemplary synthesis of the strategic and affective use of space in literature.

4

Concluding Remarks

By comparing three novelistic realisations of the setting of the Danish-German borderland as experienced at distinctive points in its nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century history, we have identified, firstly, a trajectory from a more southern to a more northern locational emphasis, reflecting the pressures on and loss of Denmark’s territory during the period in question. In their spatial composition, all three narratives display degrees of loyalty to the Danish geopolitical condition at the time. Secondly, we have seen how positive emotions of outreach and international connection are replaced by the strain of invasion and the terror of siege and violation and then by displacement, longing, hardening and exclusion. Thirdly, we have demonstrated the role of elements of national utopianism, linked to island environments, and recognition of national rebuilding efforts in the texts. Ultimately, however pessimistic the loss- and post-loss-orientated narratives may appear, they also read as expressions of resistance against inflated nationalism and the notion

76

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The original reads: “[…] Joán [talte] igen, om “Øen” – om de Forbandedes Ø, hvor han vilde skabe Lykke… / Og han talte om, hvordan den skulde blive et Fristed for de Pinte; og de ulykkelige vilde de modtage og Forbryderne, der var flygtede, og de Mange, som Livet havde slaaet med Saar, de skulde tage imod dem… / Han talte og vidste ikke selv, hvorfra han fik sine egne mange Tanker – om et Hospital, de vilde bygge ude ved Moders Mølle og Munkebjerg vilde de kalde det… / […] og Havnen kalder vi Vejle – –”. Bang, De uden Fædreland –, 520. Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia”, 35.

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of a national home with no room for the other. While being heavily nationally orientated, the three narratives thus share elements of transnationalism. Together, our explorations have shown how literature can combine strategic and affective aspects of spatial representation to interrogate nationalism, illuminate “debatable lands”, depict territorial loss, capture resultant feelings, and scrutinise strategies for loss management.

Bibliography Andersen, Hans Christian. De to Baronesser. In H.C. Andersens samlede værker: Romaner, vol. II, edited by Klaus P. Mortensen. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprogog Litteraturselskab, Gyldendal, 2004 [1848]. Andersen, Hans Christian. H.C. Andersens dagbøger, vol. III, edited by Helga Vang Lauridsen and Tue Gad. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, G.E.C. Gads Forlag, 1995. Bang, Herman. De uden Fædreland –, edited by Nicholai Reinseth. In Romaner og noveller, vol. 5, edited by Jesper Gehlert Nielsen and Jørgen Hunosøe. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, People’s Press, 2008 [1906]. Bang, Herman. Tina. Translated by Paul Christophersen. London and Dover N.H.: The Athlone Press, 1984. Bang, Herman. Tine, edited by Esther Kielberg. In Romaner og noveller, vol. 3, edited by Jesper Gehlert Nielsen and Jørgen Hunosøe. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, People’s Press, 2008 [1889]. Borup, Morten. “Indledning”. In Hans Christian Andersen, Romaner og Rejseskildringer, vol. IV, edited by Morten Borup, VII–XXI. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprogog Litteraturselskab, Gyldendal, 1943. Cohen, Margaret. “The Chronotopes of the Sea”. In The Novel, vol. 2: Forms and Themes, edited by Franco Moretti, 647–66. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Dal, Erik. “Efterskrift”. In Hans Christian Andersen, De to Baronesser, edited by Erik Dal, 231–70. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Borgen, 1997. Goldschmidt, M.A. “Review of De to Baronesser”. In Hans Christian Andersen, De to Baronesser, edited by Erik Dal, 256–65. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Borgen, 1997. [The review was originally published in Nord og Syd, 1. Qvartal, 1849]. Grodal, Torben Krag. “Tine – det patriarkalske samfunds undergang”. In Dansk litteraturhistorie, vol. 6: Dannelse, folkelighed, individualisme 1848–1901, 386–88. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2000 [1984]. Jameson, Fredric. “The Politics of Utopia”. New Left Review 25 (2004): 35–54.

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Kielberg, Esther. “Efterskrift”. In Herman Bang, Tine, edited by Esther Kielberg, 491–508. In Romaner og noveller, vol. 3, edited by Jesper Gehlert Nielsen and Jørgen Hunosøe. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, People’s Press, 2008. Möller-Christensen, Ivy York. “Spiegelbilder des Krieges: Grenzverletzungen als literarische Katalysatoren der nationalen und existentiellen Selbstreflexion”. European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 44, no. 2 (2014): 230–47. Mortensen, Klaus P. “H.C. Andersens romaner”. In H.C. Andersens samlede værker: Romaner, vol. I, edited by Klaus P. Mortensen, 13–45. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, Gyldendal, 2004. Nilsson, Torbjörn. Impressionisten Herman Bang: Studier i Herman Bangs författarskap till och med Tine. Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag, 1965. Reinseth, Nicholai. “Efterskrift”. In Herman Bang, De uden Fædreland –, edited by Nicholai Reinseth, 585–601. In Romaner og noveller, vol. 5, edited by Jesper Gehlert Nielsen and Jørgen Hunosøe. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, People’s Press, 2008. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu. Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2016. Sørensen, Peer E. “Eksil og modernitet: Herman Bang mellem dekadence og vitalisme”. Norsk Litteraturvitenskapelig Tidsskrift no. 1 (2011): 84–92. Tygstrup, Frederik. “Affekt og rum”. K&K. Kultur og Klasse 116, no. II (2013): 17–32. Westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 [2007]. Zerlang, Martin. Herman Bang’s København. Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag, 2007.

Chapter 7

Affective Bodies on the Move: Space, Emotions and Loss in Fredrika Runeberg’s Historical Novel Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters Kristina Malmio

Spatial imagery, emotions, and literature have played an important role in most European nationalist movements, and in constructing such imagined communities as nations. Such is the case in the historical novel Fru Catharina Boije och hennes döttrar: En berättelse från stora ofredens tid (Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters: A Story from the Time of the Greater Wrath) by an author using the pseudonym –a –g. Written already at the end of 1830s, completed in 1843 but not published until 1858, the story begins in 1718, during the Great Northern War. Sweden has lost the territory of Finland to Russian troops, who roam around killing, plundering and burning. The story centres on the fortunes of two young noble women during wartime, Cecilia and Margaretha, daughters of the harsh Catharina Boije, and their suitors. Side by side with the love stories involving the daughters, the future of Finland is at stake in the peace negotiations between Sweden and Russia that take place in the novel. Affects play a central role in Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters. Not only are the central themes of love, honour and loyalty saturated with feelings but affects also move the central characters and steer their fates. The emotions of the protagonists are depicted carefully and in detail, and the very fact that the setting is during wartime contributes to its emotional character. The author behind the pseudonym –a –g is Fredrika Runeberg (1807–1879). A Finnish writer, she had Swedish as her native language – Swedish was the language of education, culture and administration in Finland at the time, and the majority of the educated class were Swedish speaking. Together with author Zacharias Topelius, Fredrika Runeberg was a pioneer of the historical novel in Finland and a keen admirer of the works of Sir Walter Scott.1 A growing interest in history and the novel as a genre, especially the historical novel,

1 See e.g. Hedvig Rask, “Min pennas saga: Om Fredrika Runebergs litterära självbiografi”, in Fredrika Runeberg, Min pennas saga, ed. Hedvig Rask (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2007).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_009

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characterized much of the literary production of the time. The novel was a genre instrumental in social and political commentary, and Runeberg’s historical novel contributes to the formation of a growing Finnish nationalism in the nineteenth century.2 Authors used historical novels as a means with which to forge a common past; novels thus played an important role in forming the ideas of nationhood and national identity.3 Moreover, historical fiction links with emotions. As Anu Koivunen puts it, “emotions are formative not only of subjects but also of social relations, forms of politics and political mobilization”.4 They are also entangled in history writing, nation building and cultural memory. Thus, the emotional aspects of historical novels are of interest. Much research on nationalism and literature has focused on the creation and construction of the idea of a nation or on the birthing of nationalist feelings. What makes Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters interesting and perhaps somewhat unusual is the great emphasis it puts on loss and the heterogeneous group of human and non-human agents that contribute to the production of emotions and nationhood. To demonstrate how this is done, we need an approach that emphasizes the performative dimension of affects. My aim, therefore, is to study the novel through the lens of affects as social, performative, and “on-the-move” agents introduced by Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004). Instead of asking “What are emotions”, she asks, “What do emotions do”?5 Ahmed claims that emotions are relational, produced in the encounters between subjects and objects. Moreover, it is the objects of emotion that circulate (rather than the emotions themselves as such), and emotions move via the movement or circulation of objects. Such objects become “sticky”, “saturated with affect, and [as] sites of personal and social tension”.6 Our task is to track how “words for feeling, and objects of feel2 See Mari Hatavara, Historia ja poetiikka Fredrika Runebergin ja Zacharias Topeliuksen historiallisissa romaaneissa (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2007); Heidi Grönstrand, Naiskirjailija, romaani ja kirjallisuuden merkitys 1840-luvulla (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2005); Kati Launis, Kerrotut naiset: Suomen ensimmäiset naisten kirjoittamat romaanit naiseuden määrittelijöinä (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2005), 110; Merete Mazzarella, Fredrika Charlotta född Tengström: En nationalskalds hustru (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2007). 3 Heidi Grönstrand, “Historical Fiction and the Dynamics of Romance: The Cases of Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson and Fredrika Runeberg”, in Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia, eds. Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2015), 141. 4 Koivunen quoted in Grönstrand, “Historical Fiction”, 141. 5 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, [2004] 2014), 4. 6 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 11.

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ing, circulate and generate effects: how they move, stick, and slide. We move, stick, and slide with them”, Ahmed states.7 Studying affective economies, therefore, is first about studying the production of affects, emotions, feelings (Ahmed frequently uses the words synonymously) and second, about focusing on economies, namely what flows, circulates, is valued and exchanged. Ahmed offers, I think, an approach of interest to scholars focusing on the use of emotions in the construction of imagined communities such as nations in literature. Studying the exchanges and transfers of sticky objects is the focus of my analysis of Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters. Still, I need a perspective on spatiality in order to grasp the movements of the sticky objects and the territorial, mapping dimension of the nationalist thinking connected to emotions and loss in the novel. By locating the places mentioned and the relations between them, we get an idea of the moving boundaries of the nationalist project. Here the ideas put forward by Franco Moretti on the relationship between geography and the novel are useful as well as studies of literary geographies and cartographies that focus on the relation between real and imagined places (see also Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s chapter in the present volume).8 In a nationalist context, the relation between the novel and geography is even more enhanced. Runeberg’s novel has already been the subject of a couple of studies that scrutinize it through the lens of nationalism. Of special interest is Mari Hatavara’s interpretation of it as an allegory of the political situation of Finland at the time of its writing, which I will return to later.9 In addition, Heidi Grönstrand has analysed the novel in terms of sentimental novel and romance.10 Nonetheless, taking a point of departure in the production of loss and affective economies offers a nuanced, state-of-the-art approach to Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters. What earlier studies have not observed is the fact that the construction of nationalism is closely connected to loss. Loss is the most central theme of the novel by far: loss of wealth, lives, beloved ones, bodies, morality, inner balance, and protection, whether political, cultural, military, or financial. Moreover, the bodies and emotions depicted are on the 7 8

9 10

Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 14. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998). As Robert T. Tally Jr states, “novels always involve a cartographic project, as novelists attempt to represent ‘real’ places in their fiction or create imaginary locations for otherwise ‘realistic’ novels”. Robert T. Tally Jr, “Introduction: Mapping Narratives”, in Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative, ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2014), 6. Hatavara, Historia ja poetiikka. Grönstrand, Naiskirjailija, romaani; Grönstrand, “Historical Fiction”.

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move, and the motors of many significant exchanges and transfers. By focusing on loss and the movements of the bodies in Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters, the ambivalent and contradictory nature of nationalism depicted in the moment of writing becomes visible. Simultaneously, a focus on loss and moving bodies covers a wide array of exchanges and transfers which are spatial, regional, national, linguistic, political, physical, generational, and cultural. In addition, the bodies that move are not only human, but also non-human. The nationalist idea of Finland put forward in the story is illustrated and expressed – paradoxically – in the depictions of a bleeding, wounded, paralysed and dying body, as such an extraordinarily strong image of severe and dramatic, life-threatening loss. However, simultaneously, through the movements of other bodies, the imagined spatial geography of Finland stretches in various directions. Through the moves, the story constructs and portrays the real and imagined geography of Finland. Three central sticky objects occur, move and circulate in the novel and carry the emotions; a spider, the heart and letters. Notably, the sticky objects repeatedly “stick” to each other. What’s more, the spider especially has “stuck” to scholars repeatedly as the many interpretations show. With a point of departure in Ahmed’s approach to affects, I ask which emotions connect to the sticky objects and how they contribute to the production of loss, and thereby to nationalism. What is the economy of affects that Runeberg’s novel puts forward? What exchanges and transfers take place? What does loss produce? What are the spaces and places connected to each other, and how do they contribute to the production of Finland? My hope is that a scrutiny of the sticky objects might shed some new light on the way the novel portrays emotions and the Finnish and European nation-building process in the nineteenth century. Most importantly, the article elucidates the importance of loss in the production of nationalism. First, however, I need to introduce the historical context of the novel, the novel’s central features, and prior research on it.

1

The Historical Contexts of the Novel

In the 1830s, Fredrika Runeberg belonged to a group of young intellectuals by virtue both of coming from an academic family and married to Finnish national poet-to-be Johan Ludvig Runeberg. The male members of the group would later become of central importance in expressing and developing the nationalist ideas in Finland in social, political and cultural terms. While Johan Ludvig Runeberg was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Helsingfors

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Morgonblad (1832–1837), which published and disseminated many new political and literary ideas, Fredrika Runeberg collected, translated and edited much of the content published. In this newspaper, she also published her first texts in the 1830s, already then signing her writings –a –g. The Finnish literary and cultural circles were very small, and the identity of –a –g was common knowledge.11 Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters was Runeberg’s first novel – before this, she had only written poems and short stories for various literary albums and newspapers. In contrast to many reviews of novels written by Finnish female authors at the time, reviews of her work were mostly favourable.12 It has been conjectured that this was due to fact that she was personally acquainted with two of the important male literary critics of her time, namely J.V. Snellman and Zacharias Topelius.13 Compared to most other female authors in Finland of her era, one can hardly depict Runeberg as a marginalized or neglected female author. Scholars have never forgotten her, nor has she been excluded from the canon.14 In the 1840s, at the time that Runeberg wrote her novel, Finland was an independent Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire, after having endured the status of being a backyard of Sweden for more than six centuries. Sweden and Russia are the central fields of political force in Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters. This was also the case in reality, and Finland’s position between these two nations, both striving to become empires through warfare, was difficult. In the novel, Runeberg goes back to the historical events of the eighteenth century, which might be seen as the first steps in the development that finally led to the separation of Finland from Sweden in 1809. In the period of 1700–1721, Sweden and Russia were at war, and Russia occupied the Finnish territory. In the peace agreement of 1721, parts of Finland were ceded to Russia, but the main part of Finland remained under Swedish rule until 1809. As historian Max Engman puts it, in 1809, the most radical change in Finland’s history took place, and the grandest divorce in the history of the Swedish

11

12 13 14

The use of a pseudonym was more a literary convention than an effective way of hiding of one’s identity. When used by female authors, pseudonyms were also a way of expressing proper female modesty. See Pia Forssell, “Fredrika Runeberg och bilden av författarskapet”, Historiska och litteraturhistoriska studier 82 (2007): 93–98; Åsa Arping, Den anspråksfulla blygsamheten: Auktoritet och genus i 1830-talets svenska romandebatt (Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Symposion, 2002), 9–21; Rask, “Min pennas saga”, 19. Merete Mazzarella, Från Fredrika Runeberg till Märta Tikkanen (Helsingfors: Söderströms, 1985), 47; Rask, “Min pennas saga”, 22. Rask, “Min pennas saga”, 22. Mazzarella, Från Fredrika, 28; Grönstrand, Naiskirjailija, romaani, 21–22; Launis, Kerrotut naiset, 8.

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state. Sweden lost its war with Russia, along with more than one-third of its territorial area and one fourth of its entire population.15 From a Swedish point of view, the loss of Finland became a national trauma (see also Anna Bohlin’s chapter in the present volume). What was perceived as a major “loss” from the Swedish point of view was, for Finland, the beginning of an era of social, political, industrial and cultural development. One of the results was that all the tax revenues from Finland stayed in Finland and were used to develop the territory. Prior to this, half the taxes had been directed to Sweden.16 According to Engman, the nineteenth century, for Finland, was a period that combined continuity and turbulence; a tension between the nation-state model, a heritage from the Swedish era, as well as being a part of the Russian Empire, the largest empire in the world at the time.

2

Entrance History: The Novel, Its Times and Places

The three-dimensional temporality of nationalism – a fantasy of a past, which will be re-enacted, thus forming a present that in turn will ensure a promised future – is activated at the very beginning of Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters. Its time range spans many years; first, the reader is introduced to a frame narrative, an example of what one might call “nationalistic geographical tourism”. The time frame of the narrative is somewhat difficult to ascertain. Initially, the reader gets the impression that it depicts events around the time the story was published, the 1850s. Yet later, in a note, the author comments on a detail described in the frame story: “This was the case in the beginning of the 1830s; whether something of this old is still there, is unknown to the author”.17 A female Finnish visitor has been travelling to several Finnish natural locations, a trip she has longed to take. The places she has visited, “such pearls of our countries beauty”, are, according to the narrator, unknown to many but make every Finnish heart beat more happily.18 Already at the beginning, there is a geographic and cartographic dimension present, as the visitor gives us a list of real places she has seen; Kyro and Nokia rivers, and the ridges of Kangasala, Imola and Hattelmala in Häme province. 15 16 17

18

Max Engman, Språkfrågan: Finlandssvenskhetens uppkomst 1812–1922 (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2016), 25. Engman, Språkfrågan, 30. (Fredrika Runeberg), Fru Catharina Boije och hennes döttrar: En berättelse från stora ofredens tid af –a –g (Helsingfors: Finska Litteratur-sällskapets tryckeri, 1858), 2. Litteraturbanken.se. 2015. All the translations from the novel are mine. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 1.

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Figure 7.1

Finnish nature and countryside portrayed by Magnus von Wright for Zacharias Topelius, Finland Presented in Drawings (1845–1852) Courtesy of The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS)

Her journey eventually takes her to Hattanpää mansion, near the small industrial town of Tampere. She wants to see the place, famous for its beautiful park on the fair lake Pyhäjärvi, and after a long walk, she takes a rest at the old fashioned, aristocratic manor. Before dinner, an old friend of the female visitor/narrator, residing in the house and familiar with the many stories associated with the history of the estate and the family of owners, shows her around. In one of the rooms, there is a door with a panel painting representing a young girl wearing a helmet and a shield, dressed as the Roman goddess of Minerva (Pallas Athene), carrier of wisdom, handicraft and warfare. The painting, which features a huge spider dangling from a thread above Minerva, piques the visitor’s curiosity.19 The setting for the storytelling is described meticulously: the visitor is asked to sit down in an old-fashioned chair and the narrator changes her speech to an out-of-date style and vocabulary. She 19

According to Mazzarella, Runeberg got the impulse for the novel during a journey she took to the district near to Tampere and to Hattanpää in the summer 1833. At Hattanpää, she heard the story about a young Miss Boije, who died due to a spider, and Runeberg was shown a painting representing a girl dressed in the clothes of Minerva on a door. Mazzarella, Från Fredrika, 32.

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then begins her story about the drawing, a portrayal of Cecilia Boije, who once lived in the room. The frame story presents a pleasurable moment in the life of the visitor, and the tale told by her friend, the story within the story recounted by the visitor to the reader, is the novel we are about to read. In her novel, Runeberg uses several of the techniques developed by Walter Scott; the inclusion of a frame narrative is but one of these. The story also includes real historical milieus and characters in a fictional setting.20 The story within the story takes us to the year 171821 and proceeds to the year 1721 when the peace negotiations between Russia and Sweden finally end. The frame story and the story within the story are binary opposites: an entertaining moment of friendly, intimate storytelling in a beautiful calm setting in the nineteenth century is intertwined with the story of a violent and threatening historical past, eighteenth-century Sweden, incapable of or disinterested in protecting the Finnish soil. Set in motion by the panel painting, the past re-enacted, is one of terror, loss, and neglect. The past is by definition always something lost. This might well be interpreted as a positive condition because the present is all the things the past was not: a time of peace, material and psychological wellbeing, travels without fear. The third dimension of temporality in nationalism, the promised future, is present through the discourse on nature, in the depiction of the beauty of the landscape that makes every Finn’s heart beat more happily. However, there is something not at all harmonious about the nationalistic scenery; one of the attractions, the river of Nokia is described as sad, and in mourning.22 Nature’s appearance speaks the language of sorrow, in the midst of the beauty of the summer day. The story within the story is complicated; it involves many dramatic events and takes the reader in many geographical directions. At the beginning, “a gloomy evening in spring 1718”, Lady Catharina Boije, her daughters, and their servants residing in the Hattanpää mansion are in a state of fear as the Russian troops are advancing to the estate of the Boije family. Lady Catharina is a widow, and the head of family, the son of the household Göran Boije, is taking part in the ongoing battle. As the story continues, Russian soldiers take Cecilia and her mother to the town of Åbo as prisoners, while Margaretha flees into the woods and is rescued by a Swedish officer and partisan, Magnus Malm, just before she falls into the hands of a Cossack. Margaretha and Malm 20 21

22

Mazzarella, Fredrika Charlotta, 185; Grönstrand, Naiskirjailija, romaani, 239–40. The original edition has the year 1712, but the online edition has changed to 1718, since the story otherwise does not add up. See litteraturbanken.se/författare/RunebergFC/titlar/ FruCatharinaBoije/sida/-2/etext. Accessed February 23, 2021. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 1.

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aim to flee to Sweden and during their journey, they fall in love. They are taken into custody and separated from each other. Before the Russians capture them, however, they were wedded by an old priest who had met them on their journey to an island where Magnus hid a boat. Many more similar scenes follow the dramatic start of the novel. Cecilia, Margaretha’s younger sister, was already as a little girl engaged to marry a nobleman of Swedish origin, Carl Lejonankar. She, however, dies the night before their wedding. There is also Johan Bruce, a nobleman who is the friend of the family. Bruce loves Cecilia, works for the Russians, but decides to die for Finland. As a historical novel, a genre that strives to project a trustworthy depiction of a historical past, its discussion of the national identities of the protagonists and its depiction of social issues, such as the position of women and the estates, is typical of nineteenth century and of the time when the story was written.23 As early as the 1850s, the reviewers of the time noted the anachronistic nationalist feelings of the protagonists.24 Later, Merete Mazzarella suggested that the portrayal of the daughters’ thoughts, feelings and actions and their quest for personal happiness represents an affinity with nineteenthcentury thinking.25

3

Emotions and Sticky Objects

The novel’s depiction of emotions is rich and varied. Runeberg regularly portrays the physical and emotional reactions of her protagonists; Cecilia and Margaretha cry loudly or shout with happiness; Margaretha looks feverish, shivers and is agitated; Johan Bruce’s face is gloomy.26 The depictions of bodily reactions express extreme emotions. Already the opening scene describes Cecilia, pale, shivering and trembling. The family at the Hattanpää estate gather for evening prayer, led by Catharina Boije. Cecilia comes in late, due to a spider she had found in her room, and because she is afraid of the spider, asks her mother whether she might sleep in her sister’s room. Her mother, however, replies sternly that this is not the time for feminine weakness as Finland lies ravaged, bleeding. The cities are in ruins, the bourgeoisie are all but beggars, the homesteads deserted, or populated by only women 23 24 25 26

Grönstrand, Naiskirjailija, romaani, 232. Rask, “Min pennas saga”. Mazzarella, Fredrika Charlotta, 191. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 89, 90, 122, 123.

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and children. There is misery everywhere, and soon our fatherland will be forced to give up this soil for the enemy who reigns already in all places. In a couple of days, your own home might lie in ashes, your beloved ones’ buried in the ruins, or spared for an even worse fate. Cecilia, and you go pale because of a spider!27 The individual emotions of Cecilia are opposed to the condition of Finland, depicted by Lady Catharina as a ravaged, moribund, bleeding body. In her list of the maladies of Finland, she describes misery on all levels, abstract, concrete as well as symbolical. The threat of the enemy moves closer and closer towards the protagonists’ bodies. The fatherland in Lady Catharina’s account refers to Sweden, and Russians, the enemy has already invaded the territory of Finland. Sharing traits with the sentimental novel and melodrama, the heart is the central organ in Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters.28 Already in the frame story of the novel, a nationalistic heart is beating, and the story within the story includes many more. The word “heart” recurs regularly, and a struggle in the hearts of the protagonists is at the centre of the novel. In the heart, emotions such as love, fear, pride, happiness, and sorrow take place; the hearts of the young women, soon to be broken; the hearts of the Finnish people faithful to Sweden, the hearts of those noble men and women who are described as “Swedish by their birth and in their heart” but who have fled Finland for Sweden.29 The icon of the heart occurs repeatedly as a figure of speech in the many love letters included in the story, as we shall see later. Even the central sticky object of the novel, the spider that threatens Cecilia, attaches to the heart. Cecilia imagines that the insect is going to weave a web around her heart and that she will die of suffocation. Earlier, she has merely dreamt of the spider; in the present time of the story, the insect has moved from fantasy to “reality”, as it suddenly appears in her bedroom. There is also the imagery of a worm devouring her whole heart, which the old nurse Vappo warns Cecilia about.30 Whereas for Magnus Malm, Margaretha is the one his 27

28 29 30

“Härjadt ligger Finland, nära att förblöda. Förstörda äro dess städer, borgarena tiggare; öde dess hemman, eller befolkade endast af qvinnor och barn. Elände rår öfverallt, och snart kanske skall fäderneslandet nödgas afträda detta land åt en fiende, hvilken nu redan herrskar här öfverallt. Kanske inom några dagar ligger ditt eget fädernehem i aska, och de dina begrafna under ruinerna, eller skonade för att undergå än svårare öden. Cecilia, och du bleknar för en spindel!” Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 8. Grönstrand, Naiskirjailija, romaani, 226, 230. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 94, 47, 105. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 197.

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heart has chosen, the heart for Carl Lejonankar, Cecilia’s husband to be, is but a little piece she should leave in Finland because she has no use for it in Sweden.31 His commentary reveals his “heartlessness”. The emotions portrayed in the novel have been studied as expressions of the main female protagonists, in terms of their female fears, obligations, and conditions. The spider has been the object of at least three interpretations, which enter into a dialogue with each other and connect either to emotions or to nationalistic discourse. According to Merete Mazzarella, the novel is structured on a string of contradictions which are carried by its central characters, women as well as men: dream – reality, intuition – rationality, nature – culture, and freedom – its opposite, political as well as private.32 Even the sisters embody these oppositions; Cecilia, the younger daughter, is sensuous, romantic, and emotional, while Margaretha is brave, independent, active and empathetic, and capable of pragmatic action when needed. In Heidi Grönstrand’s reading, we find an interpretation of Cecilia that is the opposite of Mazzarella’s view. Grönstrand states that Cecilia questions the position of women in the social order along with the importance of marriage. She reads the heart as an organ connected to the sentimental novel and thus portraying braveness, related to both subjectivity and society.33 The spider connects to elements that symbolize power, freedom and social issues, Grönstrand explains. Cecilia’s dying scene involves a promise of a better future in freedom; she imagines her heart, now fully embedded in the spider’s web, being transformed into a butterfly.34 Mazzarella in turn argues that Cecilia’s fear of the spider is a symbol of her immaturity and timidity – she could have become free if her fear of the spider had not paralysed her.35 In yet another interpretation, Mari Hatavara emphasizes the “mythical relation of the spider to mothers” and reads the spider as a metaphor of the controlling mother, Lady Catharina. The myth of Arakhne is connected to weaving, and thus to creating. The spider is also the weaver of the net of destiny. Later on in the story, Cecilia is dressed as Minerva, or Pallas Athene, 31 32 33 34

35

Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 212–13. Mazzarella, Fredrika Charlotta, 199–203. Grönstrand, Naiskirjailija, romaani, 230. Grönstrand, Naiskirjailija, romaani, 230–31. Anna Bohlin has pointed out to me that a worm that transforms into a butterfly is a symbol used even by Fredrika Bremer in order to describe a spiritual development. According to Mazzarella, the reading of Hertha: En själs historia (1856) by Fredrika Bremer, finally encouraged Fredrika Runeberg to publish Fru Catharina Boije och hennes döttrar, which had by that time been waiting for fifteen years. Mazzarella, Fredrika Charlotta, 184–85. Mazzarella, Fredrika Charlotta, 199–200.

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when the spider turns up. According to the myth, Athene in her jalousie turned Arakhne into a spider. Even Hatavara stresses Cecilia’s questioning of the traditional roles and the possibility of emancipation in the future and she accepts Grönstrand’s view according to which Cecilia’s death from fright of the spider can be interpreted as her becoming free.36 But, what for Grönstrand is the future of women, is for Hatavara a picture of Finland’s free future. Hatavara reads Cecilia as the allegorical portrayal of the maiden of Finland with two suitors, Sweden and Russia. However, she also points out that both a realistic and an allegorical reading lead to contradictions and a pessimistic portrayal of Cecilia and Carl. All three emphasize the contradictory nature of the novel, the spider, and the emotions depicted in it, and perceive the emotions created by the spider as the inherent, mental reactions of Cecilia. From my perspective, seeing the spider as an object that emotions stick to and that transfers emotions makes it easier to explain the very many different layers that are stuck to it. As has already been shown convincingly by Mazzarella, Grönstrand, and Hatavara, it is not only an insect, but also a symbol, a figure of speech, which carries many meanings. It is linked with (female) fear, dreams, sexuality, identity, motherhood, nation, loss of independence, and mythology. Evidently, it is a very sticky object covering several psychological, historical and cultural layers, private as well as social. Moreover, the spider is also a mover of affects and creator of emotions. It gives rise to many things in the novel and for the novel: it is a theme or symbol, which holds the story together and gives it a dramatic form; it produces scenes of intense emotional effect; it makes the audience sympathetic towards Cecilia; it connects the story to the melodramatic/sentimental genre.37 The spider moves, the emotions stuck to it move and it also moves the people around Cecilia, physically as well as psychologically. It moves Cecilia emotionally, but paralyses her physically. It does not move or affect Carl, but makes Magnus try to protect and help Cecilia. The spider is truly a complex object. However, it is not the origin of emotions; rather, it is a non-human actor that sets affects in motion. As Ahmed puts it, emotions are relational. They are effects of encounters, which gives rise to moves of “towardness” or “awayness” in relation to objects faced. “[T]he attribution of feeling to an object […] is an effect of the encounter, which moves the subject away from the object. Emotions involve such affective forms of reorientation”, Ahmed states.38

36 37 38

Hatavara, Historia ja poetiikka, 154, 149–51. As Grönstrand states in Naiskirjailija, romaani, 178, 225–31. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 8.

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In fact, the spider is a lesson in how emotions are not inherent in an object – the various characters in the story relate to it very differently. What’s more, the spider attaches even to place: it always appears in Cecilia’s room, and next to her body. Thus, the spider connects not only to emotions and movement, but also to spatiality. It moves, disappears and returns, always coming closer to her body. At the end, it comes down along its thread and lands on Cecilia’s heart. The spider’s occurrences have many effects which are about loss: Cecilia’s loss of life, Lady Catharina’s loss of her younger daughter, Carl’s loss of bride, Cecilia’s wet-nurse Vappo’s loss of Cecilia, who has become a stand-in for her own dead children, Margaretha’s loss of her sister, Bruce’s loss of a heart that carries feelings similar to his own about Finland. As Cecilia is a transporter of nationalist thoughts in the novel, her death means finally even a loss for “Finland”.

4

Hearts, Loss and National Identities in Transfer

At the beginning of the novel, there is a nationalist heart beating. Many others in the story within the story follow this first appearance of a heart. The hearts and the emotions connected to them stick of course to romantic feelings, but they are frequently also used to depict nationalistic emotions, which are always felt in the heart. People are described as being true to Sweden in their hearts, and Lady Catharina Boije is a Swede by “birth and heart”.39 Time after time, the women and men fall into discussions about the characteristic features of Swedish, Finnish, and Russian people, and of their own identities. Already at the beginning, Cecilia tells her sister Margaretha, that Margaretha is Swedish, their mother Catharina Boije is “really Swedish”, although she has learned to speak Finnish, and their father half-Swedish, as most noble people in Finland are. But, Cecilia concludes, “I am a real Finn”.40 Cecilia connects Finnishness to certain characteristic features such as a rigid outer appearance, unwillingness to speak Swedish or to speak at all, but also to being deeply devoted and trustworthy. For her, the wet-nurse, Vappo, who sucked her as a baby, is the uttermost Finn. Grönstrand offers an interesting interpretation of the witch Vappo, cast in a mould inspired by Scott:41 “Following the idea widespread in folklore that witchcraft is transmitted through breast milk, a part

39 40 41

Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 47, 79. The original reads: “jag är en verklig finska”. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 15. Grönstrand, Naiskirjailija, romaani, 224–25.

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of Vappo’s magical power has been transferred to Cecilia in the act of breastfeeding”.42 The corporeality and intimacy of the relationship between Cecilia and Vappo, causes Grönstrand to draw parallels to mother tongue, as it has been described by Yasemin Yildiz. Yildiz sees the mother tongue as a highly emotional constellation that strongly associates language with maternal origin, affective and corporeal intimacy, and natural kinship.43 On this point, however, I do not agree with Grönstrand. Vappo is by definition not Cecilia’s corporeal mother. Cecilia has two mothers, Lady Catharina, who is her bodily “origin”, and Vappo, who has nurtured her. Nor is it so that being a true Finn here necessarily connects to blood, territory or mother tongue; Cecilia does not share any of these bonds with Vappo. It is the duality here that I find interesting; Cecilia turns away from the carrier of her origins and “mother tongue”, Lady Catharina, and identifies, instead, with a Finnish woman of the people. Cecilia’s individual, warm emotions stick to a new body, and she offers a form of identification for those other bodies, interested in investing their emotions in a new object, and contributing thus to the creation of a new collective body, that of “Finland” and “Finnish”. For example, for the Swedish speaking educated class, which turned themselves away from Sweden, towards the Finnish and Finland, at the time the novel was published. If we study the depictions of Finland and Finnishness in the story in terms of exchange and transfer, we soon encounter loss. The material terms of the territory are repeatedly described in terms of defeat, shortfall, and damage. Legally, Finland was an equal part of Sweden. However, Johan Bruce describes the actions of the Swedish King towards the Finns in terms of exploitation, and the relationship between Finland and Sweden all but egalitarian. Many characters in the novel perceive him as a traitor because he works for the Russians; after all, he has breached his loyalty to King and the country. Cecilia asks him, why he is “a Swede serving Russia”, despite the fact that he otherwise seems to be a good person. Johan’s answer includes a declaration of identity: “I am a Finn, not a Swede, even less a Russian”, and he continues: “[…] Finland is my fatherland, soon about to become a desert. Why should a Finn be a Swede? Since when have you heard a Swede count himself as one of us? They have given us but scorn and contempt; the word Finn is for them not more than a nickname”.44 According to Bruce, Swedes’ relationship to Finns is characterized by disrespect and inequality. Cecilia opposes him, stating what 42 43 44

Grönstrand, “Historical Fiction”, 148. Yasemin Yildiz quoted in Grönstrand, “Historical Fiction”, 149. “Finland är mitt fädernesland, Finland, det snart sagt till en öken vordna. Hvarför skulle finnen vara svensk? När hörde du väl en svensk räkna sig till samma folk med oss? Hån

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she has heard, that Sweden has generously embraced Finland in a brotherly relationship and given this wild region its laws, civilization, and knowledge of God.45 Bruce then explains to Cecilia the conditions of his childhood in a long account of loss. First, his mother dies of the plague; his father earlier preceded her in death. Bruce, a descent of one of the oldest noble families in the country, grows up in the house of a neighbour, a man of the people who has lost all his family and wealth due to the war against Russia. In his household, Bruce becomes “a real Finn”. However, the war erupts again, and Bruce’s stepfather must join the Swedish army. Bruce, now fourteen years old and yearning for a chance to study, travels to the town Åbo, where people talk about a letter from the Swedish King promising Finns some economic relief, but “the money was needed, and every penny was sucked out with the promise that after the war, the needs of Finland would be taken care of”.46 Once again, Sweden does not keep its promise to provide compensation. Finland is the supply line for Sweden with the task to provide the resources that Sweden needs, and the King continues to ask for more: additional material resources, loyalty, bravery and lives to be sacrificed to protect his regime. The losses of Finland are material as well as social and cultural. Most of the men have died; valuable assets are transported from Finland to Sweden; land remains uncultivated and educated people have left Finland. Even Bruce marches to war, is taken to prisoner in Russia, and finally ends up with a good position in the household of a Russian nobleman, Prince Galitzin, an actual historical figure included in this fiction. Bruce decides to continue his struggle for Finland, but in the service of Russia. For him, Sweden has an interest in Finland only because Finland protects Sweden, and the exchange between Sweden and Finland is nothing but negative. He depicts the ongoing wars as “an ocean of misery”, and the country as bleeding from thousands of wounds. What he now longs for is a heart, Cecilia’s, which like his own, beats for “our country”.47 He wants to see the development of Finland in peace. The kinds of debates on loyalty and identity that take place between Bruce and Cecilia were of the utmost actuality at the time the novel was published, and even more so later during the Russian regime in Finland.

45 46

47

och förakt ha de gett oss; ordet finne har för dem varit nästan ett öknamn”. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 101. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 102. The original reads: “pengarne behöfdes, och så utpressades hvarje penning, under det löfte gafs att efter krigets slut särdeles sörja för Finland uppkomst”. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 104. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 107.

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Finnish politics centred on two opposites: the young liberal politicians who urged Finnish national independence, and those who argued in favour of loyalty under the Russian regime.48 Whereas Bruce is devoted to Finland, despite being a Swede by birth and working for the Russians, the Swede Carl Lejonankar, the owner of Cecilia’s heart, is altogether of another kind. Cecilia tells Bruce that Carl is the only one who talks to her heart, and she has extremely high thoughts about him: “Even if he were a criminal, I would have to love him, even against my own will, him I have loved long before I became aware of it […]”.49 Cecilia describes Carl as the very foundation of her heart, the very ground for all her thoughts, images and the light of the day. However, he is a man of the world. When Cecilia suffers an agonizing heart, Carl replies: “Heart! my beautiful bride, in the huge world you have no use for a heart”.50 Cecilia opposes him by saying that he has not earlier perceived the heart as a piece of abundant luxury. Carl answers, interestingly, in reference to the Finnish landscape, “Your lakes and islands”, the ridges with endless views, and “your roaring rapids” made him dizzy in his youth, but now in his maturity and the critical political situation, there is no time for dreams.51 Whereas Bruce has but one dream, that of the future of Finland and the children of Suomi,52 Carl sees dreams as unnecessary. Even more interesting, therefore, is the end of the novel, featuring a letter from Magnus to Margaretha after the death of Cecilia. In it, we are informed that Carl Lejonankar has decided to stay in Finland and take over the Hattanpää estate while Lady Catharina and Göran Boije both move to Sweden. Carl, then, loses a promising bride, but in exchange gets a piece of Finland.53 This is but one of the ambivalent transfers in the novel that underscores the fluidity of emotions, turning quickly from one object to another, seeking new objects to stick to. But this might also be interpreted as still one more reorientation, carried out by the spider.

48 49

50 51 52 53

Engman, Språkfrågan. “Vore han än en brottsling, honom måste jag ändå älska, om jag än ej ville det, honom, som jag älskat långt innan jag sjelf visste det, och det så riktigt djupt, i botten af mitt hjerta, att han varit liksom den grund, på hvilken mina tankars alla bilder framträdt, och tillika den dag, som gett ljus åt alla dessa bilder”. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 119. “Hjerta! åh, min sköna brud, i den stora verlden brukas ej hjerta”. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 212. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 213. Suomi is Finland in Finnish. That Hattanpää is taken over by Carl, is for Hatavara an ironic commentary on the behalf of the narrator, a sign that evil is rewarded. Hatavara, Historia ja poetiikka, 197.

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Ordinary people like Cecilia’s nurse Vappo are the carriers of the utmost Finnish identities in this story as in many nationalist narratives in the nineteenth century (cf. Martin Olin’s, Eve Annuk’s, Heidi Grönstrand’s, and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume.) Loss is experienced not only by noble gentry such as Bruce; even ordinary Finnish people experience utter loss. Vappo is a peasant woman with a gruesome life story behind her. When she gets the news that King Carl XII of Sweden has died in battle and the peace negotiations have been broken, she recalls her four strong young sons who were taken to a foreign country to die in the ongoing, endless Swedish wars. After they perished, even her husband had to follow them. Vappo loses not only her beloved sons, but also the protection of a husband. Consequently, the Russian forces burn down her house and kill her youngest child. Vappo then wanders with her only living child, begging and in misery from house to house and finally arrives at Hattanpää, where her daughter dies, and Lady Catharina entrusts her with Cecilia to take care of. As an exchange for all her losses, Vappo prays that God does not charge the King for all the blood and tears his actions have brought about.54 Cecilia identifies Margaretha as a Swede, herself as a Finn, and Bruce as a Swede working for the Russians, whereas Bruce recognizes himself as a Finn. Here I will turn back to the allegorical reading of Mari Hatavara on the nationalist tendencies in the novel. According to Hatavara, Cecilia and Margaretha represent Finland’s choices. She states: The central theme of the novel, the daughters’ relations to men, is parallel to the governmental and political situation of the time when the story was written. The structure created by Carl, Johan, and Magnus is analogical to the relations of Finland to Sweden and Russia.55 Hatavara notices that the suitors, who behave badly towards women, also carry fallacious ideas concerning the nation. Cecilia’s suitor, Carl, is the figure of Sweden, exploiting Finland. For Carl, Finland is only a means by which to 54

55

Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 126–27. Hatavara concludes that Vappo’s life portrays the faiths of women and children, the powerless sufferers of the actions of the kings, and the subordinate position of women in history. Hatavara, Historia ja poetiikka, 206. Hatavara, Historia ja poetiikka, 137. My translation. Anna Bohlin has observed, in a comment to an earlier draft of this chapter, the allegorical historical levels included in the names used in the story: Carl Johan was the king who in 1812 agreed with Russia that Sweden would expand toward Norway, Magnus, a medieval royal name, and Margaretha the Queen of the Calmar Union, Queen of Denmark and Norway, who in 1392 became the queen of Sweden. Cecilia Vasa, was a daughter of Gustav Vasa.

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succeed in one’s own purposes. Johan, who represents Russia, opens Cecilia’s eyes concerning her relation to Carl (Sweden), while the suitor of Margaretha, Magnus, also an embodiment of Sweden, is a hero with whom Finland has a relation to of her own free will.56 The analogy between Cecilia and Finland is a statement of the weak position of Finland, lacking independence. Neither Carl (nor Sweden) cares for Cecilia or Finland; for him Finland is merely a frontier and wilderness, which functions only as a source of resources and a barrier to Russia.57 Hatavara makes a very convincing allegorical interpretation of Lady Catharina Boije as a cold Mother Svea, controlling her daughter Cecilia, the Finnish maiden. It is not necessary, however, to resort to an allegorical interpretation to observe the nationalist ideas put forward.58 A nationalist discourse is by no means concealed in the novel, as Hatavara remarks. Nationalist ideas stick to the bodies of all characters, both men and women, and travel in various directions. What strikes me is that the kinds of culturally defined identities expressed for example in the discussion between Cecilia and Margaretha above, or between Cecilia and Bruce, are however interestingly ambivalent and fluid. Instead of being idealistic and coherent, they are idealistic, but confusing and contradictory. On the one hand, the nationalistic emotions often reside in the hearts of the protagonists. On the other, rather than being inherent in the characters, the nationalistic discourse and the identities connected to it, take place in the exchanges and transfers of the characteristic traits of Finns, Swedes, or Russians as they are described in the debates between the main characters. It is quite ordinary that nationalist identities in novels stick to main characters, but the ambivalence and fluidity of the identities – like those of Bruce’s above, which consists of a combination of being a Swede, Finn, and Russian – are maybe not that ordinary in a nineteenth-century nationalistic discourse. Nothing of the kind takes place for example in the patriotic poetry written by Fredrika Runeberg’s husband, J.L. Runeberg, whose heroes and heroines speak forcefully as champions for one identity only, that of a Finn. In Fredrika Runeberg’s novel, the production of nationalist ideas and emotions takes place in the relations between the characters, when they confront each other’s questions, choices and fates. The moving and contradictory affects and the ambivalence of the nationalism in her novel correlates with a view according

56 57 58

Hatavara, Historia ja poetiikka, 138. Hatavara, Historia ja poetiikka, 139–40. See also Grönstrand, Naiskirjailija, romaani, 35.

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to which literature contributes to the perception and understanding of new affects that are hard to define. Literature may help to make sense of changing cultural, social and political situations.59 The contradictory situation of the writing of the story leaves traces in the portrayal of national identities.

5

Mapping the Imaginary Geography of Finland

The instability of the identities is furthermore accompanied by ongoing territorial moves, as if the novel were constantly studying and producing the boundaries of Finland and looking for its territorial identity and borders. A geographical mapping takes place in the story (see also Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s chapter in the present volume), a feature typical of the historical novel. Franco Moretti sees geography as the foundation of narrative form – the internal border being the on/off switch of the historical novel.60 According to him, historical novels represent internal unevenness and abolish it – historical novels are stories “of” the border but also of its erasure. Historical novels incorporate internal peripheries into the larger unit of the state. “State building requires streamlining, […] the blotting out of regional borders”, Moretti writes.61 What’s more, as Robert T. Tally states, “[t]he contested visions of the imaginary national spaces can be figured in the tensions between the private and public spheres, as well as those between the domestic or homely and the worldly world”.62 So, which are the places and borders depicted, and blotted out, then, and how do they connect to emotions, and loss? In Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters, we regularly encounter real and imagined places, private as well as public. Many of the places and spaces depicted are realistically anchored in existing geography. In the frame story, the narrator gives the reader a list of real places in Tavastland, the county surrounding the city of Tampere. The places are given a national importance through their fair nature, as they are depicted like “beautiful paintings”, and arouse the narrator’s emotions. These places have also played important roles in the history of Finland. Thus, the Hattan-

59

60 61 62

See Anna Helle and Anna Hollsten, “Tunnetko kirjallisuutta? Johdatus suomalaisen kirjallisuuden tutkimukseen tunteiden ja tuntemusten näkökulmasta”, in Tunteita ja tuntemuksia suomalaisessa kirjallisuudessa, eds. Anna Helle and Anna Hollsten (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2016), 19. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 38. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 40. Tally, “Introduction: Mapping”, 7.

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pää estate based in the 1690s, was the central place for the party of the Hats in Finland,63 and the Kyro river, Nokia rapids, the ridges of Kangasala and Hattelmala are places of national and aesthetic importance due to their beautiful, Romantic scenery. They are also mentioned in Topelius’ Finland framställdt i teckningar (Finland Presented in Drawings, 1845) and in Boken om vårt land (The Book of Our Country, 1875). Even Topelius describes Nokia’s rapids as bleak and magnificent, with its steeply rising rocky shores and dark spruces.64 The geographical imagery connected to the bodies on the move and being moved by various losses, maps a vast area. Many real places visited by the key figures Magnus Malm, Johan Bruce, and Carl Lejonankar as they travel between Sweden, Finland, and Russia, and in Finland. Both Malm and Bruce take several trips to Russia, at times as free men, at times as prisoners of war. Whereas the men cross the boundaries of Finland, Sweden and Russia, Lady Catharina Boije and her daughters move mainly between Hattanpää, Åbo and Stockholm. First, they are taken to Åbo as prisoners; then, the second time, they travel via Åbo to Stockholm, where the daughters are to be introduced at the court. They are mainly confined to the domestic sphere and to the inside, whereas the men represent the official spheres. Malm’s depiction of his earlier adventures in a story within the story, vastly widens the body of Finland being mapped. He first lives in the east, in Nöteborg (now a part of Russia, 40 km from St. Petersburg); then his family moves to Nyenskantz (Neovia, the Swedish fortress in Ingria, near St. Petersburg), and further to Wiborg, a nearby city. From there, his journeys take him to St. Petersburg, and to various parts of Finland, from Kajaneborg in the north-eastern part to the southern inland parts of Finland in Tavastland, such as Pälkänä, and further on to Vasa in Ostrobothnia, the Western coastal area of Finland, before he crosses over to Åbo, and from there to Sweden and Stockholm. He even takes part in the Swedish armies’ tragic incursion into Norway. Malm comes and goes, moves quickly from one place to another, uses disguises of various kind, and surprises Margaretha several times by turning up when he is least expected. Johan Bruce travels between Finland and Russia, first as a prisoner, then, as an administrator and a messenger carrying letters from the Tsar in St. Petersburg to the high commanders negotiating peace in Nystad, a town on the southern coast of Finland, in 1721. Bruce has the courage to make a plea for the Tsar on behalf of Finland:

63 64

The Hats were a political party in Sweden from the 1730s onwards. The main objective of the party was to bring back Sweden’s position as a powerful state. Zacharias Topelius, Boken om vårt land, “Nokia och Kyrönkoski”, www.topelius.fi.

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“What is Finland for me?” Peter interrupted him, “Sweden may take care of it”. “Shall the country, bleeding, so lousy, so mutilated, almost dying, go back to former conditions, without getting from the mighty one as a farewell present something that might contribute to heal its wounds”. […] “The wounds he has caused, you mean. Say it out loud, Johan Petrovitsch!”65 The various geographical directions make it possible for the writer to depict the differences between the situation of Finland, and that of Russia and Sweden. Here, the material conditions of Finland under Swedish regime, are expressed again and again. Sweden and Stockholm are the centre of the court, public life, of luxury, leisure, and artifice, while the visits to Russia are taken to attend to political tasks and interests. There, surrounded by the extravagance of the court of Peter I, Bruce asks mercy for the suffering Finland, with its empty houses, and decimated agriculture. People flee, hide, and move to new places when they fear they are being pursued. They are forced to leave their homes for want of food and protection. While moving from one place to another, the protagonists repeatedly witness misery and loss as a result of the terrors of wartime. Repeatedly, the novel describes deserted, devastated houses and towns, narrates stories about men and children lost in the war, sickness, threats and fear, hunger and death. It is as if the author was obsessed with demolished and abandoned places, houses, and homes as they are repeatedly described. The houses and small cottages are deserted, often burned, or devastated, the yards grow nettles, thistles and thorns where there once were children and fields. The fields have become wilderness. Even Hattanpää mansion is burnt, and Lady Catharina and her daughters are forced to live very modestly before they are able to build themselves a new house. The houses and fields have been lost in terms of protection and productiveness. The Finnish territory and soil are repeatedly compared to a wounded, bleeding, pitiful body dying in the hands of the Russian conqueror, betrayed and left without protection by the Swedish government.

