Rattling Sabres and Evil Intruders: The Border, Heroes and Border-crossers in Panfennist and Soviet Socialist Realist Literature

• Published in: Culture Unbound
• Main Author: Musäus, Thekla
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Linköping University Elecronic Press 2014
• Subjects: Topographical and symbolic borders; literary rhetorics; socialist realism; panfennist ideology; Stalinism; Karelia; karelia*; karelian; karelians
• Online Access: https://cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/article/view/2134; https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.14611165

In this article I analyse Russian and Soviet Karelian literary texts written in Finnish at the time and in the style of socialist realism, and Finnish poems, songs and novels of the same era, proposing the idea of a ‘Greater-Finland’. I turned my attention to the question of how the depiction, construction and use of borders is handled in the respective texts, and look to determine whether the opposed ideologies of Soviet Communism and Panfennism led to similar or different artificial results. This analysis proves that the texts of the two ideologies generally draw strict distinctions between the ‘heroes’ of their own side and the bad ‘Others’. Only the heroes of the plot are able to either cross borders or to establish new ones. While in the Soviet texts opponents of Soviet society inside the Soviet Union are depicted as foreign and separated through ideological, symbolic and topographical borders, the Karelians in the Finnish texts are suspected as a hybrid people, spoiled by their contact with the evil Russians.