The wolf's hour? An abandoned house is alive...

Extracts from Viimeiset vieraat. Elämää autiotaloissa [The last visitors. Life in abandoned houses, Maahenki, 2010] by Kai Fagerström, Risto Rasa & Heikki Willamo. Text by Willamo, poems by Rasa, photographs by Fagerström and Willamo

Some thirty years later I found the badgers’ cottage again – it wasn’t the same one, but the mood of my childhood still floated there. Grey walls and a shingle roof, bare gaping windows, the door creaking on its single hinge. Oak tree in the yard, lilacs flourishing wild. The forest was rapidly reclaiming its own behind the cottage. The mounds of sand beside the wall bases showed prints of strong-clawed paws and a number of paths, hardened from use, led into the woods.

I wandered about the yard, looked at the cottage and peeked in the windows. The grey panelling was pretty and at the same time free of unnecessary ornamentation. In the front hall were shoes now decades out of style, in the main room a partially collapsed fireplace, a rusty stove and a stool missing a leg. Between the forest and the house were berry bushes and a few apple trees just barely clinging to life. In front, a hillside field facing south.

I sat in the yard under the great birch tree to await evening. I felt again the tingle of excitement of my childhood evenings in the cottage’s enchanted garden, but now the feeling was seasoned with nostalgia. It was a longing for that innocent time and at the same time for a world that was gone. The foundation stones of our lives are set at an early age and we carry those foundations through the years. Home leaves tracks within us just as do things and events experienced strongly. As adults we see the world through tinted glasses and somewhere deep within we long for the world of our childhood.

Photo: Fagerström & Willamo

At least in that early evening moment I longed for the warm summers, butterfly-filled meadows, cows in the pasture and sand beneath my bare feet. I longed for that total immersion in the world of adventures, which only a child knows how to achieve. Here and now, and let the rest of the world disappear.

I waited. The sun set and twilight deepened. A blackbird sang. At last the pale figure of a badger appeared on the mound under the window. It perched there for a moment, then reversed back under the house. Soon it emerged onto the mound again and shuffled along the path into the woods. Nothing else happened. A lone badger was living in the cottage. Thirty years earlier I would have imagined it the surly master of the house; now it was a badger. I felt wistful. I felt I had lost something irreplaceable.

I went to the cottage on several evenings and the pattern repeated. The badger sniffed the wind and withdrew into its den, to reappear shortly. Then it disappeared on its night expeditions. The only variation was which of the two paths it chose.

During those evenings, something new began to form in the depths of my mind; curiosity replaced nostalgia. Well-built houses remain from one generation to the next. The world changes around them and in the end they are abandoned. They begin to be called abandoned houses, but they are not abandoned. Without upkeep, their fate becomes decay. When the roof finally gives, water does its part and the house collapses.

The old badger did not live to see his cottage collapse. I found him next to the road, killed by a car. He was resting on his side, his paws as if frozen mid-step. I touched one of them. The pads were coarse from walking and digging, the claws, long and sharp, the teeth shone like a string of white pearls. I carried his body into the forest and placed it beneath a small spruce.

The place was briefly without inhabitants, but in the spring a large family could be found within its shelter, a raccoon dog couple and about a dozen pups. The bustle called to mind the time when the cottage was filled with children’s voices, but the new residents were of today. The raccoon dog is an immigrant from far, the east, and it has a bad name in certain circles, as immigrants always have in certain circles. But as so often, this matter didn’t deserve much fuss, either.

Photo: Fagerström & Willamo

In the Finnish countryside the raccoon dog is more of a beggar than a predator. Raccoon dogs busy about at dusk looking for voles, frogs, large insects and larvae. Sometimes they eat the eggs of bird’s nests they happen upon. They like berries and sneak into yards to snitch fallen fruit. They scout the roadsides, risking their lives in hope of road kill, and hang around barn corners. The raccoon dog has all the markings of a versatile bon viveur, but winter is a nearly unsurpassable barrier for it. Only one pup in ten lives to the age of one year, and of this dozen only one or two will see the following spring.

The raccoon dogs brought needed life to the cottage. White clouds of burnet roses bloomed in the doorway and even the tumble-down building seemed to hold itself more erect. It did not take a lot of imagination to see echoes of the cottage’s past in the animals’ bustling – children peeking through the crack of a door, grandma squinting benevolently through the window. The raccoon dog pup sitting in front of the deserted doghouse even recalled the family’s spitz at the start of its life.

Early in July the raccoon dogs moved away. In the autumn another badger appeared, beginning to stock the cottage for its winter quarters. The next spring he sometimes had a friend but there were no baby badgers to be seen. The old geezer continued his solitary life.

The cottage fell into decay. The roof leaked in a number of spots and finally gave. The owners carried away the best logs; the rest sank into a pile overrun with willowherb and raspberry bushes, and fox cubs growing up nearby briefly made the tangle into their fort.

A red cottage stands on a small hill. Seen from afar it appears in good shape there among the bushes, but closer up one sees the boarded windows and rotted steps. The people have gone. Along the walls are mounds of sand with hard-trodden paths leading from them. One runs directly into the apple orchard, another, along the ditch to the lakeside field, but the most well-worn leads under the leafy canopy of the hazelnut grove to a lair dug into the hillside.

Photo: Fagerström & Willamo

I peek in through the window. Inside it looks lived in. People have left their mark: wrinkled rag rugs, things on the table and on the edge of the toppled fireplace. Toys and tops of cooking pots strewn across the floor, a torn bag in the corner. As for the current occupants, sand and dry hay, chewed items and the path under the stove tell of them.

The cottage is being used by badgers. They have another home in the woods beneath the hazel bushes….

The badger clan lives in the red cottage like in the best of fables. They have tables and chairs, rugs on the floors and a rocking chair in the corner. They probably don’t use them, but who’s to say. Anything can happen in the dark. I imagine the clan’s oldest gathering the young about him on a floor cushioned with rugs in a corner of the main room, telling them animal stories and fables. Calmly, without hurry, in badger language. He would use people in his tales – just allegorically, in place of animals.

People and badgers have different requirements for the home. While the badgers live there they redo it; they dig up the foundations and tear open the floors, hastening the building’s decay. Might the failing of this cottage’s bearing wall also be the doing of the badger clan? They have dug up the ground beneath it and caused it to fall sideways and in so doing opened a passage into the main room.

Photo: Fagerström & Willamo

Through the badgers’ activity the house has moved into nature’s realm. After a short vacant period it again holds life, but the direction is inevitable.

The wood rots, the insulation decomposes, even the roofing felt turns brittle and crumbles. The cement cracks, the iron rusts. The glass defies time, but even that gets buried under the forest litter, shatters as frost churns the ground’s surface, and ultimately crumbles into tiny particles, like quartz sand.

Nature is reclaiming her own. After a moment on loan, the place is returning to the great cycle.

Translated by Jill G. Timbers

Check-up by a district nurse: from the exhibition ‘Everyday life in Finland’ (Muonio, 1970)

Photographs from Caj Bremer. Valokuvaaja / Photographer / Fotograf (Musta Taide, 2010; graphic design by Jorma Hinkka)

The period after the Second World War and before the age of television was the golden age of photojournals such as Life, Look and Paris Match. The big Finnish illustrated periodical was Viikkosanomat (‘The weekly news’); its early star, Caj Bremer, was one of the first Finnish press photographers to wander among people and record life as it was

‘Every photograph is the sum of aesthetic choices, and each one has a relationship with reality both when it is taken and in the time frame in which the viewer encounters it’, writes news editor and curator Riitta Raatikainen in her introduction to Caj Bremer. Valokuvaaja / Photographer / Fotograf.

Caj Bremer (born 1929) worked for years as a press photographer, most intensively between 1950 and 1970. A retrospective exhibition of his work over six decades opened at Helsinki’s Ateneum Art Museum in February (until 16 May).

Bremer’s photojournalistic scale is large; he has witnessed war and its victims, strikes and devastation, but he also has a sharp eye for important moments in ordinary people’s ordinary lives.

‘In post-war France, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis became leading names in humanist photography. While philosophers withdrew to consider the issues of existentialism, photographers set out amidst the bustle of of life,’ writes Raatikainen. It was an idea whose time had come. The New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1955 exhibition, The Family of Man, in which worldwide photographs were grouped around common human themes such as love, children and death, is perhaps the most emblematic and well-known example of the approach. Meanwhile, in faraway Finland, Bremer’s project and exhibition entitled Everyday life in Finland (1972) recorded life that he knew was to disappear, in small villages yet untouched by modernisation.

Life ceased publication in 1972, Viikkosanomat in 1975. Reportage did not die, though. Caj Bremer has been influential in many ways in Finnish photography since, but perhaps his monochromatic view of the world of the 1950s is what lives on most vividly.

Self-evidently, the photographer likes people – he has a delicious sense of humour, too. In pictures taken at funerals or weddings, of fashion models, artists, presidents or children, in Finland or abroad, it’s the people that matter most.

The time frame in which we now view the faces Bremer has captured makes us marvel at how they, silently, speak volumes.

Curious crowds: a Roma family wedding, of Kalle Hagert and Tuula Saarto, at Helsinki Cathedral, 1959

Last rites: the funeral of 15 young people who died in a boating accident in Juuka, northern Karelia, 1959

Posing: street sweeper and model, fashion photography for Salon Ika (1958); opera singer Martti Talvela (1935–1989) enjoying a sauna in Anttola on Lake Saimaa (1985)

Country cavalcade: Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson of the United States in northern Finland, 1957

Bear and bare: President Urho Kekkonen inspects the guard of honour on a visit to Great Britain, 1961

A little night music: Teemu Kupiainen playing in Baddi, India, as the sun sets. Photo: Stefan Bremer (2009)

It was viola player Teemu Kupiainen‘s desire to play Bach on the streets that took him to Dharamsala, Paris, Chengdu, Tetouan and Lourdes. Bach makes him feel he is in the right place at the right time – and playing Bach can be appreciated equally by educated westerners, goatherds, monkeys and street children, he claims. In these extracts from his book Viulun-soittaja kadulla (‘Fiddler on the route’, Teos, 2010; photographs by Stefan Bremer) he describes his trip to northern India in 2004.

In 2002 I was awarded a state artist’s grant lasting two years. My plan was to perform Bach’s music on the streets in a variety of different cultural settings. My grant awoke amusement in musical circles around the world: ‘So, you really do have the Ministry of Silly Walks in Finland?’ a lot of people asked me, in reference to Monty Python.

In 2002 the first trip during my grant period took me to France, Spain and Portugal, where I performed in small villages in the mountains. When, on the outskirts of a small French village, I plucked up the courage to perform all of Bach’s violin sonatas and partitas from memory for the first time, my one and only listener was clearly enthralled. This I deduced from the way in which it kept jangling the bell tied around its neck throughout the duration of my two-hour performance. As soon as I began to play, this lonely cow came up to me and did not walk off at any point. I thought of this as a good omen.

In autumn 2003 I travelled to China, and from there I continued to India, then Morocco. Finally, I made a less adventurous trip to Lourdes in France. Of course, there were plenty of shorter trips in between these, but on those trips I didn’t keep a diary.

For me, playing on the streets is not about background music; these are concerts – in fact, they are almost more than concerts. I often play for a single listener or just a handful of listeners at a time. As an experience, this is far more intimate than a normal concert, more challenging, and with that comes a greater sense of responsibility. Often, particularly at the beginning of my trips, I can be very nervous as I step out into the street, and sometimes, as the first people stop to listen, I have had some sort of blackout and been unable to remember how the music continues. Such a thing hasn’t happened to me in a concert hall for years. For this reason, I practice a lot on these trips, at least as much as I would when preparing for a ‘normal’ concert.

