The Birth of a Nonfiction Writer*
Eero Autio, a primary school teacher from Varkaus, appeared at my cottage in the summer of 1979. I looked at the stack of papers on the corner of my desk with gloomy admiration. How could I ever explain to another good Wettenthovian that I wasn’t going to eat the whole apple to make sure it was rotten?
I finally realized that the sly enthusiast across from my desk wasn’t a Wettenthovian. More like Christopher Columbus.
How would the late Armas Salos have reacted if a thousand incredibly strange Sumerian cuneiform texts had been stacked in front of him? Would he have burst into hysterical laughter? Would he have mumbled: it can’t be true? Would he have poured another drink?
Indeed: the first of the 900 rock carvings on the eastern shore of Lake Onega was discovered by academician K. Grewingk as early as 1848, and the discoverer of the 2000 rock carvings at the mouth of the Uikujoki River, the student Aleksander Linevski, hiked along the White Sea coast in 1926. Eero Autio lists over a hundred works in Russian that argue about the connections of the images to the social conditions of Stone Age Karelia, the Kalevala, the mythology of northern Eurasia, etc.
Where have the feelers of Finnish archaeologists and folklorists been?
According to leading Soviet archaeologists, the age of the Uikujoki rock carvings varies from 3,300 to 5,240 years. The rock carvings on Lake Onega are most commonly dated to the second pre-Christian millennium.
The scarce rock paintings in Finland and the Nämfors rock carvings on the banks of the Ångermanjoki River represent branches of the same Arctic figurative language. The medieval Sámi rock carvings found on the northern shore of the Varangian Fjord and on the Kola Peninsula, along with the figurative language of witch drums, seem to confirm the connection between the early Sámi settlement of Fennoscandia and rock art. Whether the rock artists of Lake Onega, for example, spoke Early Finnish (= the common ancestral language of the Lappish and Baltic Finnic languages) or some lost Paleo-Arctic language, the pictographs they carved into the flat coastal cliffs do not give the slightest hint.
Pictographs? For my great-grandfather, the swan carrying the sun or a fishing rod around its neck, as well as the fox-man standing on a snake, holding the sun and the moon, approaching a moose, conveyed an obvious message. The same signs are repeated in East Karelia in dozens of different variations, in dozens of different contexts. There is a danger that we will place our own overbearing ideas into the images, for example, the opposition of good and evil characteristic of the Christian-socialist worldview.
“The birth stories of primitive wilderness tribes are generally animal epics,” I explained in the chapter on Pre-Finnish poetry in Unwritten Literature (p.68) and I argued, among other things, that the seppo Ilmanlinnu, or Ilmarinen, evolved from a sky-god eagle into a human being only at the same time as the swan-heron Joukahainen ended up as a human figure Joukahainen. I notice that Russian researchers have arrived at a similar developmental hypothesis based on the rock paintings of East Karelia: animal figures dominate in the oldest pictorial layers, human figures in the younger ones.
In the 13th poem of the Kalevala, the elk skier “put the lylyn to the snow like a viper under a kulon, the solahutti swamp teacher like a snake living”. Was the elk skier a fox-like figure 3500 years ago? Did he move carried by a snake? In ancient poems, the elk, snake and sun are connected in many ways. The rock artist of Besov-Nos Cape knew how. Unlocking his code, and unlocking dozens of other codes in rock art, is a multidisciplinary task for semioticians at the end of the millennium.
Perhaps even more sensational than the mythological symbolic bouquets of the Stone Age are the extensive realistic pictorial compositions: techniques for hunting moose, deer and sperm whales, depictions of archers in battle, naval warfare, ritual processions carrying cult objects, sexual themes, themes of the underworld… Even sea vessels with a dozen or so men brandishing their weapons shock our traditional image of the primitive Nordic people of 3,000 years ago. If I were Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, I would suddenly come up with the idea of a high culture of the Sea Lapps, which withered away into modern Sámi under the pressure of the barbarians from the south.
But the discussion of the rock art of East Karelia belongs in the visual arena.
Instead, the phenomenon of Eero Autio belongs precisely to the Parnassus of cultural politics.
In the 1950s and 1960s, we constantly talked about the hidden talent reserves of the people: about smoothing the roads and opening the gates for them to come and for the improvement of culture.
One and the other have claimed that the whole thing was a bluff or self-deception. The gates have been opened so wide that more and more empty-headed people are pouring into the academies.