65

“‘Hvad är mig Finland?’ afbröt Peter, ‘Sverge må sörja för dess väl’. / ‘Skall det nästan förblödda landet, så uselt, så stympadt, ja nästan döende återgå till fordna förhållanden, utan att af den mäktige till afskedsgåfva erhålla ens något, som kunde bidraga att läka de sår’. […] ‘Han slagit, menar du. Säg ut bara, Johan Petrovitsch!’” Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 156.

Affective Bodies on the Move

Figure 7.2

6

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Places mentioned in Magnus Malm’s story, marked on the Neue Karte by Johann Elias Lange, 1788.

Letters and Emotions

Not only do people move, but letters move as well, as the vehicles of emotions. Letters stick to the hearts and to spatiality on a large scale and to Finnishness as they also contribute to the mapping of the territory of Finland. For Hatavara, the letters are one of the means by which to demonstrate the structure of the historical novels,66 whereas I think that the letters are used to depict, express, and perform emotions. They make things happen, emotionally, socially and politically, on the level of private persons as well as nations. The letters are the bearers of the emotions of the writer and the receiver. They depict their senders’ reactions in the current situations and explain how the reactions have been interpreted by others; they describe bodily as well as psychological effects. The letters are often private and are dispatched because the sender

66

Hatavara, Historia ja poetiikka; see also Grönstrand, Naiskirjailija, romaani, 109–13.

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and receiver have temporarily lost each other– thus, the letters maintain their emotions for each other and make the distance in time and place disappear for a moment – the letters embody the presence of the sender while they are read, and they transform the reality of the receiver for a short while. Distance and nearness play an important role in the letters and affect the emotions expressed in them. Obviously, this is the case in the letter from Catharina Boije to Margaretha after they have departed because of the war. Margaretha cries with joy when she identifies her mother’s handwriting, and Lady Catharina, who normally does not show affection for her daughters, seizes an opportunity to express her love for her daughter. In the letter, she utters a wish of soon being able to embrace her, sends her blessings, and signs the letter: “My dearly beloved daughter, Your kind and most affectionate Mother”.67 The letters from Magnus Malm to Margaretha are many; they are love letters, very emotional indeed, and secret. “Live well, my dearest heart, may God bless you with all happiness and felicity, and above all, may he grant us the bliss of being able to unite, not to live separated as if we were two persons with no affections for each other. Your loving husband, until death”, he writes.68 The importance of the letters is emphasized by the fact that the novel ends with a letter from Magnus to Margaretha. This letter describes their common future, which is now about to begin. The letters are used to connect to all the friends and relatives that have escaped from Finland to Sweden. Some of the letters are official, political letters, like those carried by Johan Bruce; some of the letters are private, but reveal hidden sides of people, like the letters Carl sends to his friends.69 Furthermore, the letters are the bearers of nationalistic emotions as is the case in the tragic letter from Johan Bruce to Cecilia in which he informs her that he will soon die for his father’s land: “Shall the day once come, when the children of Finland will have a free land of their own, to live and die for? Dreams, dreams, when shall thy become reality?”70 This letter also includes a dream

67 68

69 70

“Min ömt älskade dotter, Din hulda och välaffectionerade Moder”. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 75. “Lef väl, du min hjertans älskade, måtte Gud välsigna dig med all glädje och sällhet, och framför allt må han förunna oss den sällheten att snart få sammankomma, för att icke mera lefva skilda, såsom tvenne, de der till hvarandra ingen affection hafva skulle. Din intill döden älskande make”. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 146. Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 189–92. “Skall väl engång den dag gry, då Suomis barn skola äga ett fosterland, ett fritt, ett eget, att lefva för, att dö för? Drömmar, drömmar, när blifven J verkligheter?” Runeberg, Fru Catharina, 159.

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of a future, and indirectly, an idea of an independent Finland, a nationalistic vision. Hearts and letters in the novel become the counterparts or equivalents of one another. Both include various changing emotions; both are moved by bodies (the writers as well as the postman and the receiver) and include messages that will have an impact on other bodies. Both contain secrets, make things happen, physically, psychologically, materially. The letters convey the emotions of the sender to the receiver and literally transmit emotions, create and maintain relations and beliefs. At times, they expose the true emotions and hidden nature of their senders. The men and women in the novel are on the move, travelling between Sweden, Finland, and Russia, and the letters try to keep up with these moves and strive to find their recipients. As such, they are active agents in the story.

7

Concluding Remarks

In Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters, we meet an affective economy of exchange and transfer of many emotions associated with the ongoing nationalist project in Finland in the nineteenth century. Three sticky objects steer and regulate the circulation of affects in it and are the carriers of its affective economy: the spider, the heart and the letters. The first being an insect, the second an organ in the body, the third a mode of communication, they are united by movement and are the central bearers of emotions in the novel. The letters function as the spreaders of affects but also as metonyms of affects as such. The spider, the heart and the letters are related to each other and thus, all three also connect to the question of nationhood. Following the trail of the sticky objects leads the reader to loss. Runeberg repeatedly uses strong emotional pictures – the spider, the bleeding wounded body, the burnt down houses – to arouse a number of negative emotions, which then contribute to the creation of “Finland”. The novel is centred on loss, which occurs on all levels, from national to personal: loss of protection, nurturance, lives, affection, social bonds, economic assets, hope for the future. The bleeding body of the nation is both directly described and objectified by the distorted bodies and houses depicted through the geographical mapping, which makes it apparent to the reader that the losses concern everybody in all parts of Finland. The depiction of real and imagined places of the nation creates the borders of the imagined Finland. In all the ways described above, the narration underscores the need for emotions in order to construct a nation and/or an identification in terms

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of Finnishness. The extreme portrayal of the suffering, for which the novel asks the reader to feel pity, is that of the wounded body of Finland. Thus, it even invites the reader to feel for Finland and for the national project. Simultaneously, Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters shows how this project is a complicated and contradictory one, and in the midst of realisation. The Finland depicted in the historical situation of the story or the frame story is but an anachronistic vision of a nation produced in relations, in the exchange of ideas in between the characters or an effect of the landscape on the visitor. The relations of the various depicted places to each other and the emotions produced by the places, together create a “body” of Finland with highly porous and unstable borders. Finland is thus still a territory under construction during the story, through the drawing of the contacts between the various places visited. The central organ for literary depiction of emotions is the heart, and there are plenty of hearts in Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters. The hearts connect to emotions of many kinds: love, fear, deceit, hope, aspiring national emotions. One reason for the long life of the novel – many literary scholars still return to it – might be its affectivity, namely its emotional impact on readers. The novel both moves its readers and performs affects by naming them.71 As such, it also contributes to historical knowledge about the ways in which nation states have been created, the kinds of ideologies that are used in this creation, and the ways in which ideologies have been able to attract people. And this, in turn, is important knowledge when we try to make sense of what is happening today or what will happen in the future.72

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press [2004], second edition, 2014. Arping, Åsa. Den anspråksfulla blygsamheten: Auktoritet och genus i 1830-talets svenska romandebatt. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings Symposion, 2002. Berg, Anne. “Nationen i historien”. Historisk tidskrift 138, no. 3 (2018): 383–90.

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See Tuija Saresma, “Vihan ja kaunan tunneyhteisöt: Timo Hännikäisen Ilman-kokoelman affektiivinen esseistiikka”, and Saija Isomaa, “Tunteet ja kirjallisuudenlajit. Lajien emotionaalisesta vaikuttavuudesta”, in Tunteita ja tuntemuksia, eds. Anna Helle and Anna Hollsten (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2016), 221–46 and 58–83. Anne Berg, “Nationen i historien”, Historisk tidskrift 138, no. 3 (2018): 390.

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Engman, Max. Språkfrågan: Finlandssvenskhetens uppkomst 1812–1922. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2016. Forssell, Pia. “Fredrika Runeberg och bilden av författarskapet”. Historiska och litteraturhistoriska studier 82 (2007): 93–140. Grönstrand, Heidi. Naiskirjailija, romaani ja kirjallisuuden merkitys 1840-luvulla. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2005. Grönstrand, Heidi. “Historical Fiction and the Dynamics of Romance: The Cases of Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson and Fredrika Runeberg”. In Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia, edited by Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen, 140–56. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2015. Hatavara, Mari. Historia ja poetiikka Fredrika Runebergin ja Zacharias Topeliuksen historiallisissa romaaneissa. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2007. Helle, Anna and Anna Hollsten. “Tunnetko kirjallisuutta? Johdatus suomalaisen kirjallisuuden tutkimukseen tunteiden ja tuntemusten näkökulmasta”. In Tunteita ja tuntemuksia suomalaisessa kirjallisuudessa, edited by Anna Helle and Anna Hollsten, 7–35. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2016. Isomaa, Saija. “Tunteet ja kirjallisuudenlajit: Lajien emotionaalisesta vaikuttavuudesta”. In Tunteita ja tuntemuksia suomalaisessa kirjallisuudessa, edited by Anna Helle and Anna Hollsten, 58–83. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2016. Lange, Johann Elias. Neue Karte von den gegenwärtigen Kriegs-Schauplatze zwischen den Russisch. Kayserl: und Königl: Schwedischen Armeen und Flotten, welche vorzügl. ganz Finland, Liefland, Estland, Ingermanland, ein Theil von Pohlen und Rusland, Ost- und West-Preussen, die Ost See, Dännemark, Schweden, Norwegen, und ein Theil von Deutschland, nebst denen bisherigen Stellungen gedachter Armeen enthält, Leipzig, 1788. http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fd2017-00011960. Launis, Kati. Kerrotut naiset: Suomen ensimmäiset naisten kirjoittamat romaanit naiseuden määrittelijöinä. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2005. Mazzarella, Merete. Fredrika Charlotta född Tengström: En nationalskalds hustru. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2007. Mazzarella, Merete. Från Fredrika Runeberg till Märta Tikkanen. Helsingfors: Söderströms, 1985. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998. Rask, Hedvig. “Min pennas saga: Om Fredrika Runebergs litterära självbiografi”. In Fredrika Runeberg, Min pennas saga, edited by Hedvig Rask, 9–38. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2007. (Runeberg, Fredrika.) Fru Catharina Boije och hennes döttrar: En berättelse från stora ofredens tid af –a –g. Helsingfors: Finska Litteratur-sällskapets tryckeri, 1858. Litteraturbanken.se, 2015.

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Saresma, Tuija. “Vihan ja kaunan tunneyhteisöt: Timo Hännikäisen Ilman-kokoelman affektiivinen esseistiikka”. In Tunteita ja tuntemuksia suomalaisessa kirjallisuudessa, edited by Anna Helle and Anna Hollsten, 221–46. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2016. Tally, Robert T. Jr. “Introduction: Mapping Narratives”. In Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative, edited by Robert T. Tally Jr, 1–12. New York: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2014. Topelius, Zacharias. Boken om vårt land. www.topelius.fi.

Chapter 8

Carl Larsson’s Spadarfvet, My Little Farmstead: Paradise Regained or Lament for a Disappearing Agrarian Society? Martin Olin

In the autumn of 1906, Bonniers in Stockholm published Carl Larsson’s Spadarfvet, mitt lilla landtbruk (Spadarfvet, My Little Farmstead), a picture book with 24 reproductions of watercolour drawings and an introductory essay by the artist. The elegant layout of the introductory part with the text featured further illustrations in black and white by Larsson, whose manner is evident also in the decoration of the handsome binding with its stylized ears of grain. The publishers were no doubt hoping for good Christmas sales. The cheerful character of the illustrations executed in Larsson’s recognizable style has made a few of them emblematic of idyllic life in the Swedish countryside around 1900. Some, such as Äppleskörden (The Orchard), Potatisupptagningen (Potato Digging) and Julaftonen (Christmas Eve), may be encountered on seasonal merchandise, separated from the text of the book and removed from the context of the other images that show less decorous aspects of country life such as På trädan (Fallow Land, showing the distribution of manure) and Slakten (Slaughtering, fig. 8.1). The book has been re-printed many times, or rather the illustrations have, as Larsson’s text was paraphrased, or left out, in many late-twentieth-century editions. Spadarfvet was authored and illustrated against the historical background of a national crisis that has rarely been discussed in relation to the book: the break-up of the political union with Norway and the emigration to the USA on a scale that was perceived in many quarters as a potentially disastrous bloodletting of the country. The loss of a large part of the national territory, together with a perceived threat to the traditional way of life in the countryside caused by emigration and industrialisation, constitute, it will be argued in this essay, the underlying ideological discourse of Spadarfvet. The book’s realization also coincided with the tragic death of the Larssons’ eldest son Ulf, a personal loss breaking up and delaying its production. Yet, the tone of neither the text nor the images in Spadarfvet is elegiac, but is rather emphatically up-beat (at times disturbingly so), with the clear ambition of informing city dwellers about the happiness to be gained from life on a small farm in a traditional community. .

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_010

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Figure 8.1

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Carl Larsson, Slaughtering, watercolour for Spadarfvet (1906) Bonnier’s Collection, Stockholm

Larsson’s teaching presupposes a narrative, mostly unarticulated in the book but essential for the Romantic nationalism of the decades around 1900 in the Nordic countries (and elsewhere): that the true way of life of the idolized peasant class was all but irretrievably lost, and that the abandonment of customs and beliefs among the common people – allmogen – was to be deeply regretted as it meant that the nation as a whole was losing its soul, purity and purpose. The attitude of the Swedish intelligentsia to the uneducated inhabitants of the countryside was that of Romantically inclined travellers who, having arrived in a remote and scenic destination, have the momentous feeling of having come too late – but only just. Had the visit taken place twenty or thirty years earlier, they would have found themselves in the Golden Age, when the life of the peasant society was still untouched or at least unharmed by the calamitous forces of industrialisation and cosmopolitan civilization. In the suggested picturesque location, old people are still able to recall this unadulterated state from their childhood. Virtuous inhabitants still wear the traditional dress discarded by the young and vain in favour of the demoralizing fashion of the cities. Songs are still sung the words of which are no longer understood, et cetera. In Sweden, the collective sense of imminent loss not only of the ancient traditions of the countryside but also (and even more fatefully to the national identity) of the memories of those traditions, led

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to a number of scientific initiatives involving the collecting of ethnographic objects and information of various kinds. The great national manifestation of this broad movement was the founding and building of the Nordiska museet (The Nordic Museum) and of the open-air museum Skansen in Stockholm. The pioneering ethnologist Arthur Hazelius (1833–1901) was the founder of both institutions.1 Partly because of Hazelius’ personal attachment to the region, the province Dalarna was at the focus of interest. For geographical and historical reasons, parts of this region in Central Sweden had longer resisted change, or had at any rate been reached by modern developments later than the surrounding counties. Its cultural heritage, nature and inhabitants were now fetishized. Dalarna became a goal for national and international tourism; in the arts, articulations of national identity were projected onto its landscape of low mountains and plains along its lakesides and the winding branches of Dalälven. The first part of Selma Lagerlöf’s novel Jerusalem (I–II, 1901–1902), about the conflict between tradition and religious calling, is set in Dalarna (and is actually subtitled “In Dalarna”, I Dalarne). Based on a real event that occurred in 1896, it tells the story of a parish where a large part of the population emigrated to Palestine, giving up their homes and the traditional way of life with tragic consequences (cf. Jenny Bergenmar’s chapter in the present volume). The internationally acclaimed painter Anders Zorn returned to his native Mora in Dalarna where he settled. Not only did Zorn through his paintings introduce the places and people of Dalarna to a cosmopolitan audience; he and his wife also embarked on several projects with the aim of preserving the local cultural heritage. If the loss of the Golden Age had been lamented in the decades before 1900 in tragic and lyrical tones, flavoured with a substantial measure of Symbolist aesthetics, the early years of the twentieth century was a period of forwardlooking patriotism, and of optimism (cf. Peter Nørgaard Larsen’s chapter in the present volume for a discussion on the search for Arcadia in mid-nineteenthcentury Danish art). Could the loss of the Golden Age be redeemed? Was it possible to regain Paradise? It can perhaps justifiably be said that the general cultural atmosphere in the period 1900–1915 favoured attempts to reconstruct the forfeited inheritance through education and reform. Spadarfvet, it is argued in this chapter, is such an attempt. Larsson’s artistic mode in this work

1 Gustaf Näsström, Dalarna som svenskt ideal (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1937), 61–87. The reaction of the “Romantically inclined travellers” earlier in this section is suggested by Hazelius’ description of his first visit to Dalarna in 1872 quoted by Näsström on pp. 63–65.

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is occasionally pathetic, but the dominating tone is one of jovial pedagogy rather than nostalgia. Whereas the loss of a son, buried in Sweden, made the German earlynineteenth-century writer Amalia von Helwig question her sense of Fatherland (see Jules Kielmann’s chapter in the present volume), the Larssons’ loss of a child during the preparation of the book was a heavy blow not only to the family on a personal level but also, on a symbolical level, to the struggle for the redemption of what has been lost. When he died, the adolescent Ulf was following an agricultural course in preparation for his future life as owner of the farmstead bought by Carl Larsson. With reference to the discussion of different scales of loss (see the Introduction), the representation of the sad event in the book allows it to be read as a parallel to other sacrifices.

1

Carl Larsson’s Background and the Acquisition of the Farm Spadarfvet

Carl Larsson, born in 1853, was a celebrated artist who, after difficult beginnings and struggles against both the art establishment and his own anxieties, had made a name for himself. Prestigious official commissions for large-scale decorative paintings in national institutions – The Royal Dramatic Theatre, The Royal Opera House and the Nationalmuseum – had given him selfconfidence and a certain amount of financial security.2 His watercolours of domestic life and interiors of the family home Lilla Hyttnäs in Sundborn, close to Falun in the province of Dalarna, had been exhibited to wide acclaim at the General Exhibition in Stockholm in 1897 and were published in a bestselling album under the title Ett hem (A Home) by Bonniers in 1899. A Home and its subsequent international editions brought the Larsson family fame, if not riches, and through the editions, Lilla Hyttnäs, with its interiors in an idiosyncratic arts-and-crafts style created by Larsson’s wife Karin Bergöö and himself, was perceived as an ideal home for millions of people.3 On the strength of the attractiveness of the illustrations, the practical affordability of the style, and, initially, the campaigning for it by the author Ellen Key, the interiors at Lilla Hyttnäs have become iconic (fig. 8.2). The “Sundborn style” is often perceived

2 Hans-Olof Boström, Carl Larsson: Monumentalmålaren (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2016). 3 Cecilia Lengefeld, Der Maler des glücklichen Heims: Zur Rezeption Carl Larssons in wilhelminischen Deutschland (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993).

Carl Larsson’s Spadarfvet, My Little Farmstead

Figure 8.2

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Carl Larsson, The Flower Window, watercolour for A Home (1899) Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

as quintessentially Swedish; it is particularly associated with the carefreeness of life in the summer and has survived successive Modernist paradigms almost unscathed as the ideal décor for a vacation cottage. Larsson had produced the watercolours for the new album Spadarfvet over the two years preceding its publication in 1906, choosing the subjects for the album from the cycle of seasonal tasks at his farm Spadarfvet, also located in Sundborn. Whereas A Home illustrates domestic life over the year at Lilla Hyttnäs – originally an extended summer cottage to which the Larssons had moved permanently, the concept of the follow-up Spadarfvet was to celebrate work and life on a proper farm. It is worth mentioning the differences, as the two series are similar in many respects. They are watercolours of the same horizontal format, not very distant in date and style, showing life in the same village, with family members appearing in both. But in class terms, there is a significant sharp line of division, even if Larsson is consciously trying to blur it. A Home shows the life of an artistic bourgeois family who, for ideological and aesthetic reasons, has adopted local traditions and habits into their lifestyle, whereas Spadarfvet illustrates real farm work done by the tenant farmer, his wife and hired farm labourers (fig. 8.3, fig. 8.4). The Larsson family make appearances, but when they perform practical work it is, with a few exceptions, either for practice or they are doing things

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Figure 8.3

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Carl Larsson, The Farm, watercolour for Spadarfvet (1906) Bonnier’s Collection, Stockholm

acceptable to their social status, such as picking fruit in the orchard to make preserves. Carl Larsson bought the farmstead Spadarvet in 1897 as an investment and a source of produce for his own family. The publication of Spadarfvet, perhaps more than the acquisition, confirmed his new identity as a member of the landed peasant class, to which he frequently alludes, albeit ironically, in his introductory text. His own background was among the urban poor, whereas his wife Karin Bergöö came from a well-to-do bourgeois family. In the text, Larsson returns to his family ancestry, saying that he comes from country stock on his father’s side, an inheritance he humorously claims to “remember” in his nostrils when inhaling a whiff of sweat and earth from a passing farmer.4 The twenty-four watercolours all have a short text by Larsson that describes and explains the illustrated activity. The commentary is often anecdotal and refers to the situation in which Larsson painted the watercolours; in some cases, it elucidates the composition. These are the titles and subjects of the watercolours in the order in which they appear in the book:

4 Carl Larsson, unpaginated introduction to Spadarfvet: mitt lilla landtbruk: 24 målningar med text och teckningar (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1906).

Carl Larsson’s Spadarfvet, My Little Farmstead

Figure 8.4

Carl Larsson, Mowing, watercolour for Spadarfvet (1906) Bonnier’s Collection, Stockholm

Vedhuggningen i skogen (Woodcutting in the Forest) Dytaget (Cutting Peat) Isupptagningen (Sawing Ice) I snickarboden (The Carpenter’s Attic) Fisket (Out Fishing) Harvningen (Harrowing) Sådden (Sowing) På vall i hagen (At Pasture) Ladugården (In the Cowshed) Gården (The Farm) I kyrkan (At Church) Slåttern (Mowing) Rågskärningen (Harvesting the Rye) Gödselstaden (The Manure Heap) På trädan (Fallow Land) Potatisupptagningen (Potato Digging) Tröskningen (Threshing) Kastningen (Winnowing) Äppleskörden (The Orchard) Plöjningen (Ploughing)

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Dikningen (Digging Ditches) Kolmila (The Charcoal Pile) Slakten (Slaughtering) Julaftonen (Christmas Eve)

2

Personal Loss and the Production of Spadarfvet

It is obvious from Larsson’s commentary that he takes pride in his farm and in his own recent understanding of what actually goes on in the illustrations, but it is also clear that he lacked long-term hands-on experience of the performed chores. He also identifies as one threatened by recent – real or imagined – infringements on property rights.5 A stated long-term goal of the acquisition of the farm is that his eldest son Ulf should be trained to be a farmer and take over the property. A tragic personal loss is recorded in Spadarfvet. The eighteenyear old Ulf died from appendicitis during the production of the book, and Larsson records the family’s grief in the introduction, in which he includes an unfinished essay on farming begun by Ulf and found on his desk after his death. Larsson notes Ulf’s death with a poignant caesura in the text: In any case, we will have to wait for Ulf. *** † We do not wait for Ulf. – – – – – – – – – – The genesis of the book can be followed in the correspondence from 1904 to 1906 between Carl Larsson and his publisher, to whom Larsson sent the finished watercolours in batches.6 Karl Otto Bonnier bought the originals for himself, together with the right to reproduce them. Today, they are displayed

5 In the note to Vedhuggningen i skogen, Larsson says that the story goes in the village that a big company “stole” the communally owned woods some 50 years ago. He also finds out that a neighbour has recently taken all the firewood from his land and confronts him. 6 Ulwa Neergaard, Carl Larsson: signerat med pensel och penna (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1999), 328–54.

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hanging on the wall below the ceiling in the entrance hall of the former Bonnier family home Nedre Manilla on Djurgården in Stockholm. The initial plans were for the book to come out in time for the Christmas of 1905, but at the beginning of April that year only the winter illustrations were finished, and the publication was postponed until 1906. After Ulf’s death on the operating table on April 14, the project came to a complete standstill. Stricken with grief and with a need to separate himself from his familiar surroundings, Carl Larsson left for Venice, where 17 of his works were shown at the Biennale. After his return in June, Larsson resumed work on the Spadarfvet series and delivered the rest of the drawings to Bonnier during the following months. In the summer, Larsson painted decorations in the parish church at Sundborn. That he accepted the request to provide new décor in the church at a low cost was perhaps done, as Hans-Olof Boström suggests, as an expression of his mourning for Ulf.7 One of the watercolours in Spadarfvet shows the church on a Sunday with filled pews and the new paintings clearly visible.

3

The Illustrations

A visual analysis of the paintings in the series shows many of the attributes of Larsson’s art, such as the reliance on elegant, undulating lines and compositional principles reminiscent of Japanese woodcuts, with their unexpected cropping of figures and intersecting parallel screens and wooden pillars that define the picture space. Although stylistically close to Larsson’s idyllic family scenes and society portraits, a sense of realism is nevertheless quite tangible in the Spadarfvet series, as the subject matter is literally down to earth. An example including the mentioned characteristics is the watercolour showing the dunghill in the farmyard, where the carpenter Elfström is putting up a fence (fig. 8.5). Elfström, who is sawing with his back to the viewer, stands on a wooden crate carrying a label with the text (upside down): “The Royal Swedish Committee St. Louis Exhibition, Stockholm, Sweden”. Carl Larsson wishes us to know that while he is not shy to show us his presence here by the dunghill, he is also someone who belongs in the larger world. He also comments on the Swedish flag seen in the distance (now a pure Swedish flag without the indication of the union with Norway in its top left compartment). It is flying because of an annual prayer meeting in a free church in the village. Elfström – being a member of the state church – is unperturbed, whereas

7 Boström, Carl Larsson: Monumentalmålaren, 183.

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Figure 8.5

Carl Larsson, The Manure Heap, watercolour for Spadarfvet (1906) Bonnier’s Collection, Stockholm

Bäckström, digging in the middle ground, is itching to go as he belongs to the free church in question. The flag was ubiquitous in visual culture during the period; its presence here is perhaps less surprising than Larsson actually explaining the reason for it being shown. The irony of the famous artist trying to be a farmer, never completely absent from text and image in Spadarfvet, is perhaps best illustrated by the title page where children play at farming, with cows made out of spruce cones and sticks (fig. 8.6).

4

Political Movements Confronting Different Ideas of Loss

Even though the tone and the motivating forces behind the album Spadarfvet were to a degree personal, its theme chimes perfectly with a broad movement in Swedish society during the first decade of the twentieth century, the general aim of which was to prevent further emigration and to counteract the dissolution of the traditional structures of Swedish society (fig. 8.7). This movement had many manifestations with varying main emphases: economic, social, religious or aesthetic. The large-scale emigration to the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century had become a national trauma. The Norway crisis leading up to the dissolution of the union between Sweden and

Carl Larsson’s Spadarfvet, My Little Farmstead

Figure 8.6

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Carl Larsson, watercolour for the title page of Spadarfvet, My Little Farmstead (1906) Bonnier’s Collection, Stockholm

Norway in 1905 was a blow to the sense of national identity, and the threat of international Socialism frightened the urban middle classes and the landed peasant class alike. One key question appeared to be the availability of farming land. It was appreciated that Sweden was large enough to feed many more people, but that those who chose to emigrate did so because there was neither enough land for sale nor the economic structures in place that would make acquiring small farms economically feasible. A series of political and economic initiatives were taken in order to provide land for aspiring farmers. The general notion was Conservative: the aim was to preserve the existing order. But the creation of smallholdings was also believed to foster a smoother transition from an agrarian to an industrial society and the movement also attracted politicians and intellectuals who were concerned about the economic and social situation of the lower strata of society.8 A central idea of the movement 8 Nils Edling, Det fosterländska hemmet: egnahemspolitik, småbruk och hemideologi kring sekelskiftet 1900 (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1996); Anna Lindkvist, Jorden åt folket: nationalföreningen mot emigrationen 1907–1925 (Umeå: Institutionen för historiska studier, Umeå Universitet, 2007).

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Figure 8.7 Propaganda against Swedish emigration to the USA, urging potential migrants to contact Nationalföreningen mot emigrationen (The National Association Against Emigration) to enquire about work or loans to acquire or hire a small farm. C. 1910 Photo: Sverige Amerika Centret, Karlstad, 2011-12-08

to create smallholdings – Egnahemsrörelsen – was that owning land, also on a small scale, would vaccinate the owner against Socialism. Thus, the distribution of property among the poor and nearly poor, which in some ways must be described as radical, was also a deliberate method of stemming other radical tendencies. Over the horizon, there was also the threat of an international conflict. The set of ideas described is mirrored in Larsson’s introduction to Spadarfvet, in his phrases that in times when a foreign foe threatens the land, the peasant will, as always, defend his country – with his food and his blood. He and his sons will die for it. And he ends with a curious twist: “How will the great Minister [“Excellensen”] and the Union member act? Undoubtedly in the same way. But it is somehow a little more certain that the peasant will do it”.9 On a couple of occasions in Spadarfvet, Larsson also alludes to emigration – often with somewhat bitter irony. In the introduction, there is a list 9 “När landet är i fara för utländsk fiende, skall han [bonden], som alltid, försvara det. Med sin mat och sitt blod. Och detta utan fåfängans bitankar; utan hjältefasoner, utan egentligt

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of the dramatis personae of the illustrations, the tenant farmer and his family, farm hands and the Larssons themselves. Below it is a comment: “The country people are in ‘Illinojs’, U.S.A.”.10 In the caption to Plöjningen (Plowing), the author says that the peasants in Dalarna are unwilling to try crops such as peas and carrots, as they require too much labour: “Have I not told you that all the youngsters are in America?” The foreign menace is thus not a hostile neighbour threatening with loss of national territory, but a distant territory claiming the nation’s youth. If Egnhahemsrörelsen above all sought to establish an economic framework for the creation of smallholdings for young people without sufficient financial resources, another movement concerned itself with their mind-set and morals. In his classic study, Heidenstam och sekelskiftets Sverige (Heidenstam and Sweden at the Fin-de-Siècle) from 1946, Staffan Björck gives a penetrating view of the aesthetic and ideological background of the Romantic nationalism of the early twentieth century in Sweden. He briefly discusses the Youth Movement (Ungdomsrörelsen), largely forgotten today but which was a momentous presence in national life for a few years, between the Norway crisis in 1905 and the general strike in 1909, although Björck also emphasises its earlier history and relation to similar movements in Norway and Finland. The nature of the Youth Movement is curiously difficult to grasp; Björck’s succinct description is perhaps still the best characterization: It was simply called the Youth Movement, and by this term is understood in the following the endeavours that appeared in all parts of the country, to gather the young in meetings and associations, and, without any religious or political or abstinence confession, to arouse interest in and incite them to social and aesthetic culture, liberalism and patriotism, temperance, self-education and craft.11

10

11

mod, men alldeles utan rädsla; bara för det måste göras så, för att skydda hemmet och jordtorfvan, skall vår bonde och hans söner dö – för landet. Hur komma excellensen och fackföreningsmedlemmen göra? Säkerligen detsamma. Men det är liksom litet säkrare att bonden kommer att göra det”. Larsson, Spadarfvet: mitt lilla landtbruk. “Allmogen är i ‘Illinojs’, U.S.A.”. Larsson, Spadarfvet: mitt lilla landtbruk. The word “allmogen” is difficult to translate, and Larsson’s exact meaning is not clear. It seems that he wants to suggest that everyone in the local minor peasantry who does not appear in the book has emigrated. “Den kallades helt enkelt ungdomsrörelsen, och med denna term avses i det följande de strävanden, som uppträdde i alla landsändar, att utan band av någon religiös, politisk eller absolutistisk konfession samla ungdomen till möten och föreningar och där väcka och egga den till social och estetisk kultur, frisinne och fosterlandskänsla, nykterhet, bildningsarbete och hemslöjd”. Staffan Björck, Heidenstam och sekelskiftets Sverige (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1946), 256–57.

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A number of large meetings of the Youth Movement took place in Dalarna. In July 1905, Larsson briefly exhibited some of the watercolours for Spadarfvet in Falun (close to family’s home in Sundborn), where one of the youth meetings was taking place. In June the same year, he asked Karl Otto Bonnier to lend him the paintings already delivered for the exhibition, ending the letter with a comment on the dissolution of the union with Norway: “How glad I am that we’re rid of those Norwegian mad poets and rascal lawyers”.12 The 1905 Falun exhibition of the Spadarfvet series suggests that the images may have been regarded as visions of a simple, yet true and fulfilling life that was available to young couples, a life still within reach but lost to thousands who had been tempted by soulless jobs in factories or by a new start in Illinois. That this coincided with the Norway crisis may also have given Carl Larsson the impulse to contribute to a patriotic cause. The union between the countries was forced upon Norway in 1814 as part of the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. Dissatisfaction with the union grew in Norway towards the end of the nineteenth century, with poets and writers playing an important part in voicing the desire for a national destiny separate from that of Sweden. After mounting tension, the union was dissolved peacefully during the summer and autumn of 1905. The question had divided political opinion, with Liberals in many cases supporting the dissolution of the union, while Conservatives, whose standpoint the formerly radical Larsson increasingly shared, violently deplored the loss because of the stain on the national honour. In a characteristically ambiguous comment in his letter to Bonnier, Larsson says that the watercolours will be exhibited for the “sovereign people to stare at ridiculously”.13 The use of the not entirely expected phrase “sovereign people” on this occasion may reflect the ongoing crisis.

5

The Peasant as the Spirit of the Nation

Larsson’s images in Spadarfvet illustrate the updated mythos of the peasant as the incarnation of a national spirit that not least the school authorities would promulgate during the following decades (cf. Eve Annuk’s, Heidi Grönstrand’s and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume for discussions on the peasant in Estonian and Finnish nationalist discourse in the 12 13

“Hvad jag är glad att vi blifvit af med dessa skaldefnoskar och advokatkanaljer till norrmän”. Carl Larsson quoted in Neergaard, Carl Larsson, 250. “Men det är ej för min skull jag ber Dig om detta offer, utan för det suveräna folket, som skall fånbliga på’t”. Carl Larsson quoted in Neergaard, Carl Larsson, 350.

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nineteenth century). The young encountered idyllic farm-life early on in Anna Maria Roos’ school readers Sörgården and I Önnemo (both 1912, see Jenny Bergenmar’s chapter in the present volume) and in the large-scale colour lithographs for school use based on designs by the painter Nils Kreuger, such as Brunte is Fetched on Sunday Morning (1909). In 1919, the year of Larsson’s death, Bonniers published a cheap edition of Spadarfvet, where the text appears to be as important as the images (of course related to the cost of colour reproduction).14 In contrast, the introductory text has been expurgated in editions published in the late twentieth century.15 Its chatty optimism and cheerful practical advice did not perhaps seem fitting to readers who by then expected Carl Larsson’s images to be about nostalgia for the past, whereas, as has been argued above, the images in Spadarfvet speak instead of a brilliant future, conjured up to entice the young to make a fresh start, to renew a nation threatened by loss of its true identity. In 1909, the Düsseldorf publisher Karl Robert Langewiesche brought out Das Haus in der Sonne, a revised, shortened and affordable German edition of Larsson’s A Home.16 It also included a selection of images from a second album of watercolours, Larssons, originally published in 1902. It was a considerable success and brought the Larsson family fame in Germany, although there was no corresponding financial gain, as Bonnier owned the copyright. In 1919, Das Haus in der Sonne had sold more than 200 000 copies. This was, however, not the first time Larsson’s watercolour albums appeared on the German book market. Already in 1907, Bruno Cassirer in Berlin had published Bei uns auf dem Lande – a German edition of Spadarfvet. The first attempt to launch Larsson on the large German market was a disappointment for Cassirer and Bonniers: of the 600 printed copies, only around 100 had been sold a year later; in July 1909, a further 27 copies had found buyers.17 The contrast with the success of Das Haus in der Sonne only a few months later is striking. According to Cecilia Lengefeld, the failure of Bei uns auf dem Lande was due to a combination of circumstances. It was much more expensive than Das Haus in der Sonne and did thus not appeal to the same mass market. Potential buyers mistook it for a book for children – as the title page image with the playing children was used as a cover. The introduction, with its exclamatory and sentimental praise of the Swedish peasantry, would not have made the book attractive to 14 15 16 17

Carl Larsson, Spadarvet – mitt lilla lantbruk, 24 tavlor med text (Stockholm, 1919). Spadarvet: En bilderbok av Carl Larsson med text av Lennart Rudström, Stockholm 1966, 1973, 1976, 1987, 1994. Lengefeld, Der Maler des glücklichen Heims. Lengefeld, Der Maler des glücklichen Heims, 9–12, 102.

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the typical German buyer. Nor would the undertones referring to the loss of Norway and the need for a national redefinition have given it appeal outside of Sweden, as such national preoccupations seldom do beyond a country’s borders. In contrast to the approach taken with Larsson’s heavily reworked preface to Das Haus in der Sonne, the translation of the text in Spadarfvet was true to the letter with no attempt to adapt it to a foreign readership. The impression given by the watercolours was confusing. Was it an art book, a children’s book or a book on agriculture? Was its author a peasant or a painter? Swedish readers were acquainted with the author and his works and could be counted on to identify the genre to which the book belonged, if indeed such a genre exists; to an international audience the purpose of the book and the position of its author was incomprehensible. Cassirer was known for books on contemporary French art – the publisher’s urbane customers could not be expected to have an interest in Larsson’s watercolours of ploughing and harvesting, images that were, in their way, an expression of the Heimatbewegung. Paradoxically, it was precisely the cultural interests of the Heimatbewegung that would be the basis for Larsson’s upcoming popularity in Germany, and for the popularity of other Swedes, most prominently Selma Lagerlöf, who wrote about the peasant class and local heritage.18 If Lagerlöf today is the best-known Swedish author from the period, one who is mostly forgotten but who had a great following at the time should be mentioned in relation to Spadarfvet: Karl-Erik Forsslund. Forsslund’s interests were closely connected to the ideals of the Youth and Heimat movements. His bestselling novel Storgården (1900) is a passionate appeal for the life in the country and addresses among other things the difficulties for young people to acquire property and settle in their own home. Storgården, like Spadarfvet, is set in southern Dalarna and the connections between the two books and their authors are numerous.19

6

Concluding Remarks

The mechanisms of loss are effective at different levels in the text and illustrations of Carl Larsson’s Spadarfvet. On a larger scale, the sensed loss of the ancient character and traditions of the historical peasant society was among the fundamental tenets of Romantic nationalism in Sweden, a cultural paradigm so dominant at the time, and in Larsson’s circles in particular, that 18 19

Ann-Sofi Ljung Svensson, Jordens dotter: Selma Lagerlöf och den tyska hembygdslitteraturen (diss. Lund University. Göteborg & Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2011). Näsström, Dalarna som svenskt ideal, 157–80.

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this sensed loss is implied rather than stated in the book. The resonance can be heard in the text, perhaps audibly in the phrases where the author refers to emigration, another level of loss, in this case a question fiercely debated in contemporary politics. “The country people are in Illinojs”, is the laconic expression of the situation: when traditional life in the country became difficult or impossible (either this was caused by the evils of civilization or harsh economic realities), the population was claimed by another country, the USA. Large-scale emigration had been a dilemma for about half a century. The Norway crisis, on the other hand, was unfolding as the book took shape. Larsson refers to the dissolution of the union in correspondence with his editor, but only hints at it in the book. Taken together, the real or imagined losses to the Swedish nation and to the local society prompted Larsson to make an effort for the reconstruction or redefinition of the national identity based on the updated mythos of the freeholding peasant as the incarnation of the spirit of Sweden. To regain Paradise, the Swedes must learn anew to plow, harrow, sow and harvest. This project, suggested in my interpretation as a national programme, is nevertheless presented in the book as a personal one, or one undertaken for the sake of the Larsson family, whose roots in the countryside had been all but severed. The author admits his own slight knowledge and experience of the agricultural profession and intends to educate his son Ulf to become a farmer, “like his ancestors”. Ulf died from complications following appendicitis, and this grave personal loss is recorded in the book where Larsson quotes from the unfinished essay on agriculture found on his son’s desk, with the effect of giving emphasis to the fragility of the regained Paradise.

Bibliography Björck, Staffan. Heidenstam och sekelskiftets Sverige. Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1946. Boström, Hans-Olof. Carl Larsson: Monumentalmålaren, Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2016. Edling, Nils. Det fosterländska hemmet: egnahemspolitik, småbruk och hemideologi kring sekelskiftet 1900. Stockholm: Carlsson, 1996. Larsson, Carl. Spadarfvet: mitt lilla landtbruk: 24 målningar med text och teckningar. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1906. Larsson, Carl. Spadarvet – mitt lilla lantbruk, 24 tavlor med text. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1919. Lengefeld, Cecilia. Der Maler des glücklichen Heims: Zur Rezeption Carl Larssons in wilhelminischen Deutschland. Heidelberg: Winter, 1993.

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Lindkvist, Anna. Jorden åt folket: nationalföreningen mot emigrationen 1907–1925. Umeå: Institutionen för historiska studier, University of Umeå, 2007. Ljung Svensson, Ann-Sofi. Jordens dotter: Selma Lagerlöf och den tyska hembygdslitteraturen. Diss. Lund University. Göteborg & Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2011. Näsström, Gustaf. Dalarna som svenskt ideal. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1937. Neergaard, Ulwa. Carl Larsson: signerat med pensel och penna. Stockholm: Norstedt, 1999. Rudström, Lennart. Spadarvet: En bilderbok av Carl Larsson. Stockholm: Bonnier 1966, 1973, 1976, 1987, 1994.

Chapter 9

Sweden and Algeria in the Travel Writing of Anna Maria Roos, 1905–1909 Jenny Bergenmar

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Swedish literature was occupied with the construction of a national identity. One of the authors engaged in this national project was Anna Maria Roos (1862–1938). Roos is perhaps best known for her contribution to the new schoolbook published in 1906–1912, which replaced the outdated Läsebok för folkskolan (Reader for Elementary School) from 1868. The reader became an important tool for the strengthening of national citizenship education, and Anna Maria Roos’ contribution is a good example of this tendency: her texts Sörgården (1912) and I Önnemo (1912) had the subtitle Home and local culture (Hem och hembygd) and nostalgically depicted a Swedish rural life governed by seasonal changes – a way of life that threatened to be lost in the changes of modernity.1 The reader had a great influence on a whole generation of Swedes, and “the concept [of] Sörgårds-idyll still lives on as a designation of a harmonic rural life in a past time”.2 The environment and lifestyle Roos described have striking similarities with Astrid Lindgren’s later Bullerby series, which was published in 1947–1952. Like the so-called “Sörgårds-idyll”, “Bullerby” has been used to name an idealized image of Sweden as a sound society in which people live in contact with nature.3 I would argue that Roos’ texts Sörgården and In Önnemo are guided by a sense of loss, just like Carl Larsson’s picture book Spadarfvet (see Martin Olin’s chapter in the present volume). The way in which national Romanticism was expressed during this time can be understood as a reaction to a sense of loss caused by migration, urbanization and the dissolution of the union 1 Anna Maria Roos, Hem och hembygd: Sörgården och i Önnemo, Skolår 1–2, in Läseböcker för Sveriges barndomsskolor, eds. Alfred Dalin and Fridtjuv Berg (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1912). Like Selma Lagerlöf’s and Verner von Heidenstam’s contributions to the reader for elementary school, Roos’ books were commissioned by Dahlin and Berg for the schoolbook, but were published as separate books. 2 Eva Nordlinder, “Anna Maria Roos”. Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon, accessed February 2, 2020, www.skbl.se/sv/artikel/AnnaMariaRoos. 3 Ann-Sofi Ljung Svensson, Jordens dotter: Selma Lagerlöf och den tyska hembygdslitteraturen (Stockholm and Göteborg: Makadam, 2011), 141.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_011

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between Sweden and Norway in 1905, which was the final blow to Sweden’s self-image as a great nation. As H. Arnold Barton points out, the “Swedes could look back on a still not too distant past in the seventeenth century, when their country had been a great European military and imperial power”.4 However, in parallel to their longing for a fixed national identity, this generation of authors also connected to an international trend of travelling to and writing about North Africa and Asia. North Africa was also a popular destination among painters around 1900 – both male painters, such as Ivan Aguéli, and female, such as Siri Derkert.5 In this way, national subjectivity came to be articulated in travel writing, and local culture was juxtaposed with ideas about colonial territories. In this chapter, the images of Algeria presented by Anna Maria Roos in the travelogue Araber (Arabs, 1905) and the children’s book Fyra barn i Biskra (Four Children in Biskra, 1909) are investigated in relation to the national project and to European colonialism.6 As forms of travel writing, these texts necessarily include a confrontation between the familiar and the foreign, albeit in different ways, since Four Children in Biskra partly assumes the form of fairy tale and is targeted towards child readers, while Arabs chronicles the author’s travel experiences in Biskra in northeast Algeria, at the edge of the Sahara desert. Previous research has described the various forms of orientalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Nordic literature as connected to the strong focus on the national at that time.7 At the same time, Africa had become increasingly present in Swedish literature due to the translation of travel writing and children’s literature.8 The aim of this chapter is to explore what happened to the sense of loss of a traditional society in modernity, which was ubiquitous in the Swedish national discourse, when confronted with the

4 H. Arnold Barton, “From Warfare to Welfare State: Sweden’s Search for a New Identity”, Scandinavian Studies 77, no. 2 (2005): 315. 5 Åsa Bharathi Larsson, “‘Det är underligt att man är i Afrika’. Siri Derkerts vistelse i Algeriet 1914”, in Att alltid göra och tänka det olika: Siri Derkert i 1900-talet, eds. Mats Rohdin and Annika Öhrner (Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket, 2011), 94. 6 Anna Maria Roos, Araber [Arabs]. Stockholm: Hierta, 1905; Fyra barn i Biskra [Four Children in Biskra]. Stockholm: Folkskolans barntidnings förlag, 1909. The translation of the titles is my own, since there is no published translation to English. 7 Dag Landmark, “Vi civilisationens ljusbärare”: Orientalistiska mönster i det sena 1800-talets svenska litteratur och kultur (Örebro: Örebro Studies, Örebro University no. 23, 2003); Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005). 8 Niclas Hållén, “Barnbiblioteket Sagas Selim och Kalulu: Afrika som sagoland och civilisering som metafor för mognad”, Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 40, no. 2 (2010): 23–24.

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environment and inhabitants of Algeria. What kind of cultural difference does Anna Maria Roos convey to Swedish readers? How are these differences charged with emotions, and to what purpose? Furthermore, how does gender play into this discourse of cultural difference? How is the production of loss reflected in the description of the foreign? The chapter consists of the following parts. The first part introduces the author and the two studied works, along with some theoretical reflections. The remaining parts are dedicated to the analysis of the two works. The section on Four Children in Biskra concerns the feelings expressed in the tension between “homemaking” and exoticism. The three sections on Arabs cover how the Swedish is positioned in relation to the French, the Arab and the African; the role of “ugly feelings” displayed by the Arabs; and the issue of Arabic women.

1

Anna Maria Roos, Travelling, and Colonial Narratives

Roos was one of many female writers who published fairy tales, school books, plays and song lyrics for children around 1900. She also wrote literature for adults, along with literary criticism, essays and travel writing, “in a period in which it is estimated that travel books came close second in popularity to the novel”, as Joanna Shattock phrases it.9 The background to Roos’ books about Biskra was her voyage in 1902, in company with the painter Hedvig Björkman, who later became one of the illustrators of Four Children in Biskra. They visited an acquaintance, Frances Wachtmeister, who, like Roos, had medical reasons for an extended stay in a warmer climate.10 The two women became the guests of Wachtmeister and her four daughters in Biskra from February to May 1902, and the Swedish girls portrayed in Four Children in Biskra were modelled on the Wachtmeister girls.11 Like Selma Lagerlöf, Roos exemplifies how it was possible at that time for women to travel without male company, even outside of Europe. Lagerlöf and the author Sophie Elkan travelled to Jerusalem in 1899.12 Lagerlöf subsequently used her impressions to pen Jer9

10 11 12

Joanna Shattock, “Travel Writing Victorian and Modern: A Review of Recent Research”, in The Art of Travel: Essays on Travel Writing”, ed. Philip Dodd (London: Frank Cass, 1982), 154. Ingegerd Lindström, Anna Maria Roos: Inte bara Sörgården. Ett reportage bland böcker och brev (Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1989), 150. Lindström, Anna Maria Roos, 152. Lena Carlsson, Ett frihetslif! Selma Lagerlöf och Sophie Elkan: två ensamma fruntimmer med kamera (Karlstad: Votum, 2017), 49.

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usalem I–II (1901–1902), a novel that keenly deals with a sense of loss in its narration of the emigration of the majority of a Swedish village to follow a revivalist preacher to Jerusalem.13 While Arabs and Four Children in Biskra do not thematize this sense of loss explicitly, as Jerusalem does, both texts include a juxtaposition of Swedish culture with the foreign. Like Lagerlöf, Roos was engaged in the women’s movement, and travelling without the company of men can be regarded as a part of women’s emancipation.14 “Colonialism facilitates travelling or settling outside of Europe”, Elisabeth Oxfeldt points out, which also applied to travellers from Scandinavian countries.15 Algeria was colonized by France in the 1830s, and was thus accessible as a safe destination for Europeans.16 The tourist industry fuelled “desires for colonial travel with its promises of viewing ‘timeless’ peoples and landscapes and to stimulate the senses through encounters with ‘exotic’ cultures”, according to Ellen Furlough.17 Indeed, these desires are present in Roos’ texts, along with a hierarchy both between European and colonial subjects and among colonial subjects, depending on race and class. Like many other travelogues, Arabs focuses on nature, climate, culture, architecture and, not least, people. In the last chapter, “An Arabic love story”, Roos abandons the form of the travelogue and narrates the acquaintance of some young Swedish women and the young Arabic men Ali and Bachir in the form of a novelette set in Biskra. Four Children in Biskra is narrated from the perspective of the four children of the Wachtmeister family (called Vendel in 13

14

15 16 17

Jenny Bergenmar, “The Fatherland and the Holy Land in Selma Lagerlöf’s Jerusalem”, in Tracing the Jerusalem Code III. The Promised Land: Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920), eds. Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati and Anna Bohlin (Berlin: Walter de Gryuter, 2021), 448–65. Regarding Elkan’s writing, which was inspired by the same trip, see Helena Bodin, “Sophie Elkan’s Ambiguous Dream of the Orient: On Cultural Identity and the National Literary Canon”, in Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia, eds. Ann-Sofie Lönngren, Heidi Grönstrand, Dag Heede, and Anne Heith (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 78–103. Yet another example of this tendency is Finnish-Swedish Adelaïde Ehrnrooth, who was one of the most prominent spokeswomen for women’s emancipation in Finland in the late nineteenth century and who published travel writing from both Europe and Africa. Adelaïde Ehrnrooth, Två finskors lustvandringar 1: Europa och Afrika åren 1876–77 och 1884 (Helsingfors: Edlund, 1886). Adelaïde Ehrnrooth, Två finskors lustvandringar 2: Resor i Orienten (Helsingfors: Edlund, 1890). Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Journeys from Scandinavia: Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America, 1840–2000 (Minneapolis & London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010), 81. Mafoud Bennoune, The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15. Ellen Furlough, “Une leçon des choses: ‘Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France’”, French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 444.