In addition to playing on the streets, these trips involved another one of my passions: Johann Sebastian Bach and his suites for violoncello and his sonatas and partitas for violin. All of these works can be played on the viola. Only a viola player can set himself the challenge of playing every one of Bach’s suites, sonatas and partitas from memory in a single concert. Only a megalomaniacal viola player, that is….

January 19, 2004, Shimla, India

No matter how badly you sleep in a dingy, mouldy hotel room, waking up as the sun rises and seeing the summit of the Himalayas from your window more than compensates. Three hours’ morning practice on the violin sonatas. Yoga. Then out on to the street.

The centre of the old town is built on a steep ridge. On top of The Ridge there is a street, at the end of which is a market square with a church at one side. Bach and a church! I set up nearby. I feel nervous – not about my own ability, but because of the potential indifference.

An hour’s set turns into a two-hour set. Throughout there are a couple of dozen people standing around, listening intently. Between every movement someone always wants to chat. ‘Where are you from? What is your good name, Sir?’

I have to start playing the movements very attacca, without a break. Four reporters turn up, each with their own photographers. One national newspaper and three local ones, who all claim to be the largest in the region.

And the questions! ‘Shimla is the gateway to God. How do you feel this when you are playing? How does your music explain the mysteries of the universe? What is your aim in life and can you achieve it by playing? How does your music affect you as an individual? What about society as a whole?’

The most challenging exam of my life. Puzzling. People get straight to the point here; they don’t feel the need to warm up with empty chitchat. These questions make me think hard. Will this trip provide me with answers?

During the Sixth Suite a young man with a mouth organ sits down next to me and starts playing along with Bach’s harmonic progressions: G major, D major. When I finish, he begins to play some local melodies. I accompany him: C major, G major.

Lunch. I have decided to become a vegetarian for the rest of the trip. This is the easiest solution all round, and besides, vegetarian food here is very good. During my students years in Cologne I think I was a vegetarian for two years, because vegetarian food there was cheap. I could do it in Finland too, if finding good vegetarian food were as easy as it is here.

After lunch I go for a walk. I continue up The Ridge. A warm hillside. I see four eagles; one of them is circling barely 50 metres from where I stand. The city of the temple of the monkey god is full of monkeys. The eagles presumably fly up here from further across the mountains for a meal of roast monkey. I sit down to watch the flight of the eagles and start playing. I try to play in a way that mirrors the contours of the eagles’ flight: long lines, allowing the music to carry my thoughts, just as the eagle rests on the mass of warm, buoyant air.

There are never many listeners at any one time. Having said that, almost every other passer-by stops to listen for a moment, some for rather longer. During the Fifth Suite the sun goes behind a cloud; it turns cold and even the eagles disappear. Still, I manage to get to the end of the Sixth Suite without going into a tailspin, though I can’t help getting the sense that this is something of a forced landing….

A careful approach: Hanuman temple, Shimla. Photo: Stefan Bremer (2009)

January 22, Dharamsala

Slept for twelve hours! Three hours of practice, then yoga. I go to visit another masseur. In fact, I tried to reach this Tibetan-Chinese acupuncture masseur yesterday, but he wasn’t in. This time I go to make an appointment and am shown straight on to the massage table. Thumbs start kneading my buttocks.

‘Does this hurt?’ Yes, it hurts.

‘And here? What, it doesn’t hurt? What about here?’ Yes, it hurts.

The doctor convinces me to let him use one small needle. I manage not to faint. I try to think of it as a mosquito – after all, I let them bite me and eat in peace. After the procedure I feel much better, but maybe I’m just happy at overcoming my fear of needles and surviving the jab.

Later that afternoon I go back to the church. A young Irish couple is sitting outside. We chat for a while. All of a sudden the girl starts to laugh: ‘You must be the Finnish musician!’

The couple has already been in the village for a month taking part in a reiki healing course. That morning the girl opened a newspaper for the first time in a month, the national English-language newspaper The Times. It featured a photograph taken in Shimla showing me playing to street children. A short article said that I was travelling through the mountains. The girl said she’d thought that it would be nice to meet me. And now here she stands, giggling, and says that life is like a Kieślowski film.

Living in the local area there are four Christian families and a priest. An elderly gentleman standing outside gives me permission to play in the church. He says that the priest will be arriving soon. I play for half an hour for the Irish couple and the odd tourist.

The priest arrives. He quizzes me about what happened the day before. ‘Between four and five o’clock? Oh, so the door was open? You didn’t see anyone?’ Long pauses between each question.

Then: ‘Listen. Someone broke in here yesterday: our collection box was stolen. The window was smashed in. The big chain on the door was broken and that’s where they got away with the collection box. Don’t tell anyone you were here yesterday or you’ll be talking to the police for goodness knows how long.’

Okay! Got the point.

Then we agree that I will play in the church every day between three and five. Everyone is welcome to come and listen.

A little more playing followed by a yoga course for beginners – disappointing. Even the preliminary positions are so complicated that it will take years of practice for me to get into them.

Tibetan food.

Apparently the Dalai Lama arrived here this morning. Every now and then he gives public lectures in English. Suddenly the lights go out. My Tikka head lamp – what a marvellous purchase! These mountain storms are strange. The temperature is hovering around zero but there’s still plenty of thunder. The curtains billow in the gusts of wind, though the windows are shut. We won’t run out of air. It feels good to be here.

January 23,  Dharamsala

It’s early afternoon; I’m shivering beneath the blankets. The electricity comes on and off. Outside it’s sleeting. Still I managed to get in three and a half hours’ practice this morning. As I was practicing, I realised that in my imaginary practice session early that morning I had been playing some wrong notes. My pitching was a bit sketchy.

After practicing I do some yoga to warm up. Instead of doing the two-hour walk I have planned, I crawl back to bed. If only it would clear up. The kilometre-and-a-half walk to the church really doesn’t appeal.

It brightens up just before three o’clock! Clothes on then straight to the church. The snowline is 50 metres up the hill from where I am staying. 200 metres before the church it starts raining hailstones. I run to the church. Ten minutes’ warm-up. Eventually my hands are warm enough that I dare to start playing. Of course, there is no heating inside the church and the doors are always wide open.

My playing is almost going well. My audience consists of the priest, who is busy sweeping the yard, and a woman washing the floor. During the last piece, at the most difficult part of the fugue in the Third Sonata, the first outside listener arrives. Almost immediately I lose my concentration, so much so that I can’t get to the end of the fugue. After about ten attempts and a lot of fumbling around, I finally finish the movement on the wrong chord. Deeply embarrassing. Thankfully the final two movements seem to go smoothly enough. When you’re that ashamed, at least you don’t feel the cold. Before playing tomorrow, practice the fugues ten times!

I get a gig – as a photographer. The priest asks me to come back to the church the next morning to take photographs of a visiting bishop.

That evening I take my viola with me to dinner. There are people at two other tables in the restaurant. They ask me to play. We chat. At one table is an Indian reporter with Reuters, at the other the Tibetan reporter for an American company. In only a few days in India I’ve met more reporters than in the last ten years in Finland! The Tibetan wants to do an interview. I ask to see the questions in advance, because I know we’ll end up talking about politics. Now isn’t the time for silly jokes.

The next day I will see a student. A 17-year-old local boy had heard someone playing the violin and had liked it so much he had got himself a violin. To his disappointment, he so far hasn’t been able to get a note out of it. He may be even more disappointed once he does get a note out of it.

January 24, Dharamsala

The boy isn’t disappointed at all. The violin is terrible. It takes me half an hour just to put the strings in the right place across the bridge and the nut. Then I show him how to lift his hands, how to use the weight; how to hold the instrument and the bow. I try to explain what it should feel like.

Ten minutes later the boy can play a two-octave G major scale in tune, then A major; easy nursery rhymes; half an hour later even Frère Jacques. Soon our lesson is over.

By far the most talented beginner I’ve ever met. He says he has played the guitar, but even so! I could have taken photographs of the position of his hands and used them as teaching material. Tomorrow the boy and his friends are going to play me some local Tibetan music….

Bach makes kids wild: schoolchildren in Delhi. Photo: Stefan Bremer (2009)

January 25, Dharamsala

This morning I walk up as far as the snowline; it’s now at an altitude of about a couple of kilometres. The sun is just rising. Utterly still. From the other side of the valley I can hear the sounds of a religious mass. I find a sunny opening in the hillside forest and start to play. Three pine martens and four long-tailed parrots come to watch. The sun warms me and the air is fresh. Two such glorious mornings in a row!

About two hundred metres beneath me there is a road, about a hundred or so passers-by every hour. Almost all of them stop and turn their heads in bewilderment. Where is that music coming from? This instrument certainly has a very powerful sound; all you need is a decent concert hall.

More treatment for my sciatic nerve. The Tibetan acupuncture masseur I visited before gives me five needles in the buttocks and one in the neck. It’s ridiculous to be so scared of it, but I’m scared nonetheless.

I give an interview to the Tibetan reporter. As I suspected, every question has a political edge to it. He promises to send a draft of the article to my email so I can check it through.

Then more street playing in the same spot as yesterday. An old monk listens to almost the entire set, using his cane to shoo away curious people stopping in cars or on their motorbikes. Another person to stop is a Canadian convert. He moved here six months earlier after selling all of his possessions, including a large collection of Bach recordings. He knows all the Suites. He almost starts to cry with joy upon hearing his favourite music for the first time in months. He thanks my teachers. I join him in thanks.

That evening, back at the hostel in the cultural institute, my student who has just got his hands on a violin plays at least five different instruments – that must explain why he is such a quick learner. The hostel is home to 35 artists, all of whom can sing and act and play several instruments. On top of all that, my student still wants to learn to play the violin!

Tomorrow is Indian Independence Day. The festivities have already begun. In the distance I can hear the pounding of a bass.

January 26, Dharamsala

This morning I pack my things and pay my hotel bill: 19 euros for five days including hot water, heating and laundry. Then it’s out into the streets.

With the exception of my first day in Shimla, I’ve been playing with my viola case closed. There are plenty of people who need money here – far more, in fact, than in the poorest areas of China that I’ve ever visited. But this time I decide to play next to the beggars with my case open. I have made myself a little sign: For milk powder and rice. Thank you.

I play two of the Suites. Only one person stops to listen. Then some traders come out and shoo me off their patch. Is it because of my sign, or is it just one of those days?

I go back to make corrections to the interview by the Tibetan reporter. Sitting at the computer time flies past, and I forget that I have an appointment to keep. I have promised an earnest-looking shoeshine boy that today, the day I was to leave, I will meet him at twelve o’clock and buy some milk powder and rice for him and his younger sister.

I arrive sixteen minutes late. The boy is nowhere to be seen. Every day he has looked me up and asked: ‘Promise?’ I always reply: ‘Promise.’ And after all that, I don’t turn up.

I wait for the boy until one o’clock. He doesn’t show up. I give three beggar women the money I have reserved for milk powder and rice. What a mistake! I should have waited until I was about to get on the bus. Groups of beggars run up to me as though they have some kind of telepathic connection, pulling at my clothes and hanging from my limbs. And the women, to whom I gave the money, think it was not nearly enough: one of them tries to snatch all of the money from my wallet.

I dash into a nearby restaurant and don’t come out until the alley looks empty. But the beggars are still waiting. The flock gathers again in under a minute. I escape outside the village. Only once I reach the temple do the most determined of them finally give up.

