Helsinki of the Czars: A Cultural History 1808-1918

Scandinavian Review, Winter 1996

Helsinki of the Czars: A Cultural History 1808-1918 by George C. Schoolfield Columbia, SC: Camden House, Inc., 1995 308 pages. Illustrated. Glossary. Selected Bibliography. Cloth. $55

The author is a noted literary historian and former member of ASF's Board of Trustees. In the preface he describes the book as a "long appreciative essay" written because "he likes Helsinki and its genius, and because he wishes to share his liking with others, not because he has any thesis to argue."

In the 110 years that Helsinki was the capital of the "Grand Duchy of Finland" in the Russian Empire (1808 until 1917), it became a place of some European importance. From a mercantile and shipping town in the eastern reaches of the Kingdom of Sweden, Helsinki under the Czars suddenly became the seat of government and the university. It was one of the last cities to be recreated by the will of absolute monarchs (Alexander I and then Nicholas I) and one of the few cities of any size to be shaped by the good taste of a gifted city planner and a gifted architect, working in harmony (Albrecht Ehrenstrom and Carl Ludwig Engel) who made it into a Neo-Classical showcase.

By the 1860s, its Swedish-speaking society and cultural institutions were confronted by zealots of "Finnishness" (and a swiftly growing Finnish population) that demanded their rightful place in the sun. The author portrays the many transformations that took place and the national romantic passions that led, by the turn of the century, to a remarkable outburst of creative activity in music, painting, architecture and literature that helped to create a Finnish national identity. The political and social tensions culminated in Finland's independence on December 6,1917, and the Civil War of 1918, in which Marshall C.G. Mannerheim, a former Czarist calvary general, emerged as the leader of the victorious Whites.