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the book), and Anna Maria Roos has installed herself in the text as a character: “Aunt Anna”. The narration of the children’s experiences in Biskra is mixed with tales told by Aunt Anna and tales told by the Arabs they meet. “National” tales, set in a Swedish context with figures from Swedish folklore and nature, are thus blended with tales of heroic princes, enchanted princesses and wild animals in exotic environments, in a way that resembles Roos’ writing for children as a whole. In fact, the same aspects that are present in Sörgården and In Önnemo are also present in Four Children in Biskra: the mix of fairy tales, verses, and depictions of traditions and holidays, and animals and nature. The illustrations by Hedvig Björkman, Ellen Jolin and Gunhild Facks also point to this dual tendency to contrast the exotic (images of elephants, princes with turbans and villains with a crooked nose and sabre) with the national idyllic (a Swedish rural landscape figuring common animals such as cats and crows, along with people wearing folkloristic dress). On the one hand, Roos produced idyllic images of Swedish nature, seasons and traditions; on the other, she is known for her tales utilizing the Orient as a faraway fairy land. She also utilized this exotic setting in her plays.18 Continuing to analyse the two texts at hand, I will focus on the emotions that appear in encounters between the Swedish identity expressed in both works and the colonial environment. With Mary Louise Pratt’s term, these encounters can be said to take place in a “contact zone” – that is, a space that allows for contacts between “colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees’, not in terms of separateness, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power”.19 In the contact zone, communication is fraught with difficulty and needs to be guided by readings of emotional response in the absence of common moral norms. In turn, these emotions manifest and create different peoples and nationalities. Pratt stresses how “travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world created the imperial order for Europeans ‘at home’ and gave them their place in it”.20 Chris Bongie’s distinction between “Imperialist Exoticism”, within which the exotic culture is described as inferior and in need of Western improvements, and “Exoticizing Exoticism”, wherein the

18

19 20

Karin Helander, “Sagospelstraditionen och Anna Maria Roos Arabia land”, in Litteraturens underland: Festskrift till Boel Westin, eds. Maria Andersson, Elina Druker, and Kristin Hallberg (Göteborg: Makadam, 2011), 200–11. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Second edition (London & New York: Routledge, 2008), 8. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 3.

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Figure 9.1 Illustration by Hedvig Björkman in Four Children in Biskra (1909), p. 77.

primitive culture is viewed above the civilized, is relevant here.21 I will argue that Roos takes part in the creation of this imperial order, but also utilizes “Exoticizing Exoticism” to some extent in her writing for children. Following Sara Ahmed, the encounters between the Swedes and the people of colonial Algeria can be described as a “contact zone of impressions” involving perception and emotion.22 Ahmed’s statement that “[r]ather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and collective” will function as a point of departure.23 I argue that, while Roos seems to be portraying herself 21 22 23

Chris Bongie in Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1991), 17. See also Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, 14. Sara Ahmed, “Collective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others”, Theory, Culture, and Society 21, no. 2 (2004): 30. Ahmed, “Collective Feelings”, 26–27.

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(in Arabs) and a Swedish family (in Four Children in Biskra), she is simultaneously constructing collective identities: a collective Western modern identity and collective identities represented by the people the Swedes meet in Biskra. The individuals (Arabs) that Roos seems to be portraying actually describe aspects of a collective Arabic identity that is constructed in opposition to European modernity. However, Roos expresses an ambivalence to how this opposition should be valued: Biskra functions as both an escape from urban European modernity and a place in need of civilization. What is lacking in Biskra is precisely the modernization that, in a Swedish national context, is expressed as a loss of authenticity and traditions. In relation to Algeria, such modernization is instead described as part of a necessary civilization process, although there is also a wish to experience authentic Arab culture. Furthermore, Roos’ texts exemplify a clear hierarchy that places Europeans (and perhaps, most of all, the Swedes) at the top, while simultaneously trying to bridge cultural differences and explore the possibility of communication and more equal relationships. There is a difference in how emotions are valued, depending on who expresses them. I will use Sianne Ngai’s concept of “ugly feelings” to describe the negative affects connected to the colonized subjects.24

2

Turning Biskra into a Swedish Home

At a glance, Four Children in Biskra seems to be a typical example of the exotic as a vehicle for the inclusion of imagination and adventure that was so common in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Nordic literature.25 Travel as an adventure is immediately focused on in the first chapter: going to Biskra would be “almost as fun as going to the Island of Robinson Crusoe”.26 The older sister frightens one of the younger children with the statement that “there are Arabs, who travel around and sell slaves, and if they catch you, they will sell you as a slave”.27 After this, Mrs. Vendel takes over, and these imaginative, exoticizing and colonial images are followed by an account of Algeria that is more

24 25 26 27

Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Landmark, ‘Vi civilisationens ljusbärare’, 13–16. “Det vore ju nästan lika roligt som att komma till Robinson Kruses ö!” Roos, Fyra barn i Biskra, 4. “Och så finns det araber, som resa omkring och handla med slavar, och om de få tag i en, så sälja de en till slav”. Roos, Fyra barn i Biskra, 5.

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like that of a geography book: it is a French colony, south of the Atlas Mountains, and there are hotels and railways.28 Thus, both timeless exoticism and progressive modernity are mingled in the children’s introduction to Algeria. The didactic discourse is resumed in chapter five, when Mr. Vendel visits his family in Biskra. He explains his understanding of the history of Algeria from the Romans and forward, while underlining that the people of Algeria, who were once Christians, were forced to become Muslim.29 The text seems to express a twofold narrative about Africa and the Arabs: as a space for imagination and adventure on the one hand, and as a subject of learning and colonial knowledge on the other.30 Thus, an immediate contrast between fairy tale exoticism and geography instruction is introduced, and this contrast characterizes the book as a whole. In the first two chapters, there is a notable contrast between “white” and “black”: the girls’ fairness is emphasized (and Mr. Vendel has a blond moustache), while one of the first remarks made by the children upon arrival in Africa is this: –Look, how many chimney sweepers, little Ia whispered trembling, when they met some black men, when passing the gangway. –They are not chimney sweepers, they are Negroes, Sara hurried to tell her. They are always black, you see, Ia, and you cannot wash them white on Sundays, as you do with chimney sweepers.31 Differences are thus underlined in this way, and clearly connected to race (cf. Jens Grandell’s chapter in the present volume on race theories in the construction of the Sámi people). Ahmed suggests that “figures of speech”, such as metonymy and metaphor, “are crucial to the emotionality of texts”.32 In Roos’ two texts, the contrast between black and white – or, in other instances, the

28 29 30

31

32

Roos, Fyra barn i Biskra, 6. Roos, Fyra barn i Biskra, 22. This is the same contrast as Hållén identifies in his study on the Swedish translation of Henry Stanley’s children’s book My Kalulu, Selim och Kalulu (1907). Hållén, “Barnbiblioteket Sagas Selim och Kalulu”, 23–24. “–Titta, så många sotare, viskade lilla Ia bävande, då de mötte några svarta karlar, just som de gingo över landgången. –De är inga sotare, de är negrer, skyndade Sara att upplysa. De äro alltid svarta, ser Ia, och man kan inte tvätta dem vita om söndagarna, som man gör med sotare”. Roos, Fyra barn i Biskra, 7. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 12.

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scale from white, via brown towards black – is very present, and triggers emotions. The emotion brought about by this encounter is fear or uneasiness: Ia is “trembling”. According to Ahmed, “emotions work to align some subjects with some others and against other others”, and this instance, especially considering the emphasized “whiteness” of the children, places these bodies as opposites.33 As in Arabs, no relations are developed with the “black” Africans, only with the “brown” Arabs. As seen in the dialogue about the black chimney sweepers, black is here constructed as a negation of white: black can never become white, Sara explains to her little sister. Another difference that is immediately introduced is that of religion. The family celebrates both Christmas and Easter in Biskra, and thus introduces Swedish Christian traditions to the Algerians they come into contact with. They invite the Arabic staff of the hotel and teach them how to celebrate a proper Christmas. As an explanation to the unusual mix of classes (i.e. the French hotel owners with their African and Arab kitchen staff), Mrs. Vendel states that “it is a part of Christmas – as it is celebrated up in the North – that everyone, at least for a while, should feel like siblings”.34 Equality is thus pointed out as a part of Nordic identity. Verses by Roos are quoted in other parts of the text as well, and often have a national Romantic or idyllic tone. One example is the following: Home – where it smells of clover, home, where the lilacs bloom, home, where our kitty cleans her paw in the light of the sun Home – oh, if we were home! Home is bonny and good, home, where it is far better than in the grandest castle.35 This poem is included in a fairy tale about a giant that kidnaps children, “The tale of Mumburras castle”, told by Aunt Anna. Thus, the thought of home

33 34 35

Ahmed, “Collective Feelings”, 25. The original reads: “det hörde till julen, – såsom den firades uppe i norden – att alla skulle åtminstone för en stund känna sig som syskon”. Roos, Fyra barn i Biskra, 17. “Hemma – där doftar det klöver,/ hemma, där blommar syrén,/ hemma, där tvättar vår kisse/sin tass uti solens sken./Hemma – ack, vore vi hemma!/Hemma är fagert och gott,/ hemma, där är det långt bättre/än i det grannaste slott”. Roos, Fyra barn i Biskra, 95.

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Figure 9.2 Illustration by Gunhild Facks in Four Children in Biskra (1909), p. 104.

has a very literal relevance in the story. It expresses the bouts of homesickness experienced by the children in the tale, as well as an idyllic image of the national, since the story signals a Swedish landscape. However, the inclusion of this verse in the narrative also evokes the tension between (national) home and (colonial) away. Adventure is experienced only at the cost of the loss of a home, the tale seems to communicate. This longing for home that is the central theme of the fairy tale is strongly accentuated in the last chapter, “The voyage home”. They receive a letter from Mr. Vendel, who writes that spring flowers are in bloom, and they imagine that the wagtails have returned. The children receive the news of the planned return to Sweden with great satisfaction: “there is no place like home”.36 In this way, the national project, in the form of images of home and constructions of homeliness in Biskra, is strongly present in the narrative.

36

“Hemma var dock bäst!” Roos, Fyra barn i Biskra, 130.

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247

Frenchmen, Arabs, and Black Others

Although Arabs, like many other travelogues, focuses on a combination of different aspects of the foreign territory it explores, it is the impressions of others – or how they impress themselves upon the “narrating I”, to paraphrase Ahmed – that are driving the story.37 The first chapter, “Biskra. Some Contours”, includes comments on the collective appearance of different groups: there are “brown Arabs and black Negroes”; there are even Arabs with “light skin and light beard”, which is explained by pirates from North Africa having kidnapped European women and brought them home as wives or slaves.38 It turns out that the encounters described in Arabs are not only conditioned by race, but also by class. Among the persons that are allowed more space in the narrative, there is a clear division between the aristocratic Ali and Bachir (who are also introduced as characters in Four Children in Biskra), and Barah, who functions as a guide in Biskra. Unlike Ali and Bachir, who are described as handsome and well educated, Roos’ narrator suspects that Barah is of mixed race, and likens him to a tapir, as remembered from “the illustrated zoology books of my childhood” due to his solemn appearance and long nose.39 His questionable race and insignificant social position instantly make her dehumanize him as “the tapir man”, who is almost presented as a zoological specimen. Ali, on the other hand, belongs to the most powerful family in Biskra, and his friend Bachir also belongs to this sphere by association. In this case, relations on more equal terms seem to be possible. No contact zones are established between the narrator and the black population, and the in-depth encounters with Arabs are reserved for members of the educated class, who are well versed in French and European culture. Roos’ narrator also holds a clear distance from the French colonists. She wants to experience Biskra with no disturbing interference from tourists – that is, she wants to experience the authenticity of Arabic culture. The following section clarifies the distinctions she makes between European tourists, French colonists and herself, as an observer of a more authentic Algeria: I sat on a bench, idle in the warm, glittering morning sunshine, and enjoyed watching white burnouses and golden silk turbans move with 37 38 39

Ahmed, “Collective Feelings”, 30. Roos, Araber, 3, 8. Roos, Araber, 35. When discussing Arabs, I will use the concept of the “narrator” to represent the “I” of the text. However, it must be remembered that this narrator is both a “narrating I” and an “experiencing I”.

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slow dignity under the spring green arch way. No Europeans disturbed the picture. The actual season was over – we had with great satisfaction watched the tourists move off day by day – and the French colonists, thanks to whom there are hotels and shops selling spices and photographs and other blessings of civilization, would never think of attempting such a vain occupation as a walk in the park on a week day’s morning; it was only on Sunday, after Mass, that the community and their own repute demanded of them to walk in the park, dressed up and dignified, with their wives and their doll-like children, while casting condescending glances on the Arabs they met.40 This passage reveals a number of interesting aspects of Roos’ contribution to Nordic travel literature about colonial Africa: first, there is a desire to observe and describe the authentic culture without the disturbance of tourists as a product of cosmopolitan modernity. Without the tourists and the Frenchmen, the “picture” can be perceived as timeless. The narrator is in a privileged position to perceive Arabic culture because she is neither a tourist nor a part of the colonial power engaged in the processes of modernization and Europeanization. Although Roos does not question the need for a European “civilization” of Algeria, the narrator strives to give an impression of being less prejudiced than the French colonists and the tourists – the former governed by political interests, and the latter lacking any genuine interest in the country or its culture. Oxfeldt remarks that colonial travel gave Scandinavians the possibility to represent themselves as being on par with more influential colonial nationalities, thus temporarily escaping their peripheral position in the European context, and that seems to be the case here.41 Despite the tendency of the Arabs themselves to equate “French” with “European”, Roos insists on a difference that is not merely geographical.42

40

41 42

“Jag satt på en bänk, sysslolös i morgonens varma, glittrande solsken och njöt af att se hvita burnuser och guldfärgade silkesturbaner med långsam värdighet röra sig under det vårgröna hvalvet. Inga européer störde taflan. Den egentliga säsongen var förbi – vi hade med stor belåtenhet sett turisterna troppa af dag för dag – och de franska kolonister, hvilkas förtjänst det är att Biskra har hotell och kryddbodar och fotografiaffärer och annan civilisationens välsignelse, ta sig ingalunda något så fåfängligt före som att promernera i parken en hvardagsförmiddag; det är endast på söndagen, efter mässan, som samhället och deras eget anseende kräfver af dem att de, uppsträckta och värdiga, med hustrur och docklikt utstyrda barn spatsera i parken och kasta nedlåtande blickar på de araber de möta”. Roos, Araber, 135. Oxfeldt, Journeys from Scandinavia, xiv. Roos, Araber, 157.

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Roos’ way of describing emotions also underlines these differences: the Frenchmen look condescendingly at the Arabs’ idleness, creating a difference between European efficiency and productivity, and Arab/African passivity. Set apart from the colonizers, the narrator reveals an almost voyeuristic pleasure in watching “white burnouses and golden silk turbans move with slow dignity”. Both the clothing and the slow pace seem to place the figures not only in a different place, but also in a different sense of time. This temporal dislocation may be an example of what Oxfeldt describes as “a shift in contact zone – from a spatial contact zone, as the one described by Pratt, to a temporal contact zone, placing the Europeans and Arabs in different temporalities”.43 In contrast, the clothes of the Frenchmen give an over-cultured and lifeless (dressed up, doll-like) impression.

4

Ugly Feelings, Noble Feelings; Misunderstandings and Transactions

In the chapter “Frenchmen and Arabs”, this position as separate from the colonial power is further explained. In this chapter, the narrator interviews the young man Mustafa about his thoughts on the French colonial rule. She begins by stating that some Arabs – in reality, the reader is informed, this is the opinion of Barah – think that the French rule is a good thing. Mustafa becomes very indignant and exclaims “how would you like it if strangers came and conquered your country and ruled over your people?”44 Furthermore, he raises the issue of unequal tax policies, while the narrator reflects that lower taxes for the Frenchmen are necessary to induce them to move there at all.45 The portrayal of Mustafa gives the impression that he does not understand the function of taxes and that his sense of injustice is out of proportion. This idea is validated by the opinions of the “well-educated” Ali and Bachir, who, according to the narrator, contend that Mustafa’s claims are exaggerated or untrue. Despite the loss of independence, justice and political power that Mustafas’ anger reveals, he is thus made to represent the dangerous discontent that is felt by “the majority of the Arabs against their French masters”.46

43 44 45 46

Oxfeldt, Journeys from Scandinavia, 83. The original reads: ”skulle du tycka om, ifall främlingar komme och eröfrade ditt land och härskade öfver ditt folk?” Roos, Araber, 165. Roos, Araber, 166. The original reads: “ligger och gror hos flertalet Araber mot deras franska behärskare”. Roos, Araber, 168.

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In this discussion, the narrator clearly positions herself in line with the French. As an answer to Mustafa’s distraught question of why there are no newspapers in Arabic, the narrator reflects that “a certain censorship would here, without a doubt, be legitimate, considering the undeveloped political understanding of the Arabs”.47 Here is a clear example of the ambivalence of the narrator: the attempts towards authentic meetings with the Arabs, which are not possible for Frenchmen, are nevertheless limited by a sense of European superiority on part of the narrator. While Mustafa is allowed to express his sense of being oppressed, his anger is soon dismissed by the narrator as an expression of underdevelopment – a lack of civilization to be remedied by European cultivation. Suddenly, he is made part of a collective Arabic and Muslim identity, and is associated with the “Mohammedan fanaticism” that is displayed in violent acts against the French.48 Mustafa’s feelings could, with Sianne Ngai, be understood as “ugly feelings” – a framing that works to invalidate social grievances.49 Not only are Mustafa’s reasoning and education seen as flawed; his resentment also makes him morally suspect. He raises his voice, his face reddens and “his eyes flashed with indignation”.50 His agitation – or, to use Ngai’s term, “animatedness” – transforms him into “the image of the overemotional racialized subject”.51 Meanwhile, the narrator continues with her detached reasoning on the benefits of French reforms. Significantly, it is the less privileged Arabs who display ugly feelings. This is not surprising, since, according to Ngai, mean and ignoble affects are “obstructed agency” – that is, expressions of social conditions of powerlessness and frustration.52 On the other hand, Roos also catalogues actions that the narrator names as honourable or dignified, which are performed by people in a powerless position. In connection to railway travel, the narrator and her company were assisted by an obviously poor carrier. Since they did not have change to pay him, he promised to return with change. Although it required an effort to get back on time, the carrier did return with it. However, Roos puts this display of honesty in a distinctly colonial context:

47 48 49 50 51 52

The original reads: “men en viss censur vore här utan tvifvel, i betraktande af arabernas i politiskt hänseende outvecklade ståndpunkt, fullt berättigad”. Roos, Araber, 169. The original reads: “mohammedanska fanatismen”. Roos, Arabs, 180. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 1–2. The original reads: “hans ögon ljungade af harm”. Roos, Araber, 167. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 91. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 3.

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It is usual to speak about how civilization ruins the primitive peoples, that there might be reason to point out in what aspects it acts to improve them. I will not say, that the honesty displayed by our mild, pox-scarred Arab in Constantine, is characteristic of all city-living Arabs, but I think one might say, that the contact with the Europeans, and the experience of their regulated administration of justice and life in more ordered conditions on the whole, foster the Arabs to a better sense of honesty and reliability.53 The carrier’s honesty is thus not a personal choice, but a quality that has been developed thanks to the colonial rule. He is also made part of a collective identity (“city-living Arabs”). Thus, while Mustafa clearly voices a sense of loss – a loss of rights and of agency – the narrator argues that the Arabs gain from being colonized. In the chapter “Barah”, the narrator is invited to Barah’s home to meet his sister. The encounter is a disappointment. Moved by their hospitality, the narrator conquers her disgust and tastes the couscous prepared by the sister. However, it turns out that Barah and his sister demand payment for the meal, which triggers resentment on the part of the narrator. This is one of many encounters that take place within a commercial and transactional logic. In the chapter “Beni-Mora”, the narrator goes on an excursion to the oasis with that name, where she meets two Arab boys who converse with her and show their home to her. When they part, the narrator gives them a coin for helping her carry her painting tools: The moment I gave them the money, I realized that I had made a mistake. They said nothing, but looked quite sad. They had thought that they were my friends, they were proud of having helped me, and then I gave them payment…54

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“Det är så vanligt att tala om hur civilisationen fördärfvar naturfolken, att det kan vara skäl att framhålla i hvilka hänseenden den dock inverkar höjande på dem. Jag vill visst inte påstå, att den ärlighet, som vår koppärrige arab i Constantine visade, är utmärkande för alla stadsaraber, men jag tror att man kan säga, att beröringen med européerna, erfarenheten af deras lagbundna rättsskipning och lifvet i mera ordnade förhållanden på det hela uppfostrar araberna till mer känsla för ärlighet och pålitlighet”. Roos, Araber, 179. “Men i samma ögonblick jag gifvit dem pengarna, förstod jag, att jag begått ett misstag. De sade ingenting, men de sågo helt ledsna ut. De hade trott, att de voro mina vänner, de voro stolta öfver att ha hjälpt mig, och så gaf jag dem en slant…” Roos, Araber, 200.

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The narrator feels badly, but does not know how to remedy the situation. However, she concludes that she has had the opportunity to prove the French wrong – there were actually Arab boys who could do a stranger a favour without charging money for it. Nonetheless, this kind of situation is a recurring theme: a constant inability to see encounters as just that, without turning them into commercial transactions, rendering one party the servant of the other. On many occasions, it is underlined in Arabs that communication is fraught with misunderstandings. “[H]ow can you know what they think”, countess Ebba asks in the final chapter, “An Arabic love story”.55 Speaking about a brutal murder of a woman, their Arabic friend Ali states that this action was very wrong. Upon hearing this, the women are amazed that he should feel the need to clarify this for them. The narrator concludes: “And the European women silently reflected that this more clearly than anything, showed how insecure they and their Arabic friends always must feel about understanding each other correctly”.56 It is rather a cultural clash than linguistic misunderstandings that is thematized – more explicitly, a difficulty in decoding the intentions and values of others. Interestingly, this feeling of insecurity is acknowledged as reciprocal: it concerns both the European women and their Arabic friends.

5

European and Arabic Women

The Arabs the narrator comes into contact with are distinctly gendered, and her position as a stranger is also defined by being a lady from Europe. As early as the first chapter, Roos lets the reader know that the Arabic men consider it an “incomprehensible freedom” that women should be allowed outside without male company.57 As an author engaged in the women’s movement, Roos is critical of what she perceives as an imprisonment of women in the home from the age of 12 or 13.58 She refutes the suggestion that the women’s lack of access to the public sphere comes from the women’s own sense of propriety. It is natural that this idea would be promoted by Arabic men, who understand that Europeans see this custom as a “barbaric tradition”.59 55 56

57 58 59

The original reads: “hur vet ni hvad de tänka?” Roos, Araber, 288. “Och de europeiska kvinnorna tänkte inom sig, att knappast något så tydligt som dessa ord röjt, huru osäkra de själva och deras arabiska vänner voro och alltid måste vara om att förstå hvarandra rätt”. Roos, Araber, 280. The original reads: “obegriplig frihet”. Roos, Araber, 18. Roos, Araber, 18. The original reads: “barbarisk sedvänja”. Roos, Araber, 16.

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The women appreciate visits at home as a welcome change in their circumscribed existence, the narrator states. However, only the older women speak; the younger ones are “sad and quiet, and often weak and sickly the first years after the commencement of their imprisonment”.60 Another point of criticism on the part of Roos’ narrator is that women are often deprived of medical care, since there are no female doctors. This affects the children as well, who often suffer from untreated diseases that sometimes cause lifelong disability.61 Here, the women’s situation is used as a “barometer of civilization”, as Jill Matus has expressed it.62 Contrary to the travel writing of Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale, as explored by Matus, Roos does not place the problem of polygamy at the centre, although it is critically described. Rather, she focuses on the marriage of very young women, and on the oppression of married women more generally. The emotions displayed by the narrator on this subject are disgust and pity, coupled with a “rational” condemnation of barbaric traditions. The narrator also rejects a common criticism against the emancipation of women in Europe, using the attitudes of Muslim men as a counter-example: Many people claim that with women’s emancipation, the female virtues are spoiled; however, I think that it would be hard to find a more definite scepticism towards female virtue and fidelity, goodness and mildness, than among the Arabs, who keep their women locked inside the four walls of the home, in such a way that no one else does.63 The circumscribed life of Arab women is taken as proof that the problem lies in the attitudes of men towards women, and not in the degree of freedom acquired by women. For the narrator, the treatment of women as prisoners in the house is also a clear sign of a lack of civilization. Despite this discussion, few actual encounters with women are described. The most interesting one is narrated in the last chapter, “An Arabic love story”, 60 61 62 63

The original reads: “de unga äro ofta nedslagna och tysta; de äro också vanligen klena och sjukliga de första åren efter det att man börjat spärra in dem”. Roos, Araber, 16. Roos, Araber, 171. Jill Matus, “The ‘Eastern-Woman Question’: Martineau and Nightingale visit the harem”, Nineteenth Century Contexts 21, no. 1 (1999): 76. “Det påstås ju af många, att med kvinnornas frigörelse åtskilligt af de äkta kvinnliga dygderna försvinner; jag tror emellertid att man ska ha svårt att finna en mer afgjord skepsis beträffande kvinnlig kyskhet och trohet, godhet och mildhet, än bland araberna, som likaväl hålla sina kvinnor instängda inom hemmets fyra väggar som inga andra”. Roos, Araber, 131.

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which describes the acquaintance of three young Swedish women in the company of “the countess” Ebba with Ali and Bachir, who have already been mentioned. The girls soon become privy to a secret love story: Ali has fallen in love with a young woman from Norway, and he is now corresponding with her, and Bachir with her female friend. The question posed in this novelette is voiced by Ebba: “can a European woman consider marrying an Arabic man?”64 This is debated among the women, with one of them concluding that Arabic men are too unlike Europeans, more like wild animals than men.65 Another woman contends that, “if Ali wants to marry a European girl, I am convinced that he does not want her to live the same confined life as an Arabic woman”.66 When Ebba’s daughter is invited by Ali to his home, the young women accompany her. They are also introduced to the women of the house, but they have trouble communicating with them: The conversation was less than lively. What should one discuss with these women, who lived their lives imprisoned between four walls and who didn’t seem to know anything about the world beyond them.67 The meeting makes one of the girls reflect on the discrepancy between the exotic conceptions of Arabic harem life in European art and literature, and what she observes before her. In reality, it is only “darkness and dirt and imprisonment and confined longing and at last a dull and suppressed resignation”.68 Here, Roos alludes to a whole tradition of literary imaginations of harem life. This can be also be read as a direct answer to the sexualized and aestheticized images of the harem that are present in, for example, Verner von Heidenstam’s 1890s literature, which in turn builds upon popular European harem narratives.69 The conclusion of the story answers the question of intercultural marriage in the negative, even if the Arabs are in need of a “Germanic – or even better 64 65 66

67

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The original reads: “kan en europeisk kvinna tänka på att gifta sig med en arab?” Roos, Araber, 237. Roos, Araber, 238. The original reads: “om Ali gifter sig med en europeisk flicka är jag övertygad om att han inte vill tvinga henne att lefva samma instängda lif som en arabisk kvinna”. Roos, Araber, 239. “Konversationen blef inte precis liflig. Hvad skulle man egentligen tala om med dessa kvinnor, som lefvde sitt lif instängda mellan fyra väggar och inte tycktes veta något alls om den värld som låg därutanför”. Roos, Araber, 262. “Men det är bara mörker och smuts och fångenskap och sysslolöshet och instängd längtan och till slut bara en slö, dof resignation”. Roos, Araber, 265. Cristine Sarrimo, Heidenstams harem (Stockholm & Stehag: Symposion, 2008), 46–50.

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North Germanic”, that is to say, Nordic, influence.70 The French do not understand the Arabs, but there is “one other people, that has proven to understand and treat the people it has conquered in a way that has not elicited the hatred of those who have been defeated, – and that is the Swedes”.71 Here, Sweden’s “heroic” past is recalled, and in a positive light. Sweden has lost its empire, but Swedes are still the most skilful rulers. These concluding remarks are interesting, since they sum up the position taken by the narrator in the previous chapters, and her efforts to understand the colonized subjects while simultaneously not questioning their need for civilization. In Arabs, Algeria is not made to represent the dream of the exotic Africa and the Arabic world as a catalyst for literary imagination. To use Bongie’s distinction, it places itself within an “Imperialist Exoticism”, within which the exotic culture is described as inferior and in need of Western improvements, rather than within an “Exoticizing Exoticism”, where the less developed culture is viewed above one’s own.72 Algeria needs to be subject to European improvements; however, Swedish or Nordic Europeans are clearly separated from the Frenchmen, whose colonial rule is subtly criticized, as seen in the previous section.

6

Concluding Remarks

Two kinds of cultural difference are constructed by Roos in Four Children in Biskra and Arabs: Four Children in Biskra includes a clear element of exoticism, utilizing the popularity of the oriental tales that had spread with the different translations of One Thousand and One Nights into Swedish during the nineteenth century.73 The exotic tales related in the book are set not only in the 70 71

72 73

The original reads: “germanskt – helst nordgermanskt”. Roos, Araber, 326. The original reads: “ett annat folk, som ha visat sig förstå att behandla de folk de underkufvat och de folk af lägre civilisation de mött på ett sätt, som ej väckt de underkufvades hat – och det är svenskarne”. Roos, Araber, 325. Bongie, Exotic Memories, 17. The most relevant in the context of children’s literature is Anna Wahlenberg’s adaptation in 1899, which was published in the Saga Children’s Library series. The stories were published in separate booklets, the first of which was dated September 27, 1899. Göte Klingberg, Sekelskiftets barnbokssyn och Barnbiblioteket Saga (Stockholm: Svensk läraretidnings förlag, 1966), 41. See also Hållén, “Barnbiblioteket sagas”, 33. The translations to Swedish that were not adapted for children are described by Barbro Ståhle Sjönell, “Tusen och en natt på Svenska”, in Litteraturens underland: Festskrift till Boel Westin, eds. Maria Andersson, Elina Druker, and Kristin Hallberg (Göteborg & Stockholm: Makadam, 2011), 171–84.

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Arabic world, but also in China and India, the common denominator being the colonial context. As a contrast to these tales, there are also tales about children with Swedish names, rooted in Nordic folklore. There is a consistent tension between the children’s adventures in the foreign land and the idyllic images of home that are presented in fairy tales set in a safe and recognizable rural landscape. The longing for home is also indirectly thematized in the repeated celebration of Christian holidays. Although the spirit of Christmas is said to be to treat everyone as a sibling, “black” is constructed as an absolute opposite to “white”. The emotions produced are tied to the national space (longing, safety) and colonial space (the excitement of adventure and a place for learning, yet also fear at the experience of difference). In contrast, Arabs can to some extent be read as a corrective to exotic conceptions of Arabs and Africa. The narrator’s tone is usually not one of fascination (although there are also such occasions), but one of rational reasoning and modern values, which are measured against the “primitive” Arab culture. A “reorientation” in Ahmed’s sense never takes place: the narrator does not change her outlook or self-perception in the encounters in the contact zone.74 The anger the narrator expresses at the oppression of married women is not an emotion that brings her in closer contact with them. Even though there is a focus on encounters, the narrator is not insecure or wondering, but authoritative. In her discussion about the colonizing function of travel writing, Pratt describes an “imperial stylistics” developed during the nineteenth century. One version of this is what she calls the “monarch of all I survey”, which establishes a “relation of mastery” between “the seer and the seen”, often through aestheticized descriptions.75 Both the mastery and the aesthetic quality are observable in the episode in which the narrator reflects on Arabs and Frenchmen in the park. Interestingly, the narrator also assumes a certain mastery over the French, whose way of being masters is questioned, even though European civilizing efforts are welcomed. In the last chapter, this mastery is clearly connected to a nationalist discourse referring to Sweden’s past as a major power. In Arabs, national identity is contrasted with colonial mismanagement, the cultural deficiency of Arabs and the racial difference of Europeans, Arabs and Africans. Perhaps this piece of travel writing can be described as the result

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As Ahmed puts it, “Emotions are relational: they involve (re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to such objects – the attribution of feeling to an object is an effect of the encounter, which moves the subject away from the object. Emotions involve such affective forms of reorientation”. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 8. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 200.

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of a “nationalistic geographical tourism”, albeit of a different kind than that described by Kristina Malmio in this volume: instead of travelling to places with national significance in one’s own country, this kind of tourism allows for the formulation of a nationalist self-understanding in contrast to European colonial powers and to non-European “primitive” cultures. In any case, Arabs, like Roos’ schoolbook texts, can be read as proof of the engagement in the national project by women writers, and of the fact that national identity is indeed also transnational.76 To conclude, the production of loss is very literal in Four Children in Biskra: it is a narrative that takes place in an “away space” that is conditioned by a longing for home. Arabs, on the other hand, can be read as an imperialist discourse constructing the Arab world as an opposite. In a Swedish context, nation and loss pertain to the upheavals of society in different ways, threatening a national self-image that consists of both ideas of a heroic past and a belonging in rural, local cultures. While modernity is seen as a threat in the Swedish context, it is seen as necessary progress in Arabs– a necessary progress to be carried out by Europeans; and, as expressed in “An Arabic love story”, Swedes may be the most fitted to such work, precisely because of what they have lost – namely, their national power.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. “Collective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others”. Theory, Culture, and Society 21, no. 2 (2004): 25–42. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Barton, H. Arnold. “From Warfare to Welfare State: Sweden’s Search for a New Identity”. Scandinavian Studies 77, no 2 (2005): 315–26. Bennoune, Mafoud. The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830–1987. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bergenmar, Jenny. “The Fatherland and the Holy Land in Selma Lagerlöf’s Jerusalem”. In Tracing the Jerusalem Code III. The Promised Land: Christian Cultures in Modern Scandinavia (ca. 1750–ca. 1920), edited by Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati and Anna Bohlin, 448–65. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021.

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Amelia Sanz and Suzan van Dijk, “Introduction”, in Women Telling Nations: Women Writers in History 1, eds. Amelia Sanz, Francesca Scott, and Susan van Dijk (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2014), 10.

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Bharathi Larsson, Åsa. “‘Det är underligt att man är i Afrika’. Siri Derkerts vistelse i Algeriet 1914”. In Att alltid göra och tänka det olika: Siri Derkert i 1900-talet, edited by Mats Rohdin and Annika Öhrner, 93–135. Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket, 2011. Bodin, Helena. “Sophie Elkan’s Ambiguous Dream of the Orient: On Cultural Identity and the National Literary Canon”. In Rethinking National Literatures and the Literary Canon in Scandinavia, edited by Ann-Sofie Lönngren, Heidi Grönstrand, Dag Heede, and Anne Heith, 78–103. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Bongie, Chris. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Carlsson, Lena. Ett frihetslif! Selma Lagerlöf och Sophie Elkan: två ensamma fruntimmer med kamera. Karlstad: Votum, 2017. Ehrnrooth, Adelaïde. Två finskors lustvandringar 1: Europa och Afrika åren 1876–77 och 1884. Helsingfors: Edlund, 1886. Ehrnrooth, Adelaïde. Två finskors lustvandringar 2: Resor i Orienten. Helsingfors: Edlund, 1890. Furlough, Ellen. “‘Une leçon des choses’: Tourism, Empire, and the Nation in Interwar France”. French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 441–73. Hållén, Niclas. “Barnbiblioteket Sagas Selim och Kalulu. Afrika som sagoland och civilisering som metafor för mognad”. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 40, no. 2 (2010): 23–37. Helander, Karin. “Sagospelstraditionen och Anna Maria Roos Arabia land”. In Litteraturens underland: Festskrift till Boel Westin, edited by Maria Andersson, Elina Druker, and Kristin Hallberg, 200–11. Göteborg: Makadam, 2011. Klingberg, Göte. Sekelskiftets barnbokssyn och Barnbiblioteket Saga. Stockholm: Svensk läraretidnings förlag, 1966. Landmark, Dan. “Vi, civilisationens ljusbärare”: Orientalistiska mönster i det sena 1800talets svenska litteratur och kultur. Örebro: Örebro Studies, Örebro University no. 23, 2003. Lindström, Ingegerd. Anna Maria Roos – inte bara Sörgården. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1989. Ljung Svensson, Ann-Sofi. Jordens dotter: Selma Lagerlöf och den tyska hembygdslitteraturen. Stockholm and Göteborg: Makadam, 2011. Matus, Jill. “The ‘Eastern Woman Question’: Martineau and Nightingale Visit the Harem”. Nineteenth Century Contexts 21, no. 1 (1999): 63–87. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Nordlinder, Eva. “Anna Maria Roos”. Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon. Accessed February 21, 2020. www.skbl.se/sv/artikel/AnnaMariaRoos. Oxfeldt, Elisabeth. Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 1800– 1900. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005.

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Oxfeldt, Elisabeth. Journeys from Scandinavia: Travelogues of Africa, Asia, and South America 1840–2000. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Second edition. London & New York: Routledge, 2008. Roos, Anna Maria. Araber. Stockholm: Hierta, 1905. Roos, Anna Maria. Fyra barn i Biskra. Stockholm: Folkskolans barntidnings förlag, 1909. Roos, Anna Maria. Hem och hembygd: Sörgården och i Önnemo, Skolår 1–2. In Läseböcker för Sveriges barndomsskolor, edited by Alfred Dalin and Fridtjuv Berg. Stockholm: Bonnier, 1912. Sanz, Amelia, and Suzan van Dijk. “Introduction”. In Women Telling Nations: Women Writers in History 1, edited by Amelia Sanz, Francesca Scott, and Suzan van Dijk, 9–24. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2014. Sarrimo, Cristine. Heidenstams harem. Stockholm & Stehag: Symposion, 2008. Shattock, Joanna. “Travel Writing Victorian and Modern: A Review of Recent Research”. In The Art of Travel: Essays on Travel Writing”, edited by Philip Dodd, 151–64. London: Frank Cass, 1982. Ståhle Sjönell, Barbro. “Tusen och en natt på svenska”. In Litteraturens underland: Festskrift till Boel Westin, edited by Maria Andersson, Elina Druker, and Kristin Hallberg, 171–84. Göteborg & Stockholm: Makadam, 2011.

Part 3 Personal Loss and Lived Nationalism

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Chapter 10

“Thus Shall Our Joy Be Solemn, and Our Pain Fruitful”: Nation, Loss and the Power of Emotions in Amalie von Helvig’s Writings Jules Kielmann

As the German writer and translator Amalie von Helvig (1776–1831, born Imhoff) was moving back and forth between Sweden and Germany during the eventful years of the Napoleonic Wars, her life was shaped by the experience of loss in multiple ways.1 On a collective level, the tremendous defeat of the Prussian army at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt in October 1806, the resulting territorial losses to France, and the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine have gone down in history as a German national trauma.2 On a personal level, Helvig’s constant moving repeatedly forced her to break up from familiar places, considered as “home”, and resituate herself in new social, cultural and national contexts. In 1804, after her marriage with the Swedish military officer Carl von Helvig, the family moved from Weimar to Stockholm. Due to her poor health, Helvig and her three children returned to Germany in 1810, relocating to Heidelberg. In 1814, she left Germany to spend another two years in Sweden, including a longer visit in Uppsala where her youngest son died of scarlet fever in 1816, before finally settling down permanently in Berlin where she resided from 1816 until her death in 1831. In her letters from Sweden to Germany, as well those she sent to her Swedish friends after returning to Germany, Helvig articulates her relation to Germany as her original home country, her “Vaterland”, and her changing perceptions of

1 While in the context of German literary history, Helvig is mostly referred to by her maiden name Amalie von Imhoff, in Sweden she is known as Amalia von Helvig. For an overview of Helvig’s biography, see my article “Anna Amalie (Amalia) von Helvig”, in Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon, 2020, www.skbl.se/en/article/AmaliavonHelvig, trans. Margaret Myers. 2 On Germany during the Napoleonic Wars, see Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck: 1800–1866, trans. Daniel Nolan, especially Chapter 1, “The Great Upheaval” (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996, German original 1983). A compact overview of the “Histoire-bataille” is provided by Joep Leerssen in his article “From Bökendorf To Berlin: Private Careers, Public Sphere, And How The Past Changed In Jacob Grimm’s Lifetime”, in Free Access to the Past: Romanticism, Cultural Heritage and the Nation, eds. Lotte Jensen, Joep Leerssen, and Marita Mathijsen-Verkooijen (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 53–68.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_012

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the concepts of home and belonging over time. Her position as a female writer, working both inside and outside the shifting borders of Prussia and a variety of smaller German-speaking states during the first decades of the nineteenth century, gives a unique perspective on cultural and political events and the German nation-building process. This chapter investigates Helvig’s reflections on concepts and experiences such as loss, home and nation, as recorded in her writings during the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath. In the first section, I investigate Helvig’s reaction to the Prussian defeat of 1806 which she experienced from Sweden, whereas the second section examines Helvig’s attitude to the changed political and cultural circumstances that she encountered after her return to Germany in 1810. In the middle section of the chapter, I analyse Helvig’s ideas about the state of the German nation and its future as well as the role of women in the process of nation-building, as they are described in her pamphlet An Deutschlands Frauen: Von Einer ihrer Schwestern (To Germany’s Women: From One of Their Sisters, 1814). Applying Sara Ahmed’s idea of emotions as crucial for the process of delineating collective identities, I examine how Helvig uses emotions to shape a German national identity related to the Germanic North.3 In the final two sections, I investigate how this transnational aspect of her concept of German(ic) nationhood affects Helvig’s literary works and engagement with cultural transmission4 between Germany and Sweden, as well as her personal attitude to nationhood 3 Sara Ahmed, “Collective Feelings: Or, The Impressions Left by Others”, Theory, Culture & Society 21, no. 2 (April 2004): 25–42, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276404042133. 4 The Dutch literary scholar Petra Broomans defines the role of a cultural transmitter as follows: “A cultural transmitter basically works within a particular language and cultural area. She/he often takes on various roles in the field of cultural transmission: translator, reviewer, critic, journalist, literary historian, scholar, teacher, librarian, bookseller, collector, literary agent, scout, publisher, editor of a journal, writer, travel writer, or counsellor. Transmitting another national literature and its cultural context to one’s own national literature and cultural context is the central issue in the work of a cultural transmitter. Transmission often reflects a bilateral situation. Even the transmission of one’s own literature takes place. The motivation can be aesthetically, ideologically, politically and/or economically based”. Petra Broomans, “Introduction”, in Rethinking Cultural Transfer and Transmission: Reflections and New Perspectives, ed. Petra Broomans (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2009), 2. By translating Swedish authors such as Geijer, Atterbom and Esaias Tegnér, writing essays about Swedish arts and literature, and inviting her Swedish friends to Germany, introducing them to her literary network, providing them with recommendations and promoting their German publications, Helvig acted as a cultural transmitter par excellence. Broomans describes the process of cultural transmission as reciprocal, in contrast to the term “cultural transfer”, which implies a one-way influence of one culture on another. Broomans, Rethinking Cultural Transfer and Transmission, “Preface”.

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and the idea of a “fatherland” as expressed in letters written to her Swedish friends after she again returned to Germany in 1816.

1

Grieving the “Fatherland” from a Distance

When Helvig left for Stockholm in 1804, the city she left behind was Weimar, the famous capital of the Duchy Saxe-Weimar. It was recognized as the vibrant centre of German Classicism and home of her literary patrons Goethe and Schiller, and was still part of the Holy Roman Empire. The fall of the Empire and the defeat of the Prussian and Saxon troops by the French at the battle of Jena-Auerstedt in October 1806 changed the condition of the complex of German-speaking territories significantly. The news of the Prussian defeat, the occupation of Weimar, and that the duchy had joined the Confederation of the Rhine and become a client state of the French Empire, all made a deep impression on Helvig. Although – or perhaps because – she resided at a considerable geographical distance from Germany, she realized the massive consequences of this double loss of territory and autonomy for the self-image of “Germany”. In a letter to the poet and literary critic Karl Ludwig von Knebel (1744–1834), who had been a close friend of Helvig’s family since her childhood, she wrote in October 1807: You still live contentedly, perhaps more comfortably after such significant fateful events; everyone sees what has been saved as a gift and is working to replace what was lost – but as for those things that were lost and cannot be regained in this century, German freedom, German fame and masculine pride – could anyone live for a long time without this better person’s zest for life – ! – I hope, my friend, that our children will cut out these blemishes as the day of retaliation must someday dawn. Enough of this, perhaps too much, from my constant grief I only realize all too well that it would be difficult for me to unlearn viewing Germany as my fatherland.5

5 “Sie leben noch zufrieden, vielleicht leichter nach so bedeutenden verhängnisvollen Augenbliken, jeder sieht das gerettete als ein Geschenk an und arbeitet das verlorne zu ersetzen – aber was damals verloren ging und nicht in diesem Jahrhundert wieder erobert werden kann, teutsche Freyheit, teutscher Ruhm und Männerstolz – kann man wohl lange ohne diese Lebenslust des bessern Menschen leben – ! – Ich hoffe mein Freund, unsre Kinder sollen diese Scharten auswetzen denn einmal muss doch der Tag des Widervergeltens anbrechen. Genug hiervon, vielleicht zuviel, aus meines immerwährenden Gram

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Helvig’s reflections are indicative in several ways. She transforms the loss of the past into a guide for the future by linking the temporal concept of the lost state of the past with the productive spirit of the present, revaluing what was lost while at the same time referring to the future as the time of recovering what was lost. The loss itself is two-fold in its nature, as it consists of such (material) objects as can be replaced easily, as well as of abstract, collective qualities distinguishing German nationality (“German freedom, German fame and masculine pride” as constituting the lost “zest for life”), which she considers to be much harder to regain. Furthermore, Helvig identifies her “constant grief” about these losses as fundamental to her (personal) national identity as well as to her idea of German national identity as an abstract concept in general. In her article “Collective Feelings: Or, The Impressions Left by Others”, Sara Ahmed argues “that emotions play a crucial role in the ‘surfacing’ of individual and collective bodies”.6 The passage from Helvig’s letter to Knebel can be read as an example of the process Ahmed describes. The emotion of grief contributes to the delineation of Helvig’s self-image as German, as well as to her definition of this “fatherland” that has suffered a loss.

2

“A Stranger in Every Sense” – Returning to the “Fatherland”

When Helvig left Sweden with her sister and her three children in 1810 and moved to the German university town of Heidelberg, the “fatherland” of her youth that she had described in her letter to Knebel three years earlier had changed significantly. The Electorate of Baden was part of the Confederation of the Rhine and under the rule of French law, as was Heidelberg. Growing resentment against everything French fuelled a spirit of patriotism, together with a growing interest in anything considered to be truly “German”, be it history, language or culture.7 Herder’s idea that every people has a particular “spirit” (Volksgeist) that is based on its social and geographical

sehe ich nur zu gut daß ich es schwerlich verlernen könnte Teutschland als mein Vaterland anzusehen”. Helvig, in an unpublished letter to Karl Ludwig von Knebel, November 20, 1807 (Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar, Sign. GSA 54/169). If not further specified, all translations from German and Swedish into English in this chapter are my own. 6 Ahmed, “Collective Feelings”, 25. 7 Stefan Reiß stresses the importance of the Napoleonic Wars for the discursive shaping of the German nation in the context of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation. Stefan Reiß, Fichtes ‘Reden an die deutsche Nation’ oder: Vom Ich zum Wir. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 2006, 140; cf. Nipperdey, 265–66.

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environment, history and tradition, and is manifested in its language and culture, encouraged several intellectuals to collect folklore, folk tales and songs.8 The preoccupation with the Germanic Middle Ages, including both German and Scandinavian culture and history, became increasingly popular among Romantic intellectuals. As a precondition for the genesis of a “myth of the North” during this period, Bohrer describes a changed view of history. Instead of the pre-Romantic epoch’s purely restorative affinity with the Germanic (as well as the Greco-Roman) antiquity in the sense of a “historical return”, the Romantic period distinguished itself by its future-oriented idealization of Germanic antiquity. It thereby transcended mere impulses to rediscover linguistic and cultural roots in the past, and instead, instrumentalized the past as a future ideal.9 This cultural change in direction had a considerable impact on Helvig’s work as a writer. Before her departure to Sweden in 1804, she had been surrounded by a rich intellectual network in Weimar, the melting pot of German Classicism, and benefited from her friendship with her literary patrons Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. The aesthetic ideals of ancient Greece and Rome that had prevailed during her upbringing and characterized her earlier works had now found competitors in the Romantic school’s interest in the German and Nordic Middle Ages. Also, Schiller, who had been responsible for publishing Helvig’s previous works in his literary journals Musenalmanach and Die Horen, had died in 1805. As the centre of the younger school of German Romanticism, and as a university town rich in intellectual life, Helvig’s new hometown Heidelberg was a fruitful milieu for her interest in art and literature. Among other writers, researchers and intellectuals, Helvig’s circle included the art collectors Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée (1783–1854 and 1786–1851, respectively), who housed

8 I.e. Johann Gottfried Herder, Volkslieder (Folk Songs, 1778–1779), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder und Hausmärchen (known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, seven editions 1812–1857), Deutsche Sagen (German Legends, two volumes 1816–1818); Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (literally: The Boy’s Magic Horn: Old German Songs, three volumes 1806–1808). 9 Karl Heinz Bohrer, Der Mythos vom Norden: Studien zur romantischen Geschichtsprophetie (Köln, 1961), 8. Other studies investigating ideas of the “Nordic” around 1800 include Horst Oppel, Studien zur Auffassung des Nordischen in der Goethezeit (Halle (Saale): Niemeyer, 1944) and Richard Wolfram, Ernst Moritz Arndt und Schweden: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Nordsehnsucht (Weimar: Duncker, 1933). On the use of the adjective “Nordic” in German around 1800, see Susanne Pertz, Das Wort nordisch: Seine Geschichte bis zur Jahrhundertwende (Dresden: Dittert, 1939).