I walk up to the clearing I found before. Again I see an eagle soaring overhead. I sit down to warm myself in the sunshine. I am reminded of someone I was at school with for twelve years. After she died she appeared in my dreams and introduced me to an eagle. ‘The eagle is your friend now; it will show you the way.’

Then there is the shoeshine boy. I gave him a solemn promise to show up. This ten-year-old boy, who has double-checked this important matter with me many times over, only waited a minute or so at our meeting place. He was clearly unable to take the disappointment of being let down by the rich tourist. And now he’s gone… I feel awful.

There are lots of elderly Tibetans on the path. Almost all of them give me an encouraging smile. Some mime playing the violin. When one of them finally asks me to play, I simply have to start. I feel drained. No Bach this time. Finnish classics, popular songs. Then some film themes. Modern Times, The Sound of Music and such like. I only play whenever I see people walking towards me along the path. Gradually I start to feel better.

After a while, my Canadian music-lover friend appears and says he has been looking for me all over. I’ve promised to play somewhere that afternoon. I play the Preludes from the First, Fourth and Sixth Suites. He says he prefers them played on the viola as opposed to on the cello. My emotional barometer rises immediately. I ask if I can have that comment that in writing.

I then play the Chaconne, which my listener doesn’t know. Before beginning, I encourage him to sit down in a comfortable position; the piece lasts around fifteen minutes. Once I have finished, he says: ‘It couldn’t have been that long. You only just started.’

After that I play Itsy Bitsy Spider to two children, who run off giggling. I’ve been playing for two hours. As I close my case, two eagles fly past, one behind the other, barely twenty metres from where I am standing. Perhaps one of them is the eagle my school friend showed me.

The sun is setting. I sit down in the bushes, by the side of a dusty path. I don’t dare go back to the village before dark. It is 5.45 in the evening. My bus leaves at seven. I start to pack up my things. In an hour, not a single person has walked past me.

I am just about to set off down the path towards the village, when the shoeshine boy appears at the bottom of the hillside with two of his friends. He walks up to me and looks at me gravely. I look back. Neither of us says a word. I dig a bundle of notes from my pocket and give them to him. The boy doesn’t look to see how much is there, but puts the money in his pocket and thanks me.

We walk back to the village together. As we part, the boy looks me in the eyes and says: ‘If you back, many small shoes.’ I look back at him and say: ‘Promise.’

Kieślowski or Kaurismäki?

My bus is leaving soon.

Translated by David Hackston

News photos document dramatic, dangerous or tragic incidents – but the photojournalist Markus Jokela is interested in documenting ordinary, domestic and everyday life, be it in Iraq, Russia, Biafra or Sri Lanka. These photographs, with commentaries, are taken from his new book, Jotain on tapahtunut / Something happened (2009), offering glimpses of life in contemporary Finland and in the United States

I’ve never been particularly enthusiastic about individual news photos, especially about taking them.

A good news photo has to state things bluntly and it has to be quite simple in visual terms. It must open up immediately to the viewer.

But the images in photo reportages do not have to scream simplified truths. They can whisper and ask, and open up gradually. One can come back to them. The reportage is something personal. Though a poor medium for telling about the complex facts of the world, it can provide experiences that survive.

Finland 1990–

If we look at Finland from an aeroplane, we see an uninhabited land, where someone has cleared the forests, but left thin strips as backdrops to the lake shores. An when we see it through a car window, we often see scrubland that was once fields. In a built-up area we encounter faded big apples on a supermarket wall. Around the corner the colour turns into the blue and yellow of a chain of kiosks. There are people dotted about the place.

If we get a glimpse into Finnish homes, waiting there on the dining table might be the national dish: pizza. Nor do these homes look a bit they say in those furnishing features in glossy in-flight magazines.

Table Rock, Nebraska 1992

In the warm September of 1992, Myron ‘Snappy’ Kent brought a load of watermelons into town. Sheriff Schulze dropped by for a cup of coffee, and Mary Lou picked up the mail.

Nettie and Lawrence Stehlik celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary, and eight-year-old Jill Speers found a snail while waiting for the school bus.

Table Rock revisited 2009

In January 2009 a freezing wind beats down on the prairie. Snappy, the sheriff, Mary Lou, the Stehliks and little Jill are dead.

Puppy ran into a combine harvester and lost his paw. An ice storm delayed Santa Claus from a chldren’s story hour by two weeks. In 1992 Table Rock had a population of 308. It is now 232.

Illustration: The Universal Dictionary of Natural History (Paris, 1849)

Extracts from the collection of essays Kutistuva turska ja muita evoluution ihmeitä (‘The shrinking cod and other evolutionary marvels’) by Hanna Kokko & Katja Bargum

Who cannot but stand in awe of the genius of various parasites’ nervous system manipulations or of how beautifully the orchid ensures its pollination? The astonishingly precise adaptations of organisms are the starting point for the idea of Intelligent Design. According to Intelligent Design, such adaptations are too perfect to be products of evolution – rather, they reveal the actions of an intelligent designer. It’s a fascinating idea, write Hanna Kokko and Katja Bargum – but is it science?

At first glance, the Intelligent Design movement, which began in America, seems quite satisfying with all of its pseudo-scientific genetic studies. However, the movement does not follow the rules of science. To wit, the Intelligent Design doctrine does not present a logical construct into which new puzzle pieces might fit, nor does it offer any predictions. Instead, the supporters of intelligent design deceive their listeners by presenting distorted rules for the contestation of ideas: the work in evolutionary biology that has not yet been done is counted as a victory for their side by saying ‘they haven’t been able to explain that either’.

In order to shed light on this argument, it helps to survey a few imprecise or poor adaptations. These adaptations do not fit well with the idea of intelligent design, and, additionally, they put in stark relief the capricious course of evolution. The short-sightedness of natural selection prevents evolution from achieving perfection. Thus, we relate in the following why, for example, wisdom teeth torment so many of us, how we can explain the disarray of men’s sexual organs and how sex can kill.

Darwin’s Demons

The first reason for the imperfection of all organisms is the harsh truth that you can’t have everything. In order to examine this truth, we journey to the South Pole.

Hardly any process for creating new life feels to the bystander quite as agonizing as the reproduction of Emperor Penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri). They incubate one single egg during the southern continent’s winter, when the temperature drops to sixty degrees below zero and the wind blows at 45 metres per second. The poor penguins shiver for months on end in this ice storm – and why? For one single chick. Couldn’t evolution come up with a more efficient means for producing new penguins?

In order to put a finer point on this question, English biologist Richard Law created the concept of ‘Darwin’s Demons’ to describe an imaginary organism that would reproduce immediately after its own birth, produce innumerable offspring every second and live forever. A demon like this would spread with the speed of lightning, filling every last nook and cranny of the Earth. All other organisms would be forced to give way. The diversity of nature would be replaced by one single demon species, the biomass of which would extend second by second farther into outer space. Luckily, we don’t see these sorts of monsters in nature. Why?

Darwin’s Demons illustrate clearly that no organism can be perfect in every trait. No organism has limitless energy resources at its disposal. Thus, natural selection is forced to choose between individuals that make their energy investments in slightly different ways. Investing in a certain trait must always be done at the expense of some other trait. Natural selection has shaped penguins into beings that have chosen quality over quantity. They brave cold and hunger for their singletons. As a counterbalance, the penguins do not burn themselves out trying to feed large broods.

Thanks to their slow-paced, if freezing cold, method of reproduction, penguins can live for more than ten years, repeating their reproductive slog numerous times. Similar choices about resource allocation can be seen in many organisms. By adjusting egg size and nutrient content, the female owl may ‘decide’ to have two large or three smaller chicks. Young fish, on the other hand, must consider whether it is most advantageous to reproduce right now or to increase their size for a few years and then reproduce more efficiently. This ‘consideration’ is of course not conscious, but rather the best solutions are sought in a comparison between faster and slower individuals. But whatever the solution, you can’t have it all.

The discomforts of old age

Organisms also display imperfect traits because natural selection just can’t get at them. For example, many diseases that strike at advanced ages, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease, are mostly outside the circle of influence of natural selection. How can this be possible?

Natural selection works by weeding out individuals before reproduction. This should prevent the passing on of poorly functioning genes to the following generation. So why are there still diseases?

Doesn’t natural selection work? Yes, it does, but in the case of the discomforts of old age, much more weakly than at other times. That is, these diseases flare up after the individual has already reproduced at least a few times. Selection has not yet had a chance to ‘see’ the weak traits of the genes being passed on to the offspring. And since variation always increases from time to time, the nuisances of old age remain in the population much more readily than weaknesses that are apparent from youth.

The distribution of energy resources to the different stages of life, just as the diseases of old age, are cases in which evolution simply is unable to make all traits perfect. The slow pace of evolution may also be a reason for the imperfection of organisms.

Less wise teeth

The existence of wisdom teeth is a mystery to all of us who suffer from the problems they cause. For some, wisdom teeth erupt into a space too small, and for others they are upside down in the mouth. Wisdom teeth must often be removed in a painful operation. For some lucky souls they never appear at all. What explains the existence of these pesky teeth?

The knowledge that wisdom teeth were once useful is probably not of any comfort to the patient languishing in the dentist’s chair. In apes, the wisdom teeth line up nicely in a row with the other molars, and they are used in the same way for mastication. That is, in our animal cousins all of the teeth fit in the mouth, but in humans, the expansion of the skull as the brain grew resulted in a smaller jaw size. Nowadays it’s a tight squeeze for wisdom teeth to grow in properly. In addition, the change in our diet from raw ingredients to cooked, soft meals has reduced the work load of the molars, and wisdom teeth aren’t much needed for food processing. It may be that wisdom teeth are slowly evolving out of use.

Wisdom teeth may be selected against for two reasons. Because they are not used, at the moment their development consumes energy needlessly. However, the total expenditure of energy for forming a small piece of bone does not perhaps seem terribly large. The more important factor may be the fact that wisdom teeth can cause considerable harm. We all remember how dangerous infectious diseases were just a few decades ago before the invention of antibiotics. Just a hundred years ago teeth were one of the greatest health problems in what are now the western nations.

Hey, let’s make bones…or not…

Wisdom teeth are only one example of the remnants of evolutionary history. In fact, the human body is full to overflowing with similar vestiges, which give us clues about our progenitors’ way of life. Many of these vestigial remnants have withered away, becoming smaller as they became unnecessary. The caecum and appendix are vestiges of this kind. In many animals the caecum is an important organ in the digestion of plant-derived nutrients. In rabbits, the caecum makes up as much as half of the whole intestine. However, in humans, the caecum has shrunk subsequent to our move to a more meat-rich diet.

Bones can also lose their purpose and atrophy. Many of us only notice our tail bone once it gets broken in a fall.

Evolution never starts from a blank slate, rather fumbling around with existing DNA instructions. So what do you do if you have to create a legless animal based on a currently legged being? This is achieved much more easily by giving a sort of halt command (‘…not!’) the development of the individual than by purging all of the original instructions for creating legs from the genotype.

Illustration: The Universal Dictionary of Natural History (Paris, 1849)

Whales are not fish but mammals. That is, both whales and humans have a family tree that stretches far back through the reptiles all the way to fish. These sorts of familial relationships demonstrate that a certain line of four-legged land mammals returned to even more watery digs and finally set out to sea entirely. In fact, whale embryos are four-legged just like human embryos, and only later in the development of the individual do the rear legs receive the instruction to atrophy. If something goes wrong with this instruction, the old four-legged traits can sometimes pop up again. Accordingly, a dolphin was recently discovered in Japan that in addition to pectoral fins had ‘hind leg fins’, the specimen also being astonishingly reminiscent of 40-million year old dolphin fossils. In 1919, a humpback whale was caught near Vancouver that had metre-long hind legs with bones and all.

