Affordances of memorability: Finnish reception of the oppression of Ingrian Finns in the Soviet Union

Abstract

By addressing recent discussions on reception within the field of memory studies, this article aims to analyze the reasons for the alleged absence of public memory relating to the history of Ingria and the experiences of Ingrian Finns in Finland by focusing on Inkerin romaani (2002), a posthumous novel by Toivo Pekkanen. Through analysis of three scales of reception, the article explores the dynamics of memory and affordances of memorability. It argues that understanding memory dynamics requires looking at the reception of memory as well as its blockages. Moreover, this article suggests that these aspects of memory dynamics can be fruitfully analyzed and theorized through the notion of affordances of memorability.

On January 20, 2019, journalist Lea Pakkanen wrote a special feature, “My grandmother, deported in Siberia,” ¹ in the Helsingin Sanomat, the largest newspaper in Finland. Covering her journey to Yakutia, Siberia, where her late grandmother spent years as a deportee, Pakkanen discusses the Soviet terror inflicted on the people called Ingrian Finns. Additionally, Pakkanen writes about her own Ingrian Finnish roots, her lack of knowledge about her grandmother’s experiences, and the absence of historical consciousness regarding both Ingria and Ingrian Finns in Finland in general. She notes that although the Soviet terror touched the lives of many Ingrian Finns, silence has prevailed around the topic for decades at both private and public levels. Furthermore, Pakkanen maintains that although 32,000 persons with Ingrian Finnish backgrounds have migrated to Finland since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, their history is poorly recognized and poorly acknowledged in Finland.

The group called Ingrian Finns used to live in the historical area of Ingria, located along the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland. For the Ingrian Finns, the 20th century was characterized by various forms of mobilities and the Soviet terror. Today, the majority of the people identifying as Ingrian Finns live in Finland, Russia, Estonia, and Sweden. Although the history of Ingrian Finns is not very well known among Finland’s general public, as Pakkanen argues, her article in the Helsingin Sanomat can be seen as part of larger emergent discussions that reflect a growing awareness of silenced, forgotten, and absent histories, as well as memories. Claims about recognition often characterize these kinds of discussions around the selectivity of memory. Moreover, these discussions relate to a more general increase in the social and political importance of memory in the Western world (e.g. Huyssen, 2003; Radstone and Hodgkin, 2003; Macdonald, 2013). From this perspective, memory is often associated with an abundance of representation, which entails political and cultural recognition and power. The lack of memory, on the other hand, is associated with oblivion and silencing, often seen as resulting from either trauma or repressive hegemony (Van Vree, 2013).

The case of Ingrian Finns, however, complicates these kinds of links between representation and memory. Although the history of Ingria and Ingrian Finns has, without doubt, been both a symbolically and politically charged topic in Finland—and, at times, silenced—several reflections on the experiences of Ingrian Finns have occurred in the public sphere during the last 100 years. For instance, since the 1930s—and especially after the late 1980s—dozens of memoirs and works of autobiographical fiction dealing with Ingrian Finns’ experiences have been published in Finland, and some have been quite popular (see Sihvo, 1991). Arguably due to the memoir’s relatively low status as both a literary genre and a historical source, most of these works have not become well-known classics or entered the literary canon. Still, the sheer existence of this literature reflects that the past experiences of Ingrian Finns were neither silenced nor forgotten.

In addition to testimonies and memoirs, other kinds of literary works have discussed Ingrian Finns’ dramatic 20th-century history. Arguably, one of the most prominent of these works is Inkerin romaani (“The Novel of Ingria”), a posthumous work by Toivo Pekkanen (1902–1957) published in Finland in 2002. Pekkanen is a notable 20th-century Finnish author and one of the central figures of Finnish working-class literature, who ascended from poor childhood to the position of a nationally distinguished author with several literary prizes and the honorary title of the Academician of Art in 1955. During his career, Pekkanen wrote over 30 works, mostly prose and plays. His literature is characterized by his calm and subdued style and detailed realistic descriptions of the everyday life of workers. Even though Toivo Pekkanen’s works are often counted among working-class literature, he often focused on the personal development of his proletarian protagonists instead of opting for overtly political and class-conscious works. Avoidance of manifestly leftist opinions with literary themes related to the life of working-class people made Pekkanen’s oeuvre both appreciated and criticized across the political spectrum. ²

Considering Toivo Pekkanen’s position as a well-known author in Finland, one would think if any book could have increased the public and collective awareness of Ingrian history and generated debates on Ingrian Finns’ tragic experiences in Finland, it would have been his Inkerin romaani. But although the first edition of Inkerin romaani quickly sold out, and the novel was reviewed by the most important newspapers, public discussion of the novel and its topic was limited and soon passed over. Moreover, even today, no research has been published on the novel. ³ This lack of discussion is surprising. Not only was the novel authored by a nationally recognized author, but the story of its belated publication is also compelling. Indeed, authored at the beginning of the 1940s during the Second World War and the war between Finland and the Soviet Union, the novel was not published until 2002 due to reasons related to Finland’s geopolitical position as a neighbor of the Soviet Union.

Given these issues, the absence of public memory appears not to stem from silencing alone. Rather, it seems that when stories about Ingrian Finnish experiences have been told and histories have been represented, they have not managed to circulate long term in the popular historical consciousness. Clearly, the absence of public memory relates to reception. By continuing the recent discussions on reception within the field of cultural memory studies (e.g. Sindbæk Andersen and Törnquist-Plewa, 2017), this article aims to analyze the reasons for the absence of public memory about the history of Ingria and the experiences of Ingrian Finns in Finland by focusing on Inkerin romaani. By analyzing three scales of reception—the novel’s publication history, the novel’s media reception, and my reading of the novel’s poetics—I will explore the dynamics of memory (and the lack thereof) in general and affordances of memorability in particular.

