Abstract
In this article I analyse Russian and Soviet Karelian literary texts written in Finnish at the time and in the style of socialist realism, and Finnish poems, songs and novels of the same era, proposing the idea of a ‘Greater-Finland’. I turned my attention to the question of how the depiction, construction and use of borders is handled in the respective texts, and look to determine whether the opposed ideologies of Soviet Communism and Panfennism led to similar or different artificial results. This analysis proves that the texts of the two ideologies generally draw strict distinctions between the ‘heroes’ of their own side and the bad ‘Others’. Only the heroes of the plot are able to either cross borders or to establish new ones. While in the Soviet texts opponents of Soviet society inside the Soviet Union are depicted as foreign and separated through ideological, symbolic and topographical borders, the Karelians in the Finnish texts are suspected as a hybrid people, spoiled by their contact with the evil Russians.
Highlights
At the beginning of a Finnish book about Eastern Karelia published in 1934, there is a photograph: an aisle between dark fir and birch trees, subtitled ‘Raja’ – ‘The border’ (Akateeminen Karjala-Seura 1934: 7)
As sources to analyse I have not chosen seemingly ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ official statements such as geographical textbooks and dogmatic newspaper articles, but rather fictional texts. The reason for this is the assumption that the rhetorics of the two ideologies may find a more diversified and subtle ground for expression, in the especially rhetorical argumentation typical of fictional genres such as novels and poems
The novel is based on the history of the so-called ‘Kinship-Wars’, when in the time after Finnish independence from Russia from 1917–1922, Finnish army divisions and individual volunteers went over the border into Russian territory in order to fight for the independence of these areas from the young Soviet Union and to unite the respective regions with Finland
Summary
At the beginning of a Finnish book about Eastern Karelia published in 1934, there is a photograph: an aisle between dark fir and birch trees, subtitled ‘Raja’ – ‘The border’ (Akateeminen Karjala-Seura 1934: 7). The novel is based on the history of the so-called ‘Kinship-Wars’, when in the time after Finnish independence from Russia from 1917–1922, Finnish army divisions and individual volunteers went over the border into Russian territory in order to fight for the independence of these areas from the young Soviet Union and to unite the respective regions with Finland (cf Niinistö 2005).
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