Anarchy in the UKR

Serhiy Zhadan

Lev Hrytsyuk writes that contemporary Ukrainian writing is increasingly finding a home in Swedish - Anarchy in the UKR (2005) by the young Ukrainian poet and novelist Serhiy Zhadan (Zjadan in Swedish) made it to Russia's National Bestseller shortlist in 2008, and the novel pulls no punches, focusing as it does on some particularly violent episodes from 20th century Ukrainian history. The book is a result of the author's  travel through Ukraine to the places where the famous revolutionary and anarchist guerrilla warrior Nestor Makhno fought his battles. Between 1918 and 1921 Makhno was leader of the peasant army that fought against the German, Austrian and Belarusian counter-revolutionary forces in Ukraine. Zhadan's narrative style deliberately mimics the phrasings and moral contortions of Soviet journalism, and the entire venture seems to be a no-holds-barred polemic with Ukraine itself. 


Now Bonniers are set to publish the book in Nils Håkanson's Swedish translation. It's unclear whether an English version is planned - somehow one feels that it ought to be.

Shady characters? - 2

Yet another example of how Finland and its complex history get distorted in the eyes and minds of Finland's Nordic neighbours. From The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo:

How well do you know the history of Swedish Nazism?”

“I’m no historian, but I’ve read a few books.”

“In 1939 the Second World War began, and in 1940 the Winter War in Finland. A large number of the Lindholm movement joined as Finland volunteers. Richard was one of them and by then a captain in the Swedish army. He was killed in February 1940 — just before the peace treaty with the Soviet Union — and thereby became a martyr in the Nazi movement and had a battle group named after him. Even now a handful of idiots gather at a cemetery in Stockholm on the anniversary of his death to honour him.”

See also: Shady characters?

A valley in the violence

In Hbl Philip Teir interviews Finnish-Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen, whose work is being published in Sweden and who is tipped to win this year's Nordic Council Literature Prize. Excerpt:

After Sofi Oksanen appeared on a Danish TV culture show and depicted the Finnish people as depressive and uncommunicative she heard criticism from many quarters. The fact that Finland has two brutal school shootings behind it and a bleak set of statistics relating to violence was no excuse. This is stuff one shouldn't talk about to foreign journalists... "It isn't sanitary," was the view of Finland's Professor Laura Kolbe.

"I've learned that while many people don't mind as long as you stick to writing books and winning prizes ... as soon as you say something like this, the reaction is "Get back to Russia, you Estonian whore," says Oksanen, who grew up in Jyväskylä with a father who is Finnish and a mother who is Estonian.

See also: Knocking Finland

Hallgrímur Helgason: The Author of Iceland - 7

(continued)

The train slowed down, and somewhere out in the night the bark of a dog was heard, then a rifle shot. I transferred myself fearfully to another compartment, but then got into still more trouble when the train guard saw I was in the wrong seat. Next thing, I would be hauled off the train at the next station. Then I would have fallen out of the Great Manuscript and would naturally have ended up like Stjáni. How on earth could people think it was possible to run a society in which a quarter of the inhabitants were made to work as prompters and see to it that their fellow citizens didn’t fluff their lines? And what kind of character was it who saw it as their life’s work to supervise the work of others? A mediocrity took power in every field and gave birth to an even lower type of human being. The Soviet Union was a society upside-down. The gangs that inhabited the sewers of other countries were in power here. Gunmen and bandits sat at the palace table while the most capable scholars and intellectuals of the age were kept in thumbscrews down in the dungeons. As soon as the walls came tumbling down, the presidential candidates were fetched from prison.