Originally developed in the psychology of visual perception (Gibson, 1977)—and more recently in the fields of design (e.g. Norman, 1988), archaeology (e.g. Knappett, 2004), anthropology (e.g. Ingold, 2000; Keane, 2016), and media, communication, and technology studies (e.g. Nagy and Neff, 2015)—the concept of affordance refers to the qualities of certain expression of media (e.g. narrative, objects, and technology) in relation to their use in certain situations. I suggest that affordances of memorability refer to the formal, functional, and thematic qualities of texts and media as well as the performative, social, and historical contexts that define which memories, narratives, and experiences attract broader interest so that they become mediated and collectively remembered (while others remain forgotten). This means that affordance is inherently a relational and social phenomenon (Keane, 2016: 30). In this article, I argue that understanding the dynamics of cultural and social memory requires looking not only at the reception of memory but also at blockages to reception. Moreover, I argue that these aspects of memory dynamics can be fruitfully differentiated, analyzed, and theorized through the notion of affordance of memorability. As an analytical concept, affordance directs attention not only to the properties of “memory matter,” such as certain stories, events, characters, artifacts, or images, but also to their actualization in a certain sociohistorical situation. Affordance, in other words, allows theorization and analysis of memorability as a fundamentally relational (on the relationality of memory, see Erll, 2018) and socio-material phenomenon.

Reception and memory

The role of creative arts in the production and mediation of cultural memory is at the center of contemporary (cultural) memory studies. Mediation, remediation, and pre-mediation have been regarded as the key processes through which memory exists in culture (e.g. Rigney, 2005; Erll and Rigney, 2009; Erll, 2017). These issues related to mediation have been inherently connected to the wider paradigmatic shift in memory studies. Already a while ago, the field has shifted to what has been called “transnational” or “transcultural” memory studies, with a focus on the global mediations and dynamics of memory (e.g. Levy and Sznaider, 2002; Rothberg, 2009; Crownshaw, 2011; Bond and Rapson, 2014; Erll and Rigney, 2018), often primarily understanding the latter notion as circulating texts. This shift is reflected in an increasing focus on the spatial dimensions of memory alongside the temporal dimension. In other words, in addition to the changing meanings ascribed to the past in various moments, memories’ spatial spreading between different mediums, locations, and cultural environments has emerged at the center of memory studies. Following these developments, scholars have also paid increasing attention to the scales of memory (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014) and the reception of memory (Kansteiner, 2002; Sindbæk Andersen and Törnquist-Plewa, 2017).

In memory studies, memory is understood as a changing set of representations of the past in the present, instead of mere passive storage. Moreover, it refers to the process in which the events and narratives of the past are selected and interpreted contextually with regard to the preconditions and needs of each present. This approach means that remembering—whether we are discussing memory’s collective or personal forms—is a highly selective practice that always exists as a pair with its inseparable counterpart, not remembering, which is often conceptualized as forgetting or silence (see, e.g. Connerton, 2008; Winter, 2010; Van Vree, 2013; Savolainen, 2017). As a result, in addition to investigating the various examples, instantiations, and performances of memory, examining the process of selection or differential memorability (Rigney 2016) is central to understanding the workings and operations of memory. In other words, it is important to pay attention to various mechanisms—affordances of memorability—that guide and control which narratives and representations of the past invite attention, start to circulate, and, thus, attract remembrance.

In an influential theory on memory’s mediated nature, Rigney (2005: 16–20) argues that cultural memory functions through the logic of plenitude and scarcity. This process means that a culture selects a limited number of memories as canonical interpretations but, at the same time, enough representations and images must be available and circulating in different media before they can become canonical memory sites and cultural symbols. According to Assmann (2008), cultural memory consists of two aspects: “the canon” and “the archive,” or the active memory and the passive memory. The canon, on the one hand, is characterized by “a notorious shortage of space” (Assmann, 2008: 100). The canon consists of a limited number of normative texts, persons, and artifacts that circulate, in the process of mediation, as ever-involving representations. The resources of active working memory have undergone a process of selection, which Assmann labels “canonization.” The archive, on the other hand, is an institution of passive memory located between forgetting and the canon. It defines “what can be said in the future about the present when it will have become the past” (Assmann, 2008: 102). Assmann (2008: 100–105) maintains that the interdependence and flow between the canon and the archive are what construct cultural memory and its dynamics.

More recently, cultural memory scholars have investigated processes of selection under the rubric of reception. Reception has been considered the key process in the construction and circulation of memory. As Törnquist-Plewa, Sindbæk Andersen, and Erll (2017: 3) point out, “No mediation of memory can have an impact on memory culture if it is not ‘received’—seen, heard, used, appropriated, made sense of, taken as an inspiration—by a group of people.” They also observe that, although reception is one of the key concepts in memory studies, the question of how to analyze and detect acts of reception still remains largely unanswered. Indeed, reception is often discussed only implicitly as a process that is always included in memory transmission (Törnquist-Plewa, Sindbæk Andersen, and Erll, 2017: 4). Moreover, the discussion of reception has underscored the importance of distinguishing between the scales of reception as well as analyzing the movement of contents and forms between multiple scales (Törnquist-Plewa, Sindbæk Andersen, and Erll, 2017: 5; see also Kansteiner, 2002).

In this article, I will tackle these issues by analyzing reception through three interconnected scales. First, I will approach reception by means of the cultural and historical contextualization of Inkerin romaani and its publication history. Second, I will approach reception as a metacultural practice by analyzing reviews of Pekkanen’s novel (altogether 12 reviews) published in Finnish newspapers in 2002 and 2003. ⁴ Third, I will approach reception through my own reading of Inkerin romaani and its poetics. Throughout my analysis, in addition to paying attention to elements that promote, enable, and guide reception, I will explore elements that hinder, distort, and misguide reception. My aim is to detect cultural discourses, conceptions, and ideologies that relate to memory generally and to Ingrian Finns’ history in Finland particularly. This approach, I argue, will also offer insights about affordances of memorability.