The glowing enthusiasm, almost furious intensity with which Autio, a teacher from a factory town in central Savo, has, during his evenings and weekends, without a single scholarship, learned foreign languages, bought expensive foreign works, rewrote his works many times, and developed into a top expert in a scientific desert, differs almost unbelievably sharply from the average laziness and the “I-don’t-do-anything-unless-I-pay” ethic of academic researchers.
What explains this exceptional phenomenon?
Joensuu University of Applied Sciences was founded in 1969. Karelian Heikki Kirkinen moved from Paris to become its rector. In the same year, teacher Eero Autio was offered the opportunity to complete his studies on leave. Joensuu offered a study program for non-university students. Eero Autio applied to become a student of Heikki Kirkinen in his old seminary building. “It’s a great thing that you are Karelian and Orthodox,” Kirkinen told Eero Autio. “We Karelians need to study the history of Karelia from the beginning again. But for that, you also need to know Russian.”
The 1970s were the golden age of summer universities. Eero Autio was one of the most diligent summer course attendees. In 1973 he received his Bachelor of Arts degree, and in 1976 his Bachelor of Arts degree. After that, he focused on the Russian language.
Varkaus and Petrozavodsk established lively twin city relations in the 1960s. Petrozavodsk donated a rather large batch of books during a visit, from which a special Petrozavodsk section was formed in the Varkaus City Library. In the spring of 1977, teacher Autio borrowed a book from there, bound in Karelian colors, “Risunki na skalah” (=Rock Drawings) by archaeologist J. A. Savvateyev.
The city of Varkaus decided, as a pioneer among cities, to pay the interlibrary loan costs of its library on behalf of its residents. Over the course of a couple of years, Eero Autio ordered about 400 interlibrary loans from domestic and foreign scientific libraries. “That was my stroke of luck, that city decision,” he says.
In four stages, therefore, the cultural and political opening of society had significance for Eero Autio.
I wonder, I interview, I look for the basic motivations for this strange departure. Eero Autio evades. In our conversation, a memory of the Suistamo Orthodox cemetery, the resting place of Shemeikkai, where a thousand-year-old means of transportation for the deceased had been preserved as a symbol: an upside-down boat, one of the basic motifs of rock art. The Antonoffs of Jänisjärvi and Alatunkylä, the ancestors of the Autio family, have also remained there. Eero Autio is a staunch Orthodox, a true Karelian.
I wonder what role Aino Autio, a widowed mother from Suistamo, played in the story, who fled to Varkaus with her three minor children during the war years. Two of the children are now teachers, the third an architect. The researcher has inherited his abnormally quiet nature from somewhere.
On his own initiative, Eero Autio brings up the brother of his father-in-law from Joro, Professor Lauri Kettunen, the first scientist he met. Kettunen was a sparkling original, a man of broad views. At the Joensuu seminar, Eero Autio, a war veteran born in 1924, had been called a “Russian” by his friends. Being Orthodox was difficult in Varkaus, too, until the 1960s, when a powerful speech by Urho Kekkonen put an end to the soft persecution of the faith. Lauri Kettunen was ahead of his time, says Eero Autio. He viewed the Karelian Orthodox as an equal person.
How could one Lauri Kettunen, an exceptional person, be enough for every talented reserve member?
Eero Autio talks about his Eastern connections: the archaeologist Savvatev, his extremely helpful advisor and pen pal. He talks about his two futile trips to Leningrad: The Onega rock sculpture that was moved to the Hermitage remained invisible behind museum bureaucrats. But a friendly librarian was found at Leningrad University who copied the book pages needed by the Finnish tourist for free.
It seems that the birth of a non-fiction writer from Takametsä consists of such small coincidences. Even a strong will would not have taken the man through the grey stone, over the threshold of publication, if society had not smoothed the academic path of those like him at the right moment and a happy coincidence brought Heikki Kirkin, Lauri Kettunen, the archaeologist Savvatev, and the non-fiction director Pentti Huovinen into view.
In the final stages, Eero Autio was truly lucky: Pentti Huovinen read the manuscript, got the spark, and told him what the author still had to do. Liisa Steffa and her partners were inspired to shape one of Otava’s most beautiful books from the pile of paper.
A happy ending that is all too rare.
MATTI KUUSI
Eero Autio: Karelian Rock Carvings. Otava 1981
- FOOTNOTE
An undated calcination copy of an essay describing Eero Autio’s research career, which he wrote in the early 1980s, judging from the literature reference, was found in Matti Kuusi’s home archive. Despite searches, the editorial team was unable to determine whether this portrait had been published anywhere before.