Norwegian Woods (OT)

Södra Finnskoga had a unique situation among the dialects of Värmland, Sweden. In Södra Finnskoga they have never spoken “värmländsk”. During the 1600s and the 1700s, Finnish was spoken. The connections they had from Södra Finnskoga went to Norway. They started speaking the Norwegian Solör-dialect. The forest owners of Södra Finnskoga went to Kristiania (Oslo, Norway) to sell their timber and get their payment. This went on a long time into the 1900s. When the school-children from Bograngen in Sweden was studying at “Karlstads läroverk” in Sweden, they had a long way to go to school. First they went, by car in summer and by horse in winter, to Flisa railway station in Norway, a distance of 30-40 km. And from Flisa they went by train to Kongsvinger (Norway), a distance of 50-60 km, then to Charlottenberg in Sweden, a distance of 40-50 km. And from Charlottenberg they finally ended up in Karlstad (Sweden), a distance of 110-120 km. Which totally gives a distance of around 250 km (155 miles) from Bograngen to school in Karlstad. In 1914, during wartime, Swedish schoolchildren had no passports. That made the passing of the border more complicated, but they were let through. Because of school, TV and radio the youth of Södra Finnskoga has more and more started speaking “rikssvenska” (statement from 1975). Source: Finnbygden nr.1, våren 1975.

Georg Henrik von Wright was one of the most eminent philosophers of the second half of the 20th century, and a distinguished essayist and cultural critic. His philosophical interests ranged from inductive reasoning to deontic logic, from the study of values and norms to the logic of explanations of human action. To all these great themes he made important and original contributions.

His general essays (mostly in Swedish) are reflections on problems of our civilisation. They extend from discussions of contemporary strife to ecology, from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to the condition of modern man. He wrote in a distinctive personal style, with luminous clarity, austere elegance and a magisterial overview of western culture. Much influenced by the logical empiricism of the Vienna circle, and by his great teacher Ludwig Wittgenstein, he was a rationalist humanist, who became increasingly pessimistic about the effects of science and technology on the modern world. He was renowned not only for the brilliance of his thought and writing, but also for his integrity and moral virtue.

Von Wright was born in Helsinki, the son of Tor von Wright and Ragni Elisabeth Alfthan. His family belonged to the Swedish-Finnish aristocracy and were of Scots ancestry. He was educated at Helsinki University from 1934 to 1937, majoring in philosophy, history and political science, with mathematics as a minor subject. His philosophy teacher was Eino Kaila, an affiliate of the Vienna circle, whose influence was crucial in steering him towards logic and logical analysis, and introducing him to the writings of the logical empiricists.

Von Wright resolved to do postgraduate work on the problem of the justification of inductive reasoning and went to Vienna to study with members of the circle. His wishes were frustrated by the Anschluss, and, early in 1939, he went to Cambridge to work with CD Broad and RB Braithwaite. It was there that he first met Wittgenstein, whose lectures he attended and whose impact upon him was profound. He also met GE Moore, another important influence.

In the summer of 1939, von Wright returned to Finland and, with the outbreak of the winter war between his country and the Soviet Union, being unfit for military service, he worked in a voluntary organisation for propaganda on the home front. In 1941, he married Maria Elisabeth von Troil, and they had a son and a daughter. That year, too, he published The Logical Problem Of Induction, which was his doctoral dissertation.

During the continuation war of 1941 to 1944, he worked at the government information centre. He was appointed lecturer at Helsinki University in 1943, and elevated to a chair in 1946. In 1947, he returned to Cambridge on a visit, attended Wittgenstein's last lectures on the philosophy of psychology, and renewed his friendship with his teacher. On Wittgenstein's retirement in 1948, von Wright was elected to his chair at the age of 32.

During this period, he continued working on induction but also pursued a new interest in modal and deontic logic - a subject he virtually invented. Wittgenstein died in 1951, and von Wright was appointed one of his literary executors. Over the next 40 years, he produced the authoritative list of Wittgenstein's manuscripts, and contributed extensively to their editing and publication. He wrote many illuminating papers on the life and works of his revered teacher, some of which he collected in his volume Wittgenstein (1982).

