Väinö Linna´s modern realism

The Unknown Soldier and Under the North Star

By Jyrki Nummi

With his two novels, Tuntematon sotilas (1954, The Unknown Soldier) and Täällä Pohjantähden alla I-III (1959-1962, Under the North Star), Väinö Linna succeeded in arousing irritation in 1950s and 1960s Finland through his declaration that the Finnish national identity is founded in literature, and that there is no general consensus on its nature, any more than that it should consist of exclusively positive characteristics.
Linna entered literature at a time when literary positionings were undergoing a fundamental realignment. The post-war modernist opposition appeared as the literary vanguard of the time. A group consisting of young poets set themselves in the 1940s against the generation that in the epoch before the war had dominated and built up a unified national identity. When Linna came on the scene with his Unknown Soldier, a new, unexpected front was opened in the literary campaign.
Linna’s literary agenda built on the tradition of classic social realism. By describing a recognisable historical period that was fresh in the memory of his contemporaries, the author questioned the community’s own fictions, myths and ideals.
Linna’s success was seen as a setback for the development of modern literature. The younger generation’s leading literary authority, Tuomas Anhava, condescendingly described Linna in a reference work of the time as a „patriotic idealist“.
When one views Linna from a slightly greater distance, it looks as if he has managed to operate on a playing field where the half-way line has been clearly drawn between traditional and modern literature. He skilfully combined traditional realism’s criticism of society with the story-telling methods of the modern novel.
The Unknown Soldier closely observes a machine-gun company during the course of the Continuation War, from June 1941 till the autumn of 1944. The novel, which makes use of the conventions of adventure in its episodic narrative, has been exceptionally popular ever since its publication. The subject area that the novel deals with, defeat in the Continuation War, was still at the beginning of the 1950s a politically sensitive and unexplored area of Finnish public life. Equally, the feeling of guilt about the war was far too close at hand, and far too sensitive and difficult a subject for historical research.
The novel’s dominant viewpoint – the worm’s eye view – explores the world obliquely and from below. The narrative technique with which the intimate reality of the war is described also opened up for inspection the hidden structures of Finnish society, as expressed in the social relationships within the Finnish army.
Even if The Unknown Soldier doesn’t have an identifiable main character, it contains a group of colourful types who have become cultural icons: inventive wordsmiths, genuine leaders, shrewd men from the lower levels of society, but also callous murderers, childish pushers and repulsive order-givers.
The soldiers who feature most – Koskela, Hietanen, Lahtinen, Rokka, Honkajoki – are multi-layered in literary terms. Some of them are recognisable as reworkings of Runeberg’s war-heroes in Ensign Stål or updated representatives of the genealogical typology in Topelius’s Our Land; some are archetypes and Finnish versions of figures from world literature.
The novel’s linguistic variations reveal the social and cultural tensions and local peculiarities of Finnish society. Round the intersections between historical events and the fictitious characters, it spins the classical themes of the realistic novel: the unity of action and words, and of language and reality.
The popular view of the world in The Unknown Soldier is characterised by concretism and narrowness, a way of thinking that is bound to one’s immediate surroundings. With the help of this, the lower cultural strata’s own cultural activity and need for self-definition were dramatised.
The novel’s mythical hero, the multi-layered Antero Rokka, puts the entire stress on his personal goals in the war: it’s a question of staying alive, maintaining his values even when conditions are at their most wretched, and it’s a question of eventually returning home: „To hell with Europe! We’ll take Karelia and then we’ll go home!“
Rokka’s prediction is wrong. But his attitude proves to be victorious nevertheless, and it is consistent with the novel’s broader thematic structure. When Rokka goes home wounded to his children and his wife, he is returning from death and destruction, from the hell of war to the human world, to everyday life.
The Under the North Star trilogy is a description of the birth and development of the Finnish nation from the 1880s till the years after the second world war. The events are reported in a description of life and family feuds in a small village in Häme province over the course of three generations.
The main character in the trilogy is – just as in The Unknown Soldier – the community, which represents the historical power, „the people“. The novel is a description of a historic shift, a tale of the transformation of the Finnish class society through conflicts and antagonism to a civic society.
Even though the literary public knew to expect a series of novels, they were surprised at its breadth and its standpoint. In particular the dramatic descriptions of the civil war, the events that led up to it, and the war’s tragic sequel gave rise to a discussion in the press (especially in the Swedish-language Hufvudstadsbladet) about the truthfulness and general applicability of the events the novel takes up. Linna had clearly been waiting for just such an opportunity for discussion, and replied sharply to criticism from historians by stressing the falseness of the current view of history.
The conflict showed that Under the North Star filled a social and societal requirement that historical research had not been able to fulfil. The novel made public a sphere of experience that had hitherto been private and dependent on one’s own memory. Even at the start of the 1960s, the civil war was still alive in people’s minds, but no-one had brought themselves to raise it for public discussion. With his novel, Linna rose to the challenge by creating a fictitious place through which the sensitive past could be recreated under historically recognisable conditions.
The novel took up the metahistorical dimension that is part of the essence of history, but this was overshadowed by the row over historical detail. The trilogy’s „personal outlook on life, projected onto history“, as Linna himself described his novel, is based on the historical philosophy in Tolstoy’s War and Peace: the sweep of history stems from countless individual details, the consequences and direction of which the individual person is incapable of predicting or controlling.
The Tolstoyan viewpoint has become a theme in the novel’s events and the characters’ fates. Life in the village of Pentinkulma represents a milieu that exists in the shadow of the great historical events, a social group that generally lands outside historical research. The great key events of history are notable for their absence: everyday life is constantly at the heart of the novel.
Linna’s national landscape is expressly the social and local community. The scene is dominated by the small tasks, the daily rhythm of life, a miniature world with the focus on family and individual relationships. The great events of history are a distant background noise. They have a merciless but indirect influence on the ordinary person’s day-to-day life.
The word-picture of Finland’s recent history that Linna builds up contains overtones that go beyond literature in many ways. His works deconstructed and rebuilt the Finnish self-image, they exploded societal tensions that had ended up in the background.
Linna’s novels provided post-war Finland with tools to meet the challenges of a modernised and democratised society. By depicting the past, he articulated the contemporary demands for social and economic justice, and the possibilities for all groups in society to take part in and influence the building of the society, with full rights of citizenship.

Jyrki Nummi is professor at the University of Helsinki

Translated by Roy Hodson