期刊名称：Collegium : Studies across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences
印刷版ISSN：1796-2986
出版年度：2012
卷号：13
出版社：Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
摘要：In the novels Rakastunut rampa (A Cripple in Love, 1922) and Henkien taistelu (The Battle of the Spirits , 1933), Joel Lehtonen has constructed an imaginary environment that is at once one of the most disturbing and one of the most original landscapes to be found in the Finnish literature of the last century: the suburb of Krokelby. This deformed landscape, neither city nor countryside, is composed of disconcerting natural elements and crooked houses, and inhabited by grotesque characters. This article analyses the ways in which the literar y landscape of Krokelby constitutes a radical inversion of more traditional images of Finnish symbolic landscapes, such as the national-romantic lake district of Eastern Finland, and the c omplex images of turn-of-the- century Helsinki. In Lehtonen's novels, we find a carnivalisation of the proud and pure expanses of Karelia: a degenerate wasteland, filled with derelict houses; a Dante- esque scatological nightmare. The satirical and pessimistic way in which Lehtonen desc ribes these suburban surroundings is prototypical for the direc tion in which literary descriptions of Helsinki and its suburbs were gradually evolving from the 1920s onwards: towards an ever more generic city, an in-bet ween landscape of uprooted countryside and deformed cityscape. These desc riptions foreshadow later representations of what arguably has become the most influential symbolic landscape in modern Finnish movies and literature: the suburbs