After Wittgenstein's death, von Wright resigned his Cambridge chair and resumed his professorship at Helsinki. In 1961, he was elected to the prestigious Academy of Finland, which relieved him of all teaching and adminstrative obligations. Having been invited to give the Gifford lectures at Edinburgh in 1959, he wrote two of his greatest works for the occasions, The Varieties Of Goodness and Norm And Action (both published 1963). The former was, in many ways, his favourite among his writings, and it is indeed the deepest investigation of general value theory in philosophy; the latter was a remarkable pioneering work on the logic of norms.

Von Wright was elected Andrew D White professor- at-large at Cornell University, New York state (1965-77), which enabled him to make regular visits to Cornell, and to his good friend Norman Malcolm, another of Wittgenstein's eminent pupils. Cornell became, as he said, his "third intellectual home", after Helsinki and Cambridge. From 1968 to 1977, he was chancellor of Abo Academy in Finland.

From the 1970s, von Wright's philosophical interests shifted. Beginning with Explanation And Understanding (1971), he wrote extensively on action and intention, on reasons for action and the ways in which actions are explained by reference to reasons. Opposed to the reduction of reasons to causes, he championed methodological pluralism in explanation, arguing for the autonomy of the sciences of man and against attempts to reduce the characteristic forms of explanation of human behaviour to causal explanation. These investigations led him to explore the nature of human freedom, about which he wrote luminously in Freedom And Determination (1980) and Of Human Freedom, his Tanner lectures in 1985.

His interests in philosophical psychology expanded, and, in the 1990s, he became increasingly preoccupied with the mind-body relation. In The Shadow Of Descartes (1998) is a collection of essays on these themes. He published his autobiography Mitt Liv in Swedish in 2001.

Many honours and honorary doctorates came von Wright's way. He was elected a member of learned academies and societies in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Britain and the United States, and elected to an honorary fellowship at his old Cambridge college, Trinity, in 1983. He was awarded numerous medals and prizes, including the Alexander von Humboldt Forschungspreis (1986), the gold medal of the Swedish Academy (1986), the Selma Lagerlof literary prize (1993), the Tage Danielsson humanist prize (1998), and the Critical European prize last year.

· Georg Henrik von Wright, philosopher, born June 14 1916; died June 16 2003

Mannerheim: The Mighty Finn

The improbably tall, 29-year-old guardsman wearing a helmet crowned with the Romanov double eagle, caught on film attending Tsar Nicholas II at his coronation in St Petersburg, was known to his fellow officers as Lieutenant Gustaf Karlovich. Twenty-two years later, shortly after Nicholas had been shot by the Bolsheviks, the same imposing fellow, now a highly decorated general in a magnificent white fur hat, signed himself Kustaa - Finnish for Gustaf. He was now Regent of a Finland he had played a key role in liberating from both tsarist and Soviet Russian rule. Outmoded and superseded, Gustaf Karlovich has passed into the pageant of his own extraordinary history.

The Regent's family - aristocratic Finns of Dutch descent - knew the Hero of Finland simply as Gustaf, or, formally, Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. On missions where secrecy had been vital during the crossover between Russian and Finnish soldiering, the greatest Finn - as he was voted by his countrymen last year - had slipped across borders under the Swedish soubriquets Gustaf Malmstrom and Gustaf Andersson. Mannerheim, who had a theatrical bent, would have enjoyed such disguises as much as Robert Byron or Lawrence of Arabia revelled in theirs.

He spoke six languages, served the last of the tsars, fought the Japanese, routed the Reds during the Finnish civil war, squared up to Stalin and played cat and mouse with Hitler. He rode thousands of miles through unchartered central Asia, served as president of his country, hunted tigers, collected exquisite artefacts and created a beautiful home in Helsinki's Kaivopuisto Park. The cosmopolitan Marshal of Finland cut a figure every bit as complex and as contradictory as Winston Churchill, his British equivalent and cavalier contemporary.