Ingria, Ingrian Finns, and a brief overview of the history fictionalized in Inkerin romaani

Before analyzing memory reception, in this section I will give a brief overview of the history fictionalized in Toivo Pekkanen’s Inkerin romaani. Furthermore, I will discuss some problems related to the label of “Ingrian Finn” and lay out the basic synopsis of the novel. Inkerin romaani is a historical novel (on the genre, see Kaljundi, Laanes, and Pikkanen, 2015). With regard to the time of its writing, at the beginning of the 1940s, it tells the story of the relatively recent past of the 1920s. The novel’s main topics are the Soviet oppression of Ingrian Finns, the changing dynamics of the village community as a result of modernity, and the dwindling of Ingrian Finns’ peasant lifestyle in 1920s’ Soviet Union.

Ingria was a historical area located by the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, which never formed a sovereign state. The so-called Ingrian Finns—or just Finns—are descendants of Lutheran, Finnish-speaking people who moved to the region from present-day Eastern Finland and the border areas of Finland and Russia in the 17th century, when areas of Ingria and Finland were parts of the Swedish Empire. At the beginning of the 18th century, the province of Ingria, soon renamed as the Saint Petersburg Governorate, became part of the Russian Empire, and the city of Saint Petersburg was founded in the middle of this region. In 1809, Finland also became part of the Russian Empire as a grand duchy.

Ingria was a multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious area inhabited not only by Ingrian Finns but also by its first known inhabitants, the Baltic Finn Vots and Izhorians, as well as Russians, Germans, Estonians, and other communities. Soon after the establishment of Saint Petersburg, Russians became the majority population in the area. Ingrian Finns, who belonged to the social class of serfs, maintained their Finnish language and Lutheran religion, even though the Eastern Orthodox religion and Russian language dominated the surrounding environment. After Russia’s abolishment of serfdom in 1861, ideas of romantic nationalism became popular in both Ingria and Finland. As a result, a Finnish-language cultural life started to flourish, an education system was founded in Ingria, and contact between the intelligentsia in Ingria and the Grand Duchy Finland was strong (see Flink, 2000). At the beginning of the 20th century, the Ingrian Finnish intelligentsia was divided into conservative and religious nationalists, on the one hand, and progressive socialists, on the other. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Finland and Estonia gained independence, their borders with the historical area of Ingria became national borders, and Ingria’s positioning became a topic of various negotiations. Approximately 130,000 Ingrian Finns lived in Ingria at the time. The revolution was followed by the Russian Civil War, which was eventually won by the Reds supporting the Bolsheviks. ⁵

When discussing labels that vaguely refer to national, geographical, or ethnic categories (such as Ingrian Finn) as markers of individual or group identities, a critical stance is needed. To begin with, the definition and use of these categories pose questions of presentism and essentialism, as the significance and implications of these categories are contextually and temporally bounded. Second, national, geographical, or ethnic backgrounds are rarely commensurate with personal or collective identity, not to mention the fact that identities are also mutable and porous. Indeed, in the Russian Empire and then under the Soviet Union, the Finnish-speaking population was officially labeled as Finns, and they also frequently self-identified as Finns. In this sense, “Ingrian Finn” served as a label for differentiating between Finns living in Ingria and those in Finland. Although some sources indicate that the Finnish-speaking population of Ingria referred to themselves as Ingrians ⁶ already in the 1800s (Miettinen, 2006: 161), the emergence of the labels of “Ingrian Finn” or “Ingrian” has been connected to the work of Finnish 19th-century romantic nationalists, on the one hand, and to the ethnic-national revival of the Finnish population of the Soviet Union of the 1980s, on the other (Zadneprovskaya, 1999; Hakamies, 2004). Today, Ingrian Finn or Ingrian is a valid identity for many people with ties to Ingria’s Finnish-speaking population, but so are the identities of a Finn and Russian, for example (see Teinonen, 1999; Zadneprovskaya, 1999; Davydova and Heikkinen, 2004; Miettinen, 2004). Toivo Pekkanen’s book adopts the terms Ingrian, Ingrian Finn, and Finn. Although cognizant of the problems related to such labels and categorizations, in this article I use the term Ingrian Finns when referring to the Finnish-speaking population of the historical area of Ingria and their descendants.

For Ingrian Finns, the 20th century was characterized by the results of mobilizations and terror, including forced collectivization of farms, various forced and voluntary migrations, forced labor in the Gulag, and occupations. The first mass deportations of Ingrian Finns took place in 1929–1931, when approximately 18,000 persons were sent to forced labor in the Kola Peninsula, Soviet Karelia, and Central Asia. Deportations were part of the Soviet Union’s transition to socialism, a central part of which was the collectivization of agriculture. However, these developments and related acts were not targeted only at Ingrian Finns. At this time, deportees were mostly kulaks, who were considered wealthy independent farmers, as well as religious leaders or opponents of collectivization. The next mass deportations took place between 1935 and 1938, and they were related to the Soviet Union’s need to secure the border areas, which meant relocating national minorities deemed politically unreliable. Between the First and Second World Wars, an estimated 45,000–60,000 Ingrian Finns were imprisoned or deported, while thousands fled abroad. ⁷

