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Topic #1385

Reading Topic #1385

Scandinavians! They seem so nice and friendly, and then they go and bust out something like black metal or salmiakki and reveal that they are actually enemies of all human decency. :)

I kid. Rather fond of that part of the world, actually. My first lover was Swedish! And my favorite car! ... Was also Swedish, I mean. They're not the same individual. And "was" isn't really accurate, she's alive and well. ... The lover, I mean. Not the car. Although that may be as well, I don't know. Oh dear, this has all gotten very messy.

As part of the research for one of the papers I had to do last spring, I read a rather remarkable book called All the Russias by one Henry Norman, MP, published in 1902. This turned out to be a bit of a bust for my actual purposes, because despite being called All the Russias, it appears not to mention Byelorussia or the Ukraine at all (although even that is, in its way, indicative of something).

For purposes of this discussion, though, there's a chapter on Finland (which was at the time part of the Russian Empire) which opens thus:

Finland is a little country, and there is not much to tell about it. But it is the focus of some brave ideas, and its short story has no soiled page. A desolate and waterlogged land, in a hard northern climate, three-quarters of its surface destitute of population, possessing no natural wealth except its forests and no natural advantages except its waterfalls, where the ripening crops race against the descending frost for their harvest-goal and are often outstripped, and where the peasant for half the year lives like an Arctic explorer—how should it have any story? Yet the very hardness of the struggle has made the Finn one of the sturdiest specimens of humanity—only the sturdy could survive; industry was the condition of his existence; his loneliness has bred self-reliance, and his long solitudes have awakened faith. He has developed in this dark wintry corner of Europe a civilisation curiously his own—quaintly original on the one side and Transatlantically progressive on the other. He has a natural bent for science, especially in its practical application; art has been born to him—not much in quantity, but vigorous and independent in quality; while literature has by nature deep roots in the hearts of men whose chilly, infertile home-land is the richest of all the world in folk-song and lyric proverb, in legend and magic spell, in epic saga and chanted rune.

Yes, it is a little country, but it is big in character, big in the material and moral progress it has made under severe conditions, and it raises a big political question. No review of Russia to-day could be complete that did not take Finland into account, though even in its short story there is much that cannot, with discretion, be discussed just now.

I have sometimes been tempted for this to turn up in Our Witches at War at some point, as an excerpt from some turn-of-the-century Britannian politician's take on Suomus in a pre-Neuroi book about the Orussian Empire. Eila would probably find it alternately flattering and bemusing. :)

--G.
*but then we knew that from Eila.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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