Now Mannerheim is the subject of an exhibition at the State Hermitage, St Petersburg, called Mannerheim. Russian Officer. Marshal of Finland . In fact, the show is housed not in the former Winter Palace, but across Palace Square in Karl Rossi's magnificent General Staff Building (1819-29), a neoclassical design every bit as sweeping, spectacular and unlikely as Mannerheim's career.

Squeezed into six handsome rooms, the Mannerheim exhibition attempts to tell the story of this extraordinary adventurer through 600 objects. The curators have rounded up starchily posed photographs of bigwigs from before the Russian Revolution, elegantly written letters, unlikely medals, wartime newsreels and extravagant weaponry. This is something of a museological handshake between Russia and Finland: Mannerheim was accused of being a fascist by the Soviets, until four years ago when Vladimir Putin laid a wreath on Mannerheim's tomb in Helsinki as a gesture of reconciliation. And so there are paintings of weather, mostly of snow, in which the wars between Hitler, Stalin and Mannerheim were fought out and exhausted.

Then there are those exceptional pieces that make this show not simply a three-dimensional biography, but an art exhibition in its own right. Besides intricate astrophysical calendars, votive images and a pocket-sized portable altar, here are dazzling costumes drawn from across central Asia and China - the everyday garb of tribespeople, settled and nomadic, that make the costly offerings of today's international fashion houses seem lustreless and thin.

Mannerheim took many fine photographs of the peoples he encountered on his daunting ride across central Asia between 1906 and 1908. Ostensibly this was a fact-finding mission for the tsar's government; in practice, it proved to be a cultural treasure hunt for the gimlet-eyed cavalry officer rather thinly disguised - in a Burberry trenchcoat - as a scientist. At every turn on his epic journey, Mannerheim discovered new, undocumented ways of life together with the costumes, jewellery, weapons and calligraphy that framed and adorned them.

Although those he met would have been gloriously exotic to contemporary European eyes, Mannerheim took care to be dressed in a manner suited to the occasion. There was always an appropriate hat or pair of riding boots to enable him to cut the sartorial dash needed to mix it with emirs, warlords and mandarins. There is also a photograph on display in the Hermitage of the dashing colonel in 1944 looking, in today's terms, decidedly "cool", dressed in a mix of half-native, half-St Petersburg chic outside the mission church of Ganzhou. Mannerheim knew very well how to make an impression whenever the camera lens turned his way. He never looked less than a head of state or commander-in-chief, and - perhaps rightly, if not inevitably - he was to become both at the same time.

The third child of Count Carl Robert and Countess Helene Mannerheim, née von Julin, he was born in June 1867 at Louhisaari, a tall baroque manor house filled with music, paintings and play on the southwest coast of Finland. The Grand Duchy of Finland was then a nominally autonomous protectorate of Imperial Russia. For a charismatic young Finn, the one possible way out of a corner of provincial tsardom was on horseback through the Nikolaevsky Cavalry School, St Petersburg. Here, Mannerheim excelled. Almost immediately afterwards, he made a socially, if not emotionally, advantageous marriage to Anastasia Arapova, the daughter of a Russian general; she bore him two much-loved daughters.

As a 37-year-old colonel, Mannerheim volunteered to fight in the Russian-Japanese war of 1904-05, before making his trip to the Orient in 1906. Promoted to major-general in 1910, he was with the Russian army until the October Revolution. Virulently anti-communist, and therefore effectively redundant - or perhaps under an unspoken death sentence - in Soviet Russia, he returned, aged 50, to Finland, cementing its independence as he crushed leftist forces in the country. He then put art into national service, commissioning his future aide-de-camp , the artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931), to design flags, uniforms and decorations for the new republic.

This sense of artistry was woven through each act in a deftly judged life. Mannerheim believed a leader had to be someone to live up to, an almost mythical figure. Many Finns - certainly in the 1960s and 70s - found him a difficult figure, a national hero hard to reconcile with their country's democratic, largely non-hierarchical and unshowy way of life. Was Mannerheim too much of a work of art - a leader as remote, perhaps, as a painting of some mounted monarch hanging in the halls of the Hermitage?