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a famous collection of paintings of the Old Masters.10 In June 1811, Helvig suggested to the writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843), whom she had met in Weimar several years previously, that they publish a collection of legends and tales together. Inspired by paintings from the Boisserées’ collection, which she had been studying and copying intensely, Helvig had written several legends in verse form. Combined with similar works by Fouqué, who recently had celebrated literary successes with Nordic-Germanic motifs such as the Nibelungen theme in the drama cycle Der Held des Nordens (1810) and the romantic tale Undine (1811), Helvig’s legends could be part of a broader collection ready to be published swiftly and without much effort. She assumed that an anthology of legends and tales “in German old style” would fall on fertile soil in the current German cultural climate.11 It was not only as a companion for the joint book project that Helvig tried to win over Fouqué. She had not published anything during her time in Sweden, and for a female poet returning from abroad after several years of both personal and literary absence, achieving success in Germany’s changed literary scene would require a trustworthy and significant intercessor. Prose fiction and free verse such as Fouqué was writing were en vogue, while Helvig herself had mostly used rhyme in her already written legend-ballads. She was furthermore in need of financial success; her husband Carl von Helvig, who had been discontented with his position in the army after falling out of favour with the new Swedish king, had fled Sweden and the army helter-skelter, returning to Germany without having employment. In consequence, Helvig had to use her literary skills to make a living for herself and her children, a fact she used to justify her professional writing to her husband.12 Helvig was well aware of her weak position in the hierarchy of the German publishing trade, and that the new cultural currents that had emerged during her absence disfavoured her former style of writing. Suggesting a joint book project to Fouqué can also be read as tactically seeking a replacement for her deceased patron and “literary agent” Schiller. She expressed in a letter to

10

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12

On Helvig’s intellectual network in Heidelberg see the letters written to her husband on September 19, October 1 and 3, 1810, cited in Henriette von Bissing, Das Leben der Dichterin Amalie von Helvig, geb. Freiin von Imhoff (Berlin: W. Hertz, 1889), 270–73. Letter Helvig to Fouqué, June 5, 1811, in Briefe an Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué von Chamisso [et al.]. Mit einer Biographie Fouqué’s von Jul[ius] Ed[uard] Hitzig und einem Vorwort und biographischen Notizen von H. Kletke, ed. Albertine Baronin de la Motte Fouqué (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1908) [Berlin: Adolf & Comp., 1848], 94–99. Cf. letter, Helvig to her husband Carl, July 25, 1811, cited in von Bissing, Das Leben der Dichterin Amalie von Helvig, 308–09.

Nation, Loss and the Power of Emotions in Helvig’s Writings

Figure 10.1

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The first volume of Amalie von Helvig’s and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s collection of Tales and Legends, Taschenbuch der Sagen und Legenden (1812). The strong impression left by Francesco Francia’s Madonna, which Helvig had studied at the art collectors Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée’s home, became an important inspiration for her contributions to the collection of legends.

Fouqué her feeling of alienation in this “fatherland” that did not resemble the country she had left years earlier, and asked him to contact his publisher, Julius Hitzig, on her behalf and through him to “introduce [her] poetic children to the public in an appropriate way: […] I can not do it any other way, as so much has changed during my absence from Germany that I am a stranger in every sense of the word”.13 The first volume of their collection Tales and Legends was published in 1812. While in the ten ballads Helvig contributed she was inspired by mediaeval legends, Catholic hagiography and folk beliefs focused on “Old German” sub-

13

Letter, Helvig to Fouqué, June 5, 1811, in Briefe an Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, 94. The original reads: “meine poetischen Kinder auf eine anständige Art im Publicum zu introduciren, […] aber ich kann auch nicht anders, denn so Vieles hat sich seit meiner Abwesenheit von Deutschland geändert, daß ich ein Fremdling in jedem Sinne bin”.

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jects in both content and style,14 in her anonymously published pamphlet To Germany’s Women: From One of Their Sisters (1814) she addressed the issue of “German” nationality in its contemporary context by referring to recent political events.15

3

“Thus Shall Our Joy Be Solemn, and Our Pain Fruitful” – Using the Unifying Power of Emotions

According to Ahmed, it is by analysing “the impressions left by bodily others that we can track the emergence of ‘feelings-in-common’”.16 In To Germany’s Women: From One of Their Sisters, written in the aftermath of the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, Helvig represents the French as these “bodily others” and as the origin of the lamentable state of the German nation. The Battle of Leipzig, in which Napoleon was defeated by the Sixth Coalition, including the armies of Prussia, Russia, Austria and Sweden, marked a turning point in the Wars of Liberation and the birth of efforts to create a German nation state. Helvig’s donation of the profits from her fifty-page pamphlet to those left “broke and impoverished in and around Leipzig in October 1813” after the battle underlines its important status.17 After decades of French polit-

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On the use of the notion of “Old German style” (“altdeutsch”) during the Napoleonic Wars, see Nathanael Busch, “Zur Logik des Altdeutschen”, in Rezeptionskulturen: Fünfhundert Jahre literarischer Mittelalterrezeption zwischen Kanon und Populärkultur, eds. Mathias Herweg and Stefan Keppler-Tasaki (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 226–47. Busch emphasizes the complex nature of the term, writing “Old German must be understood as a myth of a vaguely temporally, culturally defined prehistoric age. A nationally oriented way of thinking popularized selected parts of the assumed past and thus did not create something new for the sake of the new, which it could have done, but referred in this new to the old. To this day, Old German is about imagining a whole range of things not just as typically German, but as originally German, as always-German. The desired reality is not constructed, but the appropriate foundation is given to the desired social change of the present. The things that are called Old German are not connected by common characteristics, but are taken as Old German by an ideology in order to point to a breaking point or continuity in history”. Ibid., 446–47. [Amalie von Helvig], An Deutschlands Frauen von Einer ihrer Schwestern: Zum Besten der in Leipzigs Umgebungen in den Oktobertagen 1813 Abgebrannten und Verarmten (Leipzig: Fr. Chr. Wilh. Vogel, 1814). Ahmed, “Collective Feelings”, 27, my italics. In the following, I refer to the nation as a “body” following Ahmed’s analysis of the way that “feelings make ‘the collective’ appear as if it were a body in the first place”. Ibid. Cf. the German subtitle “Zum Besten der in Leipzigs Umgebungen in den Oktobertagen 1813 Abgebrannten und Verarmten”.

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ical and cultural hegemony, and the parallel existence of a large number of German states, the search for a specifically “German” culture and national identity was a reaction both to the need for conscious differentiation from France and to the longing for German unity that was to take political form in the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund) in 1815.18 Helvig’s pamphlet addresses this mood and builds on the collective memories of humiliation and loss that preceded the victory over the French in the battle of Leipzig, as well as on the spirit of hope unleashed by the recent success in the war. On the one hand, positive experiences such as the fighting spirit and patriotism demonstrated by the German soldiers in the victory over the French troops were to be used for the upcoming project of collective reorientation and nation-building. On the other hand, the traumatic experiences of the Napoleonic Wars, in particular the defeat of the Prussian-Saxon army in the battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806 and the gradual dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, had left profound uncertainty in their wake. The need for stability was expressed both in the growing desire for a national identity and in “a fundamental questioning of German masculinity”, as Karen Baumgartner observes. “A consensus began to emerge that a new type of man was needed, one who was more martial, more patriotic, more courageous, and willing to sacrifice his life for the state”.19 Helvig’s text can be read as an active contribution to the endeavour of eliminating the uncertainties described above. The dual concern of (re)defining gender roles and national identity is already implied in the title of the pamphlet, which is aimed at “Germany’s women”. Helvig’s attempt to

18

19

Carol Lisa Tully, Creating a National Identity: A Comparative Study of German and Spanish Romanticism with Particular Reference to the Märchen of Ludwig Tieck, the Brothers Grimm and Clemens Brentano, and the costumbrismo of Blanco White, Estébanez Calderón and López Soler (Stuttgart: Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, Akademischer Verlag, 1997), 3. However, Tully emphasizes the lack of collective emotional experience even after the formation of the German Confederation. “The Confederation, like the Empire before it, had few real powers, and from the point of view of the general populace, lacked the mystique of imperial authority; they could hardly say prayers for the Confederation as they had done for the Emperor. Although united politically and linguistically, the nation as a whole lacked direction and a sense of politico-cultural cohesion, as could be found in Britain”. Ibid., 2. Karin Baumgartner, “Valorous Masculinities and Patriotism in the Texts of Early Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers”, German Studies Review 31, no. 2 (May 2008): 325. Cf. Karen Hagemann, “Heldenmütter, Kriegerbräute und Amazonen: Entwürfe patriotischer Weiblichkeit zur Zeit der Freiheitskriege”, in Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Ute Frevert (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), 181–83.

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(re)determine what should be understood as “German”, “male” and “female” is built upon dichotomies. As will be shown in the following investigation, the pamphlet’s main dichotomous codes, namely gender roles and the ethnotypes “French” and “German”, prove to be deeply intertwined,20 which is a common feature even in other political texts written in German and published by Helvig’s female contemporaries.21 The experiences of the war years had an impact on both genders, with the self-perception of women depending on the fate of their men. Especially the women living under French law had suffered from seeing the moral decline and anti-patriotic infidelity of their husbands: Unblinded by the deceptive pretences of selfish policy, not bribed by the so-called world citizens and their sophistry, you deeply and sharply felt the nullity of these dishonourable alliances; heard, in silent disapproval, men’s exultation about battles won over German armies. – Painfully you saw your sons gain fame in the fight against brothers; unwillingly hosting those Frenchmen who, as friends, no less cheeky and cocky, made silent grief into a crime here [i.e. on “German” territory], which at least was allowed there to the vanquished [i.e. in the “German” states of the Federation of the Rhine under French law].22

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21 22

The Dutch comparatist and cultural historian Joep Leerssen defines “ethnotypes” as discursive “representations of national character”. “What is specific about ethnotypes is that they single out a nation from the rest of humanity by ascribing a particular character to it, i.e. a temperamental or psychological predisposition motivating and explaining a specific behavioral profile”. Joep Leerssen, “Imagology: On using ethnicity to make sense of the world”, Iberic@l, Revue d’études ibériques et ibéro-américaines, No. 10 (Autumn 2016): 16–17. Several of the texts examined by Baumgartner contain a comparison of French and German masculinity. Cf. Baumgartner, “Valorous Masculinites”, 333. “Ungeblendet von den Scheingründen einer selbstsüchtigen Politik, noch bestochen durch Sophismen sogenannter Weltbürger, fühltet Ihr tief und scharf die Nichtigkeit dieser entehrenden Bündnisse; vernahmt in schweigender Misbilligung der Männer Frohlocken bei gewonnenen Schlachten über deutsche Heere. – Schmerzvoll sahet Ihr Eure Söhne Ruhm erlangen im Kampfe gegen Brüder; bewirthet unwillig jene Franken, die als Freunde nicht minder frech und übermüthig sich geberdend, hier die stumme Trauer zum Verbrechen machten, die mindstens den Besiegten dort gegönnt war”. Helvig, An Deutschlands Frauen, 7. On the concept of “Weltbürgertum” (“world citizenship”) in the context of German-French relations around 1800, see Sigrid Thielking, Weltbürgertum: Kosmopolitische Ideen in Literatur und politischer Publizistik seit dem achtzehnten Jahrhundert (München: Fink, 2000), 36–48.

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Observing the humiliation of men is described several times as particularly painful for women.23 While German men who had been fighting on the French side are described as ambitious, gullible and blinded “world citizens”, German women had quietly fostered the virtues of patriotism, ingenuity and loyalty, which Helvig in the following suggests as the basis of a future German nation. The amalgamation of family and nation, which turns out to support Helvig’s reasoning, is indicated here. The negative consequences of the war are described here not only in terms of their effects on the family life of individuals, centred around the domestic hearth. Instead, in an ideological overlay of genealogical and “national” blood ties, the family is elevated from the personal to the political sphere and thus becomes a symbol of the German nation, which Helvig both presupposes and creates in her text (cf. Anna Bohlin’s and Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s chapters in the present volume on the representation of nations as families). In imagining Germany as a family, she makes unrelated men become German “sons” who have been made to fight for Napoleon against their “brothers”, while “poor maidens” have been forced by their fathers to celebrate victories paid for “with German blood”.24 The connection between the concepts of family and nationhood made by the notion of kinship is also implied by the word “fatherland”, which Helvig uses repeatedly. As Benedict Anderson notes, the association with kinship “denote[s] something to which one is naturally tied. […] In this way, nation-ness is assimilated to skin-colour, gender, parentage and birth-era – all those things one can not help. And in these ‘natural ties’ one senses what one might call ‘the beauty of gemeinschaft’”.25 It is such “natural ties” that Helvig describes when she argues for a person’s natural belonging to a certain “nation” as part of their attributes given by birth. As we will see later in this chapter, her conception of nationality as something automatically bestowed upon a person born into a national community linked to a certain territory will gradually change. By addressing her presumed female readership as “sisters” and including them in her own perspective by consistently using the second-person plural, Helvig reinforces the image of an emotionally based national community

23

24 25

“So tief war deutscher Mannsinn gebeugt, so gänzlich deutsches Hochgefühl entkräftet!” (“German manpower was bowed so deeply, German elation was weakened so completely!”) Helvig, An Deutschlands Frauen, 8. Ibid., 5–8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London/New York: Verso, 1983), 43.

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even at the level of grammar. Using the pronoun “we” to remind her readers of their shared emotions and experiences connected to the war, Helvig’s rhetorical strategy reminds one of Fichte’s, who in his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation) had followed a similar agenda of nation-building and “Wir-Gefühl” to unite the disappointed and disillusioned Prussian soldiers after the military disasters of 1806.26 She stresses the fruitful quality of negative experiences such as loss and pain, and points out their productive potential to lead to a better future: One day, our grandchildren will be envious of us when we tell them about these days, evoking their great joys and deep pains with intimate tales put before the receptive sensibility of youth. Certainly, there will be better times; quiet, good years will come to comfort us – but no one will forget the present ones or get over them completely. – Who did not lose someone they loved in this rich harvest of death? – Thus shall our joy be solemn, and our pain fruitful; otherwise, we truly would not deserve to feel either.27 By evoking emotional memories of grief, shame, fear and pride in her presumed female readership, Helvig uses emotions to shape the “body of the nation”. This is a common rhetorical strategy described by Ahmed, who shows “how emotions work to align some subjects with some others and against other others”, and argues that “emotions play a crucial role in the ‘surfacing’ of individual and collective bodies”.28 By using emotions to make the “surface” of this national “body” perceptible and thus associating the negative experiences and impressions suffered at the hands of the French with pain, as well 26

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The original speeches were held at the Prussian Society of Knowledge on Sundays from December 1807 until March 1808, before they were published as printed collection (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1808). Cf. Alexander Aichele, “Einleitung”, in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an die Deutsche Nation (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2008, IX). On Fichte’s evocation of a “Wir-Gefühl”, see Reiß, Chapter III, “Die deutsche Nation Fichtes”, 138–40. “Beneidend werden die Enkel uns bedauern, wenn wir dereinst zu ihnen von diesen Tagen reden, ihre hohen Freuden und tiefen Schmerzen in traulicher Erzählung hervorrufen vor der Jugend empfänglichen Sinn. Gewiß, es werden bessere Zeiten, ruhig schöne Jahre kommen uns zu trösten – aber keiner wird die jetzigen vergessen noch ganz verschmerzen. – Wem sank nicht ein geliebtes Leben hin in dieser reichen Todeserndte? – Darum soll unsre Freude eine ernste, unser Schmerz ein fruchtbarer seyn, sonst hätten wir es wahrlich nicht verdient beides zu empfinden”. Helvig, An Deutschlands Frauen, 15–16, my italics. Ahmed, “Collective Feelings”, 25; on Ahmed’s reading of the nation as “body” see note 16.

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as with the collective feelings of pride and relief about the recently won victory, Helvig makes emotions central to the generation of “German” identity. The emotions she evokes are means by which the “imagined community”29 of the diverse group of “German women” is shaped as a nation, as well as serving to define the outline of this community, distinguishing it from “the French” as the enemy-other. Remarkably, Helvig distinguishes between the women who spent the war years living on the “German” side of the Rhine, and those living under French law in the states of the Confederation of the Rhine. While she calls the first group “Bürgerinnen” (“female citizens”) of those war-torn cities, saying they “experienced the full suffering of that time in the loss or humiliation of [their] spouses, brothers and sons, at the same time as [they themselves experienced] insult and deprivation”, she refers to the latter as “residents of those countries […] that sacrificed their independence for a brief, uncertain period of time to escape the horrors of war”.30 Helvig’s use of the concept of “citizenship” is closely linked to the idea of freedom in terms of national independence and freedom from foreign oppression, which she depicts in To Germany’s Women. The German writer and journalist Helmina von Chézy (1783–1856), a contemporary of Helvig, in her article “A young Prussian woman’s conversation with a French general” (1803),31 identified individual freedom – in the sense of civil rights and political participation – as a prerequisite and necessary condition

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31

In the introduction to his influential book Imagined Communities (1983), Anderson defines nations as “limited”, “sovereign” and “imagined communities”. This implies the existence of boundaries that distinguish one community from another, as well as these communities’ striving for freedom from oppression by other communities. Nations are “imagined” as communities because “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship”, although most of its individual members in everyday life are anonymous strangers to one another. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5–6. In addressing the women of Germany as “sisters”, Helvig evokes the image of a community of – anonymous – German-speaking women, united by their aversion toward the French. “Entweder Bürgerinnen der Städte, welche durch den Krieg in tiefes Elend gestürzt worden, habt Ihr, theure Schwestern, das volle Leiden jener Zeit in dem Verlust oder der Demüthigung Eurer Gatten, Brüder, Söhne, zugleich mit eigner Kränkung und Beraubung erfahren. […] Nicht weniger erlittet Ihr, Bewohnerinnen jener Länder, die durch Aufopferung ihrer Selbstständigkeit für eine kurze unbestimmte Frist den Schrecknissen des Krieges entgingen, wenn Ihr die verheerenden Welteroberer, den Zügen verderblicher Heurschrecken ähnlich, über Eure Felder dahin streifen sahet”. Helvig, An Deutschlands Frauen, 6–7. Helmina von Chézy, “Gespräch einer jungen Preußin mit einem französischen General (beym Anblicke des Exercirens der muntern Dragoner Brigade, vom Obrist Horaz Sebastiani kommandirt)”, Französische Miscellen, Bd. 1, H. 1 (Tübingen: Cotta, 1803), 16–23.

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for the French soldiers’ military success, and diagnosed this “positive bourgeois identity”32 as the basis of her ideal of masculinity. On the contrary, Helvig blamed this striving for freedom and democratization that had led to the French Revolution on the moral decadence of France, and as something that must not be imitated.33 Since Napoleon’s France had emerged from a revolution rejected as inhumane, immoral and anti-religious, it could not serve as a model for the “renewed existence at the dawn of German Freedom”. Even less could it be respected as an occupying power, according to the opening claim of von Helvig’s tract: “Such an incarnation of hell could not appear to be the saviour of the noble German people!”34 While Helvig considered the French to be “degenerate, deeply depraved people” characterized by moral decadence, artificiality, hedonism and lack of religion, and demonized them with imagery of animal instinct, she glorified the German soldiers as exhibiting such opposing values as thoughtfulness, loyalty and Christian piety, and described them as “strengthened by their holy hatred, nurtured in silence”, “serious and worthy”, “nobly sacrificing”, and possessed of “the invigorating force of serious will” and “salvific faith”.35 The dehumanization of French soldiers as “the others” and repeated descriptions of them as godless, wild animals make up a pervasive linguistic trope that also figures in Helvig’s philhellenic poetry a decade later.36

32 33

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Baumgartner, “Valorous Masculinities”, 329. Baumgartner, “Valorous Masculinities”, 331–32, with note 23. Baumgartner emphasizes the inclusion of women in Helvig’s conception of freedom, which differentiates it from the ideas of male contemporaries such as Ernst Moritz Arndt, who was part of Helvig’s intellectual network. See also Karin Baumgartner, Public Voices: Political Discourse in the Writings of Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, esp. chapter 3, “Theorizing the Public Sphere: Gender, Sociability, and Politics” (Peter Lang: Bern, 2009). “Nicht solche Ausgeburt der Hölle konnte dem edlen Deutschen als Völkerretterin erscheinen!” Helvig, An Deutschlands Frauen, 3. “Statt daß dort ein entartetes, tief verderbtes Volk sein Joch plötzlich abschüttelnd, unter den Fahnen der Anarchie und des Unglaubens zu canibalischen Mordfesten taumelte, sahen wir hier die deutschen Männer im stillgenährten, heil’gen Haß erstarkt, sich ernst und würdig zum Tage der Vergeltung sammeln; und wie sie alles Unheil der Zwietracht und Selbstsucht erfahren, nun mit gemeinsam edler Aufopferung, verbunden durch Leid und Hoffnung, dem allgemeinen Feind entgegen gehn”. Ibid., 4. They are described as “swarms of […] perishable grasshoppers” and as “non-men”. Helvig, An Deutschlands Frauen, 7. Helvig uses the same rhetorical means that Scheitler describes as typical of the anti-Muslim discourse in philhellenistic poetry after 1820. Irmgard Scheitler, “Griechenlyrik (1821–1828): Literatur zwischen Ideal und Realität”, in Internationales Jahrbuch der Bettina-von-Arnim-Gesellschaft: Forum für die Erforschung von Romantik und Vormärz, eds. Uwe Lemm and Walter Schmitz. Vol. 6/7 (1994/1995, Berlin: Saint Albin, 1994), 205–08. For Helvig’s philhellenic poems, see her collection Gedichte

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Looking North – On How to Be a “Truly German” Woman

Due to the fundamental role that women play in bearing up Helvig’s pictured German nation, her ideas about gender roles and female impact on political development are worth examining here. Addressing “Germany’s women”, Helvig’s pamphlet contains several concrete ideas and practical suggestions for enhancing the peace and happiness of a future German nation (cf. the Estonian Lilli Suburg’s address to her “Estonian sisters”, Eve Annuk’s chapter in the present volume). While men had the mission to protect the outer borders of the German territories with military power, women were responsible for the nation’s inner condition, and the moral and emotional well-being of its members (cf. Eve Annuk’s and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume on women’s role as emotional and moral gatekeepers in Estonian and Finnish nationalist movements respectively).37 Helvig suggests, as a key reform, the increasing use and development of the German language as opposed to French, which had been the dominant language of conversation among the nobility and bourgeoisie and thus played an important part in children’s education. It is a sad mistake in the education of princes that the noble, truly German-minded mother of the country [i.e. Louise, Queen of Prussia] is forced to express her beautiful joy in the idiom of the enemy, against whom their brave sons are fighting. […] My sisters, let us use all the power of our will to shed those humiliating bonds that have kept our sex in vain dependence for too long! – May we never be accused of shamefully fostering the enemy within, when the heroic brothers have driven him from our patriotic soil with indefatigable effort.38 However, Helvig’s biggest request concerns German women’s dressing habits. Because continuing to dress and behave in the superficial and vain “French”

37 38

zum Besten der unglücklichen Greise, Wittwen und Waisen in Griechenland (Berlin: Krause, 1826). Baumgartner, Public Voices, 131. “Ja der traurige Misgriff früherer Fürstenerziehung setzt die edle ächtdeutsch gesinnte Landesmutter in die Nothwendigkeit, ihre schöne Freude in dem Idiom der Feinde auszusprechen, gegen welche deren tapfre Söhne ziehn. […] Laßt uns denn, meine Schwestern, mit allen Kräften unseres bessern Willens jene demüthigenden Fesseln abwerfen, die unser Geschlecht zu lange in nichtiger Abhängigkeit gehalten! – Nimmer möge der beschämende Vorwurf auf uns lasten, daß wir den Feind im Innern hegen, indeß die heldenmüthigen Brüder ihn mit unverdroßner Anstrengung von unserm vaterländischen Boden verjagt haben”. Helvig, An Deutschlands Frauen, 19–20.

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style, with its excessive focus on outer appearance according to the rules of French fashion, would be a betrayal of every German soldier who had fought against the French, a “truly German” woman had to change her dressing habits.39 Does it not sound like a fairy tale that German women employ French fashion retailers to adorn themselves for the festivities celebrating the country’s liberation – that large sums are still being wasted at this serious moment in servile obedience to the frivolous fashion rules of a capital threatened by the German armies! The latest Parisian fashion magazine lies beside the newspaper on a patriotic woman’s breakfast table, and does she not buy the eloquent pamphlet for Germany’s independence as well as a hat à la Chinoise?40 Instead of imitating the French, German women should remember the “beautiful features […] that Nature bestowed upon the daughters of Germania, so richly and motherly”. According to Helvig, those include “a tall stature, the body’s slim curve, blue eyes, and rich blond hair” as well as the grace of chaste gestures, the unforced decency, which remains inimitable because it wells up from the clear depths of a quiet soul. […] The petty, puffed-up styling of the Parisian girls badly suits the quiet, solid

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40

The relation between Germany and France was marked by polarization throughout the eighteenth century, as has been examined, for example, in the bilingual volume Gallophilie und Gallophobie in der Literatur und den Medien in Deutschland und in Italien im 18. Jahrhundert / Gallophilie et gallophobie dans la littérature et les médias en Allemagne et en Italie au XVIIIe siècle, eds. Raymond Heitz, York-Gothart Mix, Jean Mondot, and Nina Birkner (Heidelberg: Winter, 2011). For the discourse on francophobia in the context of fashion, see York-Gothart Mix, “Kulturpatriotismus und Frankophobie: Die Stereotypisierung nationaler Selbst- und Fremdbilder in der Sprach- und Modekritik zwischen Dreißigjährigem Krieg und Vormärz (1648–1848)”, arcadia 36, no. 1 (2001): 156–85. “Lautet es doch Mährchen gleich, daß deutsche Frauen die Hände französischer Modehändlerinnen gebrauchen, um sich zu den Festen zu schmücken, die des Vaterlandes Befreiung feiern – daß große Summen noch in diesem ernsten Augenblick verschwendet werden, um die frivolen Putzgesetze der von deutschen Heeren bedrohten Hauptstadt knechtisch zu befolgen! – Verträgt sich doch auf dem Morgentische einer patriotischen Frau neben dem Zeitungsblatte das möglichst neue Heft pariser Modeblätter, und kauft sie nicht zugleich die beredte Flugschrift für Deutschlands Selbstständigkeit und einen Hut à la Chinoise?” Helvig, An Deutschlands Frauen, 18–19.

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culture of German maidens, and does not fit their serious gait and all their doings.41 As a new role model, Helvig suggests “the beautiful women of Sweden”, our “kindred Nordic country”, who distinguish themselves by a natural appearance and simple dresses restricted in colour to black and white, which underlines their “peculiar decency”: In our kindred Nordic country, for example, you can see the beautiful women of Sweden, who are forbidden by law from wearing coloured dresses, glow no less irresistibly on festival days [when they are dressed] in pure white like the kindred flowers of a lily bed. When they are more solemnly dressed in matching black garments instead, they draw the attention of the impatient gaze to the differences in beauty and the peculiar decency among these seemingly identical figures. Only an eyewitness can fully understand the favourable impression that such unity makes, which in our fatherland would make a deep impact and please every eye, if it, like there [i.e. in Sweden] was not weakened by diligent imitation of foreign forms.42 The uniform dress code described here is a result of the Swedish “dress reform” (“dräktreformen”) introduced by King Gustav III in 1778 at the royal 41

42

“Sind wir denn so gar arm und dürftig an eigenem Geschmack, daß fremde Grillen über uns verfügen dürfen, und oft in sinnlosen Erfindungen der schönen Ausstattung zu spotten scheinen, welche Natur den Töchtern Germaniens so mütterlich verliehn? – Ward nicht dem deutschen Mädchen vor vielen andern der hohe Wuchs, des Leibes schlanke Ründung, das blaue Auge, des lichten Haares reiche Fülle? – vor allen aber die Anmuth züchtiger Geberde, der ungezwungne Anstand, welcher unnachahmlich bleibt, weil er aus stiller Seele Tiefen als aus reinem Born hervor geht. […] Uebel paßt der Pariserinnen kleinlich luft’ger Putz zu der deutschen Jungfrauen ruhig fester Bildung, zu dem Ernst ihres Ganges und ihres ganzen Thuns”. Ibid., 20–21. “So sieht man in einem nördlich uns verwandten Lande die schönen Frauen Schwedens, durch ein Gesetz vom Gebrauche farbiger Kleider ausgeschlossen, nicht minder reitzvoll an festlichen Tagen gleich verwandten Blüthen eines Lilienbeetes im reinen Weiß leuchten – oder in ernsterer Uebereinstimmung des schwarzen Gewandes den ungedult’gen Blick nur um desto sicherer auf den Unterschied hinlenken, der Schönheit und eigenthümlichen Anstand unter diesen sich gleich scheinenden Gestalten bezeichnet. Nur ein Augenzeuge kann den günstigen Eindruck ganz ermessen, den solche Einheit macht, welche in unserm Vaterlande, nicht, wie dort, durch geflissentliche Nachahmung fremder Formen geschwächt, voll und tief ergreifend wirken und jedes Auge gewinnen müßte”. Ibid., 25. Cf. Detlef Brennecke, Tegnér in Deutschland: Eine Studie zu den Übersetzungen Amalie von Helvigs und Gottlieb Mohnikes (Heidelberg: Winter, 1975), 18.

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court.43 The reform restricted the clothing of the nobility in terms of colours and cuts. Like Helvig, Gustav III had argued that a national costume could stimulate the Swedish textile industry as an alternative to importing luxury goods from abroad, as well as contribute to the unity of nobility and bourgeoisie.44 The Swedish introduction of a national costume was followed with some interest in Germany.45 Helvig’s arguments for the introduction of a similar national costume in Germany, which she presents in her pamphlet, resemble those used by prominent male intellectuals of the patriotic movement, such as Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Ernst Moritz Arndt, an acquaintance of Helvig.46 As Enrico Wagner observes, the national costume functioned as a “communicative sign”: Instead of (only) contributing to the identity building of its bearers, it could be read as a sign for a national identity that had already been found(ed).47 Helvig’s reference to Sweden is revealing, as the claim that Swedish women were “legally forbidden” to wear colours other than black and white is incorrect. According to the specifications made by the king, the national costume was to be made from single-coloured, Swedish textiles, while the choice of col-

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45 46

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Eva Maria Schneider, “Herkunft und Verbreitungsformen der ‘Deutschen Nationaltracht der Befreiungskriege’ als Ausdruck politischer Gesinnung”, Bd. 1, Textteil (PhD. diss., University of Bonn, 2002), 19. http://hss.ulb.uni-bonn.de/2002/0083/0083_1.pdf. On the Swedish “dress reform”, see Lena Rangström, “Gustav III:s svenska dräktprojekt – en nationell reform i tiden”, in Nationalism och nationell identitet i 1700-talets Sverige, eds. Åsa Karlsson and Bo Lindberg (Uppsala: Uppsala universitet, 2002), 127–42; Eva Bergman, Nationella dräkten: en studie kring Gustaf III:s dräktreform 1778 (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1938). For example “Nationaltracht in Schweden”, in Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin, Chronologen: Ein periodisches Werk. Erster Band (Frankfurt und Leipzig: Felßeckerische Buchhandlung, 1779), 59. Cf. Schneider, “Herkunft und Verbreitungsformen”, 19–20; Bernward Deneke, “Beiträge zur Geschichte nationaler Tendenzen in der Mode von 1770–1815: Eine Studie zur deutschen Volkstracht von 1814/1815 mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Verhältnisse in Frankfurt”, in Schriften des Historischen Museums in Frankfurt am Main, Bd. XII (Frankfurt/Main, 1966), 211–52. For an overview of the reception in German newspapers, see Schneider, “Herkunft und Verbreitungsformen”, 20–21. Helvig suggests that German women should wear simple black robes and scarfs, inspired by mediaeval images (24). On the “Old German costume” or “German national costume”, see Busch, “Zur Logik des Altdeutschen”, 228–35, Schneider, “Herkunft und Verbreitungsformen”, as well as the comparative study by Enrico Wagner, Die Nationaltrachtdebatte im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Motivation und Durchsetzung einer nationalen Kleidertracht in Schweden, Deutschland und Dänemark (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2018). Wagner, Die Nationaltrachtdebatte, 203.

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our itself was largely left to the wearer.48 Even the version reserved for the members of the court contained both red and light-blue details. The reform applied to the nobility and bourgeoisie only, who made up five per cent of the Swedish population,49 and the majority of Swedes remained uninfluenced in their choice of colours, as shown not least by the multi-coloured, regional, rural folk costumes (“bygdedräkt” or “sockendräkt”; cf. Jens Eike Schnall’s chapter in the present volume on Danish national costumes). Considering the six years that Helvig had spent in Stockholm and her familiarity with the customs of the court, simple ignorance on the part of the author seems extremely improbable. If Helvig nevertheless chose to give her German readers the impression that all Swedish women only wore black on ordinary days and white on festival days, this can be read as a conscious construction of a certain image of Sweden, whose citizens Helvig presents to German readers as admirable. While this aspect of transnationalism might seem paradoxical given the patriotic message of the pamphlet as a whole,50 the reference to the Swedish women sheds light on Helvig’s concept of nationhood in transition. In her use of the word “verwandt” (“kindred”) to describe the relationship between her German readers and Swedish women, as well as to describe the relatedness of lilies cultivated on the same patch of soil, Helvig subtly evokes the impression of natural family ties existing between Germans and Swedes as members of the same Germanic nation-family.51 As national “relatives” and comparable “daughters of Germania”, Swedish women are an acceptable

48

49 50

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Bergman, Nationella dräkten, 50. Cf. Therese Holmgren, “Gustav III:s dräktreform: En fallstudie om nationella dräkten” (BA diss., Gothenburg University, 2016), 16. https://gupea .ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/44625/1/gupea_2077_44625_1.pdf. Rangström, “Gustav III:s svenska dräktprojekt”, 133. Cf. Holmgren, “Gustav III:s dräktreform”, 16. Anne-Marie Thiesse emphasizes transnationalism as a condition and key ingredient of nation-building: “Every national group engaged in identity creation was highly attentive to what its peers and competitors had accomplished, rushed to adapt new inventions to its own case, and was in turn imitated as soon as it improved on something. The formation of national identities was a matter of constant emulation, as indicated by the invocations regularly uttered by national militants to their fellow countrymen: ‘Look what the Germans, the English, the Swedish have done …; if we French, Spanish, Russian … want to serve our nation as it deserves, we must show that our national heritage is just as rich and glorious’”. Anne-Marie Thiesse, “National Identities: A Transnational Paradigm”, in Revisiting Nationalism: Theories and Processes, eds. Alain Dieckhoff and Christophe Jaffrelot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 125. Herder had already used the analogy of peoples and plants when he called peoples the “plants of nature” (“Pflanze der Natur”) in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Reiß, Fichtes “Reden an die deutsche Nation”, 127.

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model for the refinement of the national character of Helvig’s German readership. In her description of the Swedish women’s dressing habits, she presents them as a preferable opposite of the hated French, and proposes at the same time the restoration of some lost core values for a new German nation which are particularly to be fostered by its female members, namely purity, naturalness, moderation, modesty, honesty and straightforwardness.

5

“Northland […] Lives in Every Heart” – (Re)imagining a Nation by Cultural Transmission

A similar strategy of creating an image of Sweden and the Swedes as exotic and aesthetically attractive, and at the same time as a kindred “brother people” morally similar to the Germans, can be traced in several of Helvig’s literary works published during this period. The short travelogues “Die Rheinreise im Oktober 1811” (“The Trip on the River Rhine in October 1811”) and “Der Sommertag im Norden” (“The Summer Day in the North”), both published in 1815, contain several examples of what I consider to be Helvig’s contribution to the process of German nation-building.52 While “The Trip on the River Rhine” characterizes German identity by describing German landscapes and mediaeval artwork, “The Summer Day in the North” can be read as a complement to this discursive shaping of national identity. It is a brief report of a day trip to the Stockholm archipelago. With its cliffs looming above the majestic sea, its wildly growing vegetation and its caves, the visited isle as Helvig depicts it evokes the image of the sublime, familiar to her contemporary German readers from the ideas of Kant and Schiller (cf. Jens Eike Schnall’s chapter in the present volume on the sublime). The Nordic climate, with its short summers and harsh winters, matches her portrait of the Swedes as a passionate and wild people, who crave freedom and live simple lives close to nature (cf. Anna Bohlin’s chapter in the present volume).53 By relating Sweden’s geographical and climatic conditions to the psychological character of its inhabitants,

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Amalie von Hellwig [sic], geb. v. Imhoff, “Die Rheinreise im October 1811 und der Sommertag im Norden: Zwey Fragmente aus meinem Tagebuche”, in Urania: Taschenbuch für Frauen auf das Jahr 1815, 227–56. The ethnologist Tine Damsholt discusses similar developments within the discourses of patriotism and nationalism in in the context of the Danish historian Christian Molbech’s landscape descriptions from 1811–1815 in her article “En national turist i det patriotiske landskab”, Fortid og Nutid (March 1999): 3–26. https://tidsskrift.dk/fortidognutid/article/ view/74884.

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Helvig echoes Montesquieu’s eighteenth-century climate theory. At the same time, her description of the island landscape, with its shady meadows and fragrant air, displays features of the classical locus amoenus (see also Peter Nørgaard Larsen’s and Bjarne Thorup Thomsen’s chapters in the present volume). When she calls her sister a “Nordic Andromeda”, she activates the intertext of an ancient myth and combines the prestige of Greek antiquity with her idealized image of the North. Combining the aesthetic ideals of harmony and the sublime, Helvig presents Sweden as a place that is attractive in its familiarity, yet also exotic and exciting. She proposes expanding the idea of the German nation to encompass a more inclusive Nordic-Germanic nation family. This intention to revalue the North becomes even more concrete when Helvig speaks of the superiority of the aesthetics of extreme contrasts, as represented by a rare flower growing in a Nordic climate and landscape, to the (Classicist) aesthetic ideal of balance and harmony, depicted by the beauty of one flower among many growing in a moderate climate. Her conclusion is that Nordic poets have a superior ability to portray the beauty of nature, and therefore should be read and used as role models even in Germany. After her return to Germany in 1816, Helvig was actively engaged in introducing Swedish culture and literature to German readers. Her famous literary salon in Berlin was considered a gateway to German artistic circles for Scandinavian intellectuals, poets, artists and musicians.54 Helvig also began writing reviews and introductory essays about Swedish art and literature for several German newspapers,55 and published German translations of works by Geijer, Atterbom, Nicander and Esaias Tegnér (on Tegnér, see Anna Bohlin’s chapter in the present volume).56 Her translation of Tegnér’s epic poem Frithiofs saga (Frithiof’s Saga, 1825), a central work of Swedish Romanticism that had attracted the interest of Goethe and been published in part in his prestigious journal 54 55 56

Klara Johanson, “Den romantiske studenten: Randteckningar till litteraturhistorien”, Ord och Bild, 16:11 (1907), 564. See for example her articles in Kunstblatt: “Schwedisches Trinkhorn” (no. 62, 1822) and “Die Künstler in Schweden” (no. 94–99, 1823). Besides Geijer’s poem “Den sista skalden”, she translated Tegnér’s poems “Skidbladner” (Askania, no. 3, 1820), “Der Gesang” (Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, no. 72, 1822, and “Napoleon” (Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, no. 80, 1828), wrote an introduction to and translated extracts from Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom’s, “Die Glückseligkeitsinsel: Sagenspiel in 5 Abentheuern, im Auszug mitgeteihlt” (Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 1828:198–201, 203–04), Karl August Nicander, “Napoleon in Moskau” (Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 1828:42), as well as a collection of Swedish folk songs, Der Nordensaal: Eine Sammlung schwedischer Volkslieder, übersetzt von Amalie von Helwig. Mit Begleitung des Pianoforte nach den alten Gesangweisen von A[dolf ] F[redrik] Lindblad (Berlin: Schlesinger [1827]).

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Über Kunst und Alterthum before being released as a work of its own in 1826, became extremely popular.57 In the foreword to the second edition, Helvig describes her intention with translating Tegnér’s epic poem and the work’s potential to shape the (male) youth of Germany according to her “Nordic” ideal: Transferred to foreign soil, this poem might not expect to be received as warmly [as in Sweden]; it will be enough for the translator if the lively and fresh spirit that streams through the original is not found lacking in the translation, and if this vivid northern breeze will put colour in the cheeks of the youths and strengthen the healthy breasts like fresh air on a bright winter’s day, while the sickly ones, made effeminate by sultry narcotic fragrances, might shyly close themselves to its mighty breath.58 It is remarkable, how strongly Helvig believes in the power of literature to develop the personal and the national character of her presumed readership. Experiencing mediaeval, “Nordic” (masculine) physical strength and naturalness by reading about it is not only presented as a way of becoming a “better” German, but is also recommended as a potential “cure” for the “sickly effeminacy” supposedly resulting from the French impact on German culture. Writing about Swedish literature was only one part of Helvig’s complex involvement in cultural transmission. Nordic sources were even integrated into her own literary works. While Christian motifs had been at the centre of Helvig’s first volume of Tales and Legends from 1812, almost all of her contributions to the second volume published in 1817 have Nordic subjects, including her translation of a poem by Geijer (“Der letzte Skalde”/“Den siste skalden”/“The last skald”), the collection’s only work by a non-German writer.

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[Esaias Tegnér], Tegnérs Frithiofs-Sage, trans. Amalie von Helvig (Stuttgart/Tübingen: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1826); parts of the work had been published in Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände and Berliner Kunstblatt from 1822, as well as in Goethe’s Ueber Kunst und Alterthum, Bd. 5, H. 1 (1824) und H. 3 (1826). On Helvig’s translation of Frithiofs saga, see Brennecke, Tegnér in Deutschland, 65–76. “Auf einen fremden Boden versetzt, darf dieses Gedicht kein ähnliches Glück erwarten; es wird der Uebersetzerin genügen, wenn der lebensfrische Geist, welcher das Original durchweht, nicht ganz in der Uebertragung vermißt wird, und dieser bewegte Nordhauch, wie die reine Luft eines hellen Wintertages, die jugendlichen Wangen röthet und erkräftigend die gesunde Brust durchströmt, indes die kranke, von schwül narkotischen Düften verweichlichte, sich dem gewaltigen Odem scheu verschließen mag”. Amalie von Helvig, Foreword to her translation of Esaias Tegnér, Die Frithjofs-Sage, XIII.

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Figure 10.2 Illustration in Helvig’s translation of the Swedish poet Erik Gustaf Geijer’s ballad “The Last Scald” (“Den siste skalden”, 1811), published in the second volume of Taschenbuch der Sagen und Legenden (1817).

The Nordic is promoted with the help of motifs from Old Norse literature and depictions of the sublime Scandinavian nature. The female subject of the collection’s lyrical dedication describes how, amidst the snow-covered, Nordic nature, she “awakened” to her future life as a poet when she received a “magic light” that will continue to live within her as an “inner light” in the future.59 The image of a budding tree, rising from the cold, barren soil of the North and glowing in the starlight against the dark night sky serves to depict the lyrical subject’s experience of intense emotions that are exceptional because they are so rare. The well-established North-South dichotomy, with the Nordic countries seen as restrained, sensible and cold in contrast to the passionate, exotic

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Helvig, “Zueignung”, in Amalie von Helwig, geb. v. Imhof und Fr[iedrich] Baron de la Motte Fouqué, eds., Taschenbuch der Sagen und Legenden, zweiter Jahrgang (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1817), III–IV.

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and fertile South, is invoked to describe the consequences for the experiencing individual of the extreme environment: The golden fruits, ripening in the South cannot gleam where the trees are always green Where burning winds shear silver flowers From the drooping branches under a never-cloudy sky.60 Since the trees in southern countries are always green and bear golden fruits, they do not succeed in eliciting the same kind of surprise and exaltation from the viewer as trees that grow in the extreme climate of the North. The North represents the extraordinary, sublime and emotionally intense, while the South rather becomes an image of lethargy and sensual saturation. That this portrayal re-evaluates the traditional description of the South, and especially Italy’s stimulating effect on the (artistic) senses, becomes clear when it is compared with the famous opening lines of Mignon’s song “Kennst du das Land? wo die Citronen blühn” from Goethe’s influential novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795/96): Know’st thou the land where bloom the citron bowers, Where the gold-orange lights the dusky grove? High waves the laurel there, the myrtle flowers, And through a still blue heaven the sweet winds rove.61 The image of Italy as an idyllic and peaceful country worth yearning for, with gentle breezes sweeping over golden fruits, is depicted as a distorting mirror in Helvig’s collection of Tales and Legends. By replacing the ideals of balance and harmony, as represented by Classicist and Romantic aesthetics, with the image of a sublime and extraordinary Germanic-North, Helvig declares the need for a shift of ideals. Her reformulation of Goethe’s famous line “Know’st thou the land where bloom the citron bowers” into its Nordic counterpart

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“Nicht glänzen so an immergrünen Bäumen / Die goldnen Früchte, die der Süden reift; / Wo schwüler Brand in nie bewölkten Räumen / Vom matten Zweig der Blüthen Silber streift. –” Ibid., III. Trans. by Felicia Hemans, in Poems of Felicia Hemans (Edinburgh/London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1849), 574. German original by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Vol. 2, (Berlin: Johann Friedrich Unger, 1795), 7: “Kennst du das Land? wo die Citronen blühn, / Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn, / Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht, / Die Myrthe still und hoch der Lorbeer steht”.

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“Know’st thou the inner soul of the North? Know’st thou the spirit of the long winter nights?” can be read as a call for a revision of national/cultural rolemodels.62 The ethnotype of the Nordic that Helvig depicts in these poems is not only shaped by the environmental conditions of Scandinavia but is also located in the imagined heroic past as described in the Old Norse literature. The image of the “Nordic” inspired by both mediaeval and Romantic Scandinavian literature is not only suggested as an ideal for every individual reader; in the collection’s introduction poem, the images of the heroic past of the North are also connected with Helvig’s concept of the nation disconnected from its geographical and political territory. The transnational aspect of her approach to nationbuilding surpasses the level of inspirational comparison between Germany and its “kindred Nordic people”. Helvig defines the Nordic, and especially its literature, as the uniting foundation of the future German nation when she declares: Northland is not only At the graves of Thor and Freya in Odin’s grove, Or where the old temple’s golden roof once rose; It lives in every heart, That purely and, ignited by an ancestral glow, Blazes up at the altar of its fatherland, Founding the new building on that same soil That once was the cradle of its heroic sagas.63

6

“This Soil Which Has Become Sacred to Me” – (Re)imagining Nation and Fatherland in Personal Letters

This tendency to let ideas about “Swedish” and “German” culture melt together, as a foundation of a lost former as well as a desirable future Nordic-Germanic

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“Kennst Du des hohen Nordens innre Seele? / Kennst Du den Geist der langen Winternacht?” Helvig, Taschenbuch, vol. 2, V. “Nicht Thor und Freyas Grab bei Odins Hayne, / Nicht wo des alten Tempels goldnes Dach / Sich einst erhob, ist Nordland nur alleine, / Sein Leben ist in jedem Herzen wach / Das rein, in angestammter Gluth entzündet, / Auflodernd an des Vaterlands Altar, / Den neuen Bau auf jenem Boden gründet, / Der seiner Helden-Sagen Wiege war”. Helvig, “Vorwort”, Taschenbuch, vol. 2, IV.

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nation, which can be traced in Helvig’s literary writings as far back as 1814–1815, is also formulated in her letters from this period. In 1814, Helvig and her children returned to Sweden for a period of two years. After her husband’s sudden decision to leave Stockholm, she needed to put the family’s Swedish affairs in order before they could settle down for good in Germany. During this second stay in Sweden, Helvig also spent several months visiting her close friend Malla Silfverstolpe in the university town of Uppsala. Without doubt, the events of this stimulating visit, which culminated in her youngest son Bernhard’s death from scarlet fever in April 1816 and the experience of shared grieving within a circle of intimate friends, had a deep impact on Helvig’s personal and intellectual development. The picture of Helvig as a mourning mother and Geijer’s abandoned soulmate, longing for what she left behind when she returned to Germany from Sweden in the summer of 1816, has been shaped not least by her letters written during and after her visit to her close friends Silfverstolpe, the young Romantic poet Atterbom, and especially poet, composer and professor of history Geijer. In a letter to Atterbom from August 1816, Helvig describes her emotional bond to Sweden, which had become even stronger by having buried her child in Swedish soil: May I in Your fatherland, which in my heart has become mine as well, become known and loved by all noble and good people, the way I love those who are real Swedes. I have paid a high price for this closer and more profound acquaintance with the best amongst them, and the best within them – a very high price, my life’s sweetest joy – that treasure that rests there now, in that soil which has become sacred to me.64 The burial of her son in Swedish soil, which connects her emotionally to the geographical territory, and the experience of having met “real Swedes”, made her rethink the notions of “fatherland” and nationality (cf. Martin Olin’s chapter in the present volume on the loss of a child in relation to nationalism). According to Helvig’s conception of nationality as a certain way of being,

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“Mögte ich doch in Ihrem Vaterlande, das durch das Herz auch das meinige ist, bei allen Guten und Edlen bekannt und geliebt werden, wie ich die Schweden liebe die es wirklich sind! – Ich habe die nähere und innigere Bekanntschafft mit den Besten unter ihnen und des Besten in ihnen sehr theuer, mit der liebsten Freude meines Lebens erkauft – mit dem Kleinod, das in jener, mir darum so heil’gen Erde ruht”. Letter, Helvig to Atterbom, August 24, 1816. Helvig’s letters to P.D.A. Atterbom have been preserved at Uppsala University Library Carolina Rediviva, sign. Atterbom G 8 f 27–68.

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feeling and behaving, having been born or residing in Sweden is not enough to automatically become “a real Swede” – just as little as being German by birth qualifies anyone as a “proper German”. Several months after returning to Germany, she characterizes her fellow countrymen in a letter to Atterbom: The people are capable enough, but many are corrupt, lazy and pompous, and thus the spectre of Frenchness still haunts the German character alongside the Germanness, which, in fact, actually consists of long strides, uncovered necks and endless tobacco pipes. You have to see it for yourself, however, to recognize that your Fatherland, for all its imperfections, is the land of freedom and true manhood.65 While Helvig’s image of “Frenchness” as an ethnotype is presented as the source of the decadent character traits she observes, the ideals of “freedom and true manhood”, which distinguish her image of the German national character, are associated with the Swedes. The desired qualities of purity, honesty, independence and a certain type of masculinity are still present in the “real” Swedes, imagined by Helvig as close to the original state of the Germanic nation. The Germans, however, have lost their connection to these shared national values, because they have been overpowered by French mocksophistication for decades. In a letter to Geijer, written during the return journey from Sweden in July 1816, Helvig emphasizes the failure of the German coastline, seen from the boat, to evoke any positive emotions in her. I must add that the sight of the green coastline, where Germany rose from the waves, did not offer me any joy, any consolation – I looked coldly upon the land that came to meet me like a stranger. Oh, how deeply has nature gathered all emotions into a single one, in a woman’s heart – we have our fatherland only where this single emotion can develop; so should fate place us on an icy coast – our springtime will flourish by love

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“Das Volk ist gewiß tüchtig, aber vieles ist verdorben, erschlafft und aufgeblasen; – dabei spukt das Franzosenthum doch schon wieder im Stillen, neben dem Deutschthum, was, genau besehn, in grosen Schritten, offnen Hälsen und unendlichen Tabakspfeifen besteht –. Sie müssen das selbst sehn, um Ihr Vaterland mit allen seinen Unvollkommenheiten, doch für das Land der Freyheit und wahren Mannthums noch anzuerkennen”. Letter, Helvig to Atterbom, April 17, 1817.