At Bolshevo we were shown round a prison. A model prison, it was supposed to be. The corner of shame at the Sunday school. The refectory was magnificent, looking like a Moscow underground station, where the inmates sat dining to cello pieces by Tchaikovsky that hung high up on the walls, and they were also allowed to read the newspapers. We nodded all along, myself and a man from a Scottish newspaper, two Finns and a Dane, a whole delegation from Bulgaria. But after our host, the party stalwart of the district, had been speaking for 12 minutes, the Scotsman nudged me: some of the prisoners didn’t seem to have noticed us, and were just continuing to read their newspapers. But now we observed that one of them, an intelligent-looking, grey-haired man with yellowish skin, was holding his newspaper upside down. He saw that we had noticed, looked up from the paper, and our eyes met. After that, I remembered those eyes once a year. They said: “Everything’s upside down here. Everything’s wrong here. It’s dark at noon here. Don’t lie. Don’t tell them back home that everything’s fine here. Look at me. Don’t lie.”

I saw those eyes every year for twenty-five years. It took me twenty-five years to understand what they were saying. “Don’t lie”. I lied. I told the truth about all the lies I was told. I lied. I bore false witness in the court of history. I painted an icon of the Devil. And for that I was punished.

Stalin was unadulterated evil, the Devil himself in human form. He had his best friends shot at special ceremonies and didn’t go to his mother’s funeral. “I’m not going to cross all those mountains for the damned whore, though of course it will be better to sit with her now than when she was alive.” He made an excellent impression. His hair neatly combed, and unostentatiously dressed. I greeted him. I shook his hand.

Axel and I heard him speak at what they called an “election meeting” in the Moscow Opera. I published that speech in full in Adventure, alongside a two-page profile of “the genius in the Kremlin”. As a speaker, the Leader was totally relaxed, and could indeed be quite reassured about the results of the forthcoming elections. As luck would have it, no one had stood against him. He called them “the freest elections that have ever been held in the world”. Everyone was free to elect him. When the meeting was over we were shown into a high-ceilinged intermediary room, a great banqueting hall, with a fine, thick, ornamentally patterned carpet. Here there were delegations from every other planet in the in the solar system of socialism. All of them very pre-schooled, and very schoolteacher-like. Here you had one country headmaster after another, gentlemen from Viborg, Aalborg and Helsingborg with round spectacles and bald Lenin heads. And they all had nicknames like Otto, Felix, Jan or Karl. The revolution devours its children, but first it baptizes them.

The crowd went quiet when Joseph entered the hall, waited a little, allowed himself to be introduced to people with a few words, shook their hands and was quickly lost from view. It seemed to be pure chance that Axel and I were introduced to him. “This is a Comintern worker from Iceland, and a young author who is writing a book about the Soviet Union…” “Hello,” I said, like the fool of history. He didn’t say anything. Showed no expression. Did not smile. But looked me in the eye. A calm and kindly look, secure in the knowledge that he could have one killed. I stared at his pockmarked skin. He smelled of strong tobacco. And shook my hand. Stalin gave me a handshake.

Fifty years later my hand still shakes.

translated from Icelandic by David McDuff

The Author of Iceland - 1
The Author of Iceland - 2
The Author of Iceland - 3
The Author of Iceland - 4
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The Author of Iceland - 6

Helsinki Square

News that Tallinn may soon have a Helsinki Square (Helsingi väljak) - a proposal to give this name to the area in front of the Old City Harbour A-terminal is being discussed by municipal authorities, according to Tallinn's mayor, Edgar Savisaar. Savisaar also mentioned a proposal to erect a monument to former Finnish President Urho Kekkonen on the same site, noting that Kekkonen's visit to Tallinn in 1964 led among other things to the opening in the following year of regular passenger ferry services between the Estonian and Finnish capitals.

Carl O. Nordling

The Finland-Swedish historian and architect Carl O. Nordling (1919-2007) created an interesting website which is still maintained online in his memory, and also updated from time to time. The site contains numerous essays, articles and archive materials in a number of fields, including Scandinavian and Soviet history, music, literary criticism, anthropology, and Finnish and Finland-Swedish culture. Of particular interest to readers of this blog, perhaps, are the essays and reflections contained in The Finland-Swedes, a compendium of lists and writings relating to Finland-Swedish writers and artists, Finland-Swedish military men and civil servants, Finland-Swedish scientists and Finland-Swedish promoters of the Finnish language.