Not if you listen to the many Mannerheim veterans who rode the train from Helsinki to St Petersburg to attend the exhibition opening in company with today's senior Russian military. "He was always calm and wise," said 94-year-old Rafael Backman, the marshal's adjutant from 1942 to 1946. "He was one of those people who treated any person with respect, be it a high-ranking official or a humble soldier. In response, he earned incredible respect."

He earned respect from the Russians, too - unofficially - for refusing Hitler's request that he use the Finnish air force to bomb Leningrad. For Mannerheim, this was simply out of the question. "In Russia," says Mikhail Pietrovsky, director of the Hermitage, "we are used to thinking that many of Mannerheim's exquisite and non-standard political decisions had to do with his wish not to harm the city where he spent his youth."

Mannerheim accepted the presidency to ease Finland from war to peace. He was 79 when he finally retired to write his memoirs, moving between his home in Helsinki and Lausanne, where he died in 1951. Today, his equestrian statue, sculpted by Aimo Tukiainen, prances confidently in front of Steven Holl's ultra-modern Kiasma art gallery on the Helsinki boulevard that bears the marshal's name. This, perhaps, is as it should be, for here was a man who, although a consummate politician and inspired soldier, lived his life - whether as Karlovich, Kustuu or the Marshal of Finland - as a work of art.

Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian 09.04.2005

Sven Hedin and the mountains of Iran

Sven Hedin is well known for his relationship to the mountains of Central Asia. In 1890 he struggled across the Alai Mountains to reach East Turkestan from West Turkestan, an arduous crossing that he repeated in 1894 (Hedin 1898 and 1903). These early encounters with high alpine terrain were followed by his mapping of the Pamir juncture of immense mountain ridges in 1894-95, and simultaneous attempts to climb Mount Mustagh Ata (five attempts, which all failed). In 1897 he crossed the Kun Lun mountains to reach the northern flank of the Tibetan plateau, which he surveyed with all its individual isolated mountains, like the Koko Chili range (which he later regretted having named “King Oscar’s Mountains” – Sven Hedin strongly favoured finding and using indigenous names of mountains, rivers and lakes.). In 1901 he again crossed the Kun Lun Mountains to enter the Tibetan plateau, striking south then to cross it from east to west. 1906-1908 he devoted to the complicated landscape of West and South-western Tibet, crowned by what he considered to be the discovery of a mountain ridge north of the Yarlung Tsangpo river valley (upper Brahmaputra) which he named “Transhimalaya” (Hedin 1909-1912) Both the discovery and the name were quickly challenged (see Forêt 2004), but the existence of the ridge is clear on modern maps, though it is nowadays given the name Gangdise. Hedin´s view of orographic processes was then still the one held at the time; mountain ridges were the result of our earth’s crust slowly crumbling as the earth cooled off. The modern Wegener view of plate tectonics, though, did reach him as soon as it was published, In his library there are copies of the 1922 2nd edition as well as its first Swedish translation of 1926 (Wegener 1922 and 1926), and the analysis of the results of his last expedition were increasingly influenced by that framework (primarily through the main geologist on that team, Erik Norin).

Håkan Wahlquist

Urho Kaleva Kekkonen was born Sept. 3, 1900, in Pielesvesi in central Finland. He was 17 years old when Finnish independence was declared. His 36th year turned out to be one of special achievement; during it he took his doctorate in law at Helsinki University, won election to Parliament and entered the Government as Minister of Justice. He served through the years in several ministries, and also was Speaker of Parliament.

He demonstrated his flexibility by becoming one of two members of Parliament to oppose accepting the Soviet terms for ending the Winter War of 1939-40 and then, before what was called the Continuation War of 1941-44 was over, by suggesting in a speech that postwar neutrality was Finland's only hope for national salvation. Lifelong Interest in Sports

While attending Helsinki University, he became the national high jump champion, and he maintained his interest in sports throughout his life, avidly skiing, jogging, hiking and camping.