Toivo Pekkanen’s Inkerin romaani fictionalizes the first waves of these ordeals, locating the events described in Ingria. The novel’s timespan ranges from the early 1920s to approximately 1930, and the novel comprises two parts. The first part describes Ingria after the Bolshevik Revolution and during the Russian Civil War, while the second part focuses on the times of forced collectivization at the turn of the 1930s. Describing the lack of clarity of Ingria’s societal and political atmosphere after the revolution, Inkerin romaani begins with its protagonist, Juhana Korpolainen, returning home from the Russian Civil War (which began after the revolution). Korpolainen, the son of a wealthy Ingrian peasant, has fought in the Red Army, supporting the Bolshevik socialism of Lenin. Korpolainen’s brother is still at the front, but he is fighting for the White Army, the Red Army’s main opponent. While the brothers were at the front, the Bolsheviks had murdered their father. At the beginning of the novel, Korpolainen is described as an outsider who is disappointed in the promises of the socialist revolution, on the one hand, and who has lost his connection with his Ingrian peasant roots, on the other. He also finds the romantic nationalistic idea of a free, independent, peasant Ingria to be an unrealistic dream and nostalgic fancy. Similarly, the image of a bright new socialist future looks suspicious—and even threatening—to him.

The beginning of Pekkanen’s novel describes the relatively peaceful period during the first half of the 1920s. The protagonist, Korpolainen, manages to successfully continue his father’s work on the family farm, but eventually socialist control increases. The first part of the novel ends with Korpolainen’s imprisonment. The second part then describes the changes to village life after the transition to full-scale socialism, including the collectivization of farms, the increase of Soviet control, and various acts of terror. The Ingrians who submit to socialist change may survive, while those who try to continue their premodern, peasant lives perish. Despite his skepticism toward the traditional lifestyle, Korpolainen does not submit to the requirements of socialist modernization but instead continues farming his land the same way his predecessors had. At the end of the book, Korpolainen is again imprisoned, and his destiny is to perish in a forced labor camp, along with his inherited premodern, peasant lifestyle.

The three scales of reception

Publication history

Although reliable information about the history of Inkerin romaani and its overdue publication is meager, Toivo Pekkanen most likely wrote the novel at the beginning of the 1940s, during the so-called Continuation War (1941–1944) between Finland, supported by Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union (Mäkelä, 2002a). The novel was not published, however, until 2002. In order to understand why Pekkanen never submitted the manuscript to his publisher in the 1940s, one needs to first comprehend Finland’s political, societal, and ideological contexts when the novel was authored.

In Finland, the period between the country gaining national independence from Russia in 1917 and the Second World War was characterized by a nationalistic atmosphere, on the one hand, and a polarization of the political climate, on the other. Indeed, the country’s independence was followed by the Finnish Civil War in 1918, which resulted in victory for the White troops of the government assisted by the German Imperial Army, and defeat for the socialist Reds (Haapala and Tikka, 2013). This conflict had an effect on the political climate of Finland for decades (Kivimäki, 2012: 483). In addition to the rise of various nationalistic, right-wing movements, the irredentist ideas of greater Finland—including the areas of the Soviet Union inhabited by Finnic peoples, such as Karelians, who were considered “kindred peoples” to Finns—became popular. At the same time, the Communist Party of Finland, which had been founded in Moscow in 1918, was illegal in Finland until 1944, but the party was working underground from the Soviet Union. Indeed, it has been argued that in the first decades of independent Finland, the idea of Finland was very much constructed against the Soviet Union and communism (Vettenniemi, 2001: 34–39). Moreover, under these circumstances, Ingria as an area—as well as the Ingrian Finns’ experiences of Soviet terror—became politicized in Finland. Although Ingria was never fully considered an irredenta of Finland (Nevalainen, 1991: 241), for various political and practical purposes, both Finns and Ingrians themselves aligned and appropriated the memories and experiences of the Soviet terror inflicted on Ingrian Finns for the purposes of Finnish nationalism (Vettenniemi, 2001: 34–35; Savolainen, forthcoming).

During the Second World War, Finland fought two wars against the Soviet Union: the Winter War (1939–1940) and the Continuation War (1941–1944). During the Continuation War, Toivo Pekkanen served in the Finnish state’s information and propaganda department, along with several other artists. This period was also when he most likely authored Inkerin romaani. The first public record of the novel appears in a presentation by researcher Keijo Ahti to the Finnish Literature Research Society in March 1965, titled “Toivo Pekkanen and the World War.” In 1968, the manuscript of Inkerin romaani appeared in an exhibition showcasing Pekkanen’s life and literature in his hometown, Kotka. For the next 20 years, the manuscript was entrusted to Pekkanen’s mentor and supporter, Ester Kankkunen. After her death in 1989, Kankkunen’s archives relating to Pekkanen, including the manuscript, were kept in a bank vault in Helsinki, and they were then handed over to the Literary Archives of the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki 10 years later, in 1999 (Mäkelä, 2002a.) While doing research for a biography of Pekkanen, Matti Mäkelä, a Finnish journalist, author, and researcher found the manuscript in the archives and offered it to his (and Pekkanen’s) publisher WSOY. In 2002, Inkerin romaani was published simultaneously with Mäkelä’s (2002b) biography of Pekkanen. Mäkelä (2002a) also wrote an epilogue to Pekkanen’s novel.

Pekkanen had good reason to write a novel about Ingrian Finns during wartime. Ingria and Ingrian Finns also had a role in the Continuation War (1941–1944) that Finland fought against the Soviet Union in alliance with Nazi Germany. Simultaneously with the Continuation War, as part of Operation Barbarossa, Germany occupied parts of Ingria in the Soviet Union and laid siege to Leningrad. ⁸ Although generally remembered in Finland as an independent (and justified) battle not to be understood as part of Germany’s war efforts, Finland was in fact highly dependent on Germany’s economic and military support during the Continuation War (for the peculiarities of the Finnish memory culture of the Second World War, see Kivimäki, 2012; Kinnunen and Jokisipilä, 2012). Moreover, Finland’s offensive against the Soviet Union in 1941 was indeed part of Operation Barbarossa, as historians today agree (e.g. Kivimäki, 2012: 491–492). During the German occupation of the area of Ingria, Finland and Germany evacuated 63,000 civilians (mostly Ingrian Finns) living in the occupied area during 1943 and 1944 (see Nevalainen, 1990; Flink, 2010).