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Figure 10.3

Selection of a letter written by Amalie von Helvig to Erik Gustaf Geijer from Berlin, October 27 1816 (Uppsala University Library Carolina Rediviva, sign. Geijer G 85 j, 71). The page includes two stanzas from Helvig’s poetic foreword to the second volume of Taschenbuch der Sagen und Legenden, alluding to characters in Old Norse mythology.

alone. – I miss so many things, as this coastline will not give me any hope and as I will not find my dearest memories there anymore.66

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“So muss ich den hinzusetzen dass mir der Anblick jener grünen Ufer wo Deutschland sich aus den Wellen hob keine Freude – keinen Trost gewährte. – ich sah es kalt an, als

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Again, it is emotions, or rather a lack thereof, and the experience of loss (of love, hope and memories) that shape Helvig’s now-disrupted sense of national identity. Helvig’s ideas of the “home country” and “fatherland” seem to have shifted over the preceding decade. During her first stay in Sweden Helvig had articulated in 1807 how difficult it was to imagine being able to “unlearn considering Germany as [her] fatherland”,67 but when she perceives its coast a decade later her emotional affiliation with the geographical territory of this “fatherland” has become considerably less stable. When travelling from Sweden to Germany, “the beloved Nordic country where I have lost the dearest, where I have won the highest thing” in July 1816, it is “the fatherland of [her] heart” that she leaves behind.68 The experiences of loss, grief, friendship, joy and intellectual stimulation have “reshaped” the “surface” of her perceived “national” body (Ahmed) and detached her ideas of a “fatherland” from their geographical and national relation to the state of her birth. She recites Goethe’s Iphigenia, who has been living away from home for such a long time that her emotional images of the familiar and the foreign have switched places. Sharing her experience, Helvig must “shout out with Iphigenia: ‘and for you the fatherland has become foreign – that’s why your bleeding heart never heals’”.69

67 68

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träte die Fremde mir entgegen – O wie tief hat doch die Natur in das Herz des Weibes alle Gefühle in einem gelegt – wir haben unser Vaterland nur wo dies eine Gefühl sich entwickelt und so mögte das Geschik uns auf der Eisigen Küste versetzen – unser Frühling blüht allein durch die Liebe auf. – Wie viel vermisse ich da dieses Ufer mir keine Hoffnung mir [sic!] geben mag und ich an ihm die liebsten Erinnerungen nicht mehr finde –” Letter, Helvig to Geijer, July 23, 1816. Helvig’s original letters to Geijer are preserved at Uppsala University Library Carolina Rediviva (sign. Geijer G 85 j, 40–116). The Swedish translation of Helvig’s letters to Geijer, published in 1950 by the husband of a descendent of Geijer, does not reproduce the entire passage as it is written in the German original. With regard to the translator’s connection to the Geijer family, it might not be a coincidence that the word “love” and its capacity to bring spring even to the iciest cost, were not included in the translation, as they could be read as a reference to Helvig’s love for Geijer, who had recently married. Cf. Amalia von Helvigs brev till Erik Gustaf Geijer, ed. and trans. into Swedish by W. Gordon Stiernstedt (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1950), 145. Letter, Helvig to Knebel, see note 5. Letters, Helvig to Geijer, July 5 and 20, 1816, in Amalia von Helvigs brev till Erik Gustaf Geijer, 137, 139. July 20: “hinweg von dem geliebten nördlichen Lande wo mir das liebste verlorn, wo mir das höchste gewonnen wurde – nun geliebte Erde – birg mir das Eine wohl – trag mir das andre lang in Freude und Ehre! –”; 8 July: “aus Deinem Vaterlande – aus dem meines Herzens”. Letter, Helvig to Geijer, July 23, 1816: “musste ich die Worte Iphigeniens in mir ausrufen: ‘und dir ist fremd das Vaterland geworden – Das ists warum mein blutend Herz nicht

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This feeling of alienation and rootlessness is a recurring motif in Helvig’s writings. To Geijer she describes her deficient “rootedness”70 with the metaphor of a tree, uprooted by God to be replanted somewhere else. In her letter, she refers to the folk-tale motif of a lime tree replanted upside-down to prove the innocence of a suspected criminal, which develops an even richer crown, with its roots turning into branches. Analogous to how the lime tree’s roots reach toward the sky, she describes her own “uprooted” existence as reaching for heaven and eternity, as her earthly existence on German soil is marked by longing, loss and disappointed hopes.71 However, to view her personal relationship to Uppsala as the only reason for her interest in Sweden would be to oversimplify the more complex process of Helvig’s gradually developing involvement in cultural transmission between Sweden and Germany, as the investigation of some of her writings produced before 1816 has shown. Both To Germany’s Women and “The Summer Day in the North” were published in the years before her eventful stay in

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heilt! –’” In Goethe’s drama Iphigenie auf Tauris, I, 2 (Leipzig: Göschen, 1787), the passage reads: IPHIGENIE. Kann uns zum Vaterland die Fremde werden? ARKAS. Und dir ist fremd das Vaterland geworden. IPHIGENIE. Das ist’s, warum mein blutend Herz nicht heilt. // IPHIGENIA. Can foreign scenes our fatherland replace? ARKAS. Thy fatherland is foreign now to thee. IPHIGENIA. Hence is it that my bleeding heart ne’er heals. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Iphigenia in Tauris, in Selections from the Dramas of Goethe and Schiller, trans. Anna Swanwick (London: John Murray, 1843), 4. In Stiernstedt’s Swedish translation of the passage, however, a significant change in the chain of causality has taken place. It reads “och för Dig är fäderneslandet vordet främmande – därför att Ditt blödande hjärta ej helas!” (“and for you your fatherland has become foreign – because your bleeding heart is not healing”.) While in Helvig’s original letter, following Goethe’s drama, Iphigenia’s bleeding heart is the result of her alienation from her home country, the Swedish translation claims that her perceived alienation from her fatherland is the consequence of the emotional suffering she experiences for what she has left behind in Sweden. Stiernstedt, Amalia von Helvigs brev till Erik Gustaf Geijer, 146. For a discussion of the conceptual interrelation of rootedness and mobility, and the necessity of analysing “the sensation of rootedness” in the context of mobility studies, see Stephen Greenblatt, Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 252. Letter, Helvig to Geijer, August 9, 1816. Cf. Stiernstedt’s note on the treatment of lime trees, in Stiernstedt, Amalia von Helvigs brev till Erik Gustaf Geijer, 197. On the image of a lime tree replanted upside-down in legends and folk tales, see e.g. the chapter “Bäume als Zeugen der Unschuld” in Theodor Vernaleken, Mythen und Bräuche des Volkes in Österreich (Wien: Braunmüller, 1859), 117–19.

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Uppsala, considered by the scholars August Oberreuter and Ingrid Holmquist to be the starting point of her interest in Swedish culture and translation.72 Instead of interpreting Helvig’s idealization of “the Swedish” in her writings and her involvement in cultural transmission between Germany and Sweden as mere symptoms of a melancholic personal endeavour to reintegrate desired lost objects into her own personality, I suggest understanding it within the broader context of a collective (re)construction and (re)imagining of a “German” identity based on a shared “Nordic-Germanic” culture. Helvig’s personal experiences of living in Sweden and her gradual idealization of “the Swedish” mirrors an increasing interest in “Nordic-Germanic” culture and history in the context of German Romanticism and the awakening project of nation-building in reaction to the Napoleonic Wars.

7

Concluding Remarks

The cultural and political climate of the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath had a considerable impact on the personal and professional life of writer, translator and cultural transmitter Amalie von Helvig. As the analysis of a selection of her literary works and personal letters has shown, Helvig constantly reflected on the concepts of loss and nationhood. While she initially defined Germany as her inalienable “fatherland”, to which she was fixed by

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August Oberreuter stresses the importance of Helvig’s acquaintance with Atterbom and Geijer during her stay in Uppsala and their subsequent friendship as the main motivation behind Helvig’s cultural interest in Sweden. “Amalia von Helvig als Mittlerin zwischen Schweden und Deutschland”, in Beiträge zur deutschen und nordischen Literatur: Festgabe für Leopold Magon zum 70. Geburtstag 3. April 1957, ed. Hans Werner Seiffert (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958), 306–08. Ingrid Holmquist also reads Helvig’s acting as “an ambassador for the literature of Uppsala Romanticism as well as Swedish Romanticism in general” as proof of her close emotional ties with the circle around Silfverstolpe. According to her, Helvig seemed “quite uninterested in Swedish culture” before coming to Uppsala, “but afterwards she becomes an enthusiastic promoter of both the Swedes and their cultural productions”. Ingrid Holmquist, “Vänskap och kärlek som projekt i salongskulturen: Om Malla Silfverstolpe och Amalia von Helvig som salongskvinnor och skribenter”, in Nordisk Salonkultur: Et studie i nordiske skønånder og salonmiljøer 1780–1850, ed. Anne Scott Sørensen (Odense: Odense universitetforlag, 1998), 221–22. Brennecke dates Helvig’s sudden interest in Scandinavia to 1814 and identifies An Deutschlands Frauen as the most obvious expression of her “turn” North. However, he also alludes to her “tight personal bond” to Geijer and his national Romantic ideas as background for her deepened interest in national early history. Brennecke, Tegnér in Deutschland, 17–19.

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birth and upbringing, her thinking gradually changed during the period discussed in this chapter. In the political pamphlet To Germany’s Women: From One of Their Sisters, she drafted the outline of a German nation based on those qualities she described as “essentially German”, and evoked the image of a German nation-family formed by collective feelings and losses caused by the French. Paradoxically, her ambition to describe the moral foundation of an idealized German nation involved the idealization of another nation: Sweden. While her increasing interest in Nordic motifs corresponded to the general interest in Germanic culture of her time, Helvig’s first-hand knowledge of the Swedish language and literature, as well as her experiences of intellectual friendship and personal loss, made her particularly well suited to engage in the process of German(ic) nation-building. As Helvig’s ideas about nation and fatherland were considerably shaped by emotions and experiences, they turned out to be unstable and their borderlines permeable, which finally allowed her to fit both Germany and Sweden into her imagined NordicGermanic nation-family.

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Chapter 11

The Sense of Loss in the Context of Language Disputes in Finland: Reflections on E.F. Jahnsson’s Authorship Heidi Grönstrand

This chapter, which focuses on the life of Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson (1844– 1895), provides an agency-centred approach to the history of nationalism, nationhood, and questions on language shift and language loss. It analyses Jahnsson’s published texts, his plays and the novel Hatanpään Heikki ja hänen morsiamensa: Kertomus Tuomas piispan ajalta (Heikki from Hatanpää and His Bride: A Story about Bishop Thomas’ Era, 1884) and, in addition, texts closely related to them, such as reviews, the preface of the novel as well as private writings (for example, letters). Drawing on research that takes its starting point in everyday practices of nationalism, the chapter examines Jahnsson’s engagement in the national movement, in particular his language choices and the feelings of loss of the Swedish language and culture. Because interest is focused on an everyday perspective of nationalism, questions such as how the concept of nation is conceptualised in everyday language usage, and how Jahnsson expresses his feelings for “his” nation, become important.1 Instead of highlighting public activities and the role of the so-called great men of history, history writing and national history, this perspective sheds light on, for example, social relations and personal experiences of nationalism.2 A crucial question is what kind of a role ordinary people have in re-producing nationhood and how feelings of language loss are intertwined in the re-production of the idea of the nation. The prevalent perspective is from below, a perspective that has been developed, for example, by Michael Billig, whose concept of banal nationalism refers to processes by which nation states are reproduced day to day, often 1 See e.g. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995); Marco Antonsich and Michael Skey, “Introduction: The Persistence of Banal Nationalism”, in Everyday Nationhood: Theorising Culture, Identity and Belonging after Banal Nationalism, eds. Michael Skey and Marco Antonsich (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 4–6. 2 See Reetta Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi: Aate, tunteet ja sukupuoli Tengströmin perheessä 1800-luvun puolivälissä (Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto, 2019), 14–15, http://urn.fi/ URN:ISBN:978-952-03-1130-8.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_013

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in unnoticed practices.3 Although Billig concentrates mainly on established nation states and how they are produced in daily activities, his approach, in my view, provides an useful angle on the era of a young nation and the process of its creation, during which emotions and all kinds of national ideations are tightly intertwined. While there are similarities with Andersson’s influential book Imagined Communities and its approach asking, for example, how the nation was produced,4 Billig’s contribution deals specifically with the banal forms of nationalism. So far, E.F. Jahnsson has not gained an important position in Finnish literary history. Yet, when the focus is on the banal and from a bottom-up perspective, Jahnsson becomes an integral part of literary history and the history of nationalism.

1

Becoming a Finnish Language Writer during a Time of Language Disputes

Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson made his debut as a Finnish-language writer in 1870. His brief novel Niilo came out the same year as Aleksis Kivi’s Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers), a novel that is regarded as the first Finnish-language novel and an important milestone in the development of Finnish-language literature. While Kivi’s Seven Brothers was immediately debated, Jahnsson’s Niilo was dismissed by the critics, and it was only after his historical play Batholdus Simonis (1873) was premiered that he was acknowledged. Bartholdus Simonis as well as his next play, Lalli (1874), were both performed at the Finnish Theatre in Helsinki, which had been established in 1872 and contributed significantly to the development of Finnish literature and culture. At a time when the Finnish national movement was undergoing a transformation from an elite project to a mass movement, Finnish literature and culture were actively promoted, for example by writing competitions. E.F. Jahnsson’s play Lalli as well his novel Heikki from Hatanpää and his Bride: A Story from Bishop Thomas’ Era were written for competitions. Jahnsson actively participated in developing the genre of historical fiction, particularly historical fiction written in Finnish. Today, he is still mentioned in literary history as one of the first writers of Finnish-language historical novels.5 In 3 Michael Billig, “Banal Nationalism and the Imagining of Politics”, in Everyday Nationhood, 311. 4 Antonsich and Skey, “Introduction: The Persistence of Banal Nationalism”, 2. 5 Päivi Lappalainen, “Epäkohdat esiin – realistit maailmaa parantamassa”, in Suomen kirjallisuushistoria 2: Järkiuskosta vaistojen kapinaan, ed. Lea Rojola (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1999), 8–42.

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Finland and in many other countries, historical fiction has been important in shaping views on history and cultural memory.6 Zacharias Topelius’s novel Hertiginnan af Finland (The Duchess of Finland, 1850), first published as a feuilleton, is often mentioned as the first Finnish historical novel. Yet, it was Johan Ludvig Runeberg’s Fänrik Ståhls sägner (The Tales of Ensign Ståhl, 1848) that undoubtedly started the development of fictive historical literature, and after the middle of the century, interest in historical fiction greatly increased.7 Another of the pioneers of the genre is Fredrika Runeberg, whose historical novel Fru Catharina Boije och hennes döttrar: En berättelse från stora ofredens tid (Lady Catharina Boije and her Daughters: A Story from the Time of the Greater, 1858) was completed in 1843 but remained unpublished until 1858 (see Kristina Malmio’s chapter in the present volume.) E.F. Jahnsson’s engagement with historical fiction occurs at a time when the Finnish language, literature and culture as a whole were gaining a stronger foothold in Finland. On the one hand, and in particular at the beginning of his career, Jahnsson‘s fiction emulates Topelius, who emphasised the importance of the Swedish political and cultural heritage and did not portray the Swedes as conquerors of Finland (see Jens Grandell’s chapter in the present volume).8 On the other hand, specifically in his novel Heikki from Hatanpää and his Bride, the tone is sharper: the Swedes are represented as enemies who are a threat to the Finns, the Finnish-speaking common people, who become a symbol of the rising nation and its spirit. The preface of the novel marks a break with the tradition that Topelius stands for as it is based on a conversation between the writer, E.F. Jahnsson, and J.V. Snellman (1806–1881), the philosopher who played a crucial role in establishing the guidelines for the Finnish-language national movement and represented a more radical vision of language questions than Topelius. Interestingly, the preface of the first edition of Heikki from Hatanpää has been reprinted in all following editions, published in 1898, and 1931. Thus, the novel is still put in a frame of the Finnish-language national movement even long after it was initially published. When the rise of “Finnishness” has been discussed in research, the phenomenon has often been viewed as a political movement that included the

6 E.g. Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen, “Preface”, in Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia, eds. Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2015), 8–21. 7 E.g. Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Cultural Memory and Nation Building in Finland and Estonia”, in Novels, Histories, Novel Nations, 31. 8 Kaljundi, Laanes, and Pikkanen, “Introduction”, 32.

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strengthening of the Finnish Party.9 In 1872, two of the party’s most visible spokesmen, Yrjö-Koskinen and Agathon Meurman, became members of the Four Estates Parliament and led the party into a new era: The focus was on a strict ideological language programme that distinguished itself from an earlier form of Finnishness that was more pluralistic in its ways of defining Finnish culture. The national ideology that had been based on elements of both Finnish and Swedish language and literature came to an end.10 In YrjöKoskinen’s view, the Swedish party represented only itself, while the Finnish Party represented the people. Moreover, he was not merely the leader of the Finnish Party. Yrjö-Koskinen was also influential in many institutions and associations that had an important role in promoting Finnishness at the time, for example Suomalainen Kirjallisuuden Seura (The Finnish Literature Society).11 In terms of legislation, the year 1863 was an important date. In 1863, a decree was issued that recognised Finnish language and elevated it to a position equal to Swedish as one of two languages of administration and education. Finnish had begun to gain importance already in the mid-nineteenth century, however, especially in the field of literature and culture. For example, the Finnish national epic, Kalevala, that was published in 1835 was immediately given the status of a national symbol. Philosopher J.V. Snellman, who played an important role in getting the language law of 1863 adopted, actively promoted Finnish language and literature in his academic works and newspaper articles already in the 1840s, and later as well, as a professor and senator. For Snellman, the existence of the whole nation was grounded in language, particularly in Finnish language, which for him was closely linked with the political notion of the people and nation (cf. Jens Grandell’s and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume). Following the ideas of Herder, language for Snellman was not only a means of communication, but also an expression of creativity and the collective “folk soul” (Volksgeist).12 Although this kind of framing gave the people a role in nationalism, it foregrounded nationhood as a programme or an ideology that ordinary people played no active part in planning: they were not given a voice as proponents

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E.g. Max Engman, Språkfrågan: Finlandssvenskhetens uppkomst 1812–1922 (Helsingfors & Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2016); Ilkka Liikanen, Fennomania ja kansa. Joukkojärjestäytymisen läpimurto ja suomalaisen puolueen synty (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1995). Irma Sulkunen, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura 1831–1892 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2004), 165–69. Engman, Språkfrågan, 116–17. E. g. Engman, Språkfrågan, 71–74; 110–12.

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of nationhood. Instead there was a constant dispute over the question of who had the right to represent the “will of the people” (cf. Maciej Janowski’s and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume).13 It is no exaggeration to state that research on nationalism in many regards has followed the same path. Only in recent decades have ordinary and everyday voices been acknowledged as having a say in nationhood and attention has been focused on people’s agency in the reproduction of the nation, for example, by Michael Billig.14 For Billig, everyday voices matter alongside with more dramatic political commitments. Marco Antonsich develops this idea further by saying that “the everyday becomes the locus where people creatively and self-consciously mobilise nationhood in their social interactions”.15 In this chapter, I look more closely through the authorship of E.F. Jahnsson, on how language shift, a volunteer language shift, becomes a way to engage with nation building in the nineteenth-century Finland and how this shift involves choices that are loaded with ambivalence and contradictions. At the same time as Snellman as well as many other members of the educated class played an important role in strengthening the position of Finnish language in the nineteenth-century Finland, the significance of the common people in the Finnish-language national movement was on the rise towards the end of the century. Those who had not necessarily attended school expressed their commitment, for example, by writing about their own life in their own mother tongue, Finnish. The Finnish Literature Society played an important role in gathering and archiving these texts written by these self-taught people.16 When these personal narratives come into the limelight, writers like E.F. Jahnsson, an author who is not known and not included in the canon of Finnish literary history, is given a position in the history of literature – and nationalism. Yet, Jahnsson’s position as a representative of the so-called ordinary people is dubious. Although he was a son of a merchant shipper in the Southwest archipelago of Finland and grew up in a community

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Liikanen, Fennomania ja kansa; Päivi Molarius, “Fennomaanisen merkitysjärjestelmän muotoutuminen 1800-luvun Suomessa”, in Kaksi tietä nykyisyyteen: Tutkimuksia kirjallisuuden, kansallisuuden ja kansallisten liikkeiden suhteista Suomessa ja Virossa, eds. Tero Koistinen, Piret Kruuspere, Erkki Sevänen, and Risto Turunen (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1999), 67–83, 72–73. Billig, Banal Nationalism; see also Antonsich and Skey, “Introduction: The Persistence of Banal Nationalism”, 2–5. Marco Antonsich, “The ‘everyday’ of banal nationalism – Ordinary people’s views on Italy and Italian”, Political Geography, vol. 54 (2016): 32–42. DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.07.006. Lea Laitinen and Kati Mikkola, eds., Kynällä kyntäjät: Kansan kirjallistuminen 1800-luvun Suomessa (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2013).

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in which it was relatively unusual to attend school, his parents sent him to school and to university;17 therefore, he cannot be regarded as one of the autodidactic writers. The very fact that he participated in writing contests, which were a relatively popular way to encourage ordinary people to write in Finnish and thus promote Finnish-language literature,18 places him in a larger category of collective enthusiasts among the common people. In my view, Jahnsson’s authorship is shaped by the same collective enthusiasm that motivated the common people to participate in nation building and was an initial key to the rise of the Finnish-language literature and culture. As mentioned above, E.F. Jahnsson grew up in a remote area, in the Finnish archipelago in the village of Kustavi, about 70 kilometres north-west of the city of Turku. The Jahnssons, parents who were interested in educating their children, sent not only Evald, but also their other two sons to Turku to attend grammar school. After his matriculation examination, E.F. Jahnsson studied at the University of Helsinki (at that time Alexander University), where he acquired the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It is known that he worked as a teacher in different parts of Finland but returned to the university in his 40s and completed a degree in theology. According to Kirsi Keravuori, who has studied the correspondence between the members of the Jahnsson-family, E.F. Jahnsson’s work as a teacher and priest was for him merely a way to earn a living, while his true profession was that of a writer. He actively wrote and published in Swedish-language newspapers already during his student years. E.F. Jahnsson’s education and work, like that of his brothers, were vehicles of social mobility and membership in the rising educated class.19 In nineteenth-century Finland, the concept of educated class is tightly bound to the issue of language. As a result of Finland’s long history under the Swedish rule, the language of the administration and the relatively scantly educated class was Swedish, including at the time Finland became an autonomous part of the Russian Empire in 1809. That was also how many preferred things to be. The situation changed, however, when Snellman and his followers launched their programme based not only on the close link between the people, language, and the nation, but also on the idea of a monolingual nation, i.e. Finland with only one language. Already in 1845, Snellman wrote that Finnish will not become a school subject and achieve a status of an official 17

18 19

Kirsi Keravuori, “Rakkaat poikaset!” Simon ja Wilhelmina Janssonin perhekirjeet egodokumentteina (1858–1887) (Turku: Turun yliopisto, 2015), http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-29 -6211-2. Sulkunen, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura 1831–1892. Keravuori,“Rakkaat poikaset!” 48, 193.

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language unless there were educated men (!) to use it: “A new generation, this is what is required for Finnish nationality and Finnish language, a generation that, in addition to a love for Finnish names and the Finnish language, can acquire an ability to use it”.20 (Cf. Estonian nationalism, Eve Annuk’s chapter in the present volume.) In Snellman’s view, the fact that the majority of the people in Finland were Finnish speaking was insufficient. Instead, he found it important for the educated class to learn Finnish as well. In many respects, Snellman’s idea was met with approval: it is known that many young people of the educated classes became interested in learning the language. Especially in the 1840s, as there was not yet a possibility to study Finnish at school, they developed their skills with the aid of dictionaries and small study groups.21 According to Max Engman the advantage was that the process by which Finnish was actively developed to meet the new standards of a modern nation had begun, but the disadvantage, on the other hand, was the escalation of long-lasting language disputes during in 1870’s and onward.22 From the viewpoint of the Finnishminded (often called “Fennomans”), the Swedish speaking population was an aggressive colonising group, a foreign element having no right to live in Finland unless they adopted the Finnish language.23 Despite of the demands of reforming the school system and establishing Finnish-language schools especially for higher education, Swedish remained the main language in public life for a long time, and those who actively developed Finnish language and culture were in practice bilingual.24 This group of people was not, however, necessarily ideologically bilingual.25 E.F. Jahnsson also attended Swedish-language schools and published his first texts in Swedish, and it was not until he had completed his studies at the university that he began to work for Finnish literature and culture, and to write in Finnish.26 Yet, it is essential that he wrote and published not only in Finnish, but also in Swedish. In 1873, in the same year as his Finnish-language play Bartholdus Simonis was premiered, a collection of Swedish-language stories 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

“En ny generation, detta är, hvad som fordras för Finsk nationalitet och Finskt språk, en generation, som jemte kärlek till Finska namnet och Finska språket förvärfvat sig förmåga att använda detsamma”. Snellman quoted by Engman, Språkfrågan, 72–73. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are my own. See e.g. Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi, 100–12. Engman, Språkfrågan, 73–74. Engman, Språkfrågan, 74. E.g. Engman, Språkfrågan, 95. Kaljundi, Laanes, and Pikkanen, “Introduction”, 29. Keravuori, “Rakkaat poikaset!” 122.

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came out; Korpens berättelser (Raven’s stories) had been published earlier in the biggest Swedish-language newspaper in Finland, Hufvudstadsbladet. In 1878, his historical novel Rådmannens dotter (Magistrate’s daughter) was published, and three years later, in 1881, a new version of Raven’s stories appeared. As E.F. Jahnsson’s family background was not in the educated class, his university studies were anything but usual at the time. For many in the lower classes, the lack of knowledge of Swedish was an obstacle in terms of getting an education.27 E.F. Jahnsson’s childhood family, however, was bilingual: The mother, Wilhelmina Jahnsson, always wrote her letters in Swedish, and the father, Simon Jahnsson, in Finnish. When the three sons of the family wrote letters to their parents, they chose Swedish. It is not certain what languages the family members used in their daily communication with each other, but according to the oral history handed down in the family, Wilhelmina Jahnsson was Swedish-speaking, Simon Jahnsson Finnish-speaking, and both languages were spoken in their home.28 While Swedish-language skills were definitely an asset for E.F. Jahnsson, Swedish also became a handicap as the ideology of the Finnish-language nationalists demanded a full commitment to the Finnish language: an attitude that entailed a loss of ties with the Swedish language and culture. According to a letter (June 27, 1877) that Jahnsson wrote to Kaarlo Bergbom, the director of the Finnish Theatre Company, Jahnsson had also adopted the attitude of the Finnish-language nationalists. When working in Oulu (Uleåborg) as editor in chief for the Swedish-language newspaper Uleåborg Tidning, Jahnsson writes about his play Raatimiehen tytär (Magistrate’s daughter, 1878), a play he re-worked into the above-mentioned novel in Swedish. In his letter, Jahnsson proposes the play to the Finnish Theatre Company, but in addition, he is frank with Bergbom about his hesitation concerning the language in which the work is written. E.F. Jahnsson writes that he would have sent the play earlier as Bergbom had wanted, but he had begun to think that the play was worthless in the prose form in which he had written it, that is to say, Swedish: I have regretted a lot my deed. But when I came here, I had not finished any novels, and that’s why I got involved with the Magistrate’s daughter. I did not want to insult my efforts in Finnish-language novels that I plan to write in Finnish. […] Besides, I am not enjoying my time here, and

27 28

Keravuori, “Rakkaat poikaset!” 195. Keravuori, “Rakkaat poikaset!” 120, 386.

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my longing is great for the battlefields of my youth. […] I grieve deeply at the thought that I am sacrificing the time I could have devoted to Finnishness for Swedishness”.29 It is obvious that Jahnsson has not abandoned Swedish. The letter reveals that he is not only working for a Swedish-language newspaper but had authored a novel in Swedish based on a play he had written in Finnish earlier. It also shows the larger context of this act: the polarity between the two languages is evident, and a clear indication of troublesome language disputes. To write in Swedish is to support Swedishness, and thus to undermine the work for Finnish language and Finnishness. Although the letter does not expose the motive behind Jahnsson’s choices, it implies that writing in Swedish was a necessity that is in disharmony with his inner convictions. It is possible that Jahnsson was unable to abandon Swedish for financial reasons. For example, in a letter to his brother, Jahnsson writes about his financial problems and asks his brother for money to publish Raven’s Stories.30 For Jahnsson, writing in Swedish seems to evoke feelings of regret – and maybe also shame. At least Jahnsson finds it important to express these kinds of feelings when the addressee is Kaarlo Bergbom, who as director of The Finnish Theatre Company held an important role in strengthening Finnish culture. At the same time as Jahnsson asserts his devotion and loyalty to Finnishness, it is evident that his commitment does not involve a total disengagement from Swedish language and Swedish tradition. This perspective is further corroborated if we look more closely at his plays, especially their themes and characters, and some of the reviews of his plays and novels.

2

A Writer’s Life and Works: Success and Failure

E.F. Jahnsson’s historical play Bartholdus Simonis, written and performed in Finnish, was premiered in the spring 1873 in Helsinki by the Finnish Theatre 29

30

“Paljon olen tointani katunut, vaan tänne tullessani ei ollut minulla valmiina yhtään ruotsalaista novellia, jonkatähden hädän tullessa puutuin Raatimiehen tyttäreen, kun en tahtonut loukata niitä romani-yrityksiäni, joita olen aikonut suorittaa suomen kielellä. […] Muuten viihdyn täällä hyvin huonosti ja ikävyyteni nuoruuden taistelutantereelle on suuri. – Erinomattain minua surettaa se ajatus, että pakosta uhraan sen ajan, jonka olisin voinut uhrata suomalaisuuden asian hyväksi, ruotsalaisuudelle”. Letter, E.F. Jahnsson to Kaarlo Bergbom, June 27, 1877, KIA 50:25:3#YG, Finnish Literature Society. Letter, E.F. Jahnsson to A.W. Jahnsson, February 8, 1873, KIA 25:1–3:1015–1016, Finnish Literature Society.

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Company, which had been founded only a year earlier.31 The play was positively received, if not enthusiastically. The leading Finnish-language newspaper Uusi Suometar wrote that the lasting posterity of the play had been ensured due to its distinctive patriotic spirit.32 Although the review does not reveal what the patriotic spirit was, it is possible to infer that the love-triangle plot, which brings about questions of identity, national loyalty and belonging, expresses this spirit.33 The play is set in the year 1656, at a time when Finland was under Swedish rule, in the city of Vyborg, which is situated in the border region between Sweden and Russia. When the young protagonist Anna abandons Bartholdus Simonis, a student and a true Finn, for Gerbert, a Russian who turns out to be a traitor, the destiny of the city of Vyborg and all of Finland is at stake. An important part of the patriotic spirit was undoubtedly the fact that Bartholdus Simonis was the first historical play in Finnish. Moreover, all the actors were Finns, i.e. not from Sweden, contrary to the prevailing tradition up until this time for the theatres in Finland.34 Bartholdus Simonis was featured not only in Helsinki, but also at least in Vyborg later the same year. Many newspapers repeated the same positive accolades that were written immediately after the play premiered, mentioning the excited applause of the audience as well.35 In total, the play was performed twelve times, which, according to theatre historian Pentti Paavolainen, is a substantial number of performances at that time.36 Despite its success, Bartholdus Simonis did not pave the way for a successful career as a playwright or author for E.F. Jahnsson. Nevertheless, the play’s positive reception is an apt example of how tightly emotions are intertwined in historical fiction and nation building as well as in political mobilisation: the spectators

31

32 33 34 35 36

The Finnish Theatre Company was not, however, the first theatre to perform plays in Finnish. Nya teatern (The New Theatre, nowadays known as Svenska teatern, the Swedish Theatre) included in its repertoire plays in Swedish and Finnish. https://disco.teak.fi/ teatteri/sv/2helsingfors-som-centrum-for-teaterlivet-fram-till-ar-1872/. Anon. Uusi Suometar May 2, 1873. Heidi Grönstrand, “Historical Fiction and the Dynamics of Romance: The Cases of Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson and Fredrika Runeberg”, in Novels, Histories, Novel Nations, 140. E.g. Eliel Aspelin-Haapkylä, Suomalaisen teatterin historia I: Teatterin esihistoria ja perustaminen (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1906), 44. Anon. Morgonbladet, November 11, 1873; Anon. Sanomia Turusta November 28, 1873; Aspelin-Haapkylä, Suomalaisen teatterin historia I, 44. Pentti Paavolainen, “Sankariksi kelpaamaton? Evald Jahnssonin Lallin lyhyt näyttämöhistoria”, in Kirjailijoiden Kalevala. Kalevalaseuran vuosikirja 92, eds. Antti Tuuri, Ulla Piela, and Seppo Knuuttila (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2013).

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of the play become an integral part of the meaning-making process of the play.37 In his next play Lalli, Jahnsson continues to deal with historical themes. This time, he goes back to times before recorded history, to a legend that foregrounds the Finns, namely the Finnish-speaking Finns and their opposition to the Swedes. Lalli brings into focus one of the first Swedish crusades against Finland captured in the legend of Bishop Henry. According to the legend, the Finnish peasant Lalli killed Bishop Henry with an axe on the icy surface of Lake Köyliö in Western Finland. In contrast to Bartholdus Simonis, the performance of Lalli was a failure. Pentti Paavolainen, who has written about the reception and stage arrangements of Lalli, argues that the problem was that the conflict portrayed, namely, the battle between the missionaries and Finns, lacked a distinctive hero. The result was that Lalli was performed only two times, although Kaarlo Bergbom gave his support to the play. It was E.F. Jahnsson himself who stopped further performances of Lalli because he was provoked by the negative reception it received. If the audience had expected a story which depicted the bishop Henry as the villain and Lalli as the hero, they were to be disappointed: Jahnsson treated conflicts between the Christian missionaries and pagans, Swedes and Finns, without clearly identifying the persons with whom the audience should sympathize. It is as if the conflict between the two parties was not sharp-edged enough. Instead of showing Bishop Henry as a cruel conqueror, Jahnsson portrays him as a compassionate man, who, for example, asks his warlord not to use violence. In Paavolainen’s view, Jahnsson is a Finnish-minded Fennoman, but a moderate one.38 Jahnsson’s next play was the earlier mentioned Magistrate’s Daughter, which was performed by The Finnish Theatre Company in different towns around Finland in 1878. The Swedish-language novel with the same title came out the same year. According to the review of the novel in Uleåborgs Tidning (January 13, 1879), the novel had been published earlier as a feuilleton in the same newspaper, probably during the time Jahnsson worked for the newspaper. Like his previous plays, Magistrate’s Daughter is also a historical drama set

37

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Ilona Pikkanen, Casting the Ideal Past: a Narratological Close Reading of Eliel AspelinHaapkylä’s History of the Finnish Theatre Company (1906–1910) (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2012), http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-951-44-8986-0; Grönstrand, “Historical Fiction and the Dynamics of Romance”; Anu Koivunen, “An affective Turn? Reimagining the Subject of Feminist Theory”, in Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences, eds. Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 20. Paavolainen, “Sankariksi kelpaamaton?”, 49–67.

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in the times when Finland was under Swedish rule. This time, the events take place in the year 1509, with the Danes attacking Turku (Åbo), the capital city of Finland. Similar to Bartholdus Simonis, there is a triangle drama at centre of the plot. The Finnish heroine from Turku, Ebba Suurpää, falls in love with Rolf Jute from Denmark, but has to await her fiancé for seven years, because her father’s desire is that she should marry Sven, a Finnish man. From the perspective of foregrounding of nationality and commitment to the nation, this is a surprising setting, particularly because Ebba sticks with her decision and marries the Dane, Rolf Jute (cf. the romantic plot in the Estonian “Liina”, Eve Annuk’s chapter in the present volume). The novel, which mostly follows the same storyline as the play, provides important historical background information that explains the plot. Already in the beginning, that the reader learns that when Ebba and Rolf meet for the first time, Denmark and Finland, as parts of Sweden, were not enemies. As the Danish King Hans ruled both Denmark and Sweden, in practice, Denmark and Finland shared the same king.39 In this light, Ebba and Rolf Jute’s romance does not appear unpatriotic. Instead, Jahnsson’s loyalty to the Swedish tradition and Finland’s long history as part of the Swedish realm is further reinforced. Magistrate’s Daughter, both the play and the novel, was announced in newspapers, but apart from the review in Uleåborgs Tidning, which focused mostly on the plot of the novel, nothing substantial was written about its reception. The period when Jahnsson first wrote Magistrate’s Daughter as a novel in Swedish and then as a play in Finnish marks an interesting period prior to his devotion to the Finnish language. This kind of parallel writing in different languages or self-translation, in which an author translates his or her own texts and the outcome is two (or more) versions with overlapping content, addressing two (or more) different audiences,40 is a phenomenon that draws attention to cross-language constellations.41 Although it can be regarded as an effort to overcome the idea of linguistic purity, essential to modern nations, in Jahnsson’s case self-translation is associated with practical implications.42 As 39 40

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Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson, Rådmannens dotter: historisk originalnovell ([publisher unknown], 1878). E.g. Steven Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 32–33; Jan Hokenson and Marcella Munson, The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-translation (Manchester, UK & Kinderhook (NY), USA: St. Jerome Publishing, 2007), 12–14. Heidi Grönstrand, “Self-translating: Linking Languages, Literary Traditions and Cultural Spheres”, in Cosmopolitanism and Transnationalism: Visions, Ethics and Practices, ed. Leena Kaunonen (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2014), 118. http://hdl.handle.net/10138/45246. E.g. Grönstrand, “Self-translating”, 119.

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the above-mentioned letter to the director of Finnish Theatre shows, Finnish is the language Jahnsson himself values highest, while his relationship with Swedish is more complicated. Swedish is the language used in his daily work as a journalist and writer, and in contrast to Finnish, it is not connected with political goals. Swedish is also represented as a language that erodes his credibility as a Finnish-language author. So, although Jahnsson is involved in two languages and is able to reach a broader readership than by using only one language, there are signals that indicate he is more interested in strengthening monolingual aims, not challenging them. Six years after publishing Magistrate’s Daughter, he wrote the historical novel Heikki from Hatanpää and his Bride: A Story from Bishop Thomas’ Era in Finnish, first as a feuilleton and then in book format. The same year, 1884, he published another historical novel, Muuan suomalainen soturi Kristiina kuningattaren aikana (A certain soldier in Queen Kristina’s time). With his novel Heikki from Hatanpää, Jahnsson not only adopted a different genre, but also a new way of reflecting on language questions. Instead of a conciliatory attitude, the contrast between the language groups is now represented as keen and indelible but like his previous works, there is once again romance at the heart of the story, which functions as a means by which the past is made into a captivating story, and the spectator, or in this case the reader, becomes engaged with the story. As the lovers fight for their happiness, the tensions embedded in the rise of the modern nation, such as language issues, are revealed and new kinds of alliances are suggested. Thus, the romantic plot is in close interplay with social change by proposing and testing alternatives to contradictions of the time.43 In Heikki from Hatanpää, E.F. Jahnsson returns to the themes of crusades, portraying again the battles between Swedish troops and Finnish-speaking Finns. The opening scene portrays a place of sacrifice in the Finnish inland, where the young protagonists of the novel, Heikki and Lyyli, have come together with other young people to celebrate in the wild; they invoke Ukko, the ancient Finnish god of thunder, and other heroes of Finnish folk poetry, such as Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen. The idyllic scenery forms an important milieu for Heikki and Lyyli’s romance: it is the place where Heikki asks for Lyyli’s hand in marriage. Soon, however, their love is threatened, and thereby also all Finnish culture, as Lyyli is taken as a prisoner by Heikki’s rival suitor Paavo, who is leading the Catholic Troops of Bishop Thomas. The events are set in the year 1245, the year when Bishop Thomas of Turku/Åbo, the first Catholic bishop mentioned in historical records, resigned 43

Grönstrand, “Historical Fiction and the Dynamics of Romance”, 154.

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Figure 11.1

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E.F. Jahnsson’s Heikki from Hatanpää and his Bride: A Story from Bishop Thomas’ Era (1884) Cover illustration by Venny SoldanBrofeldt. National Library of Finland

from his post. In Heikki from Hatanpää, the authority of the bishop and the Christians is often expressed through massive and grandiose decorations, valuable jewellery, fancy clothes and shining steel armour, helmets and lances. In contrast to these outward markers of power, the Finns, such as Heikki, Lyyli and the other pagans, are portrayed as people with a close relation to peace and unspoiled nature. The contradiction between these two worlds is further

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underlined by references to language. Whereas many in the Christian troops are literate and know several languages, most of them do not know Finnish. The missionaries sing their songs in Latin, and Heikki and Lyyli and other pagans sing old Finnish-language folk songs. In his authorship, Jahnsson adopts the same strategy as many other writers of historical novels in the mid-nineteenth century. He appropriates Swedish history by customising and fusing certain parts of it – especially wars and revolts – with the Finnish national narrative.44 Heikki from Hatanpää depicts the Swedes as conquerors, whose presence in Finland caused suffering for the Finnish people. This polarised setting reaches its peak at the end of the story, when Lyyli, who refuses to convert to Catholicism, is publicly executed. The dramatic moment is further highlighted by a depiction of the spectators who burst out screaming when they see Lyyli’s beautiful head with its bloody hair rolling off the block.45 The scene makes use of the imaginary of melodrama and sentimentalism: the death is a moment of protest and triumph. The moral world of the heroine is revealed and the social injustice corrected, or at least it is implied that the injustice has been registered and will be readdressed. The moment of death creates intense sympathy for the protagonist and draws attention to the values she is fighting for.46 In contrast to Jahnsson’s earlier works, in Heikki from Hatanpää the support for the Fennoman ideology is less ambiguous. In addition to the story, the dedication and the preface of the novel also endorse the Fennoman ideas, and the presence of J.V. Snellman is remarkable. The novel is not only devoted to the memory of J.V Snellman, who had died in 1881, but the preface elaborates on Jahnsson’s reminiscence of his face-to-face meeting with Snellman, which had taken place after a performance of his play Lalli. The preface tells a story about how Snellman had invited Jahnsson to his apartment to discuss the play, which Snellman had apparently found very pleasant. Snellman confesses that he himself had planned to write about the same theme, the struggles between the pagans, “our pagan ancestors” and the Christians as “one had to begin with those times anyway”.47 By recalling this encounter with Snellman, Jahnsson inscribes himself into the Fennoman tradition more explicitly than

44

45 46 47

Kaljundi, Laanes, and Pikkanen, “Introduction”, 30; Mari Hatavara, Historia ja poetiikka Fredrika Runebergin ja Zacharias Topeliuksen historiallisissa romaaneissa (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2007), 82. Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson, Hatanpään Heikki ja hänen morsiamensa: Kertomus Tuomaspiispan ajoilta (Porvoo: Werner Söderström osakeyhtiö, 1884/1931), 244. Grönstrand, “Historical Fiction and the Dynamics of Romance”, 153. Jahnsson, Hatanpään Heikki ja hänen morsiamensa, 7.

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in his earlier works. He sees himself as Snellman’s collaborator and a continuer of his work. Heikki from Hatanpää can be seen as a marker of the abandonment of Swedish language, Swedish cultural sphere and tradition in Finland that has finally taken place in Jahnsson’s authorship. It is not known whether he published or wrote anything in Swedish during his later life. Jahnsson’s break-up with the earlier, more tolerate attitude towards Swedish language and the Swedish history in Finland, however, does not lead to success as a writer. Judging from the reviews, Jahnsson’s novels Heikki from Hatanpää and A certain Finnish soldier from Queen Kristina’s era, which both came out the same year, did not meet the genre expectations set for historical novels in 1880s. In the 1880s, realism had started to gain popularity in Finland,48 but instead of writing in a style favoured by realists, i.e. a style focusing on verisimilar narration of the individual’s everyday life and the protagonist’s development as well as on realistic conceptions of time and history,49 Jahnsson continued to follow the earlier tradition that Topelius represented. Following Topelius, Jahnsson draws on popular forms of writing, such as romance, melodrama, and adventure stories.50 An anonymous reviewer of Heikki from Hatanpää pays attention to the romance plot, the miserable love story between Hatanpään Heikki and his fiancé, as well as the revolt of the pagans against the conqueror-bishop Tuomas, all of which, according to him, is portrayed in a “Romantic form”.51 Although the reviewer acknowledges the truthful depiction of the historical events, the conclusion is that Jahnsson’s novel cannot be regarded as a modern “scientific” historical novel. Another review, this time by Juhani Aho, one of the best-known Finnish realists, of Jahnsson’s historical novel A certain Finnish soldier from Queen Kristina’s era further exemplifies the literary ideals of Finland in the 1880s. In his extensive and brusque critique, Aho first introduces Jahnsson by calling his writings as “poor attempts at writing” (“kyhäelmä”). After that he states explicitly that “the time demands” of authors a competence to portray scenes “true-to life” along with a thorough knowledge of the human heart. He posits Jahnsson as a representative of “old novels of chivalry, in which strange 48 49 50

51

E.g. Lappalainen, “Epäkohdat esiin – realistit maailmaa parantamassa”, 8. See e.g. Aino Mäkikalli, From Eternity to Time: Conceptions of Time in Daniel Defoe’s Novels (Bern: Lang, 2007). Hatavara, Historia ja poetiikka, 82– 93; H.K. Riikonen, “Fältskärns berättelser i förhållande till 1800-talets historiska roman”, in Författaren Topelius – med historien mot strömmen, eds. Pia Forssell and Carola Herberts (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet and Stockholm: Appell Förlag), 60–64. Anon. “E.F. Jahnsson: Hatanpään Heikki ja hänen morsiamensa, kertomus Tuomas piispan ajalta”, Valvoja (1886): 103–04.

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adventurous and unexpected, dangerous situations and, likewise, unexpected rescues are the most important elements of the story”.52 As the historical novel was not in favour among the realists,53 it is clear that because realism was acquiring status as a literary model, Jahnsson was lost his foothold in the literary field. Not even his engagement in following the tradition that Topelius started for historical fiction in Finland contributed much to his career. At the end of his review, Aho writes that the influence of Walter Scott and Topelius is obvious; he also notes that these writers are far more talented in the genre of the historical novel than is Jahnsson. Despite the severe tone of the critique, there is, however, a glimmer of hope when Aho concludes his review by saying that the narration is flowing and the language good. Yet, even the last comment is followed by a negative remark that his Finnish is influenced by Swedish as if there were direct translations from Swedish to Finnish. All in all, it is obvious that Jahnsson’s own commitment to the Finnish language and the Finnish language movement was not valued by the public, and he did not achieve much recognition as a valued writer. It is as if his knowledge of Swedish diminished his credibility as a Finnish-language writer.

3

Concluding Remarks

E.F. Jahnsson was a productive writer who wrote and published actively during the heyday of the Finnish language national movement for more than 20 years. New editions of Hatanpään Heikki, his main work, were printed even after his death, and some of his plays were performed at the turn of the twentieth century.54 As the language movement of the 1870s and 1880s was based on the notion of monolingualism and saw the future Finland as a nation with only one language, an engagement with the movement required a disengagement from Swedish. In my approach, I have focused on Jahnsson’s life and works as a Finnish-language activist who was never at the core of the movement but who, through his plays and novels, promoted Finnish language and culture. Contrary to many others with same kind of rural roots and an enthusiasm for working for the Finnish language, Jahnsson had difficulties in abandoning his other language, Swedish, and his interest in the Swedish-language culture and literature in Finland. Thus, in Jahnsson’s case, the process of language shift, 52 53 54

Juhani Aho, “Muuan suomalainen soturi Kristiina kuningattaren aikakaudelta”, Valvoja (1885): 360. Lappalainen, “Epäkohdat esiin – realistit maailmaa parantamassa”, 39. http://ilona.tinfo.fi/ ILONA is a Finnish theatre database.

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which was necessary for becoming a Finnish-language writer, was not uncomplicated or direct. This ambivalence is reflected in the publication practices of his works and in the themes he dealt with; references to it can also be found in some of his private letters. In his Finnish-language plays, Jahnsson shows fidelity to Finland’s long, shared history with Sweden. The plays are set in times when Finland was under Swedish rule, and instead of depicting the Swedes as conquerors, the Finns and Swedes fight on the same side against a common enemy. After making his debut in Finnish, Jahnsson continued to publish in Swedish, at times parallel in both languages, and it is only the one novel, Heikki from Hatanpää, that signals a break with this tradition. The extensive preface of the novel clearly places Jahnsson in the Finnish-language movement, and this time the intrigue highlights the contrast between the Swedes and Finns, the conquerors and the victims. An analysis of E.F. Jahnsson’s authorship confirms that the language climate of the end of the nineteenth century was rather grim: the polarity between the two groups, proponents of either Finnish or Swedish language, was extreme, and any cultural activity that failed to take sides was not publicly applauded. A letter written by Jahnsson shows that even he found his work in two languages unrewarding, as if he were betraying Finnish language and Finnish culture. Yet, this observation did not hinder him from continuing to write in Swedish. The case of E.F. Jahnsson shows not only how language loss is embedded in the history of nationalism, but also how difficult it was to accept and condone this loss in practice.

