Award-winning Finnish author Sirpa Kähkönen's works The Granite Man and 36 urns have recently been translated into Hungarian. Kähkönen travelled to Budapest in October to attend a discussion event at the Embassy of Finland. She also attended, together with the translator of the books Olga Huotari, the launch events of the Hungarian translations of her two books at the Budapest International Book Fair.
This interview has been written based on the discussion event at the Embassy of Finland the 2nd of October. At the event, the director of FinnAgora Riikkamari Muhonen interviewed Kähkönen.
Lovely that you could come to Budapest, Sirpa! Your work, 36 urns, that won the Finlandia prize in 2023, has been translated to Hungarian and has a launch event at Budapest International Book Fair. You have also won two of the very prestigious Savonia-awards for authors from the historical province Savo in Finland. This leads us to the first question: Why does your hometown Kuopio have such an important role in your books?
I think it is because of the language, we all have a language of the heart. I have been cared for and loved in the language that is spoken in Kuopio. Further, it was important to me to write about Kuopio, since the city has gone through a complete transformation. All the houses that I lived in as a child or have any connection to my history have been demolished. This transformation has been a theme I inherited from my mother. She was very unhappy that the city of her childhood and youth had disappeared. Rebuilding a lost city has been my life mission.
In your book The Granite Man, we travel from Kuopio to Soviet Russia. In the book we follow the experiences of a brother of one of the main characters from the Kuopio-book series. Why did you have the urge to place this book behind the Eastern border of Finland?
My grandmother has been a significant influence in my career. In my novel Black Brides, there is a love story between two people, one of them knows nothing about the things that scorch and burn the family. In the book, the main character Anna, who reminds me of my grandmother, repeatedly asks where are the men that have disappeared? Where are her husband's brothers? These questions anger everyone, and consequently get dismissed. This dismissal and silence is very cutting and inflamed, which is where one of the tensions for the whole Kuopio-book series stems; that some know, yet choose not to tell.
Oftentimes, I have thought that I should write about my father's lost uncles that my mother told me about. In the 1980s in the Soviet Union, a time of openness began. In Finnish media many stories were told about the fates of people who moved to the Soviet Union. My mother asked me to find out what happened to the lost brothers, as she knew nothing about them but their names. Despite the fact that I frequently thought that I had to write about these people, it was difficult. The more I found out, I realized the extent of how horrible the truth was.
My grandfather's brother Elias Tuomainen was the director of a Petrozavodsk ski factory and a highly respected person in the republic of Soviet Karelia. His faith was horrendous. At the end of 1936 he was still an important friend of the people and organised good working conditions for workers at the factory. The ski factory produced an impressive amount of products. Further, he invented machinery and the factory also produced furniture for cafés. The following year, he was suddenly regarded as an enemy of the Soviet Union and as a spy who was to be killed. .
The more I found out about it, the worse the betrayal felt. Similar things happened to Hungarian communists and German leftists who went to Soviet Russia. They were all betrayed and killed. How can you write about it? When I finally did start writing, it was a beautiful but also an awful journey.
Do you feel that 36 urns is very different from your previous works?
In the first Kuopio-series book, the starting point was my grandmother’s and grandfather’s unusual and difficult love affair, which was battered by politics. My grandfather spent a year in the Soviet Union, where he did a red officer-training after which he returned to Finland. Due to this, he was on a road to becoming a political prisoner, before he even met my grandmother. In the Kuopio-series books, I depicted people and all of society during a time of war. As a result we have an image of the whole society during a time of crisis.
In 36 urns all the strings are pulled together. When my mother died, I realised how many stories were told to me by the women in my family. My first love was my grandfather, who told me stories and fairytales. During the writing of 36 urns, I thought about my mother’s faith, read her diaries and remembered the way she encouraged me to uncover truths. Additionally, I thought back to my grandmother’s stories about the truth of events. My grandfather told me stories, but my grandmother told me the truth about living during the wartimes, and about the bombing of the city.
In my book Wild Thyme there is a scene, where I described what for me is a central moment in my career as an author and where my passion for telling stories originates.
During an evening in the early 1970s, me and my grandmother were getting ready to go to sleep. It was a beautiful evening and there was a thick silken duvet and lovely bed sheets that smelled fresh. At home my parents smoked cigarettes, so the bed sheets never smelled good. The sheets had lace that my grandmother had made, as well as hand embroidered monograms. We put lemon hand cream on our hands and Vicks ointment on my chest, so that my breathing would flow easily. We turned off the lights, tucked ourselves under the thick duvet - and then my grandmother started crying.
I panicked, as she was my safest person.
As she was crying, my grandmothers’ told me a story about her panic and fleeing. As a young mother in the wintertime, my grandmother kept her premature baby in a basket. She ran away from the Soviet bomber planes with this basket, and was evacuated to stay on the other side of a lake to stay safe from the war. During this evacuation she washed her baby’s diapers in the freezing cold lake while watching the city being bombed and burn from the other side of the lake.
She cried so much, and I was so little. The thought that war consisted of lots of mothers running away in panic stuck with me, as this panic clearly still lived inside my grandmother..
These experiences and emotions are things we inherit from previous generations. In 36 urns, women's personal stories and talks are highlighted within the big stories of history. The post-war generation, i.e. my mother’s (born in 1941) generation wanted to get rid of the dark cloud of the war. My generation inherited the silence and sadness from the people who had experienced the war.
Your works have been translated to many different languages. What kind of feedback have you received for your books?
At the Finnish bookfair, an elderly lady approached me and thanked me for a non-fiction book I wrote about my grandfather's political imprisonment. Her family was part of a right-wing extremist movement called the Lapua movement. But despite the fact that her family was on the other side of the political spectrum, the fanaticism was the same. There are similarities on both sides of people wanting to sacrifice themselves and wanting to live by a strict interpretation of life.
The elderly lady told me she learned to understand herself through my work. In feedback from abroad, this feeling of commonality has been brought up often. Our shared experiences are of utopias, religious experiences, ideologies, the polarisation of society that has again become popular. My intention was to create the same as great literature does, which is to present shared experiences.
I have been thinking that in my life I had salvation through literature. My childhood and youth were filled with violence and big problems, so reading was very meaningful. In Finland girls are taught to read and they can go to school. I was always told girls can do the same things boys can. Astrid Lindgren created her character Pippi Longstocking, who was so strong she could lift up a horse. I will never forget that image and the strength that I as a little girl got from it. If that little girl with funny shoes can lift a horse, maybe I can too one day.
I want to give the readers the same thing I got from literature, which was hope.
Writer: Rebecka Vilhonen