Although no explicit information describes Pekkanen’s motifs for writing Inkerin romaani, the Continuation War and Ingrian Finns’ evacuation to Finland were the context of Pekkanen writing the novel. Against this background, Pekkanen’s novel can be read as an explanation and a moral justification of Ingrians’ evacuation to Finland, and it can also be read as an arguably propagandistic reminder to Finns of how they should treat their fellow Finns who had suffered in enemy land. In the 1940s context, Pekkanen’s work also continues the line of literary works reflecting on the Soviet terror of Ingrians that were published in Finland during the 1930s (see Sihvo, 1991; Vettenniemi, 2001; Savolainen, 2018, forthcoming). ⁹ If it had been published early enough, Pekkanen’s novel would indeed have been a highly topical work in early 1940s’ Finland. The book was not published, however, because Finland eventually lost the Continuation War to the Soviet Union.

After Finland lost the war to the Soviet Union in 1944, the political climate changed significantly. Indeed, in many ways, the Second World War can be considered a turning point in 20th-century Finnish history because Finland’s (geo-)political position as a neighbor to the Soviet Union changed as a result. This shift is the most probable reason why Pekkanen never submitted the manuscript to his publisher in the first place. After Finland lost the Continuation War to the Soviet Union, the countries signed an armistice agreement that demanded Finland expel German troops from its territory, legalize the Communist Party, and ban various organizations that were defined as fascist, including the organizations that had promoted the so-called kinship ideologies and the related irredentist ideas of greater Finland. The armistice agreement also included a section concerning the 63,000 Ingrian refugees who had been evacuated to Finland in 1943 and 1944. This section stated that Finland should return to the Soviet Union all Soviet refugees who had been brought to Finland involuntarily. Although most of the Ingrian Finnish refugees cannot be considered to have been evacuated to Finland against their will, the majority eventually returned to the Soviet Union, and only 8,000 stayed in Finland or defected to Sweden (Nevalainen, 1990: 250–313; see also Flink, 2010).

Although wartime sentiments colored public opinions in Finland in many ways also after this shift, anti-Soviet views were no longer presented openly in public (Kivimäki 2012, 484). Due to this, many books—including memoirs about the Gulag and the Soviet terror inflicted on Ingrians—were banned (on book removals and censorship, see Ekholm, 2000). In this controlled public space, Ingria as well as the Ingrian Finns’ history and experiences—which were associated with right-wing ideologies dominant in prewar and wartime Finland, and perhaps also with Finland’s alliance with Germany—became highly charged and politicized topics and, as such, to be avoided altogether. Although Pekkanen’s novel neither discussed the Ingrians’ evacuation to Finland nor explicitly harnessed Ingria’s history for the purposes of Finnish nationalism or Finland’s war efforts against the Soviet Union, the mere fact that it included the history of Ingrian Finns in the Soviet Union made it a politicized work and too controversial to be considered for publication. Moreover, the relationship between Finland and the Soviet Union remained complicated for several decades after the end of the war, which continued to restrict public discussion of the Soviet Union in Finland for decades. It is argued that Finland maintained semi-official censorship with regard to the Soviet Union until the 1980s (e.g. Vettenniemi 2001), which is also why literature that discussed the Soviet Union—including literature about Ingrian Finns—remained politicized.

The so-called perestroika process at the end of the 1980s and the disintegration of the Soviet Union some years later turned over a new leaf for many citizens of the Soviet Union, including Ingrian Finns. Moreover, in 1990, President of Finland Mauno Koivisto stated in a television interview that Ingrian Finns could be considered expatriate Finns. As a result, between 1990 and 2016, more than 30,000 persons of Finnish origin (many of them with Ingrian Finnish backgrounds) migrated to Finland, mostly from the former territories of the Soviet Union. Although this migration process did not lead to a wider public and collective memory boom about the tragic history of Ingrian Finns in Finland, various memoirs and semi-fictional literary works discussing Ingrian Finns’ experiences were published in Finland during the 1980s and 1990s. At this time, Pekkanen’s novel remained in the bank vault in Helsinki, where it had been placed after Pekkanen’s supporter Ester Kankkunen passed away.

For historical and political reasons, Inkerin romaani missed its intended moment in the 1940s, and because of ill luck, it also missed its second moment of particular relevance at the beginning of the 1990s, when the migration of Ingrians to Finland began. I argue that the novel’s doubly overdue publication is one reason why a wider discussion of Ingrian Finns’ history and experiences surrounding the novel never emerged. Indeed, when Inkerin romaani was eventually published in 2002, Ingrian Finns and their history were not actively discussed in Finland, and not enough representations of Ingria were available to be crystallized into cultural memory. In other words, at that time, affordances regarding the reception of the novel and Ingrians’ history and experiences were not optimal for memorability and for a wider circulation of memory. To use Assmann’s (2008) terminology, at the time of Inkerin romaani’s publication, the cultural memory related to Ingria belonged to the segment of an archive instead of a canon.

Media reception

The media reception of Toivo Pekkanen’s Inkerin romaani is characterized by reflection regarding multiple temporal levels that connect to the novel. This characterization means that critics balance (some more explicitly than others) whether they should review the novel according to (1) the time of its writing during the 1940s, (2) the time of its seeming disappearance during the post-Second World War decades, or (3) the time of its publication in the early 2000s. This hesitation seems connected to difficulties in defining whether the novel’s main contribution is cultural, artistic, or historical.