Bibliography Aho, Juhani. “Muuan suomalainen soturi Kristiina kuningattaren aikakaudelta: Historiallinen romaani”. Valvoja 1885, 359–65. Anon. Uusi Suometar May 2, 1873. Anon. Morgonbladet November 11, 1873. Anon. Sanomia Turusta November 28, 1873. Anon. “E.F. Jahnsson: Hatanpään Heikki ja hänen morsiamensa, kertomus Tuomas piispan ajalta”. Valvoja (1886): 103–04. Antonsich, Marco. “The ‘everyday’ of banal nationalism – Ordinary people’s views on Italy and Italian”. Political Geography, vol. 54 (2016): 32–42. DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo .2015.07.006. Antonsich, Marco and Michael Skey. “Introduction: The Persistence of Banal Nationalism”. In Everyday Nationhood: Theorising Culture, Identity and Belonging after Banal Nationalism, edited by Michael Skey and Marco Antonsich, 1–13. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

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Aspelin-Haapkylä, Eliel. Suomalaisen teatterin historia I: Teatterin esihistoria ja perustaminen. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1906. Bergbom, Kaarlo (1843–1906) Letter June 27, 1877, KIA 50:25:3#YG. Finnish Literature Society. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage, 1995. Billig, Michael. “Banal Nationalism and the Imagining of Politics”. In Everyday Nationhood: Theorising Culture, Identity and Belonging after Banal Nationalism, edited by Michael Skey and Marco Antonsich, 307–21. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Eiranen, Reetta. Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi: Aate, tunteet ja sukupuoli Tengströmin perheessä 1800-luvun puolivälissä. Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto, 2019. http://urn.fi/ URN:ISBN:978-952-03-1130-8. Engman, Max Språkfrågan: Finlandssvenskhetens uppkomst 1812–1922. Helsingfors & Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2016. Grönstrand, Heidi. “Self-translating: Linking Languages, Literary Traditions and Cultural Spheres”. In Cosmopolitanism and Transnationalism: Visions, Ethics and Practices, edited by Leena Kaunonen (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2014). http://hdl.handle.net/10138/45246. Grönstrand, Heidi. “Historical Fiction and the Dynamics of Romance: The Cases of Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson and Fredrika Runeberg”. In Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia, edited by Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen, 140–56. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2015. Hatavara, Mari. Historia ja poetiikka Fredrika Runebergin ja Zachrias Topeliuksen historiallisissa romaaneissa. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2007. Hokenson, Jan and Marcella Munson. The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-translation. Manchester, UK & Kinderhook (NY), USA: St. Jerome Publishing, 2007. Ilona, Finnish theatre database. Accessed June 24, 2020. http://ilona.tinfo.fi. Jahnsson (family) Letter February 7 and February 8, 1873, KIA 25:1–3:1015–1016, Finnish Literature Society. Jahnsson, Evald Ferdinand. Rådmannens dotter historisk originalnovell. [publisher unknown], 1878. Jahnsson, Evald Ferdinand. Hatanpään Heikki ja hänen morsiamensa: Kertomus Tuomas-piispan ajoilta. Porvoo: Werner Söderström osakeyhtiö, 1884/1931. Kaljundi, Linda, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen. “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Cultural Memory and Nation Building in Finland and Estonia”. In Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia, edited by Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen, 26–76. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2015. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2015. Kaljundi, Linda. Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen. “Preface”. In Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia, edited

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by Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen, 8–21. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2015. Kellman, Steven. The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Keravuori, Kirsi. “Rakkat poikaiset!” Simon ja Wilhelmina Janssonin perhekirjeet egodokumentteina (1858–1887). Turku: Turun yliopisto, 2015. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978 -951-29-6211-2. Koivunen, Anu. “An Affective Turn? Reimagining the Subject of Feminist Theory”. In Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences, edited by Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen, 8–28. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Laitinen, Lea and Kati Mikkola, eds. Kynällä kyntäjät: Kansan kirjallistuminen 1800luvun Suomessa. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2013. Lappalainen, Päivi. “Epäkohdat esiin – realistit maailmaa parantamassa”. In Suomen kirjallisuushistoria 2: Järkiuskosta vaistojen kapinaan, edited by Lea Rojola, 8–42. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1999. Liikanen, Ilkka. Fennomania ja kansa: Joukkojärjestäytymisen läpimurto ja suomalaisen puolueen synty. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1995. Mäkikalli, Aino. From Eternity to Time: Conceptions of Time in Daniel Defoe’s Novels. Bern: Lang, 2007. Molarius, Päivi. “Fennomaanisen merkitysjärjestelmän muotoutuminen 1800-luvun Suomessa”. In Kaksi tietä nykyisyyteen: Tutkimuksia kirjallisuuden, kansallisuuden ja kansallisten liikkeiden suhteista Suomessa ja Virossa, edited by Tero Koistinen, Piret Kruuspere, Erkki Sevänen, and Risto Turunen, 67–83. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1999. Paavolainen, Pentti. “Sankariksi kelpaamaton? Evald Jahnssonin Lallin lyhyt näyttämöhistoria”. In Kirjailijoiden Kalevala: Kalevalaseuran vuosikirja 92, edited by Antti Tuuri, Ulla Piela, and Seppo Knuuttila, 47–67. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2013. Pikkanen, Ilona. Casting the Ideal Past: a Narratological Close Reading of Eliel AspelinHaapkylä’s History of the Finnish Theatre Company (1906–1910). Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2012. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-951-44-8986-0. Riikonen, H.K. “Fältskärns berättelser i förhållande till 1800-talets historiska Roman”. In Författaren Topelius – med historien mot strömmen”, edited by Pia Forssell and Carola Herberts, 43–70. Helsingfors & Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Appell Förlag, 2019. Sulkunen, Irma. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura 1831–1892. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2004.

Chapter 12

Nationalism, Emotions and Loss in Lilli Suburg’s Short Story “Liina” Eve Annuk

The Estonian national movement in the nineteenth century would seem to have everything to gain and nothing to lose. The important background factor which influenced the formation of the national movement was related to the situation of Estonian-speaking common people. Historian Ea Jansen has written that although the serfdom in the Baltic provinces of Russia was abolished at the beginning of nineteenth century (in Estonia 1816), the situation of common people, who were mostly peasants, remained difficult. Baltic-German nobility ruled the country (governed the land) retaining special rights that the Tsar had granted them and a kind of autonomy “along with rights for the German language and the Lutheran faith”. The peasantry was the lowest stratum of that society and despite the abolishment of serfdom, “all the land belonged to the lord of the manor” (cf. the peasantry in Poland and Denmark respectively, Maciej Janowski’s and Jens Eike Schnall’s chapters in the present volume).1 Also the law courts and police “were under the control of the nobility”. However, new ideas of equality and citizen’s rights, influenced by Rousseau and Herder, began to influence this backward society.2 The proportion of Baltic-Germans in the population was very small, it had fallen from 5% to 3.5% by the end of the century and therefore “educated Estonians began to wonder why all the rights in their country belonged to a tiny minority”, in the words of Ea Jansen.3 The aims of the Estonian national movement were to create the conditions for cultural development of Estonians, including Estonian-language education, and also the creation of an elite culture for the Estonians and of suitable political conditions for the survival of the nation (cf. the Finnish national movement, Jens Grandell’s, Heidi Grönstrand’s, and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume).4 Estonian independence was not achieved until 1918. 1 Ea Jansen, “National Awakening of Estonian Nation”, in Estonia: Identity and Independence, ed. Jean-Jacques Subrenat (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2004), 83. 2 Jansen, “National Awakening of Estonian Nation”, 83–84. 3 Jansen, “National Awakening of Estonian Nation”, 86. 4 Jansen, “National Awakening of Estonian Nation”, 88–89.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_014

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Nevertheless, a construction of loss was a defining feature even for the Estonian national movement. The Estonian national movement – called “national awakening” (“rahvuslik ärkamine”) – flourished between 1860 and 1885 and was characterized by the rise of national consciousness.5 “National awakening” can also be interpreted in connection with something previously lost as has been discussed by Mart Kuldkepp. He has referred to the Estonian myth of “the good old Swedish times” that had become a part of Estonian history and denoted a lost period of freedom that, in some ways, had been restored by the “national awakening”.6 However, in literary representation, the meaning of loss can also be understood as a sacrifice of love in order to regain national autonomy. This chapter deals with the representation of emotions, national sentiment and loss in the short story “Liina” (1877) by the Estonian writer, journalist, pedagogue and the first Estonian feminist Lilli Suburg (1841–1923). “Liina” is her bestknown work, figuring amongst the most important works of early Estonian literature.7 “Liina” is also important in the context of the Estonian national movement because of its emphasis on nationalism – the story deals with the importance of remaining an Estonian and preserving Estonian identity. The representation of national feelings and emotions in “Liina” can be understood as “emotional textualities” which refers to the ways in which the emotions as discourses are embedded in the text, not merely in words but also in the context in which they “are written and expressed, and toward whom they are directed”. Even more importantly, emotions in literature enable the reading audience to experience events they have not experienced before, and thus, “literature can be viewed as an intellectual somatization of felt emotions, in the sense that the act of writing takes its roots in the way emotions impacted the person”.8 Therefore, a representation of the emotions in writing enables their dissemination.9

5 Toomas Karjahärm, “Eesti rahvusliku liikumise mudelid uusimas historiograafias” [Models of the Estonian national movement in modern historiography], Acta Historica Tallinensia 14 (2009): 154. 6 Mart Kuldkepp, “The Scandinavian Connection in Early Estonian Nationalism”, Journal of Baltic Studies 3 (2013): 12–14, DOI: 10.1080/01629778.2012.744911. 7 Cornelius Hasselblatt, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu (Tallinn & Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2016), 156. 8 Andreea Marculescu and Charles-Louis Morand-Metivier, “Introduction”, in Affective and Emotional Economies in Early Modern Europe, eds. Andreea Marculescu and Charles-Louis Morand-Metivier (Palgrave, Macmillan, 2018), 6. 9 Marculescu and Morand-Metivier, “Introduction”, 6.

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This chapter also explores the context of the Estonian national movement and its gendered meanings, as well as the ways by which “Liina” represents the ideas of nationalism and constructs national feeling in a social context from an era when being German was more highly valued than being Estonian. Before the national awakening, Jansen notes, there was no educated class of people speaking Estonian and of Estonian birth. In contrast to other countries where the clergy were the first educated people from among the native inhabitants, it was the German Lutheran clergymen who ran the churches here.10 Social mobility was also linked with Germanisation, since acquiring higher social status was synonymous with Germanisation and the status of the Estonian language was inferior, “being a synonym for ‘peasant’” (cf. the Finnish case, Heidi Grönstrand’s and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume). Baltic-Germans regarded Germanisation as the road to civilisation for the Estonian speaking people of the Baltics.11 Moreover, the public’s reception of “Liina” will be analysed in its historical context since, based to its national ideas and gendered emotionality, the text was considered a threat to the Baltic-German’s position as a ruling class. As a literary text, “Liina” was so popular that it was reprinted in 1884 and translated into Finnish in 1892.12 The circumstances relating to the publication process are worth mentioning. The manuscript of “Liina” was completed already in 1873, but four years passed before it was published. The story was written in Estonian, but Suburg, who took her education in German, was unsure of her Estonian language skills and consequently sent the manuscript to her friend, the leader of the Estonian national movement, Carl Robert Jakobson (1841–1882) for editing. Jakobson did nothing with the manuscript for two years. Suburg then sent the manuscript to writer and pedagogue Mihkel Veske (1843–1890) who also held onto the manuscript for a long while. The proofs were sent to Suburg three years after she had written the story.13 Sara Ahmed has claimed that emotions are not a private matter, but “that emotions do things, and work to align individuals with collectives – or bodily 10 11 12

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Jansen, “National Awakening of Estonian Nation”, 84. Jansen, “National Awakening of Estonian Nation”, 85. Endel Nirk (ed.), Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu: XIX sajandi teine pool. Vol. II (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1966), 353. Liina in Finnish: Lilli Suburg, Liina, trans. Lilli Lilius (Helsinki: Otava, 1892). Aino Undla-Põldmäe, “Järelsõna”, in Lilli Suburg, Kogutud kirjatööd, ed. Aino UndlaPõldmäe (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 2002), 473.

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space through social space – through the very intensity of their attachments” and that emotions produce “collective feelings”.14 In that sense, emotional nationalism in “Liina” helped to create collective feelings as a part of Estonian nationalism. In 1877, when Lilli Suburg’s influential short story “Liina” was published, the Estonian national movement was at its peak. The national epic Kalevipoeg (The Son of Kalev), inspired by the Finnish national epic Kalevala, had been published in 1862 by physicist and writer Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882), and the first Estonian national song festival had been held in 1869. The role of the national epic Kalevipoeg in the Estonian national movement was decisive. Toomas Gross stresses its importance: The compilation of national epic Kalevipoeg played a particularly important role in creating the glorious past and constructing the Estonian nationhood. The existence of a national epic has often been regarded by people themselves as a proof of their distinct culture and long history, and thus a legitimisation of their nationhood. This is especially true about relatively small ethnic groups who lack otherwise glorious and heroic history and invent it in a form of an epic.15 The Estonian national movement relied on the European Romantic ideas of the nation that also reached the Baltic provinces in the nineteenth century. Historian Ida Blom has argued that “[i]n the search for national identities, Romantic nationalism in the middle of the nineteenth century in a number of western European countries singled out the peasant population as bearers of age-old traditions” (see also Martin Olin’s, Kristina Malmio’s and Heidi Grönstrand’s chapters in the present volume).16 This was also the case in the Baltic provinces, including Estonia, where national leaders began to see the peasant population as the bearer of Estonianness and traditional national values. The leaders of the national movement were men, and men also defined the goals and aspirations of the movement. The cultural aspirations were important and therefore, the major leaders, Carl Robert Jakobson and Jakob

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Sara Ahmed, “Collective Feelings: Or, The Impressions Left by Others”, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 21 (2) (2004): 26. DOI: 10.1177/0263276404042133, 26–27. Toomas Gross, “Anthropology of collective memory: Estonian national awakening revisited”, Trames 6, no. 4 (2002): 346. Ida Blom, “Gender and Nation in International Comparison”, in Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2000), 11.

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Hurt (1839–1907), stressed the need to promote Estonian culture and traditions. Jakob Hurt, having been inspired by Herder’s ideas about nationality, started collecting folklore, which became an important part of the national awakening.17 Estonian national awakening also meant the emergence of national journalism, literature and music.18 Since Estonian literature was in its initial stage, relatively few prose texts were published and those that were published gained influence.19 Romantic ideas contributed to the rise of national awareness which was also reflected in Estonian literature: “Therefore, at the first stages, before and during the national awakening, literature was clearly the main agent to express the idea of national independence, although mainly in a cultural, economic or personal sense”.20 (Cf. Finnish nationalism, Jens Grandell’s, Kristina Malmio’s, and Heidi Grönstrand’s chapters in the present volume.) The literature of the period of national awakening can be characterized as expressing overhelmingly Estonian patriotic idealism.21 The poet Lydia Koidula (1843–1886) had published several collections of poems, Vainulilled (Meadow Flowers, 1866) and Emajõe ööbik (The Nightingale of Emajõe, 1867), which encouraged national feelings. Koidula’s role cannot be underestimated because she became the symbol of Estonian national awakening, echoed in her pseudonym, Koidula, which means “of the dawn”. Her real name was Lydia Emilie Florentine Jannsen. She also published, translated and adapted short stories promoting national ideas and introduced the themes of anti-slavery and anti-oppression. For example, her short story “Martiniiko ja Korsika” (“Martiniiko and Korsika”, 1874) introduced readers to the ideas of the French Revolution. The story’s ending was censored.22 New themes in Estonian literature in the 1860s and 1870s included national oppression and the fight against it, as well as the idea of national equality.23 A novel by Eduard Bornhöhe, Tasuja (The Avenger), was published in 1880. This

17 18 19

20 21 22 23

Jansen, “National Awakening of Estonian Nation”, 90. Gross, “Anthropology of collective memory”, 346. See also Piret Peiker, “History, Politics and Myth: Lydia Koidula’s Novella Juudit, or the Last Maroons of Jamaica”, in Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia, eds. Linda Kaljundi, Eneken Laanes, and Ilona Pikkanen (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2015), 102. Arne Merilai and Katre Talviste, “A Small Literature in the Service of Nation-Building: the Estonian Case”, Interlitteraria, 24/1 (2019): 247, 252. Merilai and Talviste, “A Small Literature in the Service of Nation-Building: the Estonian Case”, 251. Nirk, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu: XIX sajandi teine pool, 276. Nirk, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu: XIX sajandi teine pool, 362.

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was a Romantic work of historical fiction “which depicted the ancient struggle for liberty in a spirit of youthful enthusiasm”, shaping national ideology.24 For about ten years (from the 1870s until the 1880s) some thirty prose texts were published on the subject of Estonian history.25 The literary fiction was not only published in the form of books. The role of Estonian journalism in publishing prose fiction was important.26 Major newspapers published short stories as sequels although most of these were translations or adaptations up until the 1880s.27 In 1881, Tsar Alexander III came into power and launched a Russification campaign. On this backdrop, the ideas of the national movement remained in the background and a period of a strict regime began. Censorship was intensified: all publications, “including those for the ethnic minorities, fell under the stricter regime of police control and censorship of Alexander III”.28 This also affected literature when, in 1893, the censorship agency banned the publication of historical fiction.29

1

About Lilli Suburg

Lilli Suburg’s life story is remarkable in many ways and her achievements were momentous for a nineteenth-century woman. She was a writer, pedagogue, Estonia’s first professional female journalist and first feminist. She came from Estonian peasant stock (her parents were manor servants who had gained prosperity by renting a part of the estate and who later were able to lease the entire estate). Finally, they bought land of their own and founded a dairy-farming estate. Suburg got the best education available for a woman in Estonia: German-language upper secondary education for girls in the small Estonian town of Pärnu.30 Although the University of Tartu had been established already in 1632, women were not admitted to university. After graduation in 1859, Suburg returned home in poor health. Unable to do physical work and unable to help her parents with farm work, she began

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Merilai and Talviste, “A Small Literature in the Service of Nation-Building: the Estonian Case”, 251. Hasselblatt, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu, 256–57. Nirk, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu. XIX sajandi teine pool, 334. Hasselblatt, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu, 250. Jansen, “National Awakening of Estonian Nation”, 95. Hasselblatt, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu, 257. German was the language of educated people in Estonia.

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Figure 12.1 Lilli Suburg at about the age of 25 Source: Estonian Cultural History Archives at Estonian Literary Museum

teaching her younger sisters and brothers. The period of her illness became the basis for her true intellectual development since she had ample time to read. Books included works by European authors on philosophy, modern education etc. (e.g. Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Pestalozzi).31 These books, along with discussions with her educated friends (among them, the leader of the national movement Carl Robert Jakobson) helped her to develop a liberal and very emancipated worldview that later became the basis of her different activities. In 1865, she started keeping a diary in German (because her schooling had been in German) and wrote her first short story entitled “Liina”, which was published in 1877. Later Suburg published a few more short stories: in 1881 “Maarja ja Eeva” (“Maarja and Eeva”); in 1887 “Leeni, ehk igavene käsualune” (“Leeni, the Eternal Subordinate”, published in Suburg’s magazine Linda); in 1900 “Linda, rahva tütar” (“Linda, the People’s Daughter”, in the newspaper Postimees).

31

Aino Undla-Põldmäe, “Lilli Suburg ja tema ajakiri Linda”, in Aino Undla-Põldmäe, Koidulauliku valgel (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1981), 281.

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In 1880, Suburg became a single mother, adopting an orphan girl whose peasant mother had died while giving birth. When in the same year she was forced to leave her parental home (her father, in a drunken state, had sold the home, leaving the entire family destitute), Suburg started an independent life. She was unmarried and needed an income. Her education enabled her to teach, and in 1882 in Pärnu, she established the private elementary school for Estonian girls based on new and progressive teaching methods, counterbalancing the traditional methods of rote memorization that were widespread in Estonia. Another reason for establishing the school was Suburg’s belief that women’s situation needed to be improved and that this could be done through education. However, the school had to operate in German because “only religious instruction was permitted in the Estonian language”.32 In her school, Suburg encouraged the development of her students’ natural gifts through the application of personal experiences, observations, and critical thinking. She also included physical exercise as a part of the school’s curriculum which was very uncommon for female students during that period.33 After the beginning of Russification in the 1880s, when schools had to adopt Russian as the language of instruction, Suburg legally transferred the school to her adoptive daughter, Anna Wiegandt. Suburg herself was not fluent in Russian. In 1885, Suburg moved the school to another small town, Viljandi, where it remained until it closed in 1899, and where she also began to publish the newspaper Linda in 1887. In 1899, Suburg went to live with her adopted daughter and son-in-law on their farm in the southern Estonian countryside. There she continued her literary work until her old age, writing short stories, journal articles, memoirs and children’s stories.

2

Women and Estonian Nationalism

National movements are often mostly male-centered, confining women to the traditional roles of mothers and caregivers, as researchers studying different nationalisms have reported.34 Women’s importance is usually emphasized in 32

33 34

Sirje Tamul and Andra Lätt, “Lilli (Caroline) Suburg”, in A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, eds. Fransisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, and Anna Loutfi (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 545. Eva Einasto, “Lilli Suburg pedagoogina”, in Eesti kooli ja pedagoogilise mõtte ajaloo küsimusi, ed. Aleksander Elango (Tartu: Tartu Riiklik Ülikool, 1969), 52. For example Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 2003).

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the context of the home and motherhood, with the task of rearing worthy citizens for the nation (see also Jules Kielmann’s and Tiina Kinnunen’s chapters in the present volume). Historian Anna Veronika Wendland has emphasized that during the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the national awakening began to emerge in Eastern Europe, tsarist Russia offered women many more opportunities for achieving financial and cultural autonomy than did contemporary Western societies.35 However, this was different in the Baltic provinces, especially in Estonia, where intellectuals and the emerging middle class assumed the traditional Baltic-German conservative gender ideology and moral norms. Estonian art historian Katrin Kivimaa has written that in the context of national movement, the emerging Estonian middle class “took over the dominating bourgeois moral code and this – in addition to differentiation mechanisms existing in village culture – laid the foundation for the patriarchal nature of the national awakening movement”.36 Therefore, the Estonian national movement can be described as male-centered, leaving traditional gender roles untouched.37 Historian Sirje Kivimäe has also characterized the Estonian national movement in the nineteenth century as “entirely men’s business”. Different organizations, like the Vanemuise Society, played a central role in the national movement, but all large organizations had only male members.38 In addition, until 1880, women singers could not participate in the first Estonian song festivals, which held a central place in the national movement.39 Unlike in Latvia, where women participated in song festivals, bourgeois moral rules were very predominant in Estonia.40 In the plays of Lydia Koidula, which were staged by the Vanemuise Society, the role of women was played by men until 1880. However, in professional theatre women were already performing, and even the Estonian Literary Society (Eesti Kirjameeste Selts) which was important in the

35

36 37 38

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Anna Veronika Wendland, “The Russian Empire and its Western Borderlands: National Historiographies and Their ‘Others’ in Russia, the Baltics and the Ukraine”, in The Contested Nation: Ethnicity: Class, Reliogion and Gender in National Histories, eds. Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2011), 425. Katrin Kivimaa, Rahvuslik ja modernne naiselikkus eesti kunstis 1850–2000 (Tartu & Tallinn: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2009), 48. Kivimaa, Rahvuslik ja modernne naiselikkus eesti kunstis 1850–2000, 41, 48. Sirje Kivimäe, “Esimesed naisseltsid Eestis ja nende tegelased”, in Seltsid ja ühiskonna muutumine: Talupojaühiskonnast rahvusriigini, eds. Ea Jansen and Jaanus Arukaevu (Tallinn & Tartu: Eesti Ajalooarhiiv, TA Ajaloo Instituut, 1995), 121. Kivimäe, “Esimesed naisseltsid”, 122. Kivimaa, Rahvuslik ja modernne naiselikkus eesti kunstis 1850–2000, 48.

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national movement, did not accept Koidula as a member until 1874, although she had long been known for her literary production.41 One of the reasons why women were neglected in the national movement was that participation in public life brought women out into the public arena and thereby put women’s femininity and traditional gender roles and moral norms “at risk”.42 It was not considered appropriate for a woman to appear in the public sphere as independent agents. This also was the reason why the poetry collections of Lydia Koidula were published anonymously, without citing the author’s name. Likewise, the views about the women’s role of the leaders of the national movement were conservative; for example, national leader Carl Robert Jakobson considered home and family as the proper sphere for women. Women’s tasks were to provide support for their husbands and raise children in a national spirit.43 The conservative gender perceptions of the male leaders of the Estonian national movement reflected the gender ideas of the Baltic-German petite bourgeoisie. Historian Sirje Tamul has claimed that under Baltic-German cultural influence, the gender ideology in Estonia was more conservative than that of Germany itself, relegating women to roles comparable to those of children.44 While feminism was very visible in European countries both in the realm of political activity and as part of the intellectual culture at the end of the nineteenth century,45 Estonian feminism did not yet exist (as intellectual discourse nor as a women’s rights movement) in the nineteenth century – it did not begin until the early twentieth century. Although social historian Heide Whelan has argued that the ideas of women’s emancipation had to some extent spread into the Baltic countries at the end of the nineteenth century, they were related to the Baltic-German context; moreover, these ideas were not strongly related to political and social demands, but were limited to demands of better education for women.46

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Kivimäe, “Esimesed naisseltsid”, 121. Kivimäe, “Esimesed naisseltsid”, 122. Kivimäe, “Esimesed naisseltsid”, 124–25. Sirje Tamul, “Saateks”, in Vita Academica, Vita Feminea, ed. Sirje Tamul (Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 1999), 13. Rachel G. Fuchs and Victoria E. Thompson, Women in Nineteenth Century Europe (Hampshire, New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2005), 167–68. Heide Whelan, “The Debate on Women’s Education in the Baltic Provinces, 1850–1905”, in Bevölkerungsverschiebungen und Sozialer Wandel in den Baltischen Provinzen Russlands 1850–1914, eds. Gert von Pistohlkors, Andrejs Plakans, and Paul Kaegbein (Lüneburg: Institut Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, 1995), 169, 180.

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Therefore, Suburg was alone in her feminism from the very beginning of her public activity, she was merely a solitary thinker and a female intellectual, and her feminist ideas were not understood by the Estonian community, nor by the Baltic-German community, whose gender perceptions were even more conservative. Suburg’s ideas about women’s emancipation and rights of which she wrote in “Liina” and in her other short stories, like “Leeni” (1887), and also in her journalistic articles, were ahead of their time since there were not enough educated Estonian women and men who could understand such ideas, and newspapers did not yet write about such issues. The discussion about women’s education and emancipation did not emerge in Estonian newspapers until the 1880s.47 The education of most Estonian women and men at that time was three years in a local school; that level of education was not enough to enable an understanding of the ideas of feminism or emancipation. That was also the reason why later, when Suburg began to publish her magazine Linda (1887), her feminist and other emancipatory ideas, regarding for example women’s education, were not understood and the magazine acquired an undeserved negative reputation.

3

The Background of “Liina” as a Literary Text

Literary researcher Aino Undla-Põldmäe has called “Liina” “the first attempt to create an original Estonian novel”.48 “Liina” as a literary text has a special place because most previous comprehensive attempts at writing novels in Estonian were actually adapted translations, not original creative works, like “Liina”.49 “Liina” is also important as the first Estonian literary text belonging to school of realism50 as “Liina”, based on Suburg’s diary, is written in a realistic style in terms of both narrative structure and the author’s voice and point of view. In addition, as the author, Suburg has inserted some footnotes into the text claiming that the events she is narrating are true, i.e. that the events actually happened as she describes them.

47 48 49 50

Eve Annuk, “Sooküsimus eesti ajakirjanduses 19. sajandi lõpul ja Lilli Suburgi ‘uus naine’”, Ariadne Lõng, no. 1–2 (2012): 65–81, 68. Aino Undla, “Naiste emantsipatsiooni pioneer. Lilli Suburg C.R. Jakobsoni võitluskaaslasena”, Järvalane, March 8, 1947. Aino Undla-Põldmäe, “Lilli Suburgi ‘Liina’ Jakobsoni ‘Sakala’ ja ‘Revalsche Zeitungi’ poleemikas”, in Undla-Põldmäe, Koidulauliku valgel, 274. Hasselblatt, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu, 278.

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Figure 12.2 The front cover of the first edition of “Liina”, 1877 Photo: Digital Archive Digar

Aino Undla-Põldmäe has claimed that it took about a month to write the manuscript.51 This was a short period of time, but given that Suburg used her own diary as the basis for the text, it is plausible. Although the diary was written in German, it provided the form and structure for “Liina”, which is written in Estonian. The story was already written in a diary as a personal memoir of childhood and Suburg took inspiration from it, sometimes literally. Even most of the characters’ names have not been changed; Suburg used either actual first names or the first letters of the names.52 There are also differences between the diary and the short story, such as some motifs and actions that have not been described in the diary or some 51 52

Aino Undla, “Uusi andmeid Lilli Suburgist”, Eesti Kirjandus no. 8 (1935): 351. Undla, “Uusi andmeid Lilli Suburgist”, 351–53.

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characteristics of the protagonist Liina, who represents Suburg’s alter ego. For example, Liina does not wear a scarf on her face because she does not have a facial defect like Suburg had. Therefore, Liina represents the ideal femininity that Suburg herself was sometimes concerned with. In her diary, Suburg had expressed the desire to appear without a scarf, but feared that it would make her ugly.53 Likewise, in real life Suburg never married, remaining a single and becoming a single mother when she adopted a baby girl. The diary also lacks national ideology,54 but “Liina” is a narrative that serves the national idea.55 Aino Undla-Põldmäe has also claimed that the plot of “Liina” resembles Samuel Richardson’s love story of a young girl who reaches a happy end after a life of difficulties. But considering its national ideas, the story was much more courageous than was its contemporary context which aspired as its goal towards reconciliation of Estonian national interests with Baltic-German landlords.56 The story was critical of the social hierarchy in which Estonians were the lowest class and the Baltic-German nobility was the ruling class. However, that was one of the reasons why the text (the 1877 edition) was censored: some parts of the text where Suburg described the difficult situation of Estonian peasants and their cruel physical punishment were censored. The censor deleted the end of the seventh chapter where Suburg described the protagonist’s encounter with the innocent serf who was beaten at the manor, and part of the fourth chapter was also censored, where Suburg described the difficult situation of the bondservant.57 Besides, the title page of the 1877 edition of “Liina” referred to censorship: on the reverse side of the title page was inscribed with a notice that the story is permitted by censorship, dated July 25, 1877 in Riga.

4

Femininity, National Sentiment and Loss in “Liina”

As researchers dealing with emotions as forms of discourse have noted, “emotions as discourses do stem from particular intellectual and historical circumstances” referring to the importance of “contextual awareness”.58 In that sense, 53 54 55 56 57 58

Unpublished source: Lilli Suburg, Diary. Entry October 31, 1865. Fund 122, m 4:1. Estonian Cultural History Archives of Estonian Literary Museum. Undla-Põldmäe, “Järelsõna”, 473. Undla-Põldmäe, “Järelsõna”, 469. Undla, “Uusi andmeid Lilli Suburgist”, 353. Nirk, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu: XIX sajandi teine pool, 353. Marculescu and Morand-Metivier, “Introduction”, 5.

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“Liina” as the emotional discourse stems from the ideas and sentiment of Estonian national awakening, affiliated with the literary texts that construct nation and national subjects through literature. But the national subject in “Liina” is not gender neutral: “Liina” represents the female voice of Estonian nationalism highlighting the gendering of the national subject. Moreover, this national subject is also feminist-oriented. In a sense, Suburg created and incarnated in the form of the protagonist Liina a feminist-minded female character, whose feminism and national identity are tightly intertwined. At a time when the Estonian national movement was male-centered and national ideas represented men’s perceptions about nation (and also about the role of women), Suburg created through her literary character an alternative nationalism based on feminine and feminist values and ideas. Suburg gave the nation a female voice creating a feminine nation, and thus, through Liina as a literary character, a woman became the bearer of national values, ideas and emotions. As a literary text, “Liina” is the autobiographical first-person narrated story of an Estonian peasant girl who underwent a German-language education. The story begins with the foreword by Suburg in which she explains the autobiographical background of her story and recalls events from her childhood. She explains why she has written the story and hopes that the reader will be understanding and emotionally supportive toward her and her love of Estonian women: “Dear Estonian sisters, please be kind toward me and please accept my love toward you because that’s the greatest reward for me”.59 (Cf. Amalie von Helvig’s address to her German “sisters”, Jules Kielmann’s chapter in the present volume.) She also admits that her friend encouraged her to face the public and to publish the story. The reader is called upon to feel empathy toward the story of Liina. Suburg’s emotional strategy is visible in the construction of the text already from the very beginning when, in her foreword, she professes mutual love between herself as an author and her readers. Love is the precondition of understanding the story and Suburg’s ideas. Actually, Suburg assumes women as her imagined readers and that is why she addresses them as sisters. Furthermore, the way Liina tells her story is emotionally charged. National feelings, like feelings of inferiority or pride in being an Estonian, are at the very heart of the story. The story of Liina begins with the representation of her childhood memoirs. The text is lively and her storytelling is emotional. Liina does not hide her

59

Lilli Suburg, “Liina: Ühe eesti tütarlapse elulugu, tema enese jutustatud”, in Lilli Suburg, Kogutud kirjatööd, ed. Aino Undla-Põldmäe (Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 2002), 11. All the translations from “Liina” are my own.

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emotions in the context of different situations but rather expresses them explicitly: she cries, cries with joy, blushes, complains, she is afraid etc. For example, when Liina had to leave her childhood friend Jansu, she was heartbroken and grieving: “I did not like food or drink, I was looking for a most quiet corner of the room and I sat there for hours thinking and also crying quietly”.60 Negative emotions are linked with the way peasants were treated. For example, Liina tells that she became aware of the class differences when she saw her father walking humbly, hat in hand, behind the manor owner: “I had never before felt such blushing and the tears in my eyes as now”.61 The story describes with emotional intensity the feeling of being an Estonian, since from the early childhood Liina has understood the class differences between Estonians and Germans. When she was accepted into the Germanlanguage school in the town, the female principal looked down disparagingly on her as a child from the countryside. The principal even threatened to throw her out of school if she did not learn well.62 Describing how she was admitted to the school, Liina realized that class differences were obstacles to her studies. She relates that in the second lesson, when she did not understand the teacher’s questions, she “was so awful with me and said that I was admitted to school just to test me, and if I do not study hard, I will be kicked out of school”.63 Then Liina started to learn diligently with “trembling fear” and was soon praised for it. A year and a half later, she was held up as an example to the other children, “who always had looked at me arrogantly as if I was a kind of lower creature in comparison with them, whose parents were of a higher class”.64 Liina admits that teachers and fellow students, with their contempt towards her as an Estonian peasant girl, awakened ambition in her “and I was driven by this ambition all those four years”.65 However, she had difficulties learning German, but she was glad to do it because German could give her access to higher social status. Being called 60

61 62 63

64 65

The original reads: “mul ei tahtnud söök ega jook maitseda, ma otsisin kõige vagusamad toanurgad üles ja istusin seal tundide kaupa mõteldes ja ka tasakesi nuttes”. Suburg, “Liina”, 26. The original reads: “ilmaski polnud ma sealjuures nõnda puna palgesse ja vett silmi tunnud tõusvat kui nüüd. […]” Suburg, “Liina”, 30. Suburg “Liina”, 35. The original reads: “taples ta minuga nii rängasti ja ütles mulle, et mind muidu prooviks siin peetakse, ja kui ma mitte usin ja virk õppima ei ole, mind välja visatakse”. Suburg, “Liina”, 35. The original reads: “kes alati uhkusega minu peale olid vaadanud, nagu oleksin ma nende vastu, kelle vanemad ometigi kõik saksad olid, nagu nuustikas”. Suburg, “Liina”, 35. The original reads: “ja see auahnus oli mind kõik neli aastat taga kihutanud”. Suburg, “Liina”, 35.

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“Bauermädchen” (i.e. Estonian peasant girl) was disparaging and it was possible through German-language education to aquire higher social status, not to remain a “Bauermädchen”. However, sometimes she was sad that she had to learn in a foreign language and complained to her friend Anna: “Oh, why aren’t we also taught in our native language like German children, because then our learning would be much easier!”66 Then Liina met Friedrich, a German, and fell in love with him. At her home, however, a beloved childhood friend, Jansu, awaited her return. Thus, Liina had two admirers from whom to choose. Although she loved Friedrich, she understood that marrying him would mean that she would have to become Germanised and that was unacceptable for her: “My inner person was like torn apart”.67 Liina understood, that if she marries Friedrich she will be Germanised “and it would mean that I would be pleased with the slavery of my nation and my fellow countrymen”.68 In addition, Friedrich’s mother was against the marriage because Estonian people were, for her, a class of despised serfs. A situation arises – a turning point in the narrative – when Liina accidentally heard Friedrich’s parents talking and referring to her as a member of the serf nation. Liina was visiting her friend Friederike, the sister of Liina’s beloved Friedrich, for several days. The morning after the party, Liina secretly overheard Friedrich’s mother, who was arguing with her husband and resolutely opposing the marriage between Liina and Friedrich: “I could never bear it if my son marries a farm girl! I would die from this shame!”69 And although Friedrich’s father claimed that education will lift Liina above her background and besides, she is pretty, the mother resisted: “my heart could never bear that my son should speak in this despised language spoken by my slaves, with us as her future parents-in-law”.70 Liina’s emotions were filled with pain instead of the love and hope she had felt before; now she felt like she was thrown into a grave “into a black, ugly grave where I was suddenly thrown in from the heaven filled with angels

66 67 68 69 70

“Oh, miks ei õpetata meid ka meie emakeeles nagu sakste lapsi, et meil seeläbi õppimine ka nii kergeks läheks kui neil!” Suburg, “Liina”, 33. The original reads: “minu seespidine inimene oli nagu lõhki tõmmatud”. Suburg, “Liina”, 67. The original reads: “ning seda pealegi seesugusel mõõdul, et minul oma rahva ja suguvendade orjaseisusest rõõm oleks”. Suburg, “Liina”, 68. “Seda ei saaks ma ilmaski ära kannatama, kui minu poeg ühe talutüdruku enesele naiseks võtaks! Ma sureksin selle häbi pärast ära!” Suburg, “Liina”, 73. “Minu süda ilmaski ei kannata, kui minu poeg selles põlatud keeles, mis minu orjad räägivad, peaks oma äiavanematega rääkima”. Suburg, “Liina”, 74.

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songs”.71 Thus, Liina attempts to solve the dilemma: love or nation. Love for her national background is stronger than her love for the German man, although she vows to love him forever: “Friedrich, I have loved you, I will love you and will never forget this love”.72 But she cannot forget her national background: “the roots of my heart are too embedded in the stump from where I have sprouted and therefore I can’t let myself be separated from my parents and yours, Jansu”.73 Finally, the decision to stay Estonian and give up her love makes her happy because she will be Estonian. Liina marries the Estonian man Jansu and the epilogue describes happy Estonian family life about fifteen years later. Aino Undla-Põldmäe has claimed that since “Liina” is a short story based on a national idea, then its central idea is reflected in the plot of the story: “from the two young men of different national background the German man is abandoned and Estonian man is accepted”.74 The whole story is built around the opposition between remaining Estonian or becoming German. The national conflict between Estonians as native inhabitants of Estonia and Germans as landlords is represented from the viewpoint of Liina, who understands the very unjust situation of Estonians. Liina’s first negative encounter with BalticGerman landlords was the situation when she rode in a sleigh together with her female friend and found an Estonian peasant man on the road who had been seriously beaten for punishment (Estonian peasants had to work for their landlords, or be physically punished). Liina was very disturbed and angry by the situation and began to understand the social injustice: “My heart trembled all this time like an aspen leaf. It was the first time that I saw such a crime by landlords”.75 For Liina, the situation was very disturbing: she described it emotionally as “scary”. Even later Liina could not rid herself of her anger and she could not sleep remembering the situation. Identifying with the peasants and being compassionate with them, because this was her family background, she felt

71 72 73

74 75

The original reads: “mustas, koledas surnuhauas, kuhu sisse mina äkitselt ingli lauludega täidetud taevast olin visatud”. Suburg, “Liina”, 74–75. “Friedrich, ma olen sind armastanud, armastan sind veelgi, ja ei unusta seda armastust iialgi”. Suburg, “Liina”, 79. The original reads: “mu südame juured on selle kännu küljes ülearu kinni, kust ma olen võrsunud, et ma iialgi minu ja sinu vanematest, Jansu, ennast täitsa lahutada lasta ei võiks”. Suburg, “Liina”, 79. Undla-Põldmäe, “Järelsõna”, 469–70. “Mu süda värises kõik selle aja kui haavaleht tuule käes. See oli esimene kord, kui niisugust sakste kuritegu nägin”. Suburg, “Liina”, 51.

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how unjustly they were being treated and that understanding no longer subsided. Liina was not merely a passive passer-by: with her female friend Anna, she helped the beaten man and his wife to get home; they also made arrangements for food for the man’s starving family. As an author, Suburg describes the situation using the dialogue where Liina and Anna are both active agents and decision-makers trying to improve the situation. The emotional assessment of the situation is equivalent to the emotional tone of the text where Liina as protagonist understands national oppression and wants to change the situation. National feelings are also linked with nature: nature can be a consolation, a source of positive emotions and a connection to the Estonian nation. Nature, like flowers or forest fortifies Liina’s confidence regarding her national identity because nature reminds her of home and her childhood and her national belonging. For example, Liina compares fir-trees to national heroes when she sees “a big fir-tree which had stretched out its strong branches, like kalevlane [being like Kalev – a national hero] arms, to embrace a small fir-tree”.76 National emotions are linked with honour, pride and shame. For example, Liina calls to remain Estonian despite the impossibility of achieving higher social status: Oh, you weak human beings all, how you all deceive yourself if you think you can acquire a higher social status through being close to a person of a higher social class! Only I alone can honour myself through my thoughts and lifestyle, but the person who does not want to be herself but tries to become a member of the other class, is worthy of disdain. And how frequently one can find such people in the world! How many Estonian men and women are under German pride!77 The purpose of this emotional appeal to readers is to make them understand that the hope of moving up in the social hierarchy through Germanisation is self-delusional, and that one should be proud of being Estonian. When Liina 76 77

The original reads: “üht suurt kuuske, mis oma tugevaid oksi, nagu mõni kalevlane oma käsivarsi, nagu kaitstes väiksema kuusekese üle välja oli sirutanud”. Suburg, “Liina”, 48. “Oh nõrgad inimeselapsed kõik, kuidas petate iseennast seeläbi, kui teie arvate ühe kõrgema seisuse inimese ligiolemise, tema paistuse läbi paremaks, kõrgemaks saada, kui teie ilma selleta olete! Üksi mina ise võin oma vaimu ja eluviiside poolest ennast au sisse tõsta, au sees üleval hoida; aga põlastaval viisil alandab see inimene ise ennast, kes nõnda ühe teise seisuse paistuse alla poeb, et ta seal oma iseoleku üsna ära kaotab – ja kui palju niisuguseid varjuta inimesi ei liperda mööda maailma? Oh kui palju on sakste uhkuse paiste all eesti õdesid ja vendi!” Suburg, “Liina”, 36.

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was going to school, her parents came to visit her and spoke with her in Estonian. For Liina, it was shameful because Estonian was a despised language and the other parents spoke German: “I have to speak to them in this bad native language that is despised by the townspeople”.78 Likewise, the five-year-long school experience is overshadowed by the feeling of inferiority due to Liina’s national background. In the story, remaining an Estonian requires sacrifices: Liina has to give up her love. Her personal loss is compensated by national feelings – pride in remaining an Estonian. Moreover – she will find another love, an Estonian man with whom she will become happy and establish an exemplary Estonian family where the husband will respect his wife who supports his ideals and the children will be raised in national spirit. It is in the last few pages of the story where Suburg’s national and gender ideals are explicitly expressed in the example of true Estonian family life. Liina’s husband, understanding the national ideals, addresses Estonian women to awaken them: “When will our women awaken from their slavery and embrace their real importance: to be supportive of their husbands, as are you! Liina, invite companions for yourself! Invite, perhaps somebody who has concealed herself among the Germans will hear your call!”79 The words of Liina’s husband about women being supportive of their husbands refer to the idea of educated women (wives) who are capable of understanding the ideals of Estonian national movement and hence the national activity of Estonian men. Therefore, it was necessary to educate women. Suburg saw Estonian women’s situation sometimes as slavery, since women were destined to work very hard without the possibility of getting an education and, through this, a better life. Since women’s education was very important for Suburg – and Liina as an example of ideal Estonian woman was educated too – Suburg used her story to explain the ideas of women’s education. Suburg hoped that through education Germanised Estonian women would find their true national identity as Estonians. At the end, Liina addresses all Estonian women as her sisters as Suburg did in the preface (Liina says: “Dear Estonian sisters!”80) and advises them to demand Estonian schools for girls, to demand a better future for them and

78 79

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Suburg, “Liina”, 54. “Millal tõuseb ka meie naisterahvaste sugu orjapõlvest oma õigele seisukohale: oma meeste toeks, nii kuidas sina minul oled! Liina, hüüa omale seltsi! Hüüa, ehk kuuleb ka veel mõni neist, kes enda oma rahva eest sakslaste sekka ära peitnud!” Suburg, “Liina”, 103. “Armsad eesti õed!” Suburg, “Liina”, 105.

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the right to be an Estonian. If women become better educated, this will also give Estonian men the opportunity to marry Estonian women instead of seeking a wife among strangers. Even those women who have been Germanised should turn to Estonians and also to Estonian men. Estonian women should help Estonian men like Finnish women have helped Finnish men. This final page of the story is written in the style of a newspaper article. It has a clear purpose: to raise women’s national self-awareness and self-consciousness through emotional support since Suburg understood the women’s important role in national movement. It also creates an understanding of feminist sisterhood that should unite all Estonian women. The notion of “sisterhood”, which Suburg used, was quite exceptional in the Estonian context and was based on Suburg’s feminist understanding of mutual emotional support between women. Suburg saw women as independent agents capable of independent decisions and responsibility. Literary researcher Cornelius Hasselblatt has argued that “in the last chapter, the story acquires the character of a political manifest when the author speaks directly to her ‘Estonian sisters’ and calls on them to educate themselves for supporting their husbands in the fight against the foreign influence”. He concludes that in Estonia, nobody had written about such problems in such a way before.81 However, regarding the story’s central idea it becomes clear that becoming truly Estonian requires sacrifices and/or losses. On the individual level, it means the personal losses, as Liina had to sacrifice her true love. But on a more symbolic level, it can be interpreted as the inevitable way of becoming a nation: something needs to be abandoned to form a new ethnic community since the Estonian state did not yet exist; it was not even dreamt of. In that sense, the loss is like a type of purgatory through which it is possible to build a new ethnic identity.

5

The Reception of “Liina”

The publication of “Liina” made Suburg famous as a female writer and a public figure.82 Estonian-language reception of “Liina” was very positive. The reviewers stressed the originality of the text and also approved of the national ideology expressed in the text. For example, the newspaper Perno Postimees praised “Liina” as a good work, praising especially the fact that it is not

81 82

Hasselblatt, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu, 256. Undla-Põldmäe, “Järelsõna”, 474.

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a translation but an original creation. The review highlighted the love for Estonia in the book and suggested that Estonian women should take this as an example.83 The newspaper Sakala Lisaleht also praised the book for not being a translation but instead an original creation based on the life of Estonians, and recommended that parents give it to their daughters to read.84 However, the German-language reception was very critical, it saw the Estonian nationalism expressed in “Liina” as dangerous for established social order and for the supremacy of Baltic-German nobility. The author even criticized the author’s name, Suburg, as possibly being a pseudonym for a man, national leader of Carl Robert Jakobson.85 This attack prompted Suburg to publish a protest in Estonian in the newspaper Sakala to defend “Liina”, because German newspapers did not publish her protest.86 It has also been claimed that the landlords and pastors tried to prevent the spread of “Liina” because they did not want servants or teachers to read it because of its nationalism.87 In an article defending “Liina” Suburg protested against the fact that German newspapers did not publish her response to criticism of “Liina”. She believed that the critics had not even read the book, judging from their criticisms. She also protested against the fact that German newspapers were unjust toward Estonian literature and authors, and against that they considered Jakobson, not Suburg, to be the true author of the book. In particular she protested against the assertion that the main idea of the book – the awakening of the sense of nationality of an Estonian woman – was perceived as hatred and an incitement against Baltic Germans in newspapers.88 This was the first time in the history of Estonian literature that an author stepped forward to defend her work in public,89 and it placed Suburg, as an author and as a woman, in an exceptional position. Suburg took on the role of a public figure, positioning herself in a male/masculine role in the context of Estonian society. Even ten years later, when Suburg began publishing her magazine Linda, the critics of the magazine criticized her public role as 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

“Omalt maalt. Uued raamatud”, Perno Postimees ehk Näddalileht, no. 17, April 28, 1878, 135. “Uued raamatud”, Sakala Lisaleht, no. 8, April 15, 1878, 4. Undla-Põldmäe, “Lilli Suburgi ‘Liina’ Jakobsoni ‘Sakala’ ja ‘Revalsche Zeitungi’ poleemikas”, 275. Lilli Suburg, “Kaebdus Revalsche Zeitungi üle”, Sakala Lisaleht, no. 10, March 10, 1879, 1. Undla-Põldmäe, “Järelsõna”, 474. Suburg, “Kaebdus Revalsche Zeitungi üle”, 1. Unpublished source: Aino Undla, Esimesed eesti naiskirjanikud, nende kujunemine, anded ja ideaalid, 1935. Papers of Rudolf and Aino Põldmäe, reg. 1992/70, 77. Estonian Cultural History Archives of Estonian Literary Museum.

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a woman editor and public figure since it was considered unfeminine: “Think yourself, Miss Lilli Suburg, whether a woman can take on responsibilities in her life that will force her to become a public figure!”90 Moreover, the debate about “Liina” further increased its popularity.91 The reception of “Liina” in Finland was very good, e.g. the newspaper Keski-Suomi wrote that the story is very well written and expressed love for the Estonian nation.92 Even years later after the publication of “Liina”, another Estonian critic attacked it. In 1903, the journalist Anton Jürgenstein (1861–1933, Estonian journalist, literary critic and politician) published an article about female characters in Estonian literature. He unjustly criticized the character of Liina as being a German, because by her very nature, she is too emotional and resembles Werther’s Lotte in Goethe’s story; she is too intellectual and does not see the problems of real life. In his opinion, the work with its unheard-of courageous thoughts received too much attention and respect from the public though it was not worth it.93 Although Jürgenstein’s views were very unjust, they subsequently influenced the reception of “Liina” and even the reception of Suburg’s entire literary production. Perhaps the fact that “Liina” brought up gendered nationalism and called for equal rights for women with men was seen as a threat to perceived national unity and perceived male predominance of nationalism.

6

Concluding Remarks

“Liina” is a literary text in which national sentiment is used to construct a national feeling – being proud of being Estonian, i.e. as a member of the Estonian national community. It represents the female voice of Estonian nationalism and its role in the Estonian national movement was important. As a literary text, “Liina” creates a textual space for expressing the national feelings. At the same time, the nationalism evoked by the text is also constructed through the criterion of loss – to establish true national identity (being an Estonian), one has to give up something, exemplified in the story by a love relationship. Thus, through her literary protagonist Liina, Suburg connects the

90 91 92 93

“Uued raamatud”, Tallinna Sõber, no. 49, December 12, 1887, 1. Nirk, Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu: XIX sajandi teine pool, 355. R., “Kirjallisuutta”, Keski-Suomi, no. 142, December 5, 1893, 2. Anton Jürgenstein, “Naesterahva-kujud Eesti algupäralises kirjanduses”, Linda, no. 6 (1903): 96, 98.

