My research work on Russian modernism and postmodernism had a lot to do with the many taboos and prohibitions of the Soviet era, what you could and couldn’t say or study. In that tangle I got to know some superb Russian academics, young and not so young, many of whom became partners. And the partnership has later continued, even across the generations, and goes on to this day.

A special place is reserved for Juri Lotman and his school at the University of Tartu in Estonia. Lotman’s wife, Zara Minc, is one of the most distinguished scholars of Russian symbolism. Back when I was working on my doctorate I was fortunate enough to get to know them both. We were able to arrange the first Helsinki-Tartu seminar on Russian literature in 1987. The seminars have been held regularly every second year, with the fifteenth coming up in the autumn of 2015.

Getting to know the most important representatives of the Tartu school awakened in me a lifelong interest in Russian cultural semiotics and from that semiotics more generally. The conceptual pair own and alien, so central to interpreting Russian history and cultural history and its dramatic turns, has been very fruitful as a basic premise for research, and one I constantly revisit.

In the 1990s an interest in cultural history led me to a bold undertaking – I wrote a textbook, Venäjän kulttuurihistoria (‘Russian cultural history’) for students setting out on Russian studies and other interested parties without an account of literary history. It was based on a basic undergraduate course I had given for several years. The missing general account of literary history was written a dozen or so years later by others, mostly my former students.

Interest in literary contacts between Finland and Russia was aroused in studies in the 1970s on Russian symbolists. I bumped into their Imatra poems and began to investigate their contact with the border city of Imatra more closely. Since the end of the 1980s Imatra has paid host to international semiotic conferences, which I have got involved in in a number of ways lately.

I have been particularly interested in cultural contacts at the turn of the twentieth century, but also entirely new writing. And in this field one new project I have in mind is to examine the portrayal of Russia in Finnish literature, starting with Paavo Rintala. Cultural contacts are a broad field of study, with a great deal still to be worked out. The Studia generalia lecture series we ran during autumn 2010 filled the lecture hall week after week.

Further information (in Finnish)

• Venäjää voi ymmärtää (’Russia can make sense’) blog

 

Additional information about the pictures

Picture 7

The photo is taken beside the Moscow-bound train at Helsinki Central Railway Station. In the photo Pekka Pesonen (centre), his closest Finnish colleague of several decades Ben Hellman (left) and Roman Timenchik (right) from the University of Riga, nowadays a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Timenchik is a Russian-speaking Latvian Jew, who graduated from the University of Tartu as a student of Juri Lotman and Zara Mints. He showed up in Helsinki with the Riga youth theatre, where he was working, because no university would take him because of his controversial ideas and Jewish background. The passionate scholar found his way to the Slavic collection in the University’s library, where Ben and I got to know him. Close scholarly ties and friendship have lasted to this day. Timenchik has spent his life working as a professor of general literature in the Hebrew University at Jerusalem. As a scholar of Russian modernism he enjoys a worldwide reputation. He was last in Finland in 2012, acting as opponent to a doctoral thesis in the University.

Picture 8

Participants in the first Tartu seminar in the splendid facilities of the then Soviet Institute (formerly housing the Latvian Embassy and once again home to the Embassy). Front row (left to right): Pekka Pesonen, Zara Mints, Aila Laamanen, Peeter Torop. Back row (left to right) : Igor Tšernov, Juri Lotman, Sergei Isakov, Ljubov Kiseljova, Valeri Bezzubov, Arto Mustajoki, Johan Wrede.

Picture 9

Juri Lotman at home in Tartu, 1992. In the photograph with him are his son Professor Mihail Lotman and three of his six children.