Based on my analysis, the reviews of Inkerin romaani include three main lines of interpretative tendencies—sometimes, but not always, in the same review. The first tendency is to present the novel as an interesting curiosity from the perspective of Pekkanen’s career and cultural value as a significant Finnish author. The second tendency is to review the novel as a work of art based on its aesthetic qualities (or, better said, “flaws”). The third tendency is to interpret the novel as a historical document of Finland’s postwar geopolitical position as a neighbor to the Soviet Union. The actual topic of the novel—that is, the Soviet repression of Ingrian Finns—bears only minor significance in most of the reviews, however.

In its media reception, the novel was very often presented in relation to the birthday centennial of Pekkanen—a great Finnish novelist—and Matti Mäkelä’s biography of Pekkanen published at the same time as the novel. In these cases, Inkerin romaani was typically reviewed against Pekkanen’s career as well as his literary oeuvre and style. Although Pekkanen’s significance for Finnish literature was typically acknowledged, most of the critics found Inkerin romaani old-fashioned and tedious, and the majority also found its language and narration artless. For example, Markku Kulmala (2002) writes in his review published in the newspaper Ilkka:

The Inkerin romaani found in the archives has been published only recently. One can almost feel in one’s bones the sleet falling onto the autumn landscape. [. . .] The language and structure of the Inkerin romaani are old-timey, and the mood is bleak. This is, of course, due to the fact that the subject matter is thoroughly dismal: the life of an oppressed fragment of a tribe within an encompassing tumultuous state has been mere misery.

As a novel, the book is by no means trendy, and probably never has been, but its significance is mostly cultural. ¹⁰

Regardless of such rather negative views, most critics still considered the novel worth publishing. Indeed, although the novel’s artistic value was perceived as mediocre at best, Inkerin romaani and its publication were regarded as important. This sense of importance was due either to Pekkanen’s literary significance or to the novel’s publication history, considered interesting because it reflected some of the main events of Finland’s 20th-century history—namely, the wars between Finland and the Soviet Union as well as Finland’s tense postwar geopolitical situation. Critics discussed the fact that Pekkanen had authored the novel during the Continuation War while serving in Finland’s propaganda office. Critics also pondered whether Inkerin romaani could or should be read as a propaganda novel. The roots of this discussion probably lie in Mäkelä’s views about the work.

Matti Mäkelä (2002b: 351–352) states in the afterword of Inkerin romaani that the novel is comparable to other works that Pekkanen wrote during wartime. By his evaluation, the novel is located somewhere between more moderate or clearly propagandistic works and “truth-seeking and biased tendencies,” thus reflecting both “Ingrian patriotism” as well as Pekkanen’s personal, rather moderate patriotism. Indeed, as a paratext of sorts, Mäkelä’s afterword guide the reader to interpret the novel as something between propaganda and bona fide art. Most critics arrived at the same conclusion as Mäkelä. Moreover, critics pointed out that although the novel was originally written during the war in the early 1940s, it could not be published then due to the change in Finland’s political climate after the country lost its war with the Soviet Union. In other words, the novel’s publication history was interpreted as a reflection of the post-Second World War political relationship between Finland and the Soviet Union.

While I agree that Inkerin romaani’s publication history does indeed reflect Finland’s wartime and postwar political history, I am surprised that only one critic mentioned the most obvious historical context of the novel: the fact that Finland evacuated 63,000 Ingrians to Finland in 1943 from the areas of Ingria occupied by Nazi Germany, which was Finland’s ally during the Second World War. Moreover, I am amazed by how little attention was paid in the media reception to the novel’s actual topic, the Soviet repression of Ingrian Finns. The novel’s topic—Ingrians and their torments—was, of course, described in the reviews. Often, this description used the vocabulary of so-called kinship ideology. In the reviews, Ingrians were labeled “kindred people,” ¹¹ which also constructed and highlighted the connection between Ingrian Finns and Finns. Moreover, in some reviews, the novel’s topic was understood in relation to history or present-day Finland. For example, the novel was interpreted from the perspective of the so-called remigration process of Ingrians to Finland, which had begun at the beginning of the 1990s, presenting a timely lesson for Finns about the history of people who had just migrated to Finland. Furthermore, in his review in the Helsingin Sanomat, Pertti Lassila interpreted the novel as Pekkanen’s dystopic allegory of Finland’s potential future after imagined Soviet occupation of Finland resulting from the Continuation War (Lassila, 2002):

For Pekkanen, the Soviet Union was a reckless, inhumane experiment in destroying cultures and the fate of Ingrians, a fearsome scenario against which Finland fought.

The commonality between these main interpretive tendencies of the novel is that they all reflect Finland’s perspective. Indeed, the media reception reveals that Inkerin romaani was first and foremost interpreted from the point of view of Finland. Although this tendency avoids straightforward patriotism and nationalism, it adheres to Finland’s memory culture after the Soviet Union’s disintegration, which has been labeled “neo-patriotic” (Kinnunen and Jokisipilä, 2012: 450–453; Kivimäki, 2012, 493–495). In Finland, the Soviet Union’s collapse led to a patriotic and even nationalistic memory boom around the Winter War and the Continuation War, as well as such related events as the Soviet annexation of parts of Finnish Karelia. The perspectives of Finnish war veterans, Lottas (members of the paramilitary women’s organization), and the so-called war children, who were sent to Sweden because of the fighting, emerged in the public sphere. Finland’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during the war was not discussed as eagerly, however, and neither was the fate of the Ingrian Finns who went back or who were returned to the Soviet Union after the war.