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meaning of nationalism to loss. However, the personal loss, which is the prerequisite of being Estonian in the text, can be symbolically understood as a way of becoming a nation by giving up something to create a new ethnic community. For example, to choose to remain Estonian, one has to sacrifice the path to social mobility and Germanisation. In its historical context, the text played an important role in constructing Estonian nationality and also made visible the gendering of the national subject, making women national subjects.

Acknowledgements This chapter received financial support from the European Union Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies, TK145). It is associated with the research project EKM 8-2/20/1 (Sociality of Life Writing and Literary Culture: an Archival Perspective).

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. “Collective Feelings: Or, The Impressions Left by Others”. Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 21, no. 2 (2004): 25–42. DOI: 10.1177/0263276404042133, 25–42. Annuk, Eve. “Sooküsimus eesti ajakirjanduses 19. sajandi lõpul ja Lilli Suburgi ‘uus naine’”. Ariadne Lõng: nais- ja meesuuringute ajakiri, no. 1–2 (2012), 65–81. Blom, Ida. “Gender and Nation in International Comparison”. In Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, 3–26. Oxford, New York: Berg, 2000. Einasto, Eva. “Lilli Suburg pedagoogina”. In Eesti kooli ja pedagoogilise mõtte ajaloo küsimusi I, edited by Aleksander Elango, 41–58. Tartu: Tartu Riiklik Ülikool, 1969. Fuchs, Rachel G. and Victoria E. Thompson. Women in Nineteenth Century Europe. Hampshire, New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2005. Gross, Toomas. “Anthropology of collective memory: Estonian national awakening revisited”. Trames 6, no. 4 (2002): 342–54. Hasselblatt, Cornelius. Eesti kirjanduse ajalugu. Tallinn, Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2016. Jansen, Ea. “National Awakening of Estonian Nation”. In Estonia: Identity and Independence, edited by Jean-Jacques Subrenat, 83–105. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2004. Jürgenstein, Anton. “Naesterahva-kujud Eesti algupäralises kirjanduses”. Linda 1903, no. 3, 41–42; no. 6, 96–98; no. 7, 116–17; no. 9, 149–50; no. 12, 202–03; no. 17, 299–300; no. 21, 366–67.

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Chapter 13

Alexandra Gripenberg and Lost Faith in National Belonging Tiina Kinnunen

The Swedish language and the Swedish mindset constitute the most dangerous enemy of the Finnish people (=nationalism), worse than Russia. And at the same time when I realize this, I have the feeling that something is breaking inside myself, I condemn myself to cosmopolitanism, because I can never become united through flesh and blood with the Finnish Finland. “I have to die in the desert”.1

∵ People’s experience of national belonging was a powerful phenomenon in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and influenced both how they saw themselves and how they narrated who they were to others. The above quotation, excerpted from a letter by Finnish Alexandra Gripenberg (1857–1913), articulates in particular how complex the experiences could be when both inclusion and exclusion – belonging and not belonging – were in operation at the same time. In Gripenberg’s life, work for national progress was intertwined with the women’s cause, and the present chapter examines how emotions played into this interconnected activism of hers in a period from the late 1880s onwards, when nationalism and feminism actively moulded Finnish society. Nationalism spoke to both genders, and we have ample examples

1 “Ruotsin kieli ja mieli on Suomen kansan (=kansallisuusaatteen) vaarallisin vihollinen, pahempi kuin Wenäjä. Ja samalla kun käsitän sen, tuntuu kuin jos jotakin minussa särkyisi, tuomitsisin itseni kosmopoliittisuuteen, sillä ett kött och blod med det finska Finland kan jag aldrig bli. ‘Minun täytyy kuolla erämaassa’”. Letter, Gripenberg to Hilda Käkikoski, November 16, 1905 (Gripenberg’s Collection, Archives on Literature and Cultural History of the Finnish Literature Society, 304:13). If not further specified, all translations from Finnish and Swedish into English in this chapter are my own. The letter was written partly Finnish, partly in Swedish.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004467323_015

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of how women’s activities unfolded in several ways to promote the national cause everywhere in Europe (see Jules Kielmann’s chapter in the present volume).2 Even feminist activism, the main purpose of which was to achieve gender equality, was known to intertwine with a national struggle that united men and women (cf. Eve Annuk’s chapter in the present volume), and at times, national identity took priority over gender identity, as Ida Blom has observed.3 For instance, Finnish feminists were actively participating in the campaign against Russian efforts, beginning in the late nineteenth century and onwards, to put an end to Finland’s autonomous status within the Russian Empire. Alexandra Gripenberg was an author and journalist, and in 1907, she belonged to the historic group of first female MPs, as women made their way into the Finnish Parliament.4 As a politician and feminist, she represented the so-called Fennoman movement that identified with the Finnish-speaking population of the country. At the same time, she was renowned across borders as “a truly international networker”5 in the non-Socialist international feminist community. Gripenberg took up a position “at the crossroads of identities” in many respects. In addition to balancing her national and international commitments, she was a Swedish-speaking Fennoman – comparable with E.F. Jahnsson, discussed by Heidi Grönstrand in the present volume – and an aristocrat working for the ordinary people.6 During her lifetime, Gripenberg’s public image was that of a powerful and strong-willed woman who did not shy away from hard work, both intellectual and organizational, to reach her goals, on the one hand, and to confront her opponents on various battlefields, on the other. Later research focuses in particular on the suffrage issue, in which she did not favour a radical 2 See also e.g. Eira Juntti, Gender and Nationalism in Finland in the Early Nineteenth Century (Binghampton University: Doctoral thesis, 2004). 3 E.g. Ida Blom, “Gender and Nation in International Comparison”, in Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2000), 3–26. 4 The only extensive biography on Gripenberg is Tyyni Tuulio’s work that came out in 1959, characterized by a highly appreciative attitude of hers towards Gripenberg and representing feminist memory culture with focus on admiration and gratitude. Tuulio, Aleksandra Gripenberg: Kirjailija, taistelija, ihminen (Porvoo, Helsinki: Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1959). 5 Susan Zimmermann, “The Challenge of Multinational Empire for the International Women’s Movement”, in Globalizing Feminisms 1789–1945, ed. Karen Offen (London: Routledge, 2010), 161. 6 Tiina Kinnunen, “The National and International in Making a Feminist: the case of Alexandra Gripenberg”, Women’s History Review 25, no. 4 (2016): 652–70.

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Figure 13.1

Kinnunen

Alexandra Gripenberg with friends in restaurant Alppila in Helsinki in 1906. Gripenberg in the middle of the photo, to the left of the flowers. KIAK2008:33:3

reform, in contrast to more progressive feminists.7 The present chapter does not challenge these images as they truly present relevant aspects of her public appearances and attitudes. Instead, it looks more closely into how Gripenberg expressed her private, personal feelings as she balanced her interconnected, sometimes even conflicting, roles. The chapter asks how emotions informed her activism. My argument is that, ultimately, after years of hard and successful work as a feminist intellectual and political activist, Gripenberg’s thoughts and feelings were filled with a sense of loss. As she wrote in the above-cited letter to a close associate Hilda Käkikoski, she had the feeling that she was

7 “Naisasianainen Alexandra Gripenberg kuoli jouluaattona”, Helsingin Sanomat December 23, 2013 (reprint of a news from December 23, 1913). Irma Sulkunen, in particular, has conducted research on the introduction of women’s voting rights as part of the 1906 parliamentary reform in Finland. Among other things, she has revisited Gripenberg’s role in the suffrage history. See for instance, Sulkunen, “Suffrage, Nation and Political Mobilization: the Finnish case in an international context”, in Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship: international perspectives on parliamentary reforms, eds. Irma Sulkunen, Seija-Leena Nevala-Nurmi, and Pirjo Markkola (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 83–105.

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being compelled to “die in the desert”. The letter was written in the middle of the revolutionary events in Finland in November 1905. The political turmoil, culminating in the General Strike, disturbed the nationalist elite’s vision of a gradual progress of the nation and its own role as the leader of the people.8 In that respect, Gripenberg was not an exception. The focus on individual agency does not contradict a broader picture of societal processes and emotional undercurrents. On the contrary, this chapter connects to recent biographical research within historical scholarship that emphasizes how narratives of human lives do deal with unique experiences of individuals, but at the same time open up perspectives into how these particular lives and general historical processes, in this case nationalism, intertwine.9 The approach associates nationalism particularly with individual agency and lived experience, and in so doing, it pays close attention to emotions that constituted agency. The affective turn provides the researchers with tools to answer the question about how people become nationalists. Within the paradigm of history of emotions, Barbara H. Rosenwein has coined the concept of “emotional communities”. This chapter focuses on an individual person, rather than a larger community, but it heuristically benefits from the idea of Gripenberg being part of (sometimes coexisting, sometimes even conflicting) communities “with their own emotional norms, values and expressions”.10 Originally, the approach of “everyday nationalism” that has inspired the discussion in this chapter unfolded as an empirical approach to examine the experience of nationalism at the grassroots level, among ordinary people.11 Gripenberg’s life course and her aristocratic background inevitably contradict how ordinary people typically lived in the Grand Duchy. Nevertheless, the concept of lived experience is useful in my analysis, and I agree with 8

9

10 11

On the General Strike, see for instance Kansa kaikkivaltias: Suurlakko Suomessa 1905, eds. Pertti Haapala, Olli Löytty, Kukku Melkas, and Marko Tikka (Helsinki: Teos, 2008). In this volume, Vesa Vares’ chapter, in particular, offers a context for Gripenberg’s view on the events: Vares, “Suurlakon häviäjät”, 349–67. See also Anu-Hanna Anttila et al, Kuriton kansa. Poliittinen mielikuvitus vuoden 1905 suurlakon ajan Suomessa (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2009). e.g. Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, Tiina Kinnunen, and Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, “Doing biography”, in Biography, Gender and History: Nordic Perspectives, eds. Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir, Tiina Kinnunen, Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, and Birgitte Possing (Turku: k&h, 2016), 7–37. Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 5. Eleanor Knott, “Everyday nationalism: A review of the literature”, Studies on National Movements 3 (2015): 1.

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Reetta Eiranen, a scholar of early Finnish nationalism, who argues that personal experiences and emotions of male and female personalities representing elites are equally valuable when nationalism is reassessed from the perspective of lived nationalism.12 How to examine how people in the past felt? Historians of emotions unanimously state that words constitute the entrance to emotions, as for instance Barbara H. Rosenwein emphasizes.13 My argument about loss as a constitutive experience for Gripenberg is based on a detailed reading of her letters to her close associates in Finland and abroad.14 No diaries of hers are preserved to give insight into her inner life. In her letters, she opened her mind in a different way than she did as a public person. Letter writing was a way to create an epistolary community that allowed her to reflect upon her thoughts and emotions. She felt that she had sacrificed herself for the future of her nation but would never become truly Finnish, united with the Finnish-speaking people “through flesh and blood”. The letters show how she felt that the price she paid for her work with the aim of uplifting Finnish-speaking women was high, even too high, because she had to give up other plans. Class-related differences played into her feeling about growing apart from her nation. I argue, however,

12

13 14

Reetta Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi: Aate, tunteet ja sukupuoli Tengströmin perheessä 1800-luvun puolivälissä (Tampere: Tampereen yliopiston väitöskirjat 79, 2019), 17–18. Rosenwein, Generations, 4–9. Collections of Gripenberg’s letters are preserved in the Archives on Literature and Cultural History of the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki (in this chapter SKS) (Gripenberg’s Collection, in this chapter: GC) and in the City Archives of Helsinki (within the Archives of Suomen naisyhdistys/ Finnish Women’s Association, in this chapter: FWA). Both collections include letters written and received by her. The letters in the City Archives are typed copies from the original ones, preserved in the SKS Archives. Letters from both collections were examined for the present chapter, the typed ones because of their readability. The following persons were among the recipients of her letters: Lady Isabel Aberdeen (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3), Maria Cederskiöld (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3), Hildi Ennola (GC, SKS, 304:4), Ellen Fries (GC, SKS, 306:3), Elisabeth (Betty) Löfgren/Lounasmaa (GC, SKS, 306:7), Hilda Käkikoski (GC, SKS, 304:13), Elin Sjöström (GC, SKS, 305:5) and Toini Topelius (GC, SKS, 305:7). Furthermore, she wrote to her sisters (Julia Gripenberg, Maria Furuhjelm and Elisabeth Stenius, GC, SKS, 305:4) as a collective and addressed them for instance as “Mina kära” (My Loved Ones). In the footnotes the recipient of these letters is “sisters”. Even in those cases when Gripenberg addressed her letters to one person, she seems to have expected that they were circulated among friends and associates. In addition to letters from Gripenberg, a letter from Toini Topelius to Gripenberg (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3) and a letter from Tilma Hainari to Hilda Käkikoski (GC, SKS, 309:3) were included in the source material. All the letters referred to in the present chapter are unpublished.

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that an analysis of Gripenberg’s sense of loss and sacrifice must pay attention to her identity as a native Swedish-speaking person, too. The Fennoman ideology that she actively advanced renounced the potential of her mother tongue as a constitutive element of true Finnishness.

1

The Fennoman Imagination of a Finnish Nation

In line with a rich body of comparative and transnational studies on European cases, the present volume demonstrates how transnational the phenomenon of nineteenth-century nationalism was, as it operated on the continental scale throughout the century. Originally, the upsurge of European nationalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century drew strongly upon cultural and academic influences. Joep Leerssen, for instance, points to the interrelatedness of language, literature, and history – “Herder’s cultural relativism combined with the romantic historicism” – that nourished intellectuals in their endeavour to conceptualise a nation and national belonging and in doing so, to create the popular basis for nations as “imagined communities”.15 Also in Finland, as Reetta Eiranen has recently shown in her thesis on the influential Tengström family, nationalism in its first phase, from the late eighteenth century and particularly the 1820s onwards, was influenced by a small, interconnected group of Swedish-speaking intellectuals.16 In the present volume, Eve Annuk discusses a “national awakening” in the Estonian context. The most important of the nationalist elite’s efforts was to create national literature for Finland. National literature was a prerequisite for and an expression of national consciousness and a subsequent national consolidation, as J.V. Snellman put it. He was a disciple of Hegel and leading figure among Fennoman intellectuals. Fennoman (in Finnish fennomaani, in Swedish fennoman) was the designation for these Finnish-minded (in Finnish suomenmielinen) nationalist activists. For the birth of national literature, the status of the Finnish language needed to be elevated from the everyday patois of common people to that of a civilized language. As Finland was under Swedish rule (until 1809), and particularly in the eighteenth century, Finnish-speaking

15

16

Joep Leerssen, “Introduction: Philology and the European Construction of National Literature”, in Editing the Nation’s Memory: Textual Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Europe, eds. Dirk van Hulle and Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2008), 25. Eiranen, Lähisuhteet ja nationalismi, passim.

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(male) individuals with aspirations to political and social advancement had to adopt the Swedish language to get an education. Priests constituted the only group with higher education who mastered the Finnish language.17 The nationalist elite who originally created the idea of a specific Finnish (Finnish-speaking) nation typically had practically no knowledge of the language that they defined as the soul of the nation. Enthused by their discovery of the “authentic” nation, and proud of the international attention to Kalevala, originally published in the 1830s, some of them made serious efforts to learn the language of the Other, Finnish-speaking common people that made up the vast majority of the population in the Grand Duchy. The elite also had few connections with these people. Based on Romantic literature, the elite created an image of common people as pure and humble. At this point in time, the Swedish-speaking common people, mainly living in the coastal areas in Southern and Western Finland remained marginal in the national imagination. From the 1860s onwards, the Fennoman movement and the Finnish party (established by leading Fennomans) was successful in gradually expanding the Finnish-speaking people’s rights to include rights to services and education at different levels and in their native language. The language itself diversified to meet the standards of academic use and modernizing society. A new, Finnish-speaking middle and upper class emerged, based on new educational resources. They, in turn, actively launched projects and established institutions to disseminate popular education among the ordinary people with the aim of strengthening their national consciousness. The new Finnish-speaking elite consisted not only of those who had successfully climbed the social ladder. In addition, some of the Swedish-speaking families who responded positively to the nationalist ideas of a Finnish-speaking Finland sent their children to Finnish-speaking schools and began to use Finnish in their everyday communication.18

17 18

Heikki Paunonen, “Kansankielestä kansalliskieleksi”, Virittäjä 105, no. 2 (2001): 223–39. Ilkka Liikanen, Fennomania ja kansa: joukkojärjestäytymisen läpimurto ja Suomalaisen puolueen synty (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1995); Ilkka Liikanen, “Kansa”, in Käsitteet liikkeessä. Suomen poliittisen kulttuurin käsitehistoria, eds. Matti Hyvärinen, Jussi Kurunmäki, Kari Palonen, Tuija Pulkkinen, and Henrik Stenius (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2003), 257–307; Klaus Lindgren and Anna-Riitta Lindgren, “Suomen suuriruhtinaanmaan säätyläistön kielenvaihto”, in Kahden puolen Pohjanlahtea I: Ihmisiä, yhteisöjä ja aatteita Ruotsissa ja Suomessa 1500-luvulta 1900-luvulle, eds. Gabriel Bladh and Christer Kuvaja (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2006), 326–96; Max Engman, Språkfrågan: Finlandssvenskhetens uppkomst 1812–1922 (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 2016), 180–83.

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As a response to the Fennoman activism, from the 1870s onwards, within some Swedish-speaking circles, a strong opposition arose. The Finnishnationalist vision of “one nation, one language” was not shared by all proFinnish nationalists, but the programme of the Finnish party was strict in its claim of a future Finland based on one national language, namely Finnish. A more moderate idea of “one nation, two languages” did not resonate among the hardliners of the movement. The so called Svecoman (in Finnish svekomaani, in Swedish svekoman), Swedish-minded activists and the Swedish party they established quite understandably opposed the idea of one hegemonic language, as it was hostile to the whole existence of a Swedish-speaking population in the country. They also claimed that the Swedish nation – as they called the Swedish-speaking population – was superior to the Finnish one, as the Swedish heritage, originating from the Swedish rule, constituted the bridge to Western civilization (cf. the Estonian case, Eve Annuk’s chapter in the present volume). To strengthen the Swedish nation, a connection was established with Swedish-speaking common people.19 Given the emotionally and politically charged confrontation – the language strife, as it was called – between the Fennomans and Svecomans, “the matrix of a nation’s set of beliefs”,20 as Anne-Marie Thiesse defines the basis of nationalism, was not universally shared. The Russification measures from the late nineteenth century onwards conveyed a new potential conflict and strengthened the dividing line within the Finnish party that had emerged between the socalled Young Finns and Old Finns. As a response to the threat that put Finnish autonomy into question, the Swedish party and the Young Finns united across the language barrier in the name of legality and non-violent resistance. Nor did the Old Finns and their Finnish party accept the Russification campaign. On the contrary, they rejected it; however, they thought differently about how to respond to the threat and chose a strategy of compliance. The conflict between the supporters of the various strategies poisoned the atmosphere in the country and even split families and friendly relations. The tensions within society further increased from the pressure exerted by the urban working class and landless people in the countryside through their claims of rights to political participation and social reforms (cf. the Polish case, Maciej Janowski’s chapter in the present volume). Until 1906, the system

19 20

Engman, Språkfrågan, 154–75. Anne-Marie Thiesse, “National Identities: A Transnational Paradigm”, in Revisiting Nationalism: Theories and Processes, eds. Alain Dieckhoff and Christophe Jaffrelot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 124.

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of representation was based on the Four Estates and the participation in elections was the privilege of the wealthy and the land-owners. The vast majority of the population – all women and the majority of the men – had no voice. Among the non-Socialists, the Old Finns had the most developed social programme with the aim of responding to the needs of the lower classes, on the one hand, and stopping the pull of the Socialists, on the other. Furthermore, the Old Finns actively sought cooperation with the working class.21 The revolutionary events that spread from Russia in 1905 and culminated in the Great Strike in November showed the limits of cooperation across class borders and the elite’s efforts to control the pressure from below. The Strike mobilized the masses and demonstrated the independent agency of the Socialist movement. The pressure forced the Tsar to re-establish the autonomous status of Finland and to allow negotiations for reforms in the Four Estates. Most importantly, a parliamentary reform with passive and active voting rights for all men and women and a unicameral parliament was introduced in 1906; the first elections were held in 1907. The landslide victory of the Social Democrats marked the beginning of a new era of democracy and equal citizenship. Among the Swedish-speaking population, the reform stirred concern about their future in Finland. In the Four Estates, the Swedish party was disproportionately influential, whereas in the new Parliament, its successor, the Swedish Folk Party, diminished dramatically, representing a minority of the Finland’s population.

2

At the Crossroads of Identities

“What do you say about suffrage associations at the 61st parallel north, which offer prizes for the best substitute for bread?”22 This quotation is from a letter of Alexandra Gripenberg to Lady Isabel Aberdeen in 1902, when some regions in Finland were suffering from famine. Lady Aberdeen was a leading figure in the International Council of Women within which Gripenberg worked actively. She appreciated Aberdeen as an ideal representative of “true” feminism, a notion referring to principles, according to her, that were conducive to emancipation. She did her utmost, in Finland and internationally, to protect “true” feminism from what she saw as dangerous radicalism. At the same time, the circumstances in Finland did not allow her to focus fully on feminism as an 21

22

Hannu Salokorpi, Pietarin tie: Suomalainen puolue ja suomettarelainen politiikka helmikuun manifestista 1899 Tarton rauhaan 1920 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1988), 46–48. Letter, Gripenberg to Lady Aberdeen, March 3, 1902 (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3).

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intellectual and political endeavour. Instead, a practical approach, as in 1902, was on the agenda. I suggest that a statement like the one in the letter tells about her adjustment to national circumstances, on the one hand, and emotional and intellectual identification with the international feminism, on the other hand. In terms of women’s suffrage, Finland was indeed a pioneer. Gripenberg herself thought that a reform that included all men and women was too radical a step. Instead, she strongly favoured a gradual process, in line with the majority of the international feminist community. When campaigns for the first elections were being planned, she could personally look back on feminist activism over a period of some twenty years, an activism that connected the women’s cause with Fennoman nationalism. She was a leading activist in the Finnish Women’s Association (Suomen naisyhdistys / Finsk kvinnoförening). A small circle of Helsinki-based women linked with male nationalist activists established the association in 1884. Inspired by international influences from Sweden and Britain, for instance, but trying not to provoke too much, the activists assailed the prevailing views on gender in the Fennoman leadership, which were through and through male. Privately, the women sometimes openly expressed their uneasiness about the conservatism of (some of) these male figures. Gripenberg, for instance, wrote to a friend how she was unable to feel sympathy with a wife of a particular leader of the Finnish party, so upset she was about his views.23 Progressive male nationalists, among them Gripenberg’s mentor Zacharias Topelius, shared the idea of women’s rights. However, the Fennoman leader J.V. Snellman was influential in gender issues as well, and he expressed conservative views. He underscored that femininity was associated with the private sphere, nurturing and raising new generations, whereas masculinity connected to the public sphere of politics and economy. Issues related to the state were explicitly male.24 Fennoman feminists fully shared this idea of women’s responsibilities for the nation but they widened the scope of women’s agency from the home to society. In line with international discourse, they advanced the conception of women’s societal motherliness and construed society as an expansion of the home.25 To free the motherly potential to serve the nation, they argued that girls and women needed education and vocational training

23 24

25

Letter, Gripenberg to Toini Topelius, January 31, 1885 (GC, SKS, 305:7). Marja Jalava, Minä ja maailmanhenki: Moderni subjekti kristillis-idealistisessa kansallisajattelussa ja Rolf Lagerborgin kulttuuriradikalismissa n. 1800–1914 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2005), 169–71, 183–98. Jalava, Minä ja maailmanhenki, 212–14.

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on equal terms with boys and men. Coeducation was a strongly propagated aim. Education was also given emphasis as a means by which to achieve to enlightened motherhood.26 Furthermore, women should be entitled to exercise their professions and acquire positions of trust in public life on equal terms with men. Equality before the law and wage equality were likewise on the agenda. Alexandra Gripenberg shared a typically common trait with the first generation of feminist activists in Finland; she came from a Swedish-speaking family. Her father was an influential estate owner and in the Four Estates, a representative of nobility. The marriage of her parents was unconventional as her mother, who was her father’s second wife, came from a lower social background. Gripenberg was young when her father passed away. The elder sisters took care of her education and were instrumental in introducing her to nationalist ideas. Her stay in the early 1880s at her sister Elisabeth’s home, in Kuopio in the Finnish-speaking region, would prove to be significant. She became a true Fennoman, as her biographer Tyyni Tuulio has put it.27 Her “national awakening” (in Finnish kansallinen herääminen), as the adoption of nationalist mindset both individually and collectively was called, encouraged her to learn more Finnish with a view to becoming “a true Finn”. However, she did not adopt a new, Finnish-language family name, as did her sister Elisabeth. One of the signs among the originally Swedish-speaking people of their having turned Finnish-minded and adopting a related identity – in addition to learning Finnish and having children educated in Finnish-speaking schools – was to take a family name in Finnish.28 I cannot find words to explain the kind of strange feelings my first serenade brought about in me. It was not given to me as a private person,

26

27 28

On motherhood and family life within Fennoman circles, see e.g. Irma Sulkunen, Mandi Granfelt ja kutsumusten ristiriita (Helsinki: Hanki ja jää, 1995). Mandi Granfelt was a teacher who married a leading Fennoman activist within popular education (kansansivistys). She became his assistant and mother of several children, exemplifying an ideal Fennoman mother. She was a member of the Finnish Women’s Association and personally close to Hilda Käkikoski. Tuulio, Aleksandra Gripenberg, 55. Lindgren and Lindgren, “Suomen suuriruhtinaanmaan säätyläistön kielenvaihto”. In a letter to Hildi Ennola, close associate, Gripenberg wrote about her decision not to take a Finnish name. She thought that changing names would play into the hands of the Swedish-minded, as the Young Finns who were their associates got interested in Finnish names. Letter, Gripenberg to Hildi Ennola, March 24, 1906 (GC, SKS, 304:4).

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but rather as if a small droplet of love from the (Finnish) people were dedicated to me.29 For Gripenberg, adopting a Finnish-nationalist mindset was an emotional and social challenge, one that she took seriously. Typically, for the Swedishspeaking elite, the contacts with the Finnish-speaking population were hierarchical, with domestic servants and day laborers, for instance. From the early “national awakening” and onward, male nationalists undertook travels to become acquainted with the common people with whom they should identify. For women, independent travelling became appropriate later as women’s life spheres widened in general. In the mid-1880s, Gripenberg travelled in Finnish-speaking regions and her letters, briefly cited above, to her close friend and associate Toini Topelius relate her observations and feelings connected to her effort to find a connection to the common people. These letters are in Finnish, which she mastered quite adequately in terms of everyday communication. Normally she corresponded in Swedish with Topelius, and her sisters – her mentors in Finnish nationalism – and other associates. One night during her travels, she was given a serenade. This episode deeply touched her and as the quotation exposes, she attached to it meanings of belonging, at least momentarily, to the community of Finnish-speaking people. Writing in Finnish, she shared her feelings with Topelius. She was excited and inspired by the episode. Furthermore, I suggest, there was gratitude in her, as she felt that she was included and shown affection. Gripenberg’s travels in the Finnish-speaking regions coincided with the beginning of her feminist activism. Shortly after the Finnish Women’s Association was established (1884), Gripenberg joined and soon became one of the group’s guiding lights. Her elder sisters introduced her to feminism, too. They saw no contradiction between feminism and nationalism, on the contrary. Women’s rights and the nation’s progress were mutually inclusive. The turn to activism changed Gripenberg’s life course. She gave up her tentative plans of becoming a writer of fiction in Swedish. Her first book, Berättelser, a collection of stories, was published in 1877. The only novel she wrote,

29

“En voi sanoilla selittää minkälaisia kummallisia tunteita tämä ensimmäinen serenadini on herättänyt minussa. Sitä ei pidetty minulle yksityishenkilön [?] vaan se oli niinkuin tämän kautta pieni pisara tuota kansan rakkaudesta olisi minulle omistettu”. Letter, Gripenberg to Toini Topelius, June 13, 1885 (GC, SKS, 305:7).

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I tätnande led, came out in 1886.30 Activism increasingly occupied her, but her confidence in her literary skills also waned. In the mid-1880s, Gripenberg shared her ponderings about her future life path with Toini Topelius, the daughter of Zacharias Topelius. Alexandra and Toini worked together in the Association and edited children’s magazines in Topelius’ footstep.31 As Jens Grandell points out in this volume, Topelius strongly influenced Finnish nationalist imagination through his literary work and scholarship. His nationalism was not an aggressive, one-language indoctrination. Gripenberg worked for a while as his secretary and got advice from him concerning literary work and support for feminist work, too. She idealized him as a trailblazer, paving the road of nationhood and the future path of women. She wrote to Toini that when she received news abroad about the festivities that took place to honour his seventieth birthday in 1888, she was deeply touched and could not help crying.32 International influences, and particularly her travels to England and further to the United States in 1887–1888, strengthened Gripenberg’s view of the significance of feminist work for both national and human progress. Furthermore, during her travels she became convinced that feminism was truly compatible with Christian faith. This was critical, as she was a deeply religious person. In her subsequent activism she recurrently emphasized how “true” feminism was inseparable from Christianity. For her, it was the Protestant/Lutheran faith that was the most women-friendly current and thus the most progressive within Christianity.33 In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Christian standpoints typically affected feminist conceptions of moral behaviour. For Gripenberg and her associates, Finnish society, like every other society, needed moral improvement as alcohol and uncontrolled sexuality undermined national purity. The campaign for women’s emancipation

30

31 32 33

Pia Forssell, “Från skrivande damer till yrkesförfattarinnor”, in Finlands svenska litteraturhistoria: Första delen: 1400–1900, ed. Johan Wrede (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 1999), 454–55. Janina Orlov, “‘Var glad som sparven kvittrar’ – barnlitteraturen”, in Finlands svenska litteraturhistoria, 348–49. Letter, Gripenberg to Toini Topelius, January 24, 1888 (GC, SKS, 305:7). Tiina Kinnunen, “Alexandra Gripenberg’s Feminist Christianity”, in Finnish Women Making Religion: Between Ancestors and Angels, eds. Terhi Utriainen and Päivi Salmesvuori (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 61–79. Also in religious matters Zacharias Topelius influenced Gripenberg. On his religious world-view, see Johan Wrede, “Zachris Topelius – barnatro och fosterland”, and Nils Erik Forsgård, “Utopisten Topelius”, in Finlands svenska litteraturhistoria, 317–30, 331–50.

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went hand in hand with work for temperance and against ideas of sexual liberty.34 During her travels abroad, Gripenberg corresponded actively with her sisters and other feminist associates at home. Particularly the letters from England and the United States in the 1880s reveal how impressed she was with the progress of feminist work in the Anglo-American world. At the same time, the letters tell about a Finnish nationalist who was both surprised and annoyed how little people – even the educated ones she mingled with – knew about Finland and furthermore, how their attitudes were prejudiced. Interestingly, she felt that people’s habit of admiring her dress was particularly insulting, as if Finland was not a civilized country at all!35 I suggest that not only affection for her nation explained her reaction towards the prejudices. At home, given her high social status, she was not used to treatment “from above”. Now, she met the mechanism of Othering, people even making comments about her clothing. She did her utmost to disseminate information about Finland and was delighted to meet anyone who already had some solid knowledge and who did not expect Finns to be “savages”.36 The image of Finns as “savages”, however, was paradoxically how Gripenberg herself occasionally framed her narrative of the Finns (on the image of the “savage”, cf. Jens Grandell’s and Jenny Bergenmar’s chapters in the present volume). In a letter to an associate, she wrote that the women’s cause should never “degenerate into an upper-class issue”.37 Before the revolutionary year 1905, she repeatedly underlined how crucial it was to reach working class women and make them experience sisterhood across class barriers. In so doing, the attraction of the Socialists could be minimized which would bring “a moral victory for the women’s cause”.38 She was touched emotionally about her vision and she wrote accordingly, how “her heart was beating with joy as the working class women would instinctively have the feeling that we are

34

35 36 37 38

Pirjo Markkola, Synti ja siveys: Naiset, uskonto ja sosiaalinen työ Suomessa 1860–1920 (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2002); Anna Elomäki, “Politiikan siveellisyys ja siveellisyyden politiikka suomalaisten naisasianaisten teksteissä”, in Siveellisyydestä seksuaalisuuteen: Poliittisen käsitteen historia, eds. Tuija Pulkkinen and Antu Sorainen (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2011), 131–52. Letter, Gripenberg to her sisters, October 4, 1887 (GC, SKS, 305:4). Letter, Gripenberg to her sisters, October 29, 1887 (GC, SKS, 305:4). The original reads: “urarta till en öfverklass fråga”. Letter, Gripenberg to Elin Sjöström, no date (GC, SKS, 305:5). The original reads: “moralisk seger för kvinnosaken”. Letter, Gripenberg to Elin Sjöström, no date (GC, SKS, 305:5).

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their friends”.39 Their lack of education and low moral standard should not disqualify the aim of sisterhood: “Let them be unlearned, even primitive”.40 In her eyes, these “savages” had the potential of growing into proper Finnish womanhood, if guided in a civilized way. In contrast to urban working-class women, peasant-women were an ideal object for feminist guidance, as landowning peasantry in general was at the core of Fennoman idealization of the pure Finnish nation (cf. Martin Olin’s and Eve Annuk’s chapters in the present volume on the idealization of the Swedish and Estonian peasant respectively). In Fennoman spirit, the ethos was “for the people but not with them”. As such, the idea of sisterhood was inherently hierarchical. The improvement of the status of ordinary women in Finland was critical, Gripenberg thought, as it would advance the progress of a nation as a whole. Accordingly, the Association actively involved itself with projects among ordinary Finnish – that is Finnish-speaking – women (in Finnish kansannaiset). In order to reach these ordinary – particularly peasant – women in towns and the rural countryside, the Association established local branches around the country. In 1908, their number had reached 36. According to the prevailing hierarchical way of thought, ordinary women’s contribution to the nation was different from what the upper-middle and upper-class women could offer. Ordinary women needed support to learn practical vocations and home-related tasks. Among other things, the Association organised on a regular basis courses, so called “Days for Home” (Kodin päivät), with this practical purpose in mind.41 In a similar vein, Koti ja Yhteiskunta (Home and society), a Finnish-speaking journal that Gripenberg edited from its start in 1889, wanted to serve the interests that ordinary women were expected to have. At the same time, the journal published theoretical articles about the women’s cause, international news included, for the more educated readers. These two aims did not always intertwine in a way that satisfied the ambitious editor-in-chief, as she wrote to her Swedish associate Maria Cederskiöld in 1911, when she closed the journal.42 This was her journal more than an official mouthpiece of the Association, but she understandably received contributions and support from her associates.

39 40 41 42

“Det att de instinktmässigt ana vänner i oss, det kommer mitt hjerta att klappa af glädje”. Letter, Gripenberg to Elin Sjöström, no date (GC, SKS, 305:5). “Låt vara att de äro okunniga, till och med råa”. Letter, Gripenberg to Elin Sjöström, no date (GC, SKS, 305:5). Alexandra Gripenberg, Naisasian kehitys eri maissa IV: Suomi. Translated by Tilma Hainari (Porvoo: Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1909), 69–72. Letter, Gripenberg to Maria Cederskiöld, December 10, 1911 (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3).

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Her right hand was Hilda Käkikoski who was a native Finnish-speaker. She translated texts by Gripenberg from Swedish or did the language editing of texts originally written in Finnish. Because of her modest social background, Käkikoski was expected to be particularly able to appeal to ordinary women. The correspondence shows how Gripenberg encouraged her to perform in the public. She also gave advice how to do that, for instance at some occasions to use both Finnish and Swedish.43 The flexible use of both Finnish and Swedish by the leading Association activists exemplifies how the strict Fennoman principle of “one nation, one language” never became reality – a fact discussed by Heidi Grönstrand, too. Feminism was typically a contested field with lines of demarcation and confrontations of various kinds. In Finland, class divided women into nonSocialist vs. Socialist activists. Furthermore, the confrontation between the Fennomans and Svecomans, on the one hand, and division within the Finnish-minded activists, on the other hand, played into women’s work, too. Gripenberg was deeply involved in these confrontations and interpreted every criticism towards the Finnish Women’s Association through her Fennoman lenses. In 1887 she wrote to her sisters from England that there “the Fennoman cause is not seen as a sin”.44 The non-Socialist community split up in 1892 as the Women’s League Unioni (Unioni Naisasialiitto Suomessa/Unionen Kvinnosaksförbund i Finland) was established. Gripenberg never stopped blaming the Unioni women for their Swedish mindset, despite the fact that among them were many pro-Finnish activists. They were, however, envisioning a bilingual Finland and looking forward to modernizing Finland’s intellectual and cultural climate with current influences from Europe. Drawing on her triangle nationalism, feminism and Christianity, Gripenberg blamed the Unioni women for not adhering to “true” nationalism neither feminism.45 Gripenberg committed her life work to “true” feminism in different roles in Finland and abroad. In the quote that begins this chapter, Gripenberg writes how she felt condemned to “cosmopolitanism” because she would never be included in “the Finnish Finland”. She equated cosmopolitanism with living, or

43 44

45

Letter, Gripenberg to Hilda Käkikoski, May 3, 1895 (GC, SKS, 304:13). The original reads: “eftersom fennomani icke kan anses för synd här i England”. Letter, Gripenberg to her sisters, December 2, 1887 (GC, SKS, 305:4). See also Gripenberg to Toini Topelius, January 24, 1888 (GC, SKS, 305:7). E.g. Gripenberg, Naisasian kehitys, 175. In her correspondence with her associates, Gripenberg repeatedly reflected upon the divide between Fennoman women and Unioni activists. Among other things, she blamed the latter for acceptance of sexual radicalism. See e.g. letter, Gripenberg to Lady Aberdeen, August 31, 1906 (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3).

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actually dying “in a desert”. This may sound strange from a person who was actively participating in cross-border feminist work. The description interestingly reveals how feminists typically conceived of internationalism around 1900. It was about “nations coming together”, not about denying the significance of national belongings. Previous research into feminist internationalism shows how this understanding was widely shared, and, among others, constituted the basis of the major international organizations, the International Council of Women (ICW) and International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA).46 For Alexandra Gripenberg, the ICW symbolized “true” feminism on an international scale with its Christian spirit. She served the Council in several ways. Among other things, she travelled widely in Europe and Turkey as an advocate of the Council, promoting the establishment of national councils that would join the International Council. In Finland, her journal Koti ja Yhteiskunta was a tool she used in disseminating acceptable views about women’s internationalism in general and the ICW in particular. In that role, she was a gatekeeper of internationalism. She did not, however, have a monopoly on doing this, as there were her adversaries, the Unioni women with their own networks and publications. In her reports on women’s internationalism, reflecting recurrent nationalist imagery, Gripenberg had a habit of describing national representation with embodied vocabulary. However, instead of using women as passive symbols, as was typically the case, she depicted them as active agents and representatives of their nations. In so doing, her approach conveyed a radical potential as it makes a claim of women’s constitutive role within and for their nations. For instance, at a conference report from London in 1899 she described how “Sweden and Norway” walked hand in hand discussing matters of feminist interest.47 When she herself visited Lady Aberdeen in Ireland in the summer of 1906, news from the suffrage reform in Finland reached the hostess and her female visitors of various nationalities. There was an outburst of joy for other “nations embracing Finland”, embodied by herself.48 46

47

48

E.g. Mineke Bosch, “Between entertainment and nationalist politics: The uses of folklore in the spectacle of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance”, Women’s Studies International Forum 32, no. 1 (2009): 4–12. Alexandra Gripenberg, “Kansainvälinen Naisten kongressi Lontoossa”, Koti ja Yhteiskunta September 15, 1899, 67. In the Fennoman discourse more generally, nations were conceptualised as individuals – “nation-individual” (kansayksilö) – and within this framing, internationalism was a compilation of these “nation-individuals”. Petri Ruuska, “Lukeneiston yksilöllinen kansa”, in Kuriton kansa: Poliittinen mielikuvitus vuoden 1905 suurlakon ajan Suomessa, eds. Anttila et al. (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2009), 57–80. Tuulio, Aleksandra Gripenberg, 284.

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Gripenberg implemented a complex strategy of intertwining the national and international as part of her life work. In Finland, she was a fervent Fennoman nationalist who envisioned female citizenship within the national community. At the same time, she performed as a mediator in communicating between Finland and the international community. She was highly capable of fulfilling this role in terms of her wide reading and fluency in several languages, English included. When she performed abroad, she placed emphasis on representing Finland, playing down her Fennoman nationalism (and in so doing, silenced the conflicts within Finnish feminism). Among her friends from Sweden, in particular, she tried to play down the rejection of the Swedish among the Fennoman movement. In 1897, she invited her Swedish friend and colleague, Ellen Fries to Finland with a remark that she would not burden Fries with “Finnish activities”.49 Nevertheless, Fries should not think that “we Finnish-minded are monsters”.50 She also justified the Fennoman standpoint. Referring to an influential Swedish historian, Erik Gustaf Geijer, she appealed to Fries, who was a trained cultural historian, to remember that “sometimes a people can be saved only when it reverts to itself”.51

3

Loss and Sacrifice – and a Strong Sense of Duty

Sacrifice is a key concept in nationalist ideology. It is also a gendered concept. In the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, with the establishment of national armies and compulsory military service in different countries, the duty (and prerogative) to serve the nation by taking to arms, when necessary, became male by definition.52 The ultimate sacrifice that was expected was to fall for one’s own country. Sacrifice was associated with an abstract promise that the sacrifices had generative effects on the nation, and so being, they were not in vain. Furthermore, in future, the coming generations

49 50 51 52

“Men du skall inte ett ögonblick besväras med våra finska intressen”. Letter, Gripenberg to Ellen Fries, June 16, 1897 (GC, SKS, 306:3). The original reads: “att du tror vi finskt sinnade äro några slags vidunder”. Letter, Gripenberg to Ellen Fries June 16, 1897 (GC, SKS, 306:3). “Du som kulturhistoriker borde då bättre än jag veta, att ett folks enda räddning ibland är … ‘att återgå till sig sjelf’”. Letter, Gripenberg to Ellen Fries, June 16, 1897 (GC, SKS, 306:3). E.g. Stefan Dudink and Karen Hagemann, “Masculinity in politics and war in the age of democratic revolutions, 1750–1850” and John Horne, “Masculinity and politics in the age of nation-states and world wars, 1850–1950”, in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering modern history, eds. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 3–21, 22–40.

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would remember the sacrifices with gratitude. In the national vocabulary, the female gender was typically associated with responsibilities and sacrifices other than military ones. Motherhood in particular was a female duty. Gripenberg did not deny gender differences, but she emphasized women’s active participation in nation building and as a feminist, made a claim for rights for women as citizens, associated with fulfilling of duties. Alexandra Gripenberg herself felt a strong sense of duty. On the one hand, it was probably a reflection of her aristocratic background. On the other, her “national awakening” played into her conception of the world and affected her mentality. Fennoman ideology called the elite, both men and women, to work for the nation and lead the ordinary people, however from gendered positions.53 “National awakening” in the 1880s filled Gripenberg with enthusiasm about belonging to the Finnish nation, or at least a promise of an access. Her response was a commitment to serve her nation. In one of her talks reflecting on women’s citizenship, dedicated to “Finland’s Parliament and Finnish women”, she summarized her mentality by saying that “those people who have been given a lot, are expected to contribute accordingly”.54 From her viewpoint, the fortunate and among them women, in particular, should work to safeguard “Christianity, high moral and the holiness of family” as key national (and international) values.55 Sense of duty explains, for instance, why she decided to candidate for the election to the Parliament in 1907, despite her critical view of the reform, too radical for her. “All the women’s associations had decided that women, if asked, have to accept being candidates”, she wrote to Lady Aberdeen. Otherwise, eligibility would be “a dead letter only”.56 Gripenberg’s correspondence from the early twentieth century onwards provides evidence of a gradual weakening of her faith in the sound development of the Finnish nation and that she increasingly felt a growing distance to her compatriots. She could no longer identify with the people with same excitement and determination as she had previously. On the contrary, she wrote from Athens in 1906 from her lecture tour on behalf of the ICW that 53

54 55 56

See, among others, Sulkunen, Mandi Granfelt; Vesa Vares, Helmi Krohn 1871–1913: Naisen velvollisuusetiikka ja yksilön ratkaisu (Helsinki: Yliopistopaino, 2005), 11–20; Maarit Leskelä-Kärki, Kirjoittaen maailmassa: Krohnin sisaret ja kirjallinen elämä (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2006), 292–310. The Krohn family was one of the leading Fennoman families in Finland and the ethos that characterized their literary, scientific and societal work was based on the conception of duty. “Jolle paljon annettu on, siltä paljon vaaditaan”. Manuscript “Finland’s Parliament and Finnish women” (GC, SKS). Manuscript “Finland’s Parliament and Finnish women” (GC, SKS). Letter, Gripenberg to Lady Aberdeen, September 22, 1906 (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3).

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it was “an unlucky accident” to be born in Finland.57 Next year she opened her mind to another associate as follows: “How badly I fit in with the people I formally belong to”.58 Her faith in, or better put, dream of, the unity of the nation and her own national belonging gave way to disappointment and disillusionment. Particularly the revolutionary events and violent acts in 1905 and the aftermath horrified her and left an enduring mark on her. In the beginning of 1906, she reflected upon the autumn as follows in a letter to Lady Aberdeen: “Our revolution was not an ideal one. No bloodshed was done, but much wrong, much oppression, persecution – even personal abuse – was performed in the name of liberty from countrymen against countrymen. In some cases we have only exchanged one form of tyranny for another”.59 Her vision of the nation’s future has turned into a grim one. Some months later she opened her heart to Aberdeen: “You must not think of my people as a people of culture in the sense we usually use this word. I think in some respects we are like the Serbians, just now… A spirit of quarrel, persecution and ill will seems to be prevailing, and all good intentions, are misinterpreted”.60 Many other Finns had a different perception of the 1905 events and spirit. It was a moment of strong emotionality and visions of a better future. As democratic demands and visions intertwined with nationalist ones, it was equal to what happened and how people felt in different parts of Europe in 1848. Gripenberg, in contrast, could not help seeing the nation going in the wrong direction. Despite the suffrage victory, she was disappointed about the nonSocialist women’s weakness in promoting the women’s cause. Particularly the pull of Socialism concerned her. Given her critical view about Socialism in general and Socialist women in particular, the comparison she made between herself and Miina Sillanpää on the eve of the elections in 1907 is striking. Sillanpää was a leading figure in the Social Democratic women’s movement, whom Gripenberg associated with low moral standards.61 She was, according to Gripenberg, much more suitable to represent Finnish women in the Parliament than Gripenberg herself as she did it “in a much more truthful way”.62 This reflection shows, I argue, how Gripenberg was losing her faith in the sound development of the Finnish nation, the women’s movement included, 57 58 59 60 61 62

The original reads: “olycksöde”. Letter, Gripenberg to Betty Lounasmaa, May 12, 1906 (GC, SKS, 306:7). “Kuinka huonosti sovin yhteen sen kansan kanssa, johon minä nimellisesti kuulun”. Letter, Gripenberg to Hilda Käkikoski, January 26, 1907 (GC, SKS, 304:13). Letter, Gripenberg to Lady Aberdeen, January 22, 1906 (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3). Letter, Gripenberg to Lady Aberdeen, July 10, 1906 (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3). Letter, Gripenberg to Lady Aberdeen, May 18, 1907 (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3). Letter, Gripenberg to Hilda Käkikoski, January 26, 1907 (GC, SKS, 304:13).

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and furthermore, how her experience of national belonging was turning into disillusionment. She could not help thinking that her hard work for Finnish women – “the uneducated but modest daughters of the nation”63 – and the whole nation, had been in vain, without positive outcomes. Her associates noticed her reflections, too. One of them wrote to Hilda Käkikoski: “I have had a feeling that she thinks she made a big sacrifice or actually sacrificed her whole life when she committed herself to the women’s cause in her home country”.64 In the middle of the electoral campaign in 1907, a hectic and timeconsuming period, Gripenberg herself wrote to Hilda Käkikoski that she had given up her other interests when surrendering herself to national interests.65 Among these interests was work for feminist goals abroad. This aspiration to leave Finland was abandoned, as the Russification measures intensified. She felt increasingly obligated to serve her nation, despite her prominent role within the ICW. In 1900, she wrote accordingly to Lady Aberdeen “that it seems as if my work should be directed more and more into the ranks of the people”.66 Among Gripenberg’s other abandoned interests was writing fiction. It was among her major interests from the 1870s and into the 1880s. She abandoned it as a potential career already in the 1880s, but her increasing disillusionment in the early twentieth century nourished her rationale that she did it for the sake of the nation. She wrote fiction only in Swedish, and in this respect, she actually felt that she had sacrificed, for the nation’s sake, the language she mastered perfectly and that constituted the core of her personality.67 Her attachment to Swedish was deeply emotional. She also felt that she could not sufficiently express herself as an intellectual in Finnish. At the same time, as a Fennoman, Gripenberg subscribed to a Finnish-speaking Finland. In 1905, she wrote to Hilda Käkikoski, in a strict Fennoman spirit, that Swedishness (ruotsalaisuus) had to be destroyed in Finland in the name of the nation’s peaceful future. In 1886, Gripenberg had received a letter from Toini Topelius in which Toini cleared up the major points of her father’s thinking as 63 64

65 66 67

The original reads: “juron, vähälahjaisen, mutta pohjimmiltaan hyvän kansan tyttäriä”. Letter, Tilma Forsström/Hainari to Hilda Käkikoski March 12, 1906 (GC, SKS, 309:3). “Olen aavistanut, että hän mielestään teki suuren uhrauksen tai oikeastaan uhrasi elämänsä ruvetessaan ajamaan naisasiaa kotimaassaan ja että häntä on katkeroittanut se seikka, että tämä elämäntyö on kantanut niin vähän näkyvää hedelmää meissä naisissa”. Letter, Tilma Forsström/Hainari to Hilda Käkikoski, March 12, 1906 (GC, SKS, 309:3). Letter, Gripenberg to Hilda Käkikoski, January 26, 1907 (GC, SKS, 304:13). Letter, Gripenberg to Lady Aberdeen, December 18, 1900 (GC, SKS, Hd:3). Letter, Gripenberg to Maria Cederskiöld, October 19, 1901 (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3).