Stories of baby chicks with teeth have circulated in scientific circles for years, but it was not until 2006 that the mutation was photographed, a change that really does give the beak of the chick developing in the egg very crocodile-like teeth – clear greetings from bygone days, that is. In addition to genetic-level information that demonstrates the ‘recycling’ of the same genes from one animal group to another, vestigial remains like this tell amazingly interesting stories about the evolutionary descent of organisms.

Prisoners of their own history

The evolutionary history of organisms can also create roadblocks to future development. A characteristic trait of insects and other arthropods is a hard shell that acts as an external skeleton. The shell helps arthropods withstand the aridness of deserts and protects against predators and parasites, but it also creates limitations. Like a growing baby that to her parents’ despair only fits in a given outfit for a month, arthropods are forced to shed their shells as they grow. This growth can be even more costly than buying children’s clothing, because the arthropod produces the new shell using its own energy reserves. The size of arthropods is also limited by the weight of the shell, which in a sizeable creature becomes disproportionately large. Because of the limitations created by their shells, one rarely finds arthropods of any kind weighing more than ten kilos.

The shell also creates metabolic challenges. The oxygen necessary for the respiration of insects living on land passes into the insect through small holes in the shell. This is not a terribly efficient way to breathe, and it makes insect movement quite difficult. This is particularly true of flying, which is difficult work and requires a lot of oxygen. Keeping large insects in the air is extremely difficult, and with the current oxygen content of the atmosphere, flying insects will never turn into the monsters of horror films. (In order to comfort the children, let it be said that about 360 million years ago there were dragon flies on parade with wing spans of nearly a metre. This was possible because the oxygen content of the air was much higher than it is now.)

As strange as it might sound, it is true that in finding a new structure (like the arthropod exoskeleton), natural selection also limits future evolution – not everything is possible any more. Although evolution can both build and disassemble different mechanisms, it very often goes in one direction: when a certain path has been trod for long enough, it is difficult to turn far enough back that another direction entirely can be chosen.

The monstrous myopia of natural selection

Illustration: The Universal Dictionary of Natural History (Paris, 1849)

The unidirectional – or misdirected – nature of evolution’s path is also demonstrated by the laughably long vasa deferentia of warm-blooded animals. In cold-blooded animals the testicles are located within the body cavity, in the same place as the ovaries of females. The vas deferens takes a direct path from the testicles to the penis, passing by the bladder on the way. As warm-bloodedness developed, a new place had to be found for the testicles, because the production of spermatozoa works better at lower temperatures. Therefore natural selection promoted the migration of the testicles outside the body cavity, into the scrotum. This migration can still be seen in the foetal stage of humans, and the dropping of the testicles is examined throughout the live of the child, to the horror of every schoolboy.

The bladder is also located in the same area of the body as the testicles, which along with the urinary tracts, can be passed on two sides. The selection of which side is of little consequence in four-legged animals, but as the preference tended towards standing upright in the evolution of humans, the testicles ended up hanging from a sort of loop – a bit like a dog on a leash can go around a lamp post on the wrong side. For example, at this moment the vas deferens in humans is at least three times longer than it would be if it went straight from the scrotum to the penis without circling around the urinary tract ten centimetres above.

Why hasn’t evolution corrected its mistake? In the case of the dog, the dog, or more likely the owner, can step back and untangle the leash by going around the pole on the correct side. In the case of evolution, fixing the mix-up would require temporarily raising the testicles back into the noisome heat of the body cavity (or returning humans to four legs). In addition, during the gradual migration of the testicles, the ducts lengthened only a little bit from one generation to another, so it did not represent any significant cost compared to the previous state. But the final cost grew step by step, and now humans are forced to produce three times more ducts than would be necessary otherwise. Nowadays the only possibility for shortening the ducts would be a large, sudden mutation that would produce a direct connection between the testicles and the penis. Giant leaps like this are unlikely.

This loop in the vas deferens demonstrates the difference between evolution and far-sighted design. While a designer is able to sketch his desired final result and build a trait accordingly, natural selection acts much more blindly. From the current working solutions it selects a few to continue on, and this then limits the basic solutions of future generations. This being the case, in situations of selection the traits that are most immediately beneficial win, even though they might not be the best solutions in the long run once all is said and done.

Evolutionary suicide

The length of the vasa deferentia might seem like a trifling inconvenience. But sometimes the short-sightedness of evolution has catastrophic consequences over the long run. For example, competition over mating can lead to a true war between the sexes. The male viviparous, or ‘common’, lizard ensures the success of mating in a rather extreme manner: he holds onto the female by biting her on the neck. These bites often leave visible scars. In populations with a lot of males, the females have more scars. That is, the more males there are, the more the females get slapped around.

How serious a problem is the harassment the females experience then? In order to figure this out, researchers compared the fertility and mortality of females in captive populations that contained different numbers of females and males. In populations where there were many males relative to the number of females, the females had fewer progeny and died younger. For this reason, in male-dominant populations the number of lizards decreased with time, while female-dominant populations grew at a healthy clip. Most disturbingly, in male populations it was precisely the males that lived while the females died, and thus the proportion of males in the population continued to increase. This meant even greater abuse and shorter life spans for the females. The spiral was complete.

Male-dominant population are thus in a vicious circle where the abuse of the males causes a diminution of the population, and, for good measure, more abuse. The vicious circle can quickly lead to the destruction of the entire population. Thus, the males are driving themselves to evolutionary suicide.

So why don’t male lizards behave themselves better? The reason is, once again, the short-sightedness of natural selection. Because the most aggressive male mates the most and has the most progeny, natural selection promotes abuse, and evolution careens blindly towards extinction. Researchers calculate that a lizard population that slips into male dominance would become extinct within about 40 years. There might not even be lizards in the world if there were not temporal and locational variation in nature in the relative proportions of males and females, and, thus, there were not always a sufficient supply of progeny from female-dominant localities to make up for extinctions elsewhere. Common lizard populations observed in nature are generally female-dominant.

Painful wisdom teeth, excessively long deferent ducts and males that condemn themselves to extinction are in their imperfection robust evidence of the way natural selection shapes organisms and traits. Similarly, they give evidence against the idea of an intelligent designer, unless in addition to intelligence the designer’s character traits include a somewhat warped sense of humour – or the designer has some other reason to muddle up organisms to make them look like evolution would be the best explanatory construct for the puzzle. That is not, of course, a logical impossibility, but by no means is it a claim that follows the rules of science either.

It is more comparable to the idea from sci-fi literature that we are all a computer simulation, the rules of which will always be unknown to us, created only for someone’s amusement. The task of science is to at least try to understand and investigate how far our understanding can get us.

Translated by Owen Witesman

Helsinki boys by the sea: in Martti Jämsä’s Polaroid lads play on the beach; in I.K. Inha’s photograph (Hietalahden satama, ‘Hietalahti harbour’), taken a century earlier, barefoot urchins meet up on the quayside

A hundred years ago the photographer I.K. Inha (1865–1930) was asked to illustrate a tourist guide to Helsinki. He took some 200 photographs, of which some 60 were included in the book, which was published by WSOY in 1910. In his new book of photographs, OPS! Helsinki Polaroid¹, Martti Jämsä (born 1959), wanders the same streets a century on, taking snapshots with his Polaroid camera.

Inha’s glass negatives were stored in the publisher ‘s archives, where they remained until 2006, when they were moved to the Finnish Museum of Photography. Polaroid is now an obsolete piece of technology: the last examples were made by the American Polaroid Company in 2007. The familiar softness and fogginess of the details in Polaroid shots evoke a kind of nostalgia for the present.

Inha’s summery photographs, of a small but rapidly expanding town full of new buildings, offer a vivid portrait of life in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland. His city studies were reprinted this year in Helsinki, valon kaupunki/ Helsingfors med I. K. Inhas ögon (‘Helsinki, city of light’)².

The two photographers occasionally choose the same vistas and subjects, looking at details of Helsinki from the same angles; the time and the methods are different, their worlds are worlds apart, but they offer fascinatingly dual readings of the city and its people.

Modes of transport: ‘Ylioppilastalo ja Raitiotietori’ (‘Student House and Tramway Square’) by I.K. Inha and wheels on wheels in front of the Railway Station now by Martti Jämsä

Monumental styles: contemporary street art in Martti Jämsä’s Polaroid shot, and I.K. Inha’s ‘Haaksirikkoiset’, ‘The shipwrecked’ (sculpted by Robert Stigell) on Tähtitorninmäki (‘Observatory Hill’) in 1908

Seascapes: Inha's photograph of maritime Helsinki (entitled Merisatama, ‘Sea Harbour’) a century ago, and a contemporary Polaroid shot of Helsinki harbour Polaroid by Jämsä

Forever the national poet: two views of J.L. Runeberg’s statue (1885) in the Esplanade Park; the Polaroid by Martti Jämsä and a view of the Hotel Kämp and the Grönqvist house by I.K. Inha

Windows on two centuries: ‘Oikokatu’ (‘Oikokatu street’) in the Kruununhaka district of Helsinkiby I. K. Inha, 1908, and a contemporary façade by Martti Jämsä

¹Martti Jämsä
OPS! Helsinki Polaroid
(Photographs by Martti Jämsä, an essay by Otso Kantokorpi, a poem by Ilpo Tiihonen; Musta Taide, 2009)

²Jukka Kukkonen – Riitta Toiviainen – Kjell Westö (ed.)
Helsinki – valon kaupunki / Helsingfors med I. K. Inhas ögon
(‘Helsinki – city of light’, WSOY, 2009, a publication of the Finnish Museum of Photography)

Toasting the bride: cheerful wedding parties drive up to the Sparrow Hills in Moscow in summer

Moscow-based journalist Anna-Lena Laurén finds the new Russia a promised land of materialism – a place where appearances are everything, and how you pay for maintaining them is a matter of strictly secondary interest

‘I want to go to the nightclub by boat! Come on, let’s hire one,’ Ilya says, heading towards the shore where a boat for at least twenty people is moored. There are six of us.

After two minutes of negotiation, he takes up his position alongside the gangway. He welcomes us onboard with a chivalrous gesture. We step onto the boat and are gently taken off down the Moyka canal in the white night of St Petersburg in June. The sky is pale pink and dark blue-lilac, the air damp and cold, but the captain hands out rugs to keep us warm. The ornamented bridges and pastel-coloured façades of St Petersburg glide past in a faint glow, it’s just light enough to make out the colours, powdery pink, vanilla yellow, pale blue.

As we pull out into River Neva the wind picks up, we shiver at the same time as we delight in the beauty of it all. Lit up by the night, the mint-green Winter Palace looms majestically alongside the Palace Bridge, and on the opposite shore the golden spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress reaches up against the deep-blue sky. The new fountain by the Strelka is lit up alternately in red, blue and pink, its jets of water dancing in time to classical music.

I turn to Ilya and kiss him on the cheek.

‘Thank you, dear Ilya, for the wonderful boat-trip!’

Ilya doesn’t even answer me, it isn’t the done thing to draw attention to your own generosity in Russia. But I can see from his expression that he’s pleased. Pleased, and proud.