Although the media reception interpreted Inkerin romaani from Finland’s perspective, the Ingrian Finnish history and experiences that the novel describes did not fit this framework of historical interpretation very well. Rather, the novel’s content defies national boundaries and frameworks, whether understood spatially or symbolically. Moreover, the novel’s rather neutral tone regarding politics and relations between the Soviet Union and Finland confuses its interpretation. Also, and more generally, the Soviet repression of Ingrians—and the evacuation of Ingrians to Finland in the 1940s, for that matter—was not among the topics of Finland’s neo-patriotic memory culture that followed the Soviet Union’s disintegration, arguably for the association of the topic with Finland’s wartime alliance with Germany—a topic not fitting for the neo-patriotic memory culture. Instead, this memory culture afforded the remembrance of other events, groups, and perspectives. This incompatibility of Inkerin romaani with Finland’s memory culture, characterized by neo-patriotism, was probably one reason why the novel’s actual topic had only secondary importance in the media reception. Moreover, I argue that this issue was one reason why the novel and the past that it describes did not become memorable at the beginning of the 2000s.

Poetics

Inkerin romaani is structured by parallelisms between old and new, past and present, traditional and modern, which basically correspond with premodern Ingria on the one side and the modernizing Soviet Russia of the late 1920s on the other. In the first part of the novel, protagonist Juhana Korpolainen straddles the ambiguous and liminal space between different ideologies and the old and new worlds—and between childhood and adulthood—hesitating to engage in anything. In the beginning of the book (Pekkanen, 2002: 28–29), he returns from the Russian Civil War as a changed man, unable to relate to his previous idealistic views on nationalism or socialism:

During his final years of boyhood spent at home, he had felt tied by unbreakable bonds to the Finnish kin of this unfortunate land. In his fanatic mind of a boy, he had been unrestrainedly proud of it [. . .] Between those years of boyhood and today were the storming experiences of the years of revolution. But for a long time now, he had not felt himself Ingrian in this particular way anymore. Had Ingrianness not been merely a waste of effort for something that could not exist? Tens of times more Russians than Ingrians were living also in their own territory. The dream of independent Ingria was madness. The idea of incorporating it to Finland or Estonia was not realistic either. No, Ingrianness could only exist as a peasant curiosity around the proud city of Saint Petersburg, sprinkled between imperial castles in the air.

Later in the book, his detachment is reflected by his uncertainty over choosing whether to continue cultivating his ancestors’ land—which he finds more or less useless in the long run—or to give up the traditional way of life. Although Korpolainen is uncomfortably aware that the traditional way of life is inevitably vanishing, and although he finds many benefits in the theories of socialism and modernity, he is forced by his innate urges as well as his falling in love with Anna Savolainen—the deeply religious daughter of a prominent Ingrian farmer—to carry on farming independently, as his ancestors had done. As it turns out, he grows to be satisfied with his choice, but not because it would lead to success but because it later turns out to be morally correct.

Similar to the character of Juhana Korpolainen, most characters of Pekkanen’s novel are not described as absolutely good or bad. They have to make uncomfortable or impossible choices and try to survive in a difficult situation. Although the narrator is on the side of Juhana Korpolainen, who chooses to follow his ancestors’ path, those characters who choose to transition to the present and yield to socialism are not described as straightforwardly evil or unlikeable. Instead, the narrator aims to understand (at least to some extent) the motives behind each individual’s choices, notwithstanding their political or societal positions. For example, Korpolainen’s father-in-law, Matti Savolainen, is described as a shrewd and kindhearted opportunist who knows he must adjust to the new system to not only survive but also use it for his own benefit. He ends up as the leader of a collective farm because he knows that he is best able to do the job. Inkerin romaani’s narrator does not, however, explicitly judge Savolainen for acting in this way. Instead, Savolainen is made to suffer for his choices through moral and essentialist self-agony (Pekkanen, 2002: 334):

But in returning home in the evenings from the kolkhoz organized in the house of the deported Tirranen, Savolainen did not feel himself particularly happy. He could not vanquish the gnawing feeling inside that he had acted disgracefully, against his reason and sense, against his peasant essence, and given away his life as a free man.

The novel does not equate terrors with communism as an ideology, but instead maintains that all political systems can be fair or fall into moral decay in the similar way that every person has the potential to do both right and wrong. Pekkanen’s novel maintains that individuals should not blindly obey rules and submit to their superiors. Rather, they should actively build, develop, and improve themselves so that they can make morally sustainable choices. In the novel, however, morally sustainable choices largely and unsurprisingly are equated with not yielding to the Soviet rule and the present. As a reflection of this ethos, Korpolainen finds that his decision to resist the Soviet rule by continuing his ancestors’ work was the morally right decision. Even though he finds himself in forced labor hopelessly digging mud, he does not regret his choices (Pekkanen, 2002: 341):

But he, Juhana Korpolainen, he had always known, he had resisted consciously, he had taken the side that he had felt doomed to defeat, devoted to destruction. As he leaped across with his long legs the bodies of his comrades lying dull, he asked himself a thousand times: Why? Why? Why? And gradually the answer became clearer to him: he had not been in favor of the past but rather against the present. Because this present, spread around and over them as blind, destructive, and as all-consuming as lava bursting from a volcano, was not the future, not progress, not light, only shame, slavery, and darkness. He would not consent to this, he would never submit. Never.

Inkerin romaani is a realistic novel with a rather traditional—even conservative and unsurprising—style of narration, and solemnly bleak mood written by a Finnish author during wartime. Even if the novel’s topic, the Soviet oppression of Ingrian Finns, could perhaps have inspired emotional, historical, or political interest, I contend that the novel poetically invited its readers to understand it primarily as an anti-Soviet, patriotic, and old-fashioned historical novel that meets the criteria of ideological literature. I would further argue that this ideological exemplarity is also what tempered its reception at the beginning of the new millennium and made it less affordable in terms of memorability.