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regarded Finland’s future. It was a historical fact, Zacharias Topelius thought, that the Finnish-speaking population would have the major role in developing Finland’s culture.68 In 1905, Gripenberg could not envision the future with the same optimism as Topelius did, under different circumstances. In a letter she wrote to Käkikoski in 1907 she painted an even more dramatic picture of the future: “the Finnish-speaking people move towards the future over the bodies of ‘us Swedish-speaking’”.69 Seen through her lenses, there was no other future left than to “die in the desert”, as she as a Swedish-speaking person could never be united with the Finnish Finland.70

4

Concluding Remarks

The starting point of this chapter was that the concept of lived nationalism can also be implemented in research on people traditionally seen as elite. The chapter examines how emotions constituted the multiple identifications of the Finnish feminist Alexandra Gripenberg. She was a nationalist and internationalist. Her contributions were indisputably significant to both fronts and her life reminds us that the national and international constitute one other in periods of strong nationalistic movements, too. In Gripenberg’s life, national feminism often took priority over international feminism. As a Finnish nationalist of the Fennoman fraction, and with a strong sense of duty, she often focused on the national efforts, but she did so from a feminist standpoint. For her, the progress of the nation intertwined with gender equality. Thus, her work for the nationalist cause connected to ordinary Finnish-speaking women, often with practical programmes and always keeping in mind their moral “uplifting”. A detailed reading of Gripenberg’s letters shows how a turn took place from the 1880s onwards in terms of her view of the development of the Finnish nation and her experience of national belonging. The revolutionary year 1905 was a turning point. In the experience of the Finnish elite, including Gripenberg, the lower classes turned away from paternal and maternal guidance. The letters to her associates in Finland and abroad offer insight into her

68 69 70

Letter, Toini Topelius to Gripenberg, May 13, 1886 (FWA, City Archives, Hd:3). “Meidän ruotsinkielisten ruumiitten yli suomenkieliset kulkevat tulevaisuutta kohti”. Letter, Gripenberg to Hilda Käkikoski, January 26, 1907 (GC, SKS, 304:13). The original reads: “… olen tullut siihen varmaan käsitykseen ettei täällä maassa ole rauhaa ennenkuin ruotsalaisuus on hävitetty”. Letter, Gripenberg to Hilda Käkikoski, November 16, 1905 (GC, SKS, 304:13).

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thoughts and emotions and so being, show that Gripenberg lost her faith in the sound development of the Finnish nation as ordinary people seemed to leave Fennoman guidance. Her experience of national belonging gradually turned into disillusionment. As this happened, she strongly felt that she had personally sacrificed too much, particularly an international career and a career as a fiction writer. Fiction would have provided her with the possibility of writing in her mother tongue. She experienced strongly that she had sacrificed her identity as a Swedish-speaking person. Although it is paradoxical, as a person with a strong sense of duty, Gripenberg was ready to “die in the desert”.

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Topelius, Toini. Letter (unpublished) to Alexandra Gripenberg. Collection of Finnish Women’s Association / City Archives of Helsinki. Tuulio, Tyyni. Aleksandra Gripenberg: Kirjailija, taistelija, ihminen. Porvoo, Helsinki: Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1959. Vares, Vesa. Helmi Krohn 1871–1913. Naisen velvollisuusetiikka ja yksilön ratkaisu. Helsinki: Yliopistopaino, 2005. Vares, Vesa. “Suurlakon häviäjät”. In Kansa kaikkivaltias: Suurlakko Suomessa 1905, edited by Pertti Haapala, Olli Löytty, Kukku Melkas, and Marko Tikka, 349–67. Helsinki: Teos, 2008. Wrede, Johan. “Zachris Topelius – barnatro och fosterland”. In Finlands svenska litteraturhistoria: Första delen: 1400–1900, edited by Johan Wrede, 317–30. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlantis, 1999. Zimmermann, Susan. “The Challenge of Multinational Empire for the International Women’s Movement”. In Globalizing Feminisms 1789–1945, edited by Karen Offen, 153–69. London: Routledge, 2010.

Index Aagaard, Carl Frederik (1833–1895) 151, 153 Aberdeen, Isabel/Ishbel Maria Hamilton-Gordon, Marchioness (1857–1939) 348n.14, 352, 359n.45, 360, 362–364 Abildgaard, Nicolai Abraham (1743–1809) 54 Åbo. See Turku Africa/African 119, 238–239, 240n.14, 244–245, 247–249, 255–256 agency 1–2, 18, 55, 103–104, 250–251, 299, 303, 324, 347, 352–353 Aguéli, Ivan (1869–1917) 238 Ahmed, Sara 11–12, 13n.38, 83,108, 110, 116–117, 123n.49, 193–195, 203, 242, 244–245, 247, 256, 264, 266, 270, 274, 291, 321, 322n.14 Åland 81 Alexander I, Tsar of Russia (1777–1825, r. 1801–1825) 32, 44 Alexander III, Tsar of Russia (1845–1894, r. 1881–1894) 324 Algeria 18, 237–257 Allport, Gordon (1897–1967) 26 Als 166, 170, 174–175, 179, 180n.49 America/American 26, 100, 109, 119, 172, 231, 357 Andersen, Hans Christian (1805–1875) 14, 17, 57, 164–174 Anderson, Benedict 2, 59n.29, 60n.31, 273, 275n.29 antisemitic 67 Antonsich, Marco 2n.2, 9n.22, 299n.1, 303 Anttonen, Pertti 10n.24, 110, 112n.17, 113n.18, 115n.24 Arabia/Arab/Arabic 59–60, 238–257 Arndt, Ernst Moritz (1769–1860) 276n.33, 280 von Arnim, Achim (1781–1831) 267n.8 Aronson, Eliot 26 art 11, 137–161, 219–235, 283 art history 139–140 artist 11, 97, 137–161, 186, 188, 219–235, 283

works of art illustration 113, 129, 219–235, 241–242, 246, 285, 312 Japanese woodcut 227 lithograph 233 painting 3, 14, 17, 27, 63, 137–161, 169, 198–199, 210, 221–222, 227, 232, 268 landscape painting 14, 17, 159, 169 portrait 227 watercolour 219–235 Arwidsson, Adolf Iwar (1791–1858) 115 Asia/Asian 92, 119, 238 Athens 362 the Atlantic 171 Atlas Mountains 244 Atterbom, Per Daniel Amadeus (1790–1855) 264n.4, 283, 288–289, 293n.72 Auerstedt 5, 263, 265, 271 Austria/Austrian 29, 33–35, 44–45, 270 Azaryahu, Moaz 165, 180n.48 Bache, Otto (1839–1927) 142–143 Baden 266 Baggesen, Jens (1764–1826) 57, 66n.51 the Baltic Sea 3–5, 86, 98n.73, 119, 165, 174 the Baltic Sea region 3, 5 the Baltic States. See also Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania 4 Bang, Herman (1857–1912) 14, 17, 164–166, 173–189 Barton, H. Arnold 238 Baumgartner, Karin 271, 272n.21, 276n.32, 276n.33, 277n.37 Belarus 32 Bergbom, Kaarlo (1843–1906) 306–307, 309 Bergsøe, Vilhelm (1835–1911) 147–148, 154, 156 Bergöö, Karin. See Karin Larsson (née Bergöö) Berlin 233, 264, 283, 290 Bernadotte, Jean Baptist. See Karl XIV Johan Bernstorff, Andreas Peter (1735–1797) 61 Billig, Michael 1–2, 9n.22, 299–300, 303 Bindesbøll, Gottlieb (1800–1856) 151

372 Biskra 238–248 Bissen, Herman Wilhelm (1798–1868) 156 Björkman, Hedvig (1861–1933) 239, 241–242 Blicher, Niels (1748–1839) 55, 60 Blicher, Steen Steensen (1782–1848) 6, 10–11, 14, 17, 50–76, 145 Blom, Ida 8n.18, 322, 345 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich (1752–1840) 119, 121 body/bodily/corporeal 16–17, 75n.84, 81, 83, 88, 96, 100, 102–104, 110, 112, 122, 130–131, 175–176, 179, 195, 200–201, 204–205, 211–216, 270, 274, 278, 291, 321 Bohrer, Karl Heinz 267 Boisserée, Melchior (1786–1851) 267–269 Boisserée, Sulpiz (1783–1854) 267–269 Bongie, Chris 241, 255 Bonnier, Karl Otto (1856–1941) 219, 222, 226–227, 232–233 borderland 14, 17, 52, 109, 164–165, 168–170, 174, 175n.30, 179–181, 183–184, 188–189 Bornhöhe, Eduard (1862–1923) 323 Borup, Morten 161n.25, 168–169 Boström, Hans-Olof 222n.2, 227 Brandes, Georg (1842–1927) 160 Bremer, Fredrika (1801–1865) 10, 82, 91, 95, 97–101, 104, 202n.34 Brentano, Clemens (1778–1842) 267n.8 Britain/British 35, 50, 271n.18, 353 Canute the Great (c.995–1035), King of England (1016–1035), Denmark (1018–1035), Norway (1028–1035) 72 Carl XII, King of Sweden (1682–1718, r. 1697–1718) 208 Cassirer, Bruno (1872–1941) 233–234 Castrén, Matthias Alexander (1813–1852) 118, 124, 127 Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia (1729–1796, r. 1762–1796) 29 the Caucasus/Caucasian 118–121 Cederskiöld, Maria (1815–1892) 348n.14, 358, 364n.67 the Celts 64 von Chézy, Helmina (1783–1856) 275 China/Chinoise 246, 278 Christiansfeld 179 Chrzanowski, Ignacy (1866–1940) 34, 39

Index the Cimbrian peninsula 70, 171 citizen/citizenship 4, 8–9, 11, 25, 38–39, 61, 66–68, 97n.67, 98, 100, 137, 139, 146, 237, 272–273, 275, 281, 319, 327, 352, 361–362 civilization 122, 125, 150, 206, 220, 235, 243, 248, 250–251, 253, 255, 321, 351 class. See social class Classicism/Classicist 26, 29–30, 34, 36, 42, 44, 265, 267, 283, 286 Cleasby, Richard (1797–1847) 71n.64 climate theories 88, 92, 121, 240, 282–283, 286 Cohen, Margaret 166, 172 colonialism/colonial 114, 125, 238–257 the Confederation of the Rhine 263, 265–266, 272, 275 conservatism/conservative 101, 177, 229, 232, 327–329, 353 contact zone 241–242, 249, 256 Copenhagen 14, 50–52, 138–139, 141–142, 146–147, 149 cosmopolitanism 344, 359 Czartoryski, Adam Jerzy (1770–1861) 32 Czech 47 Dagebüll 169 Dal, Erik 167n.6, 168–169 Dalarna 221–222, 231–232, 234 Dalälven 221 Damsholt, Tine 4n.9, 58, 59n.28, 71n.67, 74n.80, 282n.53 Dannevirke 73, 174–175 the Danube 178 decadence 143, 177, 276 Delille, Jacques (1738–1813) 34 Delumeau, Jean 26 democracy/democratization 45, 276, 352 Denmark/Danish/Dane 3, 5–7, 11, 14, 17, 30, 33, 50–76, 81, 85, 97, 137–161, 164–190, 208n.55, 221, 281, 282n.53, 310, 319 Derkert, Siri (1888–1973) 238 Drewsen, Adolph (1803–1885) 151, 153 Dreyer, Dankvart (1816–1852) 65 Dryden, John (1631–1700) 35 Düsseldorf 233 Dybbøl 174, 176 dystopian 166, 175, 188

Index Eckersberg, Christoffer Wilhelm (1783–1853) 142 Edgren, Henrik 5n.10, 6n.15, 81, 84, 90n.46 Ehrnrooth, Adelaïde (1826–1905) 240n.14 Eider 137, 153, 167 Eiranen, Reetta 2n.2, 299n.2, 305n.21, 348–349 Elkan, Sophie (1853–1921) 239, 240n.13 emigration 33, 219, 228, 230, 235, 240 emotion/affect/feeling admiration 34, 69, 103, 186, 192, 281, 334, 345n.4, 357 affective/emotional economies 12, 83, 108, 177, 194, 215 amazed 252 anger 5, 83, 101, 249–250, 256, 335 astonishment 147 awe 89, 181, 185 comfort/comfortable 62, 93, 148, 151, 265, 274 compassion 6n.11, 46, 96, 104, 110, 309, 335 consolation 289, 336 contempt 12, 88, 110, 127, 205, 333 desire 42, 93, 145, 171, 187, 232, 240, 248, 270n.14, 271, 289, 293, 310, 331 despair 12, 45, 148, 188n.74 disappointment 233, 251, 274, 292, 309, 363 discomfort/uncomfortable 100, 145 disgust 127, 251, 253 disillusionment 13, 274, 363–364, 366 emotional community 13, 26 emotional history/history of emotions 13, 26, 82, 104, 347 emotional textualities 320 emotional vacuum 67 envy 69–70 excitement 67, 152, 256, 362 fear 5, 8, 12, 27, 35, 47, 58–59, 74, 85, 89, 100–101, 116, 139, 144, 161, 199, 201–203, 212, 216, 245, 256, 274, 331, 333 grief/grieving 2, 5, 8, 11, 18, 27, 33–34, 36, 39, 86, 89, 99, 101–104, 226–227, 250, 265–266, 272, 274, 288, 291, 307, 333 guilt 83 happiness. See joy hate 12, 47, 93, 99, 101, 282

373 hope 32, 36, 40, 43, 61, 89–90, 122, 159, 187n.71, 215–216, 265, 271, 290–292, 315, 332, 334, 336–337 horror 56, 89, 93–96, 116–117, 139n.3, 148, 150, 275, 363 hostility 85, 116, 149, 176, 231, 351 humiliation 138, 271, 273, 275, 277 joy/happiness 27, 57, 61–62, 93–95, 97–98, 104, 124, 127, 145, 184, 186n.69, 188, 200–201, 214, 219, 274, 277, 288–289, 291, 311, 331, 333, 335, 337, 357, 360 lament 6, 34, 40, 53, 57, 62, 160, 221, 270 longing 61, 89, 166, 181, 188–189, 238, 246, 254, 256–257, 271, 288, 292, 307 love 8–9, 12,18, 27, 36, 43, 50, 54, 60, 63, 86, 96–98, 100–104, 130, 167, 175–176, 185, 186n.69, 192, 194, 200–201, 207–208, 214, 216, 240, 252–254, 257, 274, 288–289, 291, 305, 308, 310–311, 314, 320, 331–332, 334–335, 337–340, 348n.14, 355 melancholy 5, 14, 36, 52n.7, 53, 60, 62, 96, 153, 181, 183, 293 misery 46, 116, 147–148, 201, 206, 208, 212, 314 mourning 6, 11, 17, 29, 44, 85, 103–104, 199, 227, 288 nostalgia 2, 5, 12, 14, 16–17, 61, 73, 88, 92, 104, 222, 233, 237 optimism 140, 173, 221, 233, 365 pain 27, 74, 103–104, 138, 148, 270, 272–274, 334 pessimism 173, 174n.22, 188–189, 203 pity 212, 216, 253 pleasure 56, 93–94, 199, 249, 279, 313, 334 pride 8, 88–89, 97–98, 183, 201, 226, 251, 265–266, 274–275, 332, 336–337, 340, 350 relief 85, 206, 275 retaliation/revenge 5, 82, 84–87, 89, 92–94, 101–104, 265 sequence of emotions 90, 93, 95, 104 shame 5, 8, 85–86, 90, 101, 104, 145, 274, 277, 307, 334, 336–337 sorrow 27, 54, 59–60, 99–100, 152, 186, 199, 201, 222, 251, 253, 277, 334

374 emotion/affect/feeling (cont.) suffering 4, 7, 36, 47, 81, 85, 92, 139n.3, 146, 158, 166, 176, 207, 208n.54, 212, 216, 253, 266, 272, 274–275, 292n.69, 313, 352 terror 84, 95, 138, 189, 199, 212 ugly feelings 239, 243, 249–250 unhappiness 46, 143, 188 wrath 94, 96 England/English 56n.19, 70–71, 138, 143, 171, 178, 356–357, 359, 361 Engman, Max 3n.7, 5n.10, 8n.19, 81n.2, 81n.4, 90n.46, 98n.71, 98n.73,196–197, 207n.48, 302n.9, 302n.11–12, 305, 350n.18, 351n.19 epidemic/pandemic 1, 14, 139, 141, 146–151, 154, 156, 161 Eskimo 118 Estonia/Estonian 1, 3, 9, 15–16, 33, 43, 62, 110, 232, 305, 310, 319–341, 349, 351, 358 the Estonian language 319, 321, 326, 338 the Estonian national movement 7, 277, 319–341 ethnicity 33, 47, 68, 112, 119, 123, 272n.20, 322, 324, 338, 341 ethnotypes 272, 287, 289 Ewald, Johannes (1743–1781) 55 exile 11, 35, 38, 95, 165, 178, 187n.71, 188 exoticism 239–244, 254–255 exoticizing exoticism 241–242 imperialist exoticism 241, 255 Facks, Gunhild Maria (1874–1928) 241, 246 Falun 222, 232 fatherland 12, 89n.43, 93, 96–98, 123, 130, 166, 175n.29, 201, 205, 222, 265–267, 269, 273, 279, 287–289, 291, 293–294 Fellman, Jacob (1795–1875) 128 feminist activism 9–10, 12–13, 319–341, 345–366 female citizenship 38, 97n.67, 275, 361 feminist internationalism 360 feminist movement. See women’s movement Fennoman 13, 123, 299–316, 344–366 movement 299–316, 344–366 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814) 266n.7, 274, 281n.51 Finland/Finnish/Finn 1, 3–4, 6–9, 13, 15–16, 80–105, 108–131, 192–216, 231, 240n.14, 298–316, 321–322, 338, 340, 344–366

Index the Grand Duchy of Finland 4, 6, 91, 108, 111n.13, 196, 347, 350 the Finnish national movement 108–105, 298–316, 344–366 the Finnish language 9, 13, 118, 300–308, 310–311, 313, 315–316, 349–350, 354 the Finnish party 302, 350–351, 353 the Finnish War 82, 91, 98 Flensburg 169 Flygare-Carlén, Emilie (1807–1892) 82n.7–8, 92n.49, 95 folklore/folk beliefs 15, 36, 42, 71, 116, 172, 204, 241, 256, 267, 269, 323 Foote, Kenneth 165, 180n.48 Forsslund, Karl-Erik (1872–1941) 234 Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte (1777–1843) 268–269, 285n.59 France/French 6n.11, 26, 34–35, 39, 43, 46, 67, 70–71, 84, 150, 156, 178, 181, 234, 239–240, 244–250, 252, 255–256, 263, 265–266, 270–278, 281n.50, 282, 284, 289, 294, 323 Franzén, Frans Michael (1772–1847) 16, 103 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia (1712–1786, r. 1740–1786) 29 Frederick VII, King of Denmark (1808–1863, r. 1848–1863) 50 freedom. See liberty Fries, Ellen 348n.14, 361 Friesland 172 the Frisian islands 166, 168–171 Frimann, Peter Harboe (1752–1839) 56 Funen 74, 167–168 Furlough, Ellen 240 Gaelic people 53 Galicia 45–46 Gdańsk/Danzig 44 Geijer, Erik Gustaf (1783–1847) 85, 115, 264n.4, 283–285, 288–292, 293n.72, 361 Gellner, Ernest 2–3 gender 7–8, 12, 239, 252, 271–273, 277, 321, 327–329, 332, 337, 340–341, 344–345, 353, 361–362, 365 equality. See feminist activism geo-ideology 164, 173 geocriticism 166, 182 geopolitics 14, 84, 166, 168 Gerecke, Anne-Bitt 56n.17, 66n.50, 67

Index Germany/German 3, 8–9, 12, 30, 32–33, 39, 42–44, 46–47, 52, 55, 66–67, 70, 72–75, 119–120, 130, 137, 143, 149–150, 164–165, 167, 169–170, 172, 175n.30, 178, 189, 222, 233–234, 254–255, 263–294, 319, 321, 324–341 von Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm (1737–1823) 55 Gibbon, Edward (1737–1794) 36 de Gobineau, Arthur (1816–1882) 119 Godebski, Cyprian (1765–1809) 33–34 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749–1832) 265, 267, 283, 284n.57, 286, 291, 340 the Golden Age 1, 29, 69–70, 75, 80, 137n.1, 138, 140, 142–143, 146, 150, 154n.21, 159, 220–221 Goldschmidt, Meïr Aron (1819–1887) 149n.14, 169 Gothic aesthetics. See also the Gothic novel 56, 95 the Great Northern War 9, 192 Greece/Greek 27, 44, 267, 283 Greenland 172 Grimm, Jacob Ludwig (1785–1863) 267n.8 Grimm, Wilhelm Carl (1786–1859) 267n.8 Gripenberg, Alexandra (1857–1913) 10, 13, 15, 40, 344–366 Grodal, Torben Krag 176 Groebner, Valentin 75 Grönstrand, Heidi 193n.2–4, 194, 196n.14, 199n.20, 200n.23, 201n.28, 202–205, 209n.58, 213n.66 Gross, Toomas 322, 323n.18 Grundtvig, Nikolaj Frederik Severin (1783–1872) 53n.10, 58, 74n.79 Gustaf IV Adolf, King of Sweden (1778–1837, r. 1792–1809) 84 Gustav III, King of Sweden (1746–1792, r. 1771–1792) 279–280 Gustav Vasa, King of Sweden (1496–1560, r. 1523–1560) 88–89, 208n.55 Habsburg Empire/Habsburg Monarchy 5, 25, 30, 32–33, 46 Halligerne 168–170 Halling Aagaard, Holger (1785–1866) 154–155 Häme 197 Hammerich, Martin (1811–1881) 154–156

375 Hansen, Constantin (1804–1880) 149–150, 156, 160–161 Hartmann, Johan Peter Emilius (1805–1900) 151 Hasselblatt, Cornelius 320n.7, 324n.25, 324n.27, 324n.29, 329n.50, 338 Hatavara, Mari 193n.2, 194, 202–203, 207n.53, 208–209, 213, 313n.44, 314n.50 Hattelmala 197, 211 Hauch, Carsten (1790–1872) 155 Hazelius, Arthur (1833–1901) 221 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831) 112, 125, 349 Heiberg, Johanne Luise (1812–1890) 151, 153 Heidelberg 263, 266, 267, 268n.10 von Heidenstam, Verner (1859–1940) 237n.1, 254 Heimatbewegung 234 Helsinki/Helsingfors 6, 95, 102, 300, 304, 307–308, 346, 353 von Helvig, Amalie/Amalia (née Imhoff, 1776–1831) 8, 11–12, 263–294, 332 von Helvig, Bernhard (1809–1816) 288 von Helvig, Carl Gottfried (1765–1844) 263, 268, 288 Henry, Bishop (d. 1156) 309 von Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803) 88, 266, 267n.8, 281n.51, 302, 319, 323, 325, 349 heteroglossia 166 Hindustani. See Indian Hitzig, Julius Eduard (1780–1849) 269 Holland/the Netherlands 172 Holmquist, Ingrid 293 Holstein 52, 72, 75, 137, 166–167, 169, 171, 179 the Holy Roman Empire 5, 265, 271 Hungary/Hungarian 60, 178 Hurt, Jakob (1839–1907) 322–323 Hwasser, Israel (1790–1860) 90 hybridity 14, 52, 96, 165–166, 171, 178, 188 Iceland/Icelandic 97, 172 idealism 47, 177, 323 identity 3, 12–13, 95, 99–101, 104, 112, 178, 186, 196, 203, 206, 224, 243, 245, 250–251, 266, 276, 280, 308, 338, 345, 349, 354, 366 national. See national identity

376 idyll

14, 61, 66, 145, 149–150, 153, 156, 175, 219, 227, 233, 237, 241, 245–246, 256, 286, 311 Illinois 231–232, 235 imaginary geography 3, 80, 195, 210 Imola 197 India/Indian/Hindustani 92–93, 96, 256 industrialism 14, 16, 45, 69, 140, 145, 184, 197–198, 219–220, 229, 280 Ingria/Ingrian 112n.17, 211 Italy/Italian 35, 38, 286 Itzehoe 171 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig (1778–1852) 280 Jahnsson, Evald Ferdinand (1844–1895) 9, 299–316, 345 Jakobson, Carl Robert (1841–1882) 321–322, 325, 328, 339 Jameson, Fredric 166, 189 Jansen, Ea 319, 321, 323n.17, 324n.28, 327n.38 Janowski, Maciej 10–11 Jedlicki, Jerzy 26 Jena 5, 263, 265, 271 Jerichau, Jens Adolf (1816–1883) 153 Jew 45, 47, 67–68, 123–124, 147 Jolin, Ellen (1854–1939) 241 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor (1741–1790, r. 1765–1790) 29 Jürgenstein, Anton (1861–1933) 340 Jutland/Jutish 51–52, 60, 64–65, 74–75, 144–145, 179, 184, 186, 188 South Jutland 73, 167, 174, 187 Kajaneborg/Kajaani 211 Käkikoski, Hilda (1864–1912) 344n.1, 346, 348n.14, 354n.26, 359, 363n.58, 363n.62, 364–365 Karelia/Karelian 112n.17, 118 Karl Johan/Karl XIV/III Johan, King of Sweden and Norway (1763–1844, r. 1818–1844) 84, 208n.55 Keravuori, Kirsi 304, 305n.26, 306n.27–28 Key, Ellen (1849–1926) 222 Kiel 72–73 Kielberg, Esther 174, 175n.26 Kierkegaard, Søren (1813–1855) 141, 167n.6 Kivi, Aleksis (1834–1872) 300 Kivimaa, Katrin 327 Kivimäe, Sirje 327, 328n.41–43 Kjærgaard, Kristoffer 67n.53, 68, 69n.58

Index Klein, Vilhelm (1835–1913) 151 Klinge, Matti 6n.11,6n.13, 85, 10n.25–26, 16n.40, 90n.45–46, 95n.56, 102n.88 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724–1803) 55, 56n.17 von Knebel, Karl Ludwig (1744–1834) 265–266, 291n.67 Kniaźnin, Franciszek Dionizy (1750–1807) 38 von Knorring, Sophie (1797–1848) 95 Koch, Peter Christian (1807–1880) 73 Kochanowski, Jan (1530–1584) 34 Koidula, Lydia (Lydia Emilie Florentine Jannsen, 1843–1886) 323, 327–328 Koivunen, Anu 193, 309n.37 Kołłątaj, Hugo (1750–1812) 37 Kongeåen 179, 180n.46 Kopczyński, Onufry (1735–1817) 42 Kościuszko, Tadeusz (1746–1817) 29, 45 Koselleck, Reinhart 25 Kotliarevs’kyi, Ivan (1769–1838) 36 Köyliö lake 309 Koźmian, Kajetan (1771–1856) 44 Krasicki, Ignacy (1735–1801) 38 Kreuger, Nils (1858–1930) 233 Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold (1803–1882) 322 Krieger, Andreas Frederik (1817–1893) 151, 153 Krøyer, Hans Ernst (1798–1879) 175n.29 Kuldkepp, Mart 3n.7, 320 Kunzen, Friedrich Ludwig Æmilius (1761–1817) 66n.51 Kuopio 354 Kven 116 Kyro river 197–198, 211 lack of civilization 122, 250, 253, 255, 321 of justice/injustice 14, 172, 249, 251, 313, 335 Lagerlöf, Selma (1858–1940) 82, 102–104, 221, 234, 237n.1, 239–240 landscape agrarian/agricultural 12, 16–17, 122, 229, 235 Arcadian 14, 139, 150–151, 158–159, 221 locus amoenus 62, 283 Ossianic 53, 62, 64

Index Langewiesche, Karl Robert (1874–1931) 233 language. See also the Estonian language and the Finnish language dispute 300–307 linguistic 34, 42–43, 73, 108, 118, 175n.30, 178, 195, 252, 267, 271n.18, 276, 310 loss. See loss of language mother tongue 59, 70, 166, 205, 303, 349, 366 movement 9, 300–316, 345–366 shift 299, 303, 315 Lapland 109, 116–118, 124, 128–129 Larsson, Carl (1853–1919) 11–12, 15–16, 219–235, 237 Larsson, Karin (née Bergöö, 1859–1928) 16, 222, 224 Larsson, Ulf (1887–1905) 219, 222, 226–227, 235 Læssøe, Thorald (1816–1878) 151, 153 Læstadius, Petrus (1802–1841) 128 Latvia 7, 327 Leerssen, Joep 1n.1, 53n.11, 263n.2, 272n.20, 349 Lehmann, Orla (1810–1870) 149, 153 Leipzig 8, 43, 101, 270–271 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–1781) 325 Lewis, M.G. (1775–1818) 37 liberalism/liberal 6, 41, 82, 85, 90, 137, 140, 145, 149, 151, 153, 167–168, 173–175, 207, 231–232, 325 liberty/liberation/freedom 6, 9, 28, 31, 36, 38, 47, 88, 96, 156, 202, 252–253, 265–266, 270, 275–276, 278, 282, 289, 320, 324, 363 sexual liberty 357 Linde, Samuel Bogumił (1771–1847) 38–39, 42 Lindgren, Astrid (1907–2002) 237 Ling, Pehr Henrik (1776–1839) 84 literary genres autobiography 51, 53 ballad 41, 268–269, 285 biography 82–83, 102–104, 345n.4 children’s literature 238, 255n.73 diary 52, 325, 329–331 essay 219, 226, 235, 239, 264n.4, 283 hagiography 269 journal 44, 52, 60, 71, 140, 264n.4, 267, 283, 326, 358, 360

377 lectures 3, 111, 115–116, 119, 126–127 legend 171, 268–269, 284–286, 290, 292n.71, 309 letter 3, 18, 27, 139, 145, 160–161, 179, 181, 195, 201, 206–207, 211, 213–215, 232, 234, 246, 263, 265–266, 268, 287–293, 299, 306–307, 311, 316, 330, 344, 346–348, 352–359, 363–365 literary criticism/review 196, 200, 239, 264n.4, 265, 283, 299, 307–310, 314–315, 338–340 melodrama/melodramatic 100, 201, 203, 313–314 memoirs 139, 148n.12, 154, 156, 326, 332 newspaper article 61, 302, 338 novel 2–3, 16, 33, 38, 53, 66, 82, 87n.36, 92, 96–104, 139, 147, 152, 164–190, 192–216, 221, 234, 239–240, 286, 299–301, 307, 309–316, 323, 329, 355 epistolary novel 149n.14 Gothic novel 2, 37 historical novel/fiction 9, 12, 82, 108, 192–216, 300–301, 306, 308, 311, 313–315, 324 romance 2, 194, 314 sentimental novel 83, 97, 101, 104, 201–203, 313 novelette 240, 254 pamphlet 8, 82–83, 92–96,101, 104, 264, 270–272, 277–278, 280–281, 294 picture book 219, 238 poetry/poem/verse 6, 11, 14, 27–28, 34, 36, 41, 51, 53–57, 59, 64, 69, 82–92, 95, 104, 108, 115, 153, 161, 196, 209, 245–246, 268, 276, 283–284, 287, 311, 323, 328 political writings 3, 52, 73 psalm 39, 55 schoolbook 46, 237, 257 short story 9, 320, 322–323, 325, 330, 335 sketch 53, 140, 142n.6, 167 song lyrics 239 tale 73, 97, 115–117, 152, 199, 241, 246, 255–256, 268–269, 274, 284, 286, 301 fairy tale 238–239, 241, 244–246, 256, 278 folk tale 73, 111, 114–118, 130, 267, 292 theatrical play 52, 300, 305–310, 313 topographical writing 52

378 literary genres (cont.) travel literature/travel account/travelogue 3, 52, 56–58, 74, 240, 247–248, 282 literary history 263n.1, 300, 303, 339, 349 Lithuania/Lithuanian 5, 7, 25, 28, 30–32, 36, 40, 47 Lolland 156 London 360 Lorrain, Claude (1600–1682) 156 loss loss management 166, 173, 186, 190 lost feeling 104 of a Golden Age 1, 29, 69, 80, 220–221 of history 7, 75, 112–113, 128 of identity 13, 58–59, 66, 72, 98, 233 of independence 31, 46, 94–95, 97, 203, 209, 249, 275 of justice. See lack of justice of language 7, 18, 299, 316 of meaning 175 of morals/morality 14, 176, 194, 272, 276 of origin 1, 4, 10, 73 of protection 17, 194, 208, 212, 215 of rights 251 of traditions 1, 7, 12, 15 of virtues 1, 14, 80, 85–88, 90, 92–93, 96, 104 personal 11–12, 18, 215, 219, 226, 235, 294, 337–338, 341 post-loss 165, 173–174, 181–182, 188–189 territorial loss 1, 5–7, 11, 14, 17, 52, 66, 69, 72, 80–105, 138, 164–190, 192, 234, 263, 265 Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Prussia (1776–1810) 277 Lublin 44 Łuczewski, Michał 46 Lundbye, Johan Thomas (1818–1848) 58, 141, 159 Lviv/Lwów 45 Macpherson, James (1736–1796) 11, 14, 53 Malmö 81 Margaretha, Queen of Norway, Denmark and Sweden (1353–1412, r. 1387–1412) 208n.55 Marstrand, Wilhelm (1810–1873) 151, 153 Martineau, Harriet (1802–1876) 253 Marxism 83

Index Matus, Jill 253 Mazzarella, Merete 193n.2, 196n.12, 196n.14, 198n.19, 199n.20, 200, 202–203 Mellin, Gustaf Henrik (1803–1876) 82, 90–97, 101, 104 Meurman, Agathon (1826–1909) 302 the Middle Ages/medieval 39, 75, 83, 116, 122, 208n.55, 269, 280n.46, 282, 284, 287 Modernism/Modernist 127, 223 modernity 18, 109, 111, 114, 128, 160, 183–184, 237–238, 243–244, 248, 257 modernisation 28, 31, 139n.3, 164, 243, 248, 350, 359 Molbech, Christian (1783–1857) 53n.10, 58, 74, 282n.53 Mongol/Mongolian 118–121, 126 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat (1689–1755) 88, 283 Mora 221 morals/morality 14, 92, 176, 194, 231, 241, 250, 272, 276–277, 282, 294, 313, 327–328, 356–358, 362–363, 365 Moretti, Franco 2, 3n.5, 166n.3, 194, 210 Mortensen, Klaus P. 52n.7, 168–169 Mosse, George L. 8 Mostowska, Anna (1762–1833) 37 Nansen, Peter (1861–1918) 179 Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) 29, 38, 43–45, 101, 270, 273, 276 the Napoleonic Wars 40, 50, 58, 66–67, 138, 232, 263–264, 266n.7, 270n.14, 271, 293 Naruszewicz, Adam (1733–1796) 41 nation building 2–3, 7, 9, 75, 98, 102, 108, 110–111, 112n.17, 119, 122, 130, 193, 195, 264, 271, 274, 281n.50, 282, 293–294, 303–304, 308, 362 nation state 2n.2, 3–4, 7, 87, 122, 124, 197, 216, 270, 299–300 national anthem 11, 35, 175 awakening 293, 320–321, 323, 327, 332, 339, 349, 354–355, 362 belonging 2, 11, 62, 70, 75n.84, 124, 178–179, 183, 257, 264, 273, 308, 336, 345, 349, 355, 360, 362–366 character 59, 65–70, 72, 74, 118, 234, 272n.20, 282, 284, 289 costume 66, 70–71, 280–281

379

Index feelings 93–94, 165, 320–321, 323, 332, 336–337, 340 heritage 8n.18, 71, 123, 197, 221, 234, 281n.50, 301, 351 history 4, 26, 32, 37, 41, 47, 52, 57, 63, 65, 70, 73, 75, 85, 88–89, 102–103, 108, 112–131, 138–140, 149, 192–193, 197, 210, 244, 263, 266–267, 293, 299, 301, 303, 310, 313–314, 316, 320, 322, 324, 349 identity 4, 6, 8, 16, 30, 36, 42, 44, 52, 57–59, 66–72, 74, 75n.84, 84n.12, 85, 87, 101, 104, 112–113, 120–121, 123, 159, 193, 205–206, 209–210, 220–221, 229, 233, 235, 237–238, 241, 243, 245, 250, 256–257, 264, 266, 271, 275, 280–282, 291, 293, 320, 332, 336–337, 338, 340, 345 idyll. See idyll independence 7, 31, 40, 44, 82, 137, 207, 275, 278, 289, 319, 323 landscape 4, 9, 14, 76, 145, 159 Romanticism/Romantic nationalism 4, 14, 40, 43, 47, 80, 108, 115, 140, 145, 156, 220, 231, 234, 237, 245, 293, 322–323, 349 spirit/Volksgeist 15, 59, 74, 114, 232, 328, 337 trauma 5, 66, 80–81, 138, 145, 158, 174, 197, 228, 263, 266, 271, 302 nationalism banal nationalism 1, 2n.2, 299 everyday nationalism 1, 2, 347 lived nationalism 18, 348, 365 nationalist discourse 1–4, 7, 9, 11–12, 14–16, 52, 73, 82, 84, 105, 209, 232, 256 imagery 11, 16, 35, 40, 53, 55, 192, 211, 276, 360 movement/national movement. See also language movement 1–2, 7, 11, 18, 25, 35, 41, 44, 47, 192, 277, 280, 299–316, 319–341, 344–366 nationalistic geographical tourism 197, 257 nationhood 1, 2n.2, 111n.11, 165, 193, 215, 264, 273, 281, 293, 299, 302–303, 322, 356 Ngai, Sianne 243, 250 Nicander, Karl August (1799–1839) 283 Niemcewicz, Julian Ursyn (1758–1841) 41 Nightingale, Florence (1820–1910) 253 Nilsson, Sven (1787–1883) 114, 117

Nilsson, Torbjörn 173, 174n.23, 175n.25, 180n.49, 186n.68 Nokia river 197, 199, 211 the North Sea 165, 169, 171 Norway/Norwegian 6–7, 12, 50, 56, 66, 69, 72–74, 81, 84, 109, 111n.13, 138, 153, 208n.55, 211, 219, 227–229, 231–232, 234–235, 238, 254, 360 Nöteborg 211 Nyerup, Rasmus (1759–1829) 58 Nystad 211 Oberreuter, August 293 Oehlenschläger, Adam (1779–1850) 58, 59n.30, 69, 155, 175n.29 Old Norse literature 285, 287 myth/mythology 89, 290 d’Omalius d’Halloy, Jean Baptiste Julien (1783–1875) 119 Orient/Oriental 16, 241, 255 orientalism 238 Ostrobothnia/Ostrobothnian 116, 211 the Other 47, 114, 116, 123, 125–126, 128, 130–131, 165, 190, 244, 276, 350 Oulu/Uleåborg 306 Oxfeldt, Elisabeth 238n.7, 240, 242n.21, 248–249 Paavolainen, Pentti 308–309 Paris 145, 178, 278 Pärnu 324, 326 patriotism/patriotic 4, 29–31, 35, 39–40, 56–59, 66, 89, 123, 175, 209, 221, 231, 232, 266, 271, 273, 277–278, 280–281, 282n.53, 308, 323 anti-patriotic/unpatriotic 272, 310 peasant/peasantry 15–16, 30, 33, 44–46, 62, 70, 122, 208, 220, 224, 229–235, 309, 319, 321–322, 324, 326, 331–335, 358 Penrose, Jan 87 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich (1746–1827) 325 Peter I, Tsar of Russia (1672–1725, r. 1682–1725) 212 Ploug, Carl (1813–1894) 155 Poland/Polish 3–6, 8, 10–11, 16, 25–47, 70, 84–85, 89 Kingdom of Poland 41, 43, 49

380 Poland/Polish (cont.) Polish Republic 46 Polish uprisings 5–6, 33, 90 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 5, 25, 28, 30–31, 40 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744) 56n.19 Potocki, Seweryn (1762–1829) 32 Poussin, Nicolas (1594–1665) 156 Pratt, Mary Louise 241, 249, 256 prehistory/prehistoric 65, 75, 309 Prussia/Prussian 5, 25, 29, 32–34, 42, 137, 138n.2, 139, 143, 179–180, 182, 263–265, 270–271, 274–277 Przybylski, Jacek Idzi (1756–1819) 40 race/racism 108–131, 187, 240, 244, 247 Radcliffe, Ann (1764–1823) 37 Rahbek, Knud Lyhne (1760–1830) 67n.51 Randlev 51 realism/realist 52, 95, 104, 177, 182n.58, 194n.8, 203, 210, 227, 314–315, 329 Rein, Gabriel (1800–1867) 109n.6, 124 religion 8n.18, 9, 68, 156, 245, 276 Retzius, Anders (1796–1860) 114, 118 the Rhine 275, 282 Ribe 179 Richardson, Samuel (1689–1761) 331 Ridderstad, Carl Fredrik (1807–1886) 6 Riga 331 rights civil rights 275 equal rights 340 political rights 30, 39 property rights 226 Rix, Robert William 58, 70n.61 Roed, Jørgen (1808–1888) 156, 159 Romanian 178 Romanies 68, 112, 123–124, 130 Romanticism/Romantic 26–30, 34, 36–37, 42–43, 46–47, 69, 90, 114–115, 129, 145, 150, 156, 174n.22, 211, 220, 267, 283, 286–288, 293, 322–324, 349–350 Romantic nationalism. See national Romanticism Rome/Roman 10, 29, 35, 198, 267 Roos, Anna Maria (1862–1938) 233, 237–257 Rosenwein, Barbara H. 13, 26–27, 83, 347–348

Index Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778) 33–34, 37, 319 Runeberg, Fredrika (1807–1879) 9, 12, 192–216, 301 Runeberg, Johan Ludvig (1804–1877) 102, 301 Russia/Russian Empire/Russian 4–6, 8, 16, 25, 28–29, 31–34, 44, 82, 84–86, 90–96, 98–101, 108, 109n.4, 109n.6, 118, 124, 130, 192, 196–197, 199–201, 203–209, 211–212, 215, 270, 281n.50, 304, 308, 319, 326–327, 344–345, 352 Ryan, Marie-Laure 165, 180n.48 sacrifice 7–9, 11–13, 15, 40, 89–90, 96, 206, 222, 271, 275, 311, 320, 337–338, 341, 348–349, 361–364, 366 Samoyedic peoples 118 Sandström, Åke 5n.10, 6n.15, 81, 84–85, 90n.45, 98n.73 Sápmi/Sámi/Sámi people 4, 7, 15, 108–131 Saxe-Weimar/Saxon 5, 59, 265, 271 Scandinavism/Pan-Scandinavism/Scandinavist 52, 74, 97, 153 Schiller, Friedrich (1759–1805) 265, 267–268, 282, 325 Schleswig 7, 52, 75, 81, 87, 137, 143, 166–169, 171, 174, 179, 184 the First Schleswig War 14, 137–138, 140, 143, 166–167, 174 the Second Schleswig War 6, 14, 137, 140, 143, 166, 174, 179, 186n.68 Scotland/Scottish 54–55, 70, 171–172 Scott, Walter (1771–1832) 192, 199, 204, 315 Sentimentalism/sentimental mode 11, 26, 29, 31, 33–34, 36–38, 42, 55, 57, 83, 97–101, 104, 194, 201–203, 313 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) 57, 183 Shattock, Joanna 239 Siberia 118, 124 Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (1520–1572, r. 1548–1572) 29 Silfverstolpe, Magdalena “Malla” Sofia (née Montgomery, 1782–1861) 288, 293n.72 Sillanpää, Miina (1866–1952) 363 Skibelund Krat 179, 180n.46

381

Index Skovgaard, Peter Christian (1817–1875) 151, 153–160 Skrzetuski, Wincenty (1745–1791) 38 Slavonic 43, 178 Snellman, Johan Vilhelm (1806–1881) 112, 196, 301–305, 313–314, 349, 353 social classes 9, 12–13, 60, 92, 336 aristocracy/nobility 28–30, 32–33, 37–39, 41, 45, 198, 247, 277, 280–281, 319, 331, 339, 345, 347, 354, 362 bourgeoisie 200, 277, 280–281, 328 common/ordinary people 1, 2n.2, 13, 84, 92, 208, 220, 299, 301–304, 319, 345, 347, 349–351, 355, 362, 366 middle classes 51, 67, 229, 327 peasantry. See peasant upper classes 186, 357–358 working classes 13, 351–352, 357–358 Socialism/Socialist 144, 229–230, 352, 358–359, 363 non-Socialist 345, 352, 359, 363 Utopian Socialism 82, 97n.67 Sommer, Doris 2n.3, 100 Sonne, Jørgen (1801–1890) 140–141, 145–146 Sonnenfels, Josef von (1732–1817) 30 Sørensen, Carl Frederik (1818–1879) 151, 153 Sørensen, Peer E. 177–178, 180, 181n.51, 182n.58, 188n.74 spatial/spatiality 61, 66, 117, 165, 167–169, 171–177, 179, 181, 184, 188–190, 192, 194–195, 204, 213, 249 affective/emotional space 165 strategic space 165, 172, 174 St. Petersburg 32, 211 Stanislaus II Augustus, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (1732–1798, r. 1762–1795) 41 Starnawski, Jerzy 35 Sterne, Laurence (1713–1768) 57 Stearns, Carol 12, 27 Stearns, Peter 12, 27 sticky objects/bodies 83, 88, 93–95, 104, 193–195, 200–203, 215 Stockholm 81–82, 85, 93–95, 211–212, 219, 221–222, 227, 263, 265, 281–282, 288 Struensee, Johann Friedrich (1737–1772) 66 the sublime 14, 41, 53, 57, 73–74, 282–283, 285–286

Suburg, Lilli (1841–1923) 9, 277, 319–341 Sweden/Swedish/Swede 3–9, 11–13, 15–16, 18, 50, 59, 74, 80–105, 108–109, 111n.11, 111n.13, 112, 115–117, 123, 128, 130, 138, 193, 196–197, 199–209, 211–212, 214–215, 219–235, 237–257, 263–268, 270, 279–285, 287–294, 299–316, 320, 344–345, 349–355, 358–361, 364–366 Swinemünde 143 Symbolist aesthetics 221 Szporluk, Roman 35–36 Tally, Robert T. 166n.5, 194n.8, 210 Tampere/Tammerfors 198, 210 Tamul, Sirje 326n.32, 328 Tartu 324 Tavastland 210–211 Tegnér, Esaias (1782–1846) 82, 84–92, 95–96, 101, 103–104, 264n.4, 283–284 temporality 5, 9, 15n.39, 80, 90, 197, 199 territoriality 87, 167 Thaarup, Thomas (1749–1821) 67 Thiesse, Anne-Marie 6, 8n.18, 11n.29, 15, 84n.12, 112, 118n.38, 128n.66, 281n.50, 351 Thomas, Bishop (d. 1248) 311 Thorn/Toruń 42, 44 Thorvaldsen, Bertel (1770–1844) 155 Tickell, Thomas (1685–1740) 56n.19 Topelius, Toini (1854–1910) 348n.14, 353n.23, 355–356, 359n.44, 364, 365n.68 Topelius, Zacharias (1818–1898) 7, 10, 15, 82, 102–103, 108–131, 192, 196, 198, 211, 301, 314–315, 353, 356, 365 topography/topographic 52, 58, 60, 62, 74, 169, 175, 180n.49, 183–184 transnational 4, 6, 18, 165–166, 173, 190, 257, 264, 281, 287, 349 Treugutt, Stefan 28, 44n.30 Troy 35, 44 Turku/Åbo 199, 206, 211, 304, 310–311 Tuulio, Tyyni (1892–1991) 346n.4, 354, 360n.48 Tygstrup, Frederik 165, 177 Ujejski, Józef (1883–1937) Ukraine 32

36n.16, 39

382 Undla-Põldmäe, Aino (1910–1992) 321n.13, 325n.31, 329–331, 332n.59, 335, 338n.82, 339n.85, 339n.87 Uppsala 6, 94–95, 263, 288, 292–293 the USA/the United States 12, 219, 228, 230, 235, 356–357 Utopia/utopian 61, 73, 166, 172, 175, 186, 188–189 Utopian Socialism. See Socialism Vamdrup 170, 180 Vasa 211 Vasa, Cecilia, Princess of Sweden (1540–1627) 208n.55 the Vasa kings. See Gustav Vasa Vasenius, Valfrid (1848–1928) 102 Västerås 81 Vedel, Valdemar (1865–1942) 152–153 Vejle 149–150, 189 Venice 227 Vermehren, Frederik (1823–1910) 143–146 Veske, Mihkel (1843–1890) 321 Viking 14, 86–87, 90n.44, 92–93, 96, 104 the Viking Age 1, 75 Viljandi 326 Virgil, Publius Vergilius Marco (70 BC–19 BC) / Virgilian 11, 34–37, 39, 44 virtue 1, 14, 33, 36, 39, 80, 85–90, 92–93, 96–97, 104, 140, 253, 273 courage 36, 59, 86, 211, 271, 331, 340 decency 278–279 dignity 40, 248–249 faithful 63, 98, 186, 201 fidelity 253, 316 heroic 36, 241, 255, 257, 277, 287, 322 honesty 250–251, 282, 289 honour 86, 90, 95, 101, 127, 182, 192, 232, 250, 336 humble 350 loyalty 32, 103, 189, 192, 205–207, 273, 276, 307–308, 310 moderation 282 modesty 282, 196n.11 noble 28, 32, 37, 39, 43, 96, 124, 183n.59, 201, 204, 249, 276–277, 288 piety 276

Index propriety 252 purity 220, 282, 289, 356 worthy 276, 327, 336 Volney, Constantin François de Chassebœuf (1757–1820) 36 Vordingborg 154 Vyborg/Wiborg 81, 211, 308 Wachtmeister, Frances (1868–1922) 239 Wagner, Andreas 120 Wagner, Enrico 280 Wahlenberg, Anna (1858–1933) 255n.73 Wallin, Väinö (later Voionmaa, 1869–1947) 113, 131 Warsaw 26, 35, 37, 42, 44 the Duchy of Warsaw 29, 41, 43 Watson, Harry D. 53 Weimar 263, 265, 267–268 Wendland, Anna Veronika 327 Wereszycki, Henryk 45 Wergeland, Henrik (1808–1845) 6 Westphal, Bertrand 166, 182, 185 Whelan, Heide 328 Wieland, Christoph Martin (1733–1813) 66n.51 Wilhelmine Marie, Princess of Denmark (1808–1891) 50 Winther, Christian (1796–1876) 155, 160 women’s movement 240, 252, 363 women’s emancipation/rights 45, 240, 253, 328–329, 353–356 women’s suffrage 345, 346n.7, 352–353, 360, 363 the World Wars the First World War 7, 8n.18, 14, 26 Wybicki, Józef (1747–1822) 11, 35 Yildiz, Yasemin 205 the Youth Movement 231–232 Yrjö-Koskinen, Yrjö Sakari (1830–1903) 113, 131, 302 Zajączkowski, Andrzej 30 Zealand 74, 154–155, 159–160 Zimbardo, Philipp 26 Zorn, Anders (1860–1920) 221