He was a noted author, publishing books on politics and collections of speeches, weekly columns written during the wars and letters. He delighted in the latter part of his tenure in writing columns under a pseudonym in a national magazine in which he criticized the political moves of President Kekkonen.

His wife, Sylvi, whom he married in 1928, was also a writer, mainly of novellas and collections of aphorisms. She died in 1974. They had twin sons, Matti, who followed his father into Parliament and a later became an official in the Agriculture Ministry, and Taneli, who was a diplomat.

President Kekkonen read avidly and often said that one of his favorite books was ''Don Quixote,'' as it reminded him of his political career. But, he said, he was never sure whether he most resembled the knight of the woeful countenance or Sancho Panza.

Urho K. Kekkonen, Finland's President for more than 25 years, died in 1986, 85 years old.

Mr. Kekkonen, who was an adroit practitioner of a policy of neutrality and friendship with the neighbouring Soviet Union, died at the seaside residence that he had occupied during his long presidency. The cause of death, it was announced in Helsinki, was a ''circulatory disorder in the brain.''

Upon his retirement on Oct. 27, 1981, because of arteriosclerosis, the Finnish Government decided to allow him to continue living in the President's residence for fear that moving him might aggravate his illness.

Led Nation's Emergence

During his presidency Mr. Kekkonen helped lead Finland's slow emergence from the long shadow of two military defeats by the Soviet Union to self-assured participation in international affairs.

He first took office in March 1956 after an uneasy period in which Finnish leaders dared not even mention ''neutrality'' for fear of provoking Moscow.

To Finland's postwar neutrality policy, developed during the administration of his predecessor, Juho Paasikivi, Mr. Kekkonen added an ability to convince Moscow that he could be trusted to guide Finnish affairs in a way that would pose no threat to the Soviet Union. Thus, with him at the helm, Finland was able to safeguard its trade with its major trading partners in the West by becoming an associate member of the British-led European Free Trade Association and by obtaining a special relationship with the European Economic Community.

Two-Edged Sword

But the trust that Mr. Kekkonen enjoyed in Moscow also led to a shattering of presidential elections in Finland during his quarter of a century in office. With Moscow making clear at the end of each of his six-year terms that it wanted to see him continue in office, normal elections proved impossible in Finland until January 1982, when the current President, Mauno Koivisto, won a landslide victory.

Mr. Kekkonen was chosen in a normal election only once, in his first race in 1956, when he won by the narrowest of margins, an electoral-college vote of 151 to 149 on the third ballot. Another election battle appeared to be looming as his first six-year term drew to a close, but his opponent, Olavi Honka, a civil servant endorsed by five parties, withdrew in late 1961 ''in the national interest'' under the pressure of Soviet demands for military consultations, with Russians asking whether the attempt to defeat President Kekkonen was a move to change Finnish foreign policy.

Elections Were a Formality

Thereafter, with no political party willing to chance Soviet displeasure by running a real candidate against him, formal elections with only nominal opposition candidates were held in 1962, 1968 and 1978, and the 1968 term was extended by act of Parliament to 10 years from six years. The special legislation was decided upon at a time when Finland was negotiating for its Common Market link and when, close presidential associates said, the Soviet Union was demanding absolute guarantees that Mr. Kekkonen would continue as President long enough to insure that the new association with a Western organization would bring about no change in Finnish foreign policy.

President Kekkonen, an imperious leader with a military bearing that made him look taller than his 5 feet 11 inches, achieved an almost unchallengeable political position during his long presidency and eventually won universal respect within Finland for his leadership. But to his regret he could never match the warm public acceptance achieved by his gruff predecessor, President Paasikivi, who was much beloved as a father figure.

The Kekkonen presidential era began as a stormy one, with the new President accompanied into office by a reputation as an often Machiavellian poltician achieved during a political career that included serving five times as Prime Minister. There was no controversy in Finland over the necessity of a neutrality policy, but there was plenty over his judgment on what had to be done to carry it out, and he was denounced by political foes as a cynical politician playing a dangerous game with the Soviet Union to remain in office and to keep his agrarian Center Party in a dominant position.