Naturally, Ilya is treating us to the boat-trip, that’s never in any doubt. He is acting as host to me and my guests from Finland, Sweden and Norway, and he wants to show us his city. Suggesting that we should share the cost of the trip would spoil it all for Ilya. A Russian host must be allowed to be generous. The very last thing a guest should do is insist on Nordic social rules, where everyone pays for themselves – something which strikes Russians as incomprehensibly petty.

By the football stadium in Petrogradskaya we make a sudden detour to the shore. Ilya hurries off to a kiosk and returns with a plastic bag full of beer – the only thing missing to make the experience complete. Then we set off along the Neva again, past Krestovskiy Island, out towards the Gulf of Finland. At the point where the Neva stretches out and the Gulf of Finland takes over there is a fashionable yacht-club, complete with open-air disco. Drinks are sold in tents, and along the shore luxurious couches are lined up for you to throw yourself on between dances.

We dance until four in the morning, when the nightclub closes. Then we take a taxi to a tastefully designed Azerbaijani restaurant on Vasilievskiy Island and order Caucasian mezze, Georgian khachapuri bread, and shashlyk, a sort of shish kebab. Ilya takes care of the bill.

Ilya is a successful businessman, which is why he can afford to be so hospitable. He does so the Russian way – with excessive generosity and a supreme sense of unquestionable logic, without giving anyone a chance to protest. As usual, it’s nothing insignificant that we’re being treated to. Private boat-trips in St Petersburg, drinks throughout the evening, and dinner for ten as the finale.

At last I’ve figured out how it works, and no longer try to insist upon contributing. Instead, I thank him loudly and clearly. The next day I say repeatedly what a wonderful time we had, and how marvellously Ilya arranged everything for us. In Russia it is important to say things, to use words, to show your feelings – including appreciation.

If Ilya did not have a share in a thriving business he would not be able to be so generous. But he would still insist upon paying. Paying for others is important, particularly for men. If you have money, it’s important to be lavish with your generosity. It isn’t vulgar to show that you’re rich – on the contrary, it’s part of the deal. Anyone with money has to show it, partly through their lifestyle – material symbols like expensive cars, exclusive watches, designer shoes. But even more important, you need to signal your wealth with your behaviour. Never bother about what anything costs. Don’t even look at price-tags or check the bill in a restaurant. Always leave huge tips regardless of the level of service.

There are exceptions, of course. The filthy rich, like the oligarch Roman Abramovich, for instance, are often photographed in jeans and a leather jacket. He can afford it. Unlike people in the middle class, or even the lower middle class. They have to maintain an image of being better off than they are. Even someone who doesn’t have much money is keen to suggest the opposite.

It irritates me hugely when I take a Russian friend to dinner who is notoriously badly off, only to have him implore me not to leave my tip for the waitress in ten-rouble notes. Because it doesn’t look good. You should leave a a fifty-rouble note at least. Paying the tip in coins is quite unthinkable. It would look terrible, even if the total amount was correct – some ten percent of the bill, in other words.

Cheers: street life has changed radically during the past then years as cafés and restaurants have mushroomed in central Moscow

Generally, the way things look is terribly important in Russia. Your mobile phone is a vital status symbol, even though prices have tumbled and almost everyone can afford one. As a consequence, what matters now is what model you can afford.

My battered old Nokia 6310 phone, the best Nokia model ever made, gets a singularly bemused response – why would a foreign journalist go about with a model that’s over ten years old? The explanation, that the phone has the longest-lasting battery I’ve ever seen in a mobile, is met with complete incomprehension. How the phone performs practically is irrelevant, what matters is the image it conveys about you.

An acquaintance of mine has taken out a bank loan in order to afford the mobile she wants. She is studying to become a cultural administrator, and has a part-time job as a waitress. I’m not sure that this sort of borrowing to fund her spending is the most sensible thing she could be doing given her current circumstances, but I’m the one who doesn’t understand the way things are – Vera is investing in her image. In a city like Moscow, this is far from a waste of money.
A year or so later she and her boyfriend bought a pair of mountain bikes. The most expensive make, of course. Because of this they had to buy the bikes on credit. I say had to, because naturally it isn’t an option to choose a cheaper alternative.

The contraptions are only used once or twice, before Vera realises that Moscow isn’t the ideal city to cycle in. Since then the bikes have languished untouched on a friend’s balcony.

Russia is the promised land of materialism. Most young Russians remember very little about Communism, but it seems as though the thirst for things that didn’t exist before has passed down the generations. Everyone is an expert in brand-names – clothes, shoes, watches, DVD-players, iPods, stereos, flat-screen televisions. When my boyfriend buys me a DVD-player for my thirtieth birthday he proudly brings home a Sony, even though the cheaper Korean and Chinese versions would have been more practical, seeing as they can read pirated DVDs as well. What is mostly available in Moscow are pirated copies, and now it isn’t clear if we’ll be able to watch that sort of film. But this isn’t the issue for my boyfriend, who wants us to have a ‘beautiful’ living room, complete with both a Sony television and a Sony DVD-player.

Protesting: the submissive attitude of citizens towards the authorities is slowly changing. Here Muscovites protest against an unlicensed building being set up next to their house

I’m actually very fond of this Russian generosity. I have learned two things in Russia: an appreciation of being treated to things, and of being the one who treats others. It’s a sort of everyday pleasure that just makes life a bit nicer. It’s fun being treated, or treating others. All of these little proofs of appreciation that you scatter through your daily life make life richer.

This is a pleasure that one is seldom granted in Finland, where the staff in every restaurant know how to keep separate tabs for each member of a party, and where people proffer twenty-cent coins in exchange for a cigarette. This would make Russians faint – even in the middle of a Moscow traffic jam I have seen drivers knock on each others’ windows to cadge a smoke. And so far I have never seen anyone refuse, let alone ask for payment. Everyone knows that it is all likely to even itself out in the long run.

The trouble with these social rules arises when people who can’t afford to be generous are obliged to be. For instance, weddings are anything but cheap in Russia, especially in Moscow where it is expensive both to hire premises and to employ the services of a master of ceremonies for the evening – a wedding tamada, which has been all the rage in recent years. Everyone has to have one, no matter what their personal finances. Everyone has to travel in a Rolls Royce and offer lavish dinners.

A friend of mine in Moscow got married to the boyfriend she had been living with for a couple of years. They each earned less than a thousand dollars a month. Their parents weren’t rich either. But the wedding was excessive, in all the traditional ways – after the ceremony they were picked up by a Rolls Royce and driven around the city all afternoon, followed by a minibus packed full of their friends. This is known as katatsja, meaning roughly ‘pleasure ride’, and is an essential part of a Russian wedding.

In the evening we ate a splendid dinner in a restaurant that they had rent, and we were entertained all evening by a professional master of ceremonies. The happy couple spent the night in a hotel, and the following day we met up in the newlyweds’ home. How they managed to pay for the wedding was revealed – the bridegroom’s father had sold an apartment, the only significant asset the family had.

I didn’t say anything, but I was shocked. Selling good, solid property for the sake of one evening baffles my rational Finnish mind. This is because I am rich, compared to these people. So I just don’t know what it means to find it hard to make ends meet, yet at the same time constantly try to maintain a façade of living normalno, normally. To show that everything is as it should be. Because all normal couples have to be able to afford a Rolls Royce, their own master of ceremonies, and a four-course dinner for thirty people.

What is important is not how things are, but how they look. This means that people don’t realise the true state of things. You simply don’t talk about it. Façades work, as long as you don’t try to look behind them. People have to be allowed to maintain their dignity – they have to be allowed to treat others even though they can’t really afford to.

Russia is a country where people talk about a lot of things that are forbidden in Finland. People talk about salaries, sickness, death. You can discuss existential questions with total strangers. It’s okay to ask people how much they earn. It’s normal to discuss your attitude to God. But you don’t discuss the amount on a restaurant bill.

Cossack hospitality: the author Anna-Lena Laurén (centre, next to the stallion Arzhan) visits the village of Ragul in southern Russia, between the Black and Caspian Seas. The Cossacks were treated badly during Stalin's era, but now they are seen as important symbols of Russian Orthodox culture

From a collection of 16 articles of life in contemporary Russia, ‘De är inte kloka, de där ryssarna.’ Ögonblicksbilder från Ryssland (‘ “They’re crazy, those Russians.” Glimpses of Russia’, Söderströms, 2009. Finnish translation (by Laura Beck), ‘Hulluja nuo venäläiset.’ Tuokiokuvia Venäjältä, Teos, 2008. Photographs: Anna-Lena Laurén)

Translated by Neil Smith

On camelback: in the exotic part of Veijo Rönkkönen’s concrete cosmos there are animals and palm trees, side by side with the living plants of the northerly latitudes. - Photo, left: Veijo Rönkkönen; right: Veli Granö.

Extracts and photographs from Veijo Rönkkösen todellinen elämä / The real life of Veijo Rönkkönen (Maahenki, 2007. Translation: Kirsti Nurmela-Knox)

Veijo Rönkkönen (born 1944) has lived all his life on an isolated, small farm in eastern Finland, Parikkala, less than a kilometre from the Russian border, where he has quietly built a garden inhabited by nearly five hundred human figures made of concrete. Entrance is free.

In this book, the photographer and writer Veli Granö introduces Rönkkönen’s work of almost half a century, pointing out that art demands to be created despite professions and careers: ‘The choices that lead one to develop into an artist are not always voluntary, nor are they necessarily made through happy coincidences. Not all artists choose this career from a vast range of possible and interesting jobs; for some it may be a kind of by-product of their battle for survival.’ Veijo Rönkkönen had to make a living by working in a pulp factory for 41 years. Making art was his way of surviving in the circumstances he was not able to choose himself.

Contemporary folk art questions the prevailing conceptions of art. For me, its most important characteristic – and the point where it most deviates from the accepted conception of art – is the total freedom it leaves for the viewer. Modern art created by professional artists is automatically labelled as ‘art’; when defining modern art, its origins are often used as a starting-point: a particular piece is modern art as long as it was produced or performed by an artist. However, some of the works in this category may seem alien to the general public. Modern art has been met with loud, sometimes overly harsh criticism. This is in accordance with the trend of extreme popularisation at work in the current cultural atmosphere. In this regard, contemporary folk art can offer a useful countercultural challenge to high art and accepted artistic practices.

One does not need to be familiar with art to understand popular or vernacular art, since it can be enjoyed with a spontaneous and playful attitude. Viewers can rank the works according to their own tastes, and they are even free to laugh at these works. Questioning the art world’s hierarchies, institutions and its particular definition of an artist can even be seen as questioning modern reason. Vernacular art brings art back to its playful, carnivalistic origins, where experience, innovation and the works of art themselves are forever developing.

Nature conquers cement: moss gently creeps over the faces and bodies of the sculptures – nothing is eternal, art is as evanescent as its creators. – Photo: Veli Granö.

There are no superfluous items in the park – and I include the artist’s house and its contents in this – no act or thought that does not belong to, or is not clearly a part of its complex structure. The park itself is a ‘total work of art’, which compares readily to the development of the self.

Veijo’s decision to make art from concrete, one of the most durable of materials, is obviously related to the motif of the battle against time. Of course, even concrete is not immune to the ravages of time: moss sneaks onto the shoulders of the concrete peopleand lichen decorates their faces with colourful masks. The changes are slow, almost invisible, but the photographic record enables us to observe them. While the pictures of the sculptures, taken over the years, depict the tricks that the seasons and time have played, they also illustrate the drawn out decay of the works. These images of slowly ageing works form the family album of the silent sculptures.