Affordances of memorability

In this article, I have explored Toivo Pekkanen’s Inkerin romaani through three scales of reception: the novel’s publication history, the novel’s media reception, and my reading of the novel’s poetics. I have aimed to explore affordances of memorability. I argue that, in order to understand why certain topics attract collective attention and become memorable while others remain forgotten, the analysis of reception plays a crucial role. Moreover, I suggest that in addition to focusing on the factors that enable and guide reception, paying attention to the factors that obstruct reception is also important. After all, the same frames or premediations (Erll, 2017) that enable the emergence and circulation of certain memories and narratives also make them memorable in certain situations while blocking other memories and narratives. I argue that the concept of affordance, which focuses on the qualities of texts in relation to the qualities of media and context as partakers in memory processes, offers fruitful avenues for analyzing and theorizing about complicated processes of selection and reception. After all, these processes define which histories, events, and interpretations are remembered and which are not.

Based on my analysis, I argue that there are three main reasons why Inkerin romaani did not initiate wider public discussion of Ingrian Finnish history and experiences at the beginning of the 2000s in Finland. The first reason concerns the novel’s doubly belated publication. We cannot know for sure whether the novel’s impact in terms of memorability would have been more substantial if Inkerin romaani had been published in the 1940s or at the beginning of the 1990s. What we can say, however, is that in the 1940s and 1990s, several frames were circulating in the public discussion that could have supported reception of the novel. When the novel was actually published at the beginning of the 2000s, its topic had descended into the segment of an archive, to use Assmann’s (2008) terminology. The second reason concerns the rigid national frames of remembrance in Finland. At the beginning of the 2000s, the memory culture in Finland was still strongly characterized by so-called neo-patriotism, and Inkerin romaani was incompatible with this culture in many ways. The content of the novel escaped the dominant neo-patriotic or national frames of interpretation. This incompatibility explains why the novel’s actual topic had only secondary importance in the book’s media reception, which focused more on Pekkanen’s significance for Finnish literature and reflecting on Inkerin romaani with regard to Finland’s position as a neighbor to the Soviet Union. The third reason concerns the poetics of the novel. Although the novel’s topic could have drawn interest to the history and experiences of Ingrian Finns at the beginning of the new millennium, the rigidly dualistic and unsurprising poetic features of Pekkanen’s novel placed it firmly in the realm of ideological, patriotic, and thus outdated literature, unable to offer an interpretation of the past that was still relevant or even poetically resonant 60 years later. This, I suggest, explains why Pekkanen’s novel and the history it represents did not become memorable or manage to generate broader public discussion around Ingria’s history. These three reasons indicate that at the moment of its publication, the affordances of Inkerin romaani’s history and poetics—as well as its prevailing cultural context—were not optimal for memorability of the novel’s topic, the history and experiences of the Soviet repression of Ingrian Finns.

As journalist Lea Pakkanen asserted in the piece in the Helsingin Sanomat that I discussed at the beginning of the present article, a wider public recognition of Ingrian history and experiences in Finland has not yet occurred. Still, we cannot discuss this lack in terms of absolute silence or forgetting but rather in terms of historical, political, and temporal ambiguity, as well as discomfort surrounding the topic, all of which have affected the affordances of memorability. Recently, however, interest in Ingrian experiences and history have been reemerging in Finland, or returning from the archive to the canon, and Pakkanen’s article is one example of this phenomenon. For instance, in 2020, a multimedia museum exhibition titled Ingrians – The Forgotten Finns focusing on the history and memory of Ingrian Finns was held at the National Museum of Finland. The exhibition was created by the very same Lea Pakkanen, her father Santeri Pakkanen, and a well-known Finnish photographer, Meeri Koutaniemi. Later in 2020, Lea and Santeri Pakkanen (2020) also published an autobiographical non-fiction book Se tapahtui meille (“It happened to us”), focusing on the same theme. Both the exhibition and the book received wide media attention. Moreover, in 2018–2020 the Finnish Literature Society, the National Archives of Finland, and Inkerin Sivistyssäätiö (“The Ingrian Foundation of Culture and Education”) organized a data collection and management project related to the experiences and memories of Ingrian Finns, during which historical materials were archived and oral history interviews were conducted. Most likely, this project will also lead to more research in the future.

Interestingly, these representations have emerged multidirectionally (Rothberg, 2009) with the rise of a broader public discourse about memory’s role in culture in general and various minority groups’ difficult pasts in particular. For example, the historical and continuing suppression of Indigenous Sámi people living in Finnish (and Norwegian, Swedish, and Russian) Lapland, as well as discrimination against Finnish Kale, have started to attract more visible public debate. In these discussions, minorities’ memories and histories—typically violent and difficult—have been framed according to the discourse of human rights, minority rights, or Indigenous people’s rights. Moreover, followed by academic research, a self-critical popular discussion of Finnish war history is not a rarity anymore either. These kinds of discourses are by nature international—as are, of course, nationalistic discourses—but they highlight the value of human rights as well as the psychological and ethical importance of remembering difficult pasts. As such, they also operate as viable frames to interpret topics such as the history and experiences of Ingrian Finns. In other words, these frames afford memorability.

I argue that the findings of this particular case study reflect cultural, historical, and political issues concerning the history of Ingrians in particular and tendencies regarding the dynamics of memory in culture more generally. Since memory has become a key notion through which issues of recognition, entitlement, and power are negotiated, it should not be taken for granted. Moreover, since discussions around memory often seem to be reduced to questions concerning politics and struggles over the space of remembrance, memory scholars have an important responsibility to critically seek alternative mechanisms and factors that participate in the formation and dynamics of memory. By allowing theorization and analysis of memorability as a fundamentally relational and socio-material phenomenon, the notion of affordances of memorability may open views to complex mechanisms that influence which histories, events, and viewpoints can enter into the realm of cultural memory and why. Unfolding the complexities of memory processes may also lead to the emergence of unexpected memories and histories, as well as a better recognition of the various issues of power related to memory.