Among the site's more unusual offerings are a reconstruction of Stalin's speech to the Politburo of August 19, 1939 and the complete text of a book entitled Shakespeare: Who Wrote Hamlet and Why?

(Hat tip: Mari-Ann Kelam)

Living memory

Juhani Salokannel 's biography of Jaan Kross (Sivistystahto, WSOY, 2008) has been translated into Estonian by Piret Saluri, and on Monday the translation was launched in Tallinn at a ceremony attended by Kross's widow Ellen Niit, other members of Kross's family, and Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, writes Hannu Marttila. In his speech, President Ilves remarked that although the book was written for a readership (i.e. Finns) who had not experienced occupation by a foreign power, it would none the less be instructive for younger Estonians now in their 20s and 30s.

Bridging the Gap - History and the Nordic World

I thought I'd continue out here in the open the discussion that started in the comments to Harry's Bredsdorff post. Eric wrote:

While nowadays I am more on the right in economic and social-cohesion terms, I still read the former Communist weekly Ny Tid, partly out of nostalgia, partly because of its good cultural coverage, and partly because it is always useful to read opposite views. When I was at UEA and in Åbo, the Communists I knew were almost painfully middle-class offspring. They'd never been within an armsbreath of a worker. But I admired their idealism. And I hope that we people that kick against the cultural pricks of bestsellerdom and xeno-ignorance in the UK can adopt an even-handed approach in political terms.

I have to admit that my political sympathies are mainly centre-right/libertarian. This, I think, is partly a result of the relatively long ime I spent during the 1970s and 80s -- after periods in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe -- trying to do something to lift the veils of wilful ignorance that surrounded the view of the Soviet Union then prevalent among Western democrats, most of whom were apparently unable to perceive the true nature of global Communism. It's also probably a result of the time I spent the United States during the same era, when the discussion of these issues had a different configuration from the one that characterized debate in the UK and Europe. Today, if I were still in the U.S. I suppose I would probably sympathize most with "right-wing Democrats" and "left-wing Republicans".

This political stance caused me some problems when I met writers and intellectuals in the Nordic countries, most of whom held views that were even more the to the left than those of their counterparts in Britain. On the other hand, I became aware that -- as Czeslaw Milosz pointed out in The Captive Mind -- totalitarian ideology has the power to enslave the minds of individuals who are otherwise decent and intelligent, and that behind the ideological enslavement and blindness often lie beauty, truth and honesty. That is particularly true of writers and poets, I think. In Finland, for example, I found some poets who, though they professed to be Communists, were writing poetry that would never be accepted in the framework of Soviet literary dogma, and was even far removed from anything could be called "left wing", or "politically committed".

It wasn't until I got to Estonia in the early 1990s that I began to meet writers and intellectuals from a Nordic cultural background who also had direct and personal experience of Soviet reality, and who because of that had managed to (even had to) bridge the gap between the personal and the public/political - much in the way that W.H. Auden had done in England and America decades earlier, though from a very different experiential base. These writers knew what Communism was and what it did to people, had felt its physically and mentally destructive force, which was similar to that of Nazi ideology and practice. Meeting these people was confirmation for me that even though in the rest of the Nordic world the influence of the Soviet threat and Soviet propaganda had put blinkers on many minds, there was a Nordic cultural reality that stood outside that limitation and beyond it.

I agree with Eric that the labels of "right" and "left" have become less meaningful since the fall of Communism - yet the old dichotomy remains, now mostly polarized around opposition to or support for the United States and its cultural and political role in spreading the values of liberty and democracy throughout the world. But also, for cultural and historical reasons, and probably because I'm British rather than European, the Nordic world has always seemed to me to stand somewhere between Europe amd America, and I guess I still see it as a kind of bridge between those two inwardly diverse but outwardly monolithic entities.