Even if Veijo has always been keen to know the audience’s reactions, he has never talked to visitors voluntarily or asked their opinion on his work. Yet he meets people almost daily when working in his garden and never refuses to speak to them. His answers to any questions concerning the sculptures are, however, very curt so that the inquirer immediately understands his reluctance to continue the conversation.

Despite his withdrawn character, Veijo has always placed importance on the role of viewers. From indoors he observes those walking in the garden and looks for anything out of the ordinary. Should someone stray onto the flowerbeds, he will open the window and tell them to return to the path.

Left: Toothsome: Veijo Rönkkönen began to use dentures in his figures in 1976; ‘Javelin Thrower’ flaunts the false teeth of the artist’s father, who died in 1975. Visitors have since donated dentures to be used in Rönkkönen’s work. - Right: Concrete carnival: as visitors enter the yard, they encounter a parade of dozens of statues – women, men and children; this one is called ‘Old wife without teeth’. Veli Granö calls the parade the artist’s private carnival. - Photos: Veli Granö.

As a result of the break-up of the Soviet Union, life on the Finnish side of the border zone became a little easier. The first thing to go was the ban on stopping near the border, then the ban on using binoculars and cameras. Security cameras replaced the soldiers in the nearby watchtower. As the rules were loosened, the roadsides near the sculpture park filled with cars parked in dangerous positions. Thus for security reasons the road authority decided that a car park was required. A tourist information board and signs were erected. Since 1992, there has also been a little shop that sells refreshments and postcards of the sculpture park.

Veijo’s sculpture park is the most notable tourist attraction in Parikkala, and it is regularly advertised in various media. Numerous tourists visit the site every summer, and the busiest summer thus far saw some 26,000 visitors. Despite its status of an ‘official’ sight, Veijo has kept the park as his private garden and has nothing todo with the tourist business that surrounds him. He has no connection to the shopkeeper either, although he has paid the shop a visit at night.

His refusal to have any part in the business side arises from his overarching need to remain absolutely independent. ‘What if I decide, all of a sudden, to close up the park?’ goes his reasoning. Nevertheless, the local entrepreneurs and promoters of tourism need not be too worried. An audience is essential to Veijo, and there has never been an entrance fee, regardless of the season or the time of day. His reserved attitude towards publicity gives the sculpture park its extraordinary ambience, and the visitors can experience the dialogue between the public and the private space.

The line of statues, along with most of the other works, can be seen as Veijo’s private carnival. By turning everyday values upside down, the carnival serves as a form of therapy. The motley crew of the un-Finnish- looking figures brings medieval carnival processions to mind. It is interesting to try to figure out the origins of these strange characters. The artist himself says he simply tried to fit as many different sculptures as possible into the group.

Passer-by: the artist’s mother lived with him until her death. Here she walks past the carnival figures sculpted by his son – whose work she never appreciated until he began to be recognised. - Photo: Veijo Rönkkönen.

The media and tourism have made the world a smaller place, and this shows even in the artists’ gardens. Ideas imported from exotic regions have played an important role in the western art history. As early as during the first decades of colonialism, many artists felt that lifestyle in urbanising Europe was artificial and detached from reality. Gauguin’s travels to Tahiti and the impact of African and Oceanian sculpture on the birth of European modern art in the early 20th century are well known. Incidentally, it was this same interest in the exotic that prompted the focus on Europe’s own ‘primitives’ – outsider artists and the artwork of children.

Contemporary folk art cannot be studied within the framework of art history because the makers of folk art are seldom aware of their place in the greater tradition of art. In this respect they differ from traditional rural folk artists, who closely followed the visual conventions of their communities. Art by a contemporary folk artist usually has its own evolutionary curve, dependent on the artist, and its progress dies with its maker. Veijo, too, is quite unfamiliar with art history, and it would be more fruitful to look for the aspects that his art shares with comedy, a tradition he now continues. His attempt to create an exotic ambience of the Orient in his garden should be seen purely as his own personal project, without any reference to art history.

Dreams of childhood: the dozens of children in Veijo Rönkkönen’s park were all created over the past few years. They play, run, dance and fight like a tribe of small, colourful gymnasts. - Photo: Veli Granö.

Veijo’s sculpture park can be seen as a reflection of his own life. The various parts and works express the stages of his life, from growing up with the dreams and fears that he experienced, to some signs of ageing and mature giving up. In many parts, one can sense tones of a persuasive dialogue. Some of the sculptures are provocative, even aggressive, whereas others produce a sensation of thorough consideration and an aspiration to achieve spiritual harmony. The park is like a portrayal of a personality, with all its doubtful and conflicting characteristics.

So far, we have followed paths through the changing moods in the park, but paths always lead to a destination. Veijo’s sculpture park reaches its climax in the Yoga Park, which aims to portray a holistic spiritual experience. The path that leads to the heart of the park is like a trail to a mythical temple that is flanked with images of symbolic scenes, or sometimes tasks, troubles, temptations and even mazelike traps to challenge the traveller. The traditional temple path’s function is to cleanse the mind of worldly thoughts and prepare it for the experience of transcendence.

Behind Veijo’s work, we can see all those dreamers whose aim was to create life. Pygmalion is there, with the statue he made and then married; the alchemists, who wanted to create the homunculus; the Jewish mystic who made Golem out of clay; the smith Ilmarinen who forged a cold bride for himself, as well as the whole tradition of those who were punished for their hubris.

Veijo’s yearning for life and its flickering touch explains the importance of plants and natural environment in the sculpture park. Flowers and bushes give the garden the atmosphere of transience.

Many of the sculptures have a place for planting flowers. The blooming flowers in the sculptures’ embrace manage to veil the eeriness of the immobile stone. Here nature, forever changing and producing new and fantastic flowers, will soon shed its petals into the stream of life and death; it is the manifestation of the life force, it is life itself.

Extended self-portrait? Veijo Rönkkönen took up yoga in the 1960s, and started creating yoga figures soon after. In this Finnish back yard, the yoga park with its 250 statues is an extraordinary artistic creation. - Photo: Veli Granö.

Veijo has realised that the same vivid effect can be achieved without the gardener’s hand: if allowed, the plants push slowly up from the ground, from the roots of the statues and up along their sides. Lichen and creepers draw fresh impressions on their faces, and heavy moss capes fall gently upon their shoulders. However, these small, colourful plants can be deceptive. Their strong acidic roots corrode the sculptures’ surfaces and add to the slow process of decay. Even though Veijo would like to think that the sculptures shall remain in their place to aspire to eternal life after he is gone, he does not want to stop nature from destroying his work. He understands that his life can only continue in the process of change that he started by conquering a moment of permanence for his sculptures.

Contemporary folk art in Finland goes by the acronym ITE, from the words ‘itse tehty elämä’, a self-made, ‘DIY’ life. The French call it art brut; the English-language term is ‘outsider art’. The artists are ‘unschooled visionaries’ who make their art independent on any societal requirements or definitions. John Maizels, the British author and editor of the art magazine Raw Vision, reckons Veijo Rönkkönen as one of the masters of the outsider art.

In 2007 Veijo Rönkkönen, the artist of a self-made life, was awarded a state award, the Finland Prize, worth €30,000. More pictures: http://www.nykykansantaide.fi/veijo_ronkkonen_18.html ; click ‘Galleriaan’.

Edith Södergran and Hagar Olsson. – Photos: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, Åbo Akademis bildsamlingar.

Almost one hundred years ago, a remote Karelian village close to St Petersburg, near the Finno-Russian border, saw the birth of a fearless new form of modern poetry.

The Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran (1892-1923) began writing her burning lines inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideal of the new man and his philosophy of creativity. Södergrans’ poems were free of any traditional pattern and full of strong images.

Her work, which ran to six collections of poems, later achieved classic status in the modernist traditon that she presaged.

In 1919, after the publication of her second collection of poems, Septemberlyran (‘The September lyre’), Södergran found a soul sister in the Helsinki writer and critic Hagar Olsson (1893–1978). (See Books from Finland, 4/2008.)

Living in poverty, Södergran died of tuberculosis at the tragically early age of 31. Olsson, who deeply mourned the loss of her friend, returned to their exchange of letters 22 years later, in her book Edith’s brev (‘Edith’s letters’, Schildts/Bonniers, 1955).

We publish some of their correspondence as well as some of Södergran’s poetry here. The extracts from the correspondence of Olsson and Södergran are from The Poet Who Created Herself. Selected Letters of Edith Södergran (translated and edited by Silvester Mazzarella; Norvik Press, 2001).

See also Damned nihilist, an article by the social scientist and philosopher Kalle Haatanen, in which he takes a look at Nietzsche, a philosopher more often than not misinterpreted.

Edith Södergran to Hagar Olsson:

Raivola, Jan 1919

….Nietzsche says: Ich ging zu allen, aber kam zu niemand. [‘I approached everyone, but reached no one.’] Will it happen to me now to find someone? Could we reach out our hands to one another? You are now the object of my offensive, I want you to see me as I really am and show yourself to me as you really are. Could we become divine companions, so that all barriers fall away? I am still speaking to you in a tentative and humiliating foreign language. Nietzsche is the only human being before whom I would not be afraid to open my mouth. Are you that sea of fire I want to dive into? If you laugh you are my own. If you don’t laugh you must even so be mature enough to achieve the highest form of friendship Nietzsche in his wisdom warns his own people against.

I enclose a new letter I’ve written to the paper. If you think it could be a great help to the cause please let them have it or write and tell me to send it to them.

Address: Raivola                            Edith Södergan

Hagar Olsson comments (1955):

I cannot describe the joy I felt when I received this letter. It was a joy which reached deep inside me to where I felt most lonely. I understood at once that I was being approached by a sister-spirit. In his Södergran monograph [Gunnar] Tideström [Edith Södergran, 1949] makes some rather far-fetched attempts to explain why Edith called me ‘sister’ and what this could have meant. To a woman nothing could be easier to understand. I felt we were ‘sisters’ as soon as I read Edith’s first letter. A ‘sister’ is someone who speaks the same language as you do, who understands things implied but not stated, and for whom you feel intimate affinity regardless of whether or not the two of you otherwise share views and feelings.

In those days I was a sociable person; life bustled around me as it does when you’re young, and I was full of activity. But I never opened my inner self to anyone. I felt other people spoke a different language, that even my friends were on a different wave-length. I longed for sister-language. I thought it must be possible for people to understand one another intimately and know they shared one heart and soul. Not just couples but many together, a group or large family. I constantly dreamed of this. It may have been because in childhood I’d never had the opportunity to experience close family intimacy but grew up under psychological pressure: this kind of thing generates a hunger that can hardly ever be satisfied. But I also felt people were too dull and sluggish in their thinking and reactions and in their relationships. It seemed to me my own psychological make-up and consciousness were unlike those around me, and that I lived on two separate planes: one plane where I was surrounded by friends and one where I was alone and unable to share my intimate life with anyone….

….when I read Edith’s first letter, I knew immediately that here was someone who was conscious not only superficially but also deep inside, someone I’d be able to approach on the plane where I’d always been completely alone. She wrote in this first letter of ‘the highest form of friendship’ and asked ‘could we become divine companions?’ This was music in my ears. I opened myself at once and wrote an answer from my heart.