No Headway With the Russians

Once discussing privately the problems he faced, he said that he sought in meetings with Soviet leaders to defend some of his political foes whose sidelining was demanded by Moscow on the ground that they were rigidly anti-Soviet. But, he said, he stopped when he saw that he was making no headway, and he subsequently called publicly for those Finnish figures to retire from center stage as a contribution to their fatherland.

Chief among them was Vaino Tanner, the Social Democratic leader whom the Soviet Union never forgave for his actions in the early days after Finland's 1917 declaration of independence, when he oriented the Finnish labor movement westward toward the Nordic lands instead of toward Moscow.

Emerging after World War II from the prison to which he had been sentenced as a war criminal at Soviet insistence because of his service in wartime Governments, Mr. Tanner was re-elected party leader in 1957. In 1958, with Social Democrats heading a coalition Government, a crisis developed with the Soviet Union, and thereafter they were kept on the political sidelines for eight years or until after Mr. Tanner and his associates had been retired.

Privately, Mr. Kekkonen said that independent Finland owed a huge debt to Mr. Tanner, but publicly he denounced the Social Democrat as a stubborn self-centered politician who had no regard for his country's best interests.

Finland at the Mercy of Moscow

In numerous interviews, the President declared that Finland's freedom of action on the world stage depended directly on the degree of trust Finland enjoyed in Moscow. Pointing out that the Finnish Constitution charges the President with the conduct of foreign policy, he stressed that his interest was in keeping the freedom of maneuver at its widest.

He said that Finland could not proceed haphazardly on the assumption that everyone knew its foreign policy was one of neutrality and friendship with the Soviet Union. Finns, he said, could never take their foreign policy for granted but must rededicate themselves to it every day.

An important part of his presidency was spent in cultivating Soviet leaders, something he would do with frequent private trips to the Soviet Union for hunting and other pursuits as well as with official visits. During these trips and during the visits of Russians to Helsinki, where he would entertain them in the presidential sauna as well as at luncheons and dinners, there would be much talk of strengthening Soviet-Finnish relations. But he would also take the opportunity to remind the Russians of the difference between the Finnish and Soviet ways of life.

Tart Exchange With Khrushchev

In September 1960, for example, when the Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev used a luncheon speech in Helsinki as an occasion to suggest that Finns put anti-Soviet politicians into their Government at their own peril, Mr. Kekkonen declared in turn:

''The leaders of the Soviet Union know that under all circumstances we defend our own system because we regard it best suited to us.''

Throughout his presidency, he was referred to in Government circles as Finland's ''trump card,'' to be played during touchy periods in relations with Moscow.

He seemed able to take risks, as in late 1960 when he went to Moscow to clear the way for Finland to become an associate member of the European Free Trade Association, he took off his shoe during a luncheon and, imitating Mr. Khrushchev's United Nations etiquette, pounded the table to attract the Soviet leader's attention.

Cool and self-assured though he would appear, his stomach would churn during some of his tensest missions. Returning from crisis talks in 1961 with Mr. Khrushchev in Novosibirsk, Mr. Kekkonen cleared his calendar and reportedly spent most of a week in bed.

Kennedy Was 'Understanding'

While insuring Soviet acceptance of Finland's foreign policy, he also sought Western recognition of Finnish neutrality and in the early 1960's made a series of trips for that purpose, the principal one being to Washington in 1961. The acknowledgement he received from President Kennedy, who publicly expressed his ''understanding of why Finland is neutral,'' reflected State Department reluctance to ascribe neutrality to Finns but nevertheless was welcome as the first statement of its kind from the White House.

Toward the end of his tenure, Mr. Kekkonen was much pained by the concoction of the term ''Finlandization'' in Western Europe to describe a nation's drift under Soviet domination, and he and other Finnish officials sought through numerous speeches to argue that the name of Finland could properly be attached only to a policy of independence and neutrality.


Werner Wiskari in The New York Times, August 31, 1986