Den bla stenen: Anteckningar om ost och vast.

Schoolfield, George C.

For a long time, Johannes Salminen (b. 1925) has been one of the authentic ornaments of Finland's Swedish literature, although he does not think of himself as a Finland-Swede but rather as an "Alander who lives in Helsingfors." The production has not been large: a doctoral dissertation on Jarl Hemmer (1953); a biographical study of the "king of Aland," the masterful Julius Sundblom (1979); published correspondences with the Marxist sociologist Antti Eskola (1980) and the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski (1990); and eight fairly small volumes of essays - some published previously in the Swedish or Finnish press, some not - on history and literature. But the size of the oeuvre means nothing (save that Salminen's admirers wish it were larger); the evocative style, ironic, laconic, and unostentatiously elegant, the wealth of reference (without ever becoming ponderous), the sudden yet graceful switches and even leaps of argument which forbid hasty reading - these are some of the qualifies that always allure.

The title refers to a paralipomenon of Lonnroth's epic, in which Vainamoinen splits a blue stone, finds a serpent in it, and kills it; from its blood there grows an oak "whose branches embrace the sky." Here, as before in his work. Salminen is passionately interested in a transmission, not a conflict, between (European) West and East, a search which leads him to the home of the Kalevala and imperial Russia and then to Constantinople; in the realm of the Scandinavian-Finnish North, Karelia has been the particularly magic meeting place, rich in tradition and folk-memory but repeatedly ravaged. The first set of essays begins with this marchland and ends with a tribute to Viborg-Viipuri, now a dismal Russian town but once upon a time the quadrilingual "Alexandria of the North."

The second part lays out the reactions of a variety of "westerners" - Bishop Jacob Tengstrom, Custine, Rilke, the Finland-Swedish governors of Alaska, the trans-Kymmene novelist and memoirist Jac Ahrenberg, and so forth - to Russian rule or to Russia itself. In "The Multinational Empire" the reader is reminded of the enormous openness the czars displayed to gifted (and not so gifted) non-Russians. Cycle 3 has another mixed company; Lenin and Stalin are seen in their brief Finnish visits (which, maybe, awoke sympathies), while "The Russian Mannerheim" is a masterly essay about the handsome carrieriste and highly competent officer - a success story followed by the sad tale of Edvard Gylling and his decline from a major post in Finland's Red government of 1918 to death on Stalin's Sakhalin Island. A "Finlandish Mosaic" includes Elisabeth Jarnefelt, nee Clodt von Jurgensburg, a Fennomane by dint of marriage, linguistic passion, and sheer will; Edith Sodergran, the German-language schoolgirl and fledgling poet, who despised Russians even as she loved and hated St. Petersburg; the many refugees who entered and culturally enriched Finland after the czarist world collapsed; and, unavoidably, the threatening Zhirinovsky. Part 4, one chapter long, is a salute (meanwhile scolding Joseph Brodsky) to Byzantium, for all its notorious cruelty; and part 5, a postscript from August 1994, is a miniature autobiography of the author, that most refined and reticent of men. His father was an obstinately Fennophone peasant in Swedish-speaking Ostantrask.

George C. Schoolfield Yale University