Edith Södergran to Hagar Olsson:

Raivola, 26 Jan 1919

My delightful young thing! Can’t come. Insomnia, TB, empty cashbox. (I live by selling furniture and household utensils. Capital tied up in Ukrainian and Russian bonds, salvation depends on fall of Bolshevism). If I can manage to sleep a bit better I’ll try and come in a few months, but I can’t be sure. I’ve found what I need now: your objective eye, and your brain is big enough for both of us. May one ask? Do you work for the cause in a general sense or are you anxious to meet particular individuals? Give me a list….

I share Severyanin’s view that if a talent is a trifle dull it isn’t brilliant enough. Igor Severyanin is Russia’s greatest lyric poet of the present day. I’ve seen him at a poetry reading, never talked to him. But I’ve felt confidence in him the way I feel confidence in you. He’s a very powerful force and bound to be receptive to our ideas. But first we’ll have to train him properly, he has trashy manners and doesn’t know how to look after himself. He can be our bridge to Russia, through him we’ll get the best of Russia on the move. How about Sweden? Will it work there? We’ll reach the rest of Europe one fine day. Do you speak to individuals? Is that something you plan to do? You should read Severyanin’s best poems, it would refresh you even though he’s obsessed with the boudoir and so far hasn’t aspired to our heights.

….I suddenly felt with utter certainty that a stronger hand had grasped my painter’s brush. How old are you? Health? Nerves? I want you well and strong. Send me a short CV! Mrs or Miss? Level of education? As for me: residence: Raivola, educated at Petrischüle, TB at 16, sanatoria at Nummela and Davos, induced pneumothorax, waiting for someone to discover a cure for TB.

We’ll be ruthless with one another and sharp as diamonds.

It’s horrible for me to address you in this virtual journalese, I want to use only beautiful words, our real mutual language, but in any case who wants to waste hard-won strength on letters? We have a beautiful dilapidated old place like something in a fairy tale. Come in summer (for several days at least) if we haven’t already been forced to sell it by then. We could lie on the grass and sunbathe and talk and gossip. We have a great ancient ramshackle house, uninhabitable in winter but in summer it would make a fabulous meeting place for our people from Finland and Russia, we could have a heavenly party with drunken speeches. I once spent an evening with Hemmer and Grotenfelt and it’s one of my happiest memories. I long to have congenial company now and then. We could run riot here just as they do in Gösta Berlings saga [a classic Swedish novel by Selma Lagerlöf, 1891], just think what a blessed place this is – hard to get hold of a copy of H:bladet [Hufvudstadsbladet, a Helsinki daily paper] and our nextdoor neighbours have only just discovered that I can even write….

Oh, it’d be such fun to come to you, I’d rush up the stairs.

I have a sister and I’ve never heard her wonderful voice – I’m determined to see deep down inside you, you holiest person of all….

I shall write my love-letters to you, Hagar, when I’m in the mood. Now I’ve got someone of my own, for the rest of my life. Two years ago I wrote a poem. Each stanza began ‘I want a playmate’ (of course I was thinking of a male one) and it ended ‘I want a playmate who can break forth from dead granite and defy eternity’. Now I have my happy playmate, after waiting two years….

I’ve kissed your letter countless times. I do so desperately want to come. I’ve been sleeping better at night, it’ll give me the courage to become ‘reisefähig’.

Hagar Olsson comments (1955):

Edith asks whether I ‘work for the cause in general’. That’s exactly what I was doing, and I was often disconcerted when she demanded precise tasks from me as if we were taking part in a carefully planned and organised operation. Edith loved a concrete, hands-on approach. During the autumn I’d written a good deal in my articles about the ‘cause’ (she must have got the word from there) and living ‘for the sake of the cause’. This simply meant not being egocentric, having nothing to do with art for art’s sake, and keeping an elevated concept of humanity in view in all one’s activities. To live for the ‘cause’ was to fight for a higher consciousness, and to appeal in all circumstances to the free creative spirit which alone is capable of raising us to a level where true fellowship can become a reality. It was in this spirit that in one of my first articles I cited Nietzsche’s words, ‘Man is something that must be conquered’. Edith was on the same wavelength, which is why she talks about the ‘cause’ and ‘our ideas’ as though they were to be taken for granted.

Those who are young now may find it difficult to imagine the excitement we felt. Nowadays we are rushed round so fast on a merry-go-round of change that it’s difficult for us to grasp what’s happening to us. But in the First World War period, when these ideas first took root, it really was possible to understand what was going on if one had one’s ear to the ground. We took a deep breath and realised the world was being turned upside down and that the future lay before us like virgin earth so that all we needed to do was sow seed. And who better to do the sowing but young poets and artists who had repudiated the old contaminated values and who carried within themselves an inspired vision of a new humanity, something higher and more sensitively organised and conscious of its mission. That’s how we felt, Edith and I; each of us had reached this point independently by her own route which is why we were so happy when we found one another.

Out in Europe and Russia there were many who felt the same way, and it was Edith’s constant dream that one day we would make contact with our  soulmates in the great world. She was to sacrifice much of her strength for this dream, only to see her hopes bitterly dashed. Of course this was not a question of ‘ideas’ developed by theoretical thinking so much as a spiritual impulse which was in the air at the time. It was something one was instinctively aware of, a longing or cry in one’s nerves and blood that was constantly in one’s thoughts as a tremendous opportunity. When one reads the view of learned literary historians that Edith’s ‘commonwealth of the future’ was ‘a metaphysical, even religious idea’ and other such grandiloquent stuff, one can’t help being reminded of Faust’s words to his assistant Wagner, that prototypical academic pedant: ‘You’ll never understand what you haven’t experienced’.

Edith writes that with Severyanin we’ll be able to get the ‘best of Russia’ on the move. By this she means quite simply the best spiritual forces in Russia and not at all, as Tideström claims, the old Russian ruling class. One can do a writer no greater injustice than load her words with opinions and judgments that can’t possibly have been relevant at the time her words were written. It was a time when no one knew what would eventually become of Russia or what form Russia’s relations with Finland would take in the future. Everything was still in a state of flux. In his monograph, Tideström is anxious at all costs to detect a hostile attitude to revolutionary Russia in Edith’s words….

She hadn’t committed herself either for or against anything definite. To her the whole course of events was a process of creation like childbirth; beyond this, like the keenly aware person she was, she thought it best to wait and see. When she writes as she does in this letter, ‘salvation depends on fall of Bolshevism’, she’s clearly not expressing a carefully thought-out political attitude. She’s just explaining why she and her mother are now destitute, and giving her opinion that if Bolshevism were to fall they might get their money back. She wasn’t one to let her personal economic problems influence her political views. I’ve never known anyone so completely indifferent to horrible circumstances in their own life as she was.

Edith Södergran to Hagar Olsson:

Raivola, 9 Feb 1919

Dear Sister!

Welcome to Raivola. I’ll be at the station and from there it’s 2 kilometres to our place. My mother’s very happy you’re coming. Cat Nonno and dog Martti will also be very pleased to see you, as will our Punikki Aino.

The night before your malheur-letter came I dreamed a magnificent black horse broke loose and rushed at me. The night before my S. letter to the paper I dreamed a herd of cows came after me with clanging bells and I also dreamed I was walking in the street in a red cap, and a pedantic person I know nodded to me from the church tower – which you will see.

Just got your travel-letter. In my letter I said nothing except that after 24 hours I’d come to see there could have been a misunderstanding so I retracted my harsh offended letter. But surely you’ve already had that letter, or has there been some muddle? Bring a piece of soap with you. Come but be careful, don’t jump off the train! Don’t hurt yourself.

Hagar Olsson comments (1955):

The whole family was waiting to welcome me, even the cat and dog, a sign that even these high authorities presumably approved of my coming. ‘Our Punikki Aino’ was a maid who slept in the kitchen. Punikki is derived from the Finnish word for red and has long been used as a traditional and honourable name for cows though during the civil war it gained political overtones as a term for the Reds. But in the present context it is of course teasingly affectionate.

Edith met me from the train with horse and sleigh as she had promised but I have no visual memory of our first meeting. I can no longer see her in my mind’s eye standing as she must have done in deep snow on the station platform at Raivola that cold February day thirty-six years ago, watching out for me with her characteristic half-cheerful and half-melancholy but always expectant smile. I was much too deeply affected by the dramatic aspects of the situation to take in any external details. I was also shy and perhaps a little afraid. The only thing I can be certain of is that from the first moment I was drawn into a field of energy that made quite different demands on my inner resources from anything I’d experienced before. And no one should be under any illusion that I’d found favour through writing nice things about Edith in a newspaper! She made it absolutely clear from the first that she was no sort of mystic medium but a realist of the most uncompromising nature, indeed a pagan. I felt pretty crushed and realised there would be no point in trying to get her to understand that it was necessary for tactical reasons to emphasise the elevated passages in her work in an attempt to neutralise the effect on the general public of the vulgar ridicule she‘d been subjected to.

I was able to stay only a few days; naturally I had to get back to my editorial work on the paper, and the long journey from Helsinki almost to the Russian border, involving a change of trains at Viipuri [Vyborg], took time. But it was a rare experience. The word ‘fairy tale’ springs to mind when I think of it: the little low-roofed wooden cottage where the Södergrans lived near the Orthodox church with its cheerful bells, the two delightful women in their old-fashioned clothes – one with the bold profile of a young hawk and the other with her rosy cheeks the image of a beaming little mother troll – their merry mutual banter, their eccentric manners and wonderful capacity to accept whatever life might bring them quite independently, it seemed, of the material side of existence over which they had no control; all this contributed to the impression that they were living in a fairy tale, far from the familiar realities of everyday life. This impression was reinforced by the spell that bound Edith to me. I can’t use any other word: it was simply a magic spell that held us in its power, creating an atmosphere in which one felt everything was possible and anything could happen.

The future burned in us, making us long for the tempting but terrible crown we expected it eventually to bring. As we sat at dusk in the little old-fashioned living-room with its view of snowbound garden and lake, chattering of this and that, reading poems to each other, daydreaming and looking through Edith’s many delightful albums full of pictures of cats, this was the predominant atmosphere and it filled everything with implicit significance.

‘Did we not live in a fairy tale, where all impossible things become possible….’ Today’s young people may perhaps find it difficult to understand the magic power the future held over us then. We were poor and unknown and lived in a distant corner of the world yet we felt like royalty. Our wealth was buried in hopes which hovered like the hands of angels over a shattered world pointing the way to a new human society. At that time the elite of Europe still had the self-confidence to dream a great dream, that it would become possible for every individual human being to share in one single spiritual community. Being young, we felt we had been given a tremendous opportunity on the threshold of a new world.

This mix of emotional intoxication, intellectual delight and secret excitement together with our impulsive girlish enthusiasm made of our being together a celebration as gentle and full of dreams as spring itself….

Much misunderstood: father of the superman, Friedrich Nietzsche.

The term nihilism is often bandied about, but often badly misunderstood. In extracts from his new book, Ei voisi vähempää kiinnostaa. Kirjoituksia nihilismistä (‘Couldn’t care less. Writings on nihilism’, Atena, 2008), the social scientist and philosopher Kalle Haatanen discusses the true legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism’s high priest

The word nihilist is derived from the Latin: ‘nihil’ means, simply, ‘nothing’. When someone is labelled as nihilist or seen as representing nihilism, this has always been a curse, a mockery or an accusation, whether in philosophy, politics or everyday conversation. More recently, the word has generally been used to refer to people who do not believe in anything – people whose world-view is without principle, without ideals, barren. Often the closest word that flashes across the mind is ‘people-hater’. Sometimes, however, its meaning is comically unclear. In writing this, I have noticed that the word ‘nihilism’ has been used in the press to describe, for example, one of the autumn’s fashion megatrends (perhaps it means that dressing in black is ascetic, slightly futurist and machine-romantic, which is indeed well-suited to good people-haters). In the commentary on the Finland-Germany football match, it was noted that the German defence was ‘nihilist’, but I haven’t the faintest clue why, in what sense and with what reference this particular word was chosen. In addition to referring to a unprincipled but enthusiastic people-hater, the everyday word ‘nihilist’ can often take on a meaning implying passivity. In this case the subject is a lazy opportunist who cannot be bothered to believe in anything and whose world-view is characterised solely by endless irony and the feeling that everything has already been seen. Sometimes a synonym for such a dogma is ‘teenager’, but – as sociologists have taught us – many adults live a kind of prolonged youth today. I often feel sympathetic towards lazy people for whom the world does not exhibit that single error that must be put right….

