Mauricio Roa spends his time living, travelling and studying between Latin America and Northern Europe. With a major in communications, he is now in the last phase of his Master’s studies at the University of Helsinki.

Last year Finland celebrated The Kalevala’s 160th anniversary with an extensive exhibition at the Ateneum Art Museum. On display are more than 200 visual artworks from artists inspired by the Finnish epic. The exhibition praised the great mythological heroes by gathering paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs from the 1850’s to the late 20th century. Among the authors on display are Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931) and Robert Wilhem Ekman (1808-1873), two well-known romantic painters of the 19th century.

A couple of metres in front of Ateneum’s main entrance, the thoughtful statue of Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872) reminded all of those art enthusiasts that the much needed 19th century “Finnishness” was also constructed through the eyes of common men.

Indeed, 18th Century Finland was a disputed region between the east and the west. After a lengthily Swedish domination, Finland became an autonomous Grand Duchy of Russia. This shift in powers spurred a very particular national awakening in literature (and arts) as all emergent figures have Swedish as their mother tongue. Even Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884) the collector and creator of the highly acclaimed Kalevala, spoke Swedish within his family circles. Can one think of this artistic movement without the establishment of the Grand Duchy?

Writers and artists begun to gather around the idea of nationhood by praising the unique nature and the mighty powers of the ancient Karelian heroes described in The Kalevala. However, it was Aleksis Kivi with his work Seven Brothers (1870) who took a step further by abandoning the academic conventionalism of his XIX century’s counterparts to create seven different but faithful images of what a Finn is. The novel describes the struggles of seven peasant and stubborn brothers in their adaptation to a modern and religious society. Each one of the seven characters has a distinctive personality and, after 140 years of being written, the formula is still valid for understanding today’s Finland.

The first important step of this separation between Kivi and the conventionalists was the use of Finnish language in the then dominantly Swedish literature of the time. The use of the Finnish as a mother tongue for the first time in a novel was strengthened by the fact that the author signed it as Aleksis Kivi rather than Aleksis Stenvall.

The second step of the separation was the depiction of the brother’s lives in a humorous realism. In times of an urgent search for mechanisms of national cohesion, the Seven Brothers’ approach was an absurd that incited an immediate disproval among some of the conventionalists of the time. No wonder, two years after the publication of Seven Brothers, Kivi died in poverty aged 38.

Kivi’s legacy was understood only after his death when literates, critics and the like realised that this Kalevala’s antithesis of antiheroes and common peasants was indispensable – that it built the synthesis of our host country’s national identity. Both works are equally important and so much can be explain and understand through them, just give a try.