Stories of Otherness? The War-Memoirs of the Finnish Soldiers of the Russo-Turkish War, 1877-18781

摘要

The peripheral autonomous Grand-Duchy of Finland joined with Russia the Russo-Turkish War, sending Guard's 3rd Finnish Sniper Battalion to the war. The Finns fought mainly in minor engagements. From the media point of view the Russo-Turkish war was significant. The Finnish soldiers, both officers and men, published war-memoirs of this war. The war occurred right at the turning point of Finland's economy and society. These war-memoirs shed light on their authors' views on local Balkan and Ottoman cultures. They have some simularities and differences, depending of the social and military rank of the author. The structure of style and narration, the discourse, of these war-memoirs is only partially ordinary, but a more deep analysis shows considerable issues. This was caused by the war horrors and hardships and the cultural encounters met during the war. These caused cultural transformation of the Finnish soldiers. The main literary elements of these war-memoirs are described in an episodic and fragmentary style, the traumatic and dark tones, as well as with a positive and humorous curiosity. The Finnish soldiers did not want to boast about their victories. The motive for this was to make career and financial profit with selling adventure stories, but there was also the motive of settling psychologically the soldiers' identity crisis. They did not follow official Russian propaganda openly. They focused more on everyday routine events with the local peoples. The Russo-Turkish war is still put aside in Finland as some kind of a secondary war. The theme is related to Finnish historiography's developments, especially on the issue of Finnish imagery of other nations, especially the Finnish views on Turks and Russians. The Finnish guardsmen ran into situations, in which they negotiated with the mental frameworks for cultural encounters. The hard realities, not the Turks themselves, created negative representations, outweighing the cultural bias. The language barriers mattered less than obtaining food or lodging or coping with the war events. After all the hardships, Constantinople (i.e. Istanbul) became a cultural shock for the Finns. The cultural encounters with the local cultures were either scattered and almost randomly. These contacts can even be said to resemble what is called as the controlled encounters of Europeans with Asian cultures. The soldiers wrote fairly positive humorous, even carnevalistic accounts about the Turks. The war-memoirs do not show that the Finnish soldiers and officers were ideologically biased towards the Turks or to the religious issues. The only exception was the hatred for the Turkish guerilla-irregulars. The reception of these war-memoirs was apparently positive but ephemeral. There was social divergence in the reception, i.e. official hegemonic memory contrasting the folkloristic memory about the Russo-Turkish War. The multicultural nature of the Imperial Russian army is an important context here to stress the liminal position, in which the Finnish soldiers were both during and after the war.