Active nihilism is a slightly more problematic concept. It is used in reference primarily to Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the superman who is able to carry this insignificant, nihilist era heroically on his shoulders. The active nihilist is an exceptional individual who, in his endless appetite for life, encounters nihilist insignificance again and again, but nevertheless, in his passion for life, accepts even this nothingness – the most terrible of all thoughts – eternally shouting ‘Yes!’ in its face. Not an easy task, as we shall see….

Nietzsche shouts Yes! to life – and thus, inseparably, to death. Nietzsche’s essentially ancient Greek, pagan and Dionysian world-view deprecates life, which attempts only to protect life for its own sake. Such life is merely concealment within a self-satisfied and resentful shell. On the other hand, the question, ‘Who would Nietzsche like to see dead?’– a question to which so many people would evidently like to know the answer – is simply extraordinarily stupid. Those who pose it do not understand and have no idea that it is the nihilistic powers that deny and destroy life which Nietzsche has in his sights, and indeed not any individuals, races, or ‘lesser beings’. The superman is the human figure (or perhaps a wish/desire) in the Nietzschean conceptuary who no longer feels any resentment. The superman is free of conventional moral codes because he sees them, first, as artificial, and second, as ways of controlling crowds or masses. I do not wish to make Nietzsche excessively tame: he certainly also says that morals are produced by herd-souls, and are suitable for them. In his tumultuous texts he curses those people to the lowest circles of hell and lifts others to the heavens. Nietzsche does not feel pity – because he loves life.

But then there are the lunatics. The proponents of the school murders at Columbine, USA, declared themselves nihilists. Last year, in the testament he left on the internet, the Finnish school murderer Pekka-Eric Auvinen demanded that he should not be psychologically analysed, but that he and his actions would be met face to face. In both cases, the Nietzschean undertone was clear, in part even correctly understood (the avoidance of psychological analysis, the inevitability of violence). – But the idea that rising to the far side of good and evil would mean merely resisting the predominant morality of pity and, in its name, would allow for pitilessly slaughtering lesser people! No.

Listen up: such resistance in fact only preserves the morality in question in its negative form; it is a resentful reaction in a world of resentful morals. Nietzsche was much more radical. How banal, unaristocratic and unaesthetic a school killing is! It is true that Nietzsche’s radical philosophy, with its emphasis on the advent of the totally unexpected and, on the other hand, the destruction of the old, has no logical endpoint that might somehow reign in destruction or even give it a purpose of any kind. This is what is meant by radical thought. Still less does it offer advice or guides for the realisation of some sort of programme, particularly if this breaks with the values of aesthetic aristocracy. There may no longer be any use for the moral and the ethical, but if something True, Beautiful and Great in this insignificant world still, or again, receives an echo, it is aesthetics. If Nietzsche were to confront the actions that have been carried out in his name, he would turn away in horror. Not out of pity perhaps – the world is a cruel place – but out of revulsion: his ‘followers’ put in to practice a ‘programme’ in which radical, untamed violence is shackled to a perfect, life-despising lack of style….

In nihilist philosophy – in other words, of the kind found in real literature, not in internet nonsense or fanatical interpretations – no one gives instructions or reasons for killing, and no encouragements to such actions are contained in any texts. The last thing a Nietzschean superman would do would be to ‘overcome himself’ in such an action, however much he were to move on the far side of good and evil….

Some people adopt a particular version of nihilism as their ideology or principle, leaving their testament, public statement or video on the internet, and are guilty of indescribable violence. Then the term ‘nihilism’ takes on a different content from simple hatred of humanity. The worst self-justifications used by killers are often found in the Nietzschean concept of the superman. True: the superman is an exceptional individual; true: the superman is on ‘the far side of good and evil’; true: the superman despises the herd-soul, democracy and the equalising of everything; true: the superman cannot be psychologically analysed; true: the superman is destructive.

Let me briefly examine these arguments. The analytical method is, however, not the best approach, for Nietzsche’s philosophy is not easily susceptible to logical or exhaustive explanation. I am, anyway, of the opinion that it is not possible to present an overall picture or certain truth concerning Nietzsche’s tumultuous and often fragmentary oeuvre. Rather, the question is of more or less about successful interpretations. I shall now, however, attempt to unravel this argument a little.

First, the superman would never act reactively and respond with violence to some circumstance or state of being, or by attacking it resentfully. The destructiveness of the superman lies in the creation of the new, which does not serve any purpose or dogma. The ‘object’ of destruction is the old world of values, but only in the sense that the creation of the new always destroys the old. Second, the superman is ‘beyond good and evil’, but at what point did the interpretation change in the blink of an eye to being ‘on the side of evil’? Nietzsche’s vision may nourish irrational destruction (because it has no direction), but existence on the far side of good and evil means, first, a grasp of the accidental nature of the predominant moral values and, second, an aesthetic rising above them, not a recursive return to the programmatic destruction of the old. Third, despising the mass man does not mean despising people, it means despising the forces that trivialise life.

If nihilism is, quite rightly, interpreted as a kind of attempt at liberation from the burden of history, Christianity and humanism, it must be understood how arduous this liberation is. In the opinion of some, it is quite impossible – most closely comparable to Baron von Münchhausen when he rose from the marsh by pulling himself up by his own hair.

It is not, in other words, easy to become pagan again. For that reason, I am nervous about sociology’s sometimes too easily applied prefixes, post- and neo-. For example, the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, who constantly draws on Nietzsche, often speaks over easily of ‘neo-tribalisation’ or ‘neo-paganism’. In his conception of history, the Apollonian period with its emphasis on reason and harmony is once more making way for the new coming of a Dionysian age marked by passion, drunkenness and danger. Maffesoli speaks of an ‘orgiastic age’. The idea is interesting (I, at least, periodically become enthusiastic about it), but a couple of years ago fifty per cent of sociology dissertations were on the urban tribes of club cultures and cities. Neo-pagans and post-modern orgiasts who have rejected rationality? Oh well. Then they grow up, there’s work in the morning, and they have to go home early – if they have ever left it, as there are the children to be looked after.

The attempt to become pagan again, or ‘to able to be superficial’, as Nietzsche put it, is perhaps best described in the Bertolt Brecht text that is often used in death notices: ‘And when she was finished they laid her in earth // Flowers growing, butterflies juggling over her… // She, so light, barely pressed the earth down // How much pain it took to make her as light as that!’ [‘Song about my mother’, translated by Christopher Middleton].

When used in death notices, it is fairly clear that this beautiful text of Brecht’s makes reference to a death caused by a long, painful illness, in which death really comes as liberation or oblivion. The same is true of nihilism, when taken seriously. Nihilism is that illness. It is a lifelong struggle against (easy) life. It has no logical conclusion – some kind of post-moral age – instead, the question is of a continual struggle against various moral doctrines, collections of rules, theologies as well as triviality. For the active nihilist, freedom is does not lie in someone saying how things should be done; neither is it to be found in throwing oneself into the belief that nothing means anything. The passive nihlist acts entirely according to the logic of opposition. He finds freedom in both extremes. ‘OK, I could do that’ and ‘What point is there to anything in the end.’ Perhaps a more accurate analogy – better, at least, than the illusion of a post-moral age – is the fate of Sisyphus (Camus’s favourite, by the way), who is condemned eternally to roll a boulder up a hill. When the boulder reaches the top, it naturally rolls down again, and Sisyphus has to begin all over again, forever. That is also the fate of the nihilist.

Philosophically nihilism – in the eyes of Nietzsche and Heidegger, the entire history of western thought, from Plato onward – never reaches a conclusion, can never be overcome. It can be attacked, attempts can be made at destruction, at radically new thought, just as Nietzsche and Heidegger did. The Nietzschean idea of coming, the appearance of something completely new, is thoroughly destructive. It is an anti-nihilist radical force which destroys the past and the existing, but it has no inner definition or future horizon. The thinking of something completely new, the coming of something completely new, is not born of given conditions and does not obey the predominant laws. In other words, it destroys the conditions of its own coming. It does not return and cannot be reduced to causes or circumstances. It is completely unpredictable. For this reason the extreme anti-nihilist pathos of Nietzsche’s philosophy has been called nihilist – it has no content, it is nothing.

The question, however, is of something completely different. Niezsche does not emphasise emptiness, but something destructive, radically creative of the new and destructive of the old. It cannot be shackled or anticipated – or considered to represent something good or evil. It is aesthetics in the most radical sense of the word. It is Nietzsche’s active, heroic and aesthetic nihilis: pure force, which does not bend to truths or purposes. For precisely that reason it is able to destroy the worst curse of our age, nihilism.

There is one more, in some ways more comforting, way of thinking about nihilism. It is the desire to remain silent. In addition to Nietzsche, the 20thcentury philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt also constantly emphasise activity, creation and pathos. Such things can be tiring. The same is true of the American analysts of conservative national values and bourgeois public life and their horror of couch potatoes and ironists. In this connection I feel a sneaking sympathy for passive nihilists and their lazy irony. ‘The time is out of joint,’ as Hamlet said, but could some handyman not be paid to fix it? I don’t feel like it. I don’t have the energy. Forgetting to vote, political inactivity and watching the shopping channel all night feel more and more tempting.

There is one branch of philosophical nihilism that I have not dealt with in any detail because it is not linked with the continental philosophical tradition of nihilism. It is the habit in western philosophy of describing the word through logical sentences and language. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in particular, is considered a representative of this kind of nihilism. He apparently hated unclear sentences and wished to see philosophy as a language game, and language as limited, and, in fact, the whole of philosophy as action. Philosophy makes philosophy and thus it is quite pointless to ask what philosophy is. It is an obscure question to which one can never receive an answer.

Stanley Rosen, author of perhaps the most significant study of nihilism in recent years (although it was actually published in 1969) calls this Wittgensteinian desire for clarity a ‘yearning for silence’. Rosen considered it little less than an obsession, which wanted to remove all lack of clarity from philosophy and achieve a kind of peace in which philosophy works and A = A.

In Derek Jarman’s stylised film Wittgenstein, this desire for clarity and thus silence tortures Wittgenstein throughout his entire life. Jarman, too, sees this nihilism as an unsupportable state in the end. In the final scene, a Wittgenstein seen once more as a small boy examines the world he has created. It is purely a film set: an empty background and a mathematical grid or co-ordinate system. There the poor young Wittgenstein would like to fly in the plane he has built, but the world he has created is cold, barren of imagination, and empty. It leaves no room for flying or the imagination. The ‘yearning for silence’ was finally victorious.

I am an optimist: perhaps a suspicion of pathos combined with lazy irony is a suitable mixture of nihilist elements. At least it seems like a world one might be able to live in.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins
(First published in Books from Finland 4/2008.)