The Golden Age [antikvár]

PREFACE -«f-- Even in this day and age Finns characterise themselves by a closeness to nature, and see it as a continuing source of inspiration and national identity. But these images of nature, of forests without end, myriad lakes and abruptly changing seasons, owe more to the imagines of artists and poets, and even the odd philosopher, than the realities of the physical environment. Armed with notebooks and sketching blocks, they climbed the windswept fells only to discover the face of woman eternal in the landscape, penetrated the sombre depths of northern forests only to find the serene pastures of time immemorial, or scaled the craggy heights of Karelia only to relive the Nietzschean dream of superman in his spiritual loneliness. Although the forests of Finland forged the nation s wealth, artists saw them as a spiritual home, inhabited by the mythical heroes of the Kalevala, and increasingly by their idealisation of the common man, the sturdy peasant with his faith in education and progress. Towards the end of the 19th century Finland felt its autonomy threatened by increasingly repressive measures on the part of the tsarist authorities. This led to an unprecedented politicisation of the arts, ranging from overt propaganda, like Edvard Isto's Attack, to seeing allegories of national liberation in the raging torrents of Victor Westerholm's River Kymi or Axel Galléns Kalevala studies. This fin de siecle flowering of the arts that has become known as the Golden Age defies precise limitation. Within the context of this book it carries on into the 20th century when the seeds of a new art were sown, and the first period of tsarist oppression culminated in the Great Strike of 1905 and the