The print culture in Finland is amazing. Walk into the downtown public library in Turku and you are likely to find scores of people, many elderly but including all ages, sitting at large tables or in rows of bright yellow chairs near the windows, reading the newspaper from front to back. They are often perusing the city’s Turun Sanomat, or the Helsingin Sanomat from the capital, but they might also be reading papers from the small towns where they grew up—there are hundreds of newspapers in Finland, and the library carries dozens of them. People read them with a kind of quiet dedication that is remarkable. Turn your gaze to the bookshelves around you, and notice how many thousands of books there are by Finnish authors, as well as Finnish translations of international works. Outside, stroll by the several bookstores in town; at the train station kiosks, flip through the dozens of Finnish magazines. It starts to dawn on you that, for a country of only five and a half million people (about the same population as the state of Minnesota) with its own language that no one else in the world speaks, there is a stunning array of publications, and a deep commitment to fostering and preserving a literary culture that didn’t even exist before 1831.
Much of the credit for the thriving literary culture of Finland goes to the Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura in Finnish, or SKS). When it was founded by a bunch of young men connected to the university in Helsinki, they had to invent a new Finnish word—kirjallisuus—because until that point there was no such thing as Finnish literature. Finnish was a spoken language, but rarely written. Finland had been controlled by Sweden for generations, until Russia took control of the area in 1809; these young men saw language and literature as important tools for inculcating a sense of Finnishness among their people and for encouraging a new nationalism. With no written Finnish culture to build on, they started by collecting and publishing oral folk poetry from across the country. The best known of those efforts were undertaken by the group’s secretary, Elias Lönnrot, who gathered folk poetry in Eastern Finland and Karelia and published them in the form of the Kalevala, which became known as the national epic of Finland. As they hoped, the Kalevala represented a key turning point building toward the eventual movement to demand independence from Russia.
After independence in 1917, folklorists continued to travel across Finland, observing, interviewing, and collecting information from regular people. Archivists organized and catalogued their reports, and had them bound into impressive volumes that line the shelves of the SKS archive’s beautiful reading room. I visited there with my friend, Fulbright teaching fellow Jennifer Stewart, where archivist Juha Nirkko generously shared his extensive knowledge of the collection. Jennifer and I were both struck by the awe-inspiring dedication it took generations of archivists to bring a sense of order to the immensity of the collections.
I had wanted to visit SKS ever since I arrived in Finland, because I had been curious about a related but different major initiative that the organization has long fostered--the recruitment and collection of first-person written narratives about the past and the present by everyday people across the country. In order to foster literacy, build a written culture from scratch, and to identify potential new literary talents, the SKS sponsored writing competitions. Calls would be announced in newspapers around the country that new reminiscences were being sought on a particular topic—it might be about one’s relationship to nature, or religion, or one’s childhood, or about work in a specific industry—and people were asked to send in their written submissions. In the past, winners would be announced and might be published by the SKS as well as garner a cash prize. The calls still go out; SKS actively continues to collect these first person narratives, but nowadays it is usually more like a raffle; anyone who enters is eligible to win a prize. There are networks of people across the country well-known to the SKS staff who can be counted on to submit their memoirs; the institution also works to identify new participants based on the particular topic.
Researchers from universities across Finland use this collection method; they announce what they are trying to study and SKS publicizes their research questions and archives the responses that come in. I first heard about this practice because Finnish scholars consider this research method under the same umbrella as oral history. The word they use to refer to both these written reminiscences and oral history interviews is muistitieto, which translates to memory knowledge, or recollected knowledge (whereas the literal translation for what we call oral history would be suullinen historia). In her article about oral history in the Nordic Baltic countries of Finland, Sweden, Latvia, and Estonia, Anne Heimo writes that the advantage of muistitieto is that it highlights the “nature” of the source—that is, the individualized memories of living people—rather than focusing on whether those are passed down in oral or written form.
Finnish scholars agree that it’s a tricky business when translating and discussing this practice with people from other places. When I was visiting with researchers in Oulu, they talked about how hard it is to describe in English the method of collecting these written reminiscences. “What should we call them?” they wondered. “Written oral history,” which makes sense to them, is confusing to non-Finnish scholars who don’t know about muisitieto. “Life narratives” isn’t always accurate, because sometimes people are not writing about their own lives, but about their neighbors or their community. They aren’t really memoirs, they argued, since they are not always published. When I emailed Juha Nirkko to ask what words—both English and Finnish--the SKS archives uses, he wrote back “These are good questions! Many words have been used to describe” the method of asking the questions: call (kutsu, kirjoituskutsu); collecting campaign, competition (keruu, keruukilpailu); research survey (kysely, tutkimuskysely). And many other words have been used to describe the products created when people answer them: answer (vastaus, keruuvastaus); reminiscence, memoir, or memory-knowledge (muistitieto, muistelma); observation; experience (havainto; kokemus, elämys).
Whatever we call it, it’s a fascinating practice and one that has resulted in a vast and rich collection at the SKS. (I have been trying to find out whether any other countries outside of the Nordic areas utilize a similar approach.) As an American oral historian, I still don’t quite understand treating these invaluable documents as “the same” as oral history interviews—for one thing, I don’t think that does justice to the “co-created” nature of oral history interviews—the way that oral histories are very much created by two people meeting in real time, in a particular moment, together. The results are shaped not only by the questions asked by the interviewer and the responses of the interviewee; but also by the assumptions both parties make about each other; the communication across lines of race, class, gender, education, region, age; even the “chemistry” or lack of it between the two people involved. All of these factors shape oral history narratives in ways that make them seem quite different from what might happen when a person sits at her kitchen table to write down her memories of a particular place or event for an imagined audience, with the hopes of winning a competition. Nor does grouping these two forms together address the orality of oral history audio—what we can learn from the pauses, emotion, pace, or intensity of the spoken words. But while I might not call it the same thing, I definitely agree that these written narratives are rich documents full of important lessons to be learned, and not just about “what happened”—for instance, just as one interviewee might tell her story differently depending on the interviewer, historian Ulla-Maija Peltonen has studied how Finns wrote the stories of their involvement in the brutal 1918 Civil War differently for researchers from various archives depending on the political associations of those institutions and what they thought those researchers would want to hear. Clearly these forms share much in common, and both offer a treasure trove of material for historians and other scholars.
Seeing the richness of these narratives and the usefulness to researchers of all sorts, I have been inspired to think about whether or not this method could be imported to the United States. It’s hard to imagine a call for these written narratives going out in newspapers across the country. But could a state like North Carolina undertake such a collection? Could different states around the country do it? Could we, for instance, collect the written reminiscences from women about the first time they voted, or about their relationship to voting in general, in preparation for the centennial of the 19th Amendment? And, in a country with a different history and relationship to writing, literature, newspapers, and archives, would anyone answer the call?
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