A Life of Extremes: The British Discover Modern Finland 1917-1941, by Tony Lurcock
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A Life of Extremes: The British Discover Modern Finland 1917-1941, by Tony Lurcock
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A Life of Extremes: The British Discover Modern Finland 1917-1941, by Tony Lurcock- Amazon Sales Rank: #7664040 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-01
- Binding: Paperback
- 274 pages
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Travellers's tales from a triumphant Finland, edited by an unashamed Fennophile By voi vittu This is the concluding volume of Tony Lurcock's trilogy of anthologies of writings by British visitors to Finland from 1760 to 1941. Each volume has followed much the same pattern: an historical and social introduction to the period in question and to the types of travellers it attracted; extracts from the travellers' tales with background and biographical introductions; maps, notes, bibliographies and an index of places. The present volume covers the period from Finnish independence in 1917 to the British declaration of war on Finland in 1941, both events neatly occurring on 6 December. Although we still have examples of the sailor and the rugged traveller on a budget, we now have a new type of visitor: the professional who has a specific purpose for visiting Finland - medical, musical, architectural, or with an interest in social questions. The period is book-ended with conflict, so we also have the spies entering or leaving Finland during the early days of the Soviet Union, and then we have the volunteers and politicians who came to Finland for the Winter War. Mr Lurcock is to be congratulated on bringing this project, which has involved decades of study, to such a satisfactory conclusion. The books are both readable and enjoyable but also valuable works of scholarship and it is unlikely they will ever be superseded. I do, however, have several minor reservations. Mr Lurcock's texts are all taken from books (guided, no doubt, to some extent by Hilkka Aaltonen's bibliographical research), and not from other media such as newspapers, journals, magazines, unpublished letters and journals, and so on. Texts from media of this kind would tend to have a greater raciness and immediacy than the sometimes longwinded and stodgy book-length accounts of a journey remembered, sometimes at a great distance of time. A second reservation is that Mr Lurcock has a tendency to go along with the almost universal rosy and positive picture of Finland presented by his visitors. To take an example, he says of the medical doctor, Halliday Sutherland: "He is alert to social conditions, to the 'relatively small' discrepancies between the rich and the poor, the absence of slums and of any 'submerged tenth' or 'problem class'." This is complete balderdash. There was considerable poverty and social inequality and deprivation in the inter-war years in both town and countryside, and there were the slums of Kallio in Helsinki, Pispala in Tampere, in Lahti and elsewhere, all with their attendant social problems and criminality and high incidences of TB and other infectious diseases. Mr Lurcock seems to be accepting Sutherland's conclusions, presumably on the grounds that Sutherland was there and he wasn't. But surely an editor's job is to know better and to point out when his traveller has got it wrong, either because of incomplete information or because he has accepted as truth myths or prejudices implanted by his hosts. Mr Lurcock is an unashamed Fennophile, but he is doing neither Finland nor the general reader any service by allowing completely erroneous judgements pass without comment. In this context I took particular exception to one of Mr Lurcock's concluding comments, and one which is symptomatic of the approach of the book as a whole: "W. H. Auden dismissed the 1930s as 'a low dishonest decade', but for Finland it had been little short of triumphant." In fact, the 1930s was a particularly nasty and poisonous decade in Finnish history. There was considerable persecution and intimidation of those classes and groups thought to have been sympathetic to the losing side in the Civil War (estimated by Anthony Upton as 40% of the population), and there were the activities of a range of ultra-nationalistic and neo-Fascist organisations which threatened both to overthrow the new republic and argued for the creation of a Greater Finland extending to the Urals (a considerable provocation to the Soviet Union and one of the driving forces behind Finland's war of territorial aggrandisement from 1941 to 1944 as a co-belligerent of Nazi Germany). All of this has been well-documented by Upton and by Finnish historians, and I cannot think of any modern commentator, even the most rabidly nationalistic Finn, who would describe the 1930s as a 'triumphant' decade. Finally, I was puzzled as to why Mr Lurcock has concluded his study at 1941 - he has told us that the present volume is the final one. Apart from the neat symmetry of 6 December for beginning and ending dates, he tells us that there were no British visitors left in Finland by 1941 and that this year marks "the end of the British discovery of modern Finland; it would be many years before the next generation of travellers arrived to discover the new republic." Well, Diana Ashcroft came in 1947 and left a marvellous record of life in post-war Kajaani. Bill Mead returned the same year, no longer an impecunious student but now a serious agricultural geographer, and began his study of the resettlement of the Karelian refugees, a programme which he justifiably called one of the great triumphs of Finnish history. The journalists Wendy Hall and Katherine Whitehorn came in 1949 and 1953 respectively and wrote of their experiences. And there are presumably several others I have not heard of. It could be that Mr Lurcock does not have the stomach for the less 'triumphant' bleak and drab post-war years and the subsequent inglorious period of Finlandization. Hopefully, someone will take over the baton from Mr Lurcock and continue the story to the present day. Let us hope that she does as good a job as Mr Lurcock has..
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