Jyrki Hakapää

Foreign and National Literature. Distribution and Reception of Books in the Nineteenth Century Finland

As Finland became the Grand Duchy of Russia (1809-1917), the political stability after the war 1808-1809 led also to a better chance for strengthening international cultural contacts. This relationship with foreign countries was altered thoroughly as the frontier between Sweden and Finland was set up.

In 1810's the Finnish book-stores had to restart - or it can be said that their actual activities only then started in Finland. Earlier the distribution contacts had been concentrated to few academics or then books had to be ordered individually mainly from Sweden as in Finland there were very few book-stores or printing houses.However However in the beginning of the 19th century readers' interest towards literature was increasing, which caused the need for central book-stores to distribute steadily the increasing amount of books.

At the time Finnish publications were very few and the public acquired almost only foreign reading. The Finnish national movement was starting to show its cause and results through the printed works, but still at least during the 1830's the book-stores had to rely on imported books. Sometimes this was even the only option, since a bookseller may not be given a permission to establish his own printing house.

Following this the early Finnish publishers, printing houses and distributors made their business with the foreign books. This meant that they needed very good international contacts. How did these contacts work and develop is my basic theme for the presentation in NIHK2001. I will examine this phenomenon through one of the most important book-stores at the time in Helsinki, the Wasenius' book-store (established in 1823).

As I have stressed the importance of the foreign contacts, I still have to point out that nevertheless the national movement makes the whole subject interesting. As the books were little by little begun to be both published in Finland and written in Finnish, they found their way to the reading public exactly through these same book-stores. How did they handle these two cultural flows, were there contradictions or should there even be made a division between them, is the further question of my actual research work.