Maila Talvio, a Finnish authoress visits the Karaims in Lithuania in 1894
ENIn the 1890s Finnish artists and writers began to travel with greater frequency. By 1908 tourism was already so substantial that Eino Leino complained upon leaving for Italy that travel accounts had lost their appeal. Finns tavelled in two different directions: either to see the sights of nature at home in Finland, or abroad, mainly to ltaly and France. In Finland they laid claim to the sacred national woodland landscape; from culn¡red lands they sought stimuli for work. In 1893 Juhani Aho wrote from Florence that the very air there was inspiring. In Florence his novel "The Pastor's Wile" (1893) obtained its pure and refined form, which has bæn regarded as particularly Finnish. Traffic between the woodlands of Karelia and the wonders of Italy implied a crisis of the intelligentsia, whose identity was perhaps too exclusively based on national symbols. Now they were faced with the pressures of the modem age and growing individualism. The need to distance oneself, however, bred a sense of guilt, and what became established as the discourse of travel accounts was demonstrating the special nahral beauty of Finland by comparison with other lands. In 1889 while at the Eiffel Tower Juhani Aho remembered the tall Finnish spruce and wrote that Finns were heather which clings to its native soil. The Eavel accounts by Maila Talvio (1871-1951) compare foreign lands with the Finnish backwoods, which for Talvio were located in her home disrict of Hartola. The comparison makes it clea¡ that one's duty was to make sacrifices for the sake of the backwoods folk. ln her story "On a Foreign River" (1894) a young woman on a spring night in Moscow ponders how far she had had to travel in order to realize what her mission was.Talvio's journeys diverged from the ordinary routes taken by writers, Because she followed her husband, J. J. Mikkola, a professor of Slavonic philology, on his research and lecture tours, the journeys were directed primarily to eastern and central Europe. The travel letters pubtished in magazines, by which Talvio supplemented her family's income, show, however, that ltaly, too, was an experience. The subjects of Talvio's travel letters were, on the one hand, the culnred cities of Europe, in particular Lübeck, Prague and Cracow, and on fhe other hand the distant villages of small fragmented peoples, for instance the Kashubs and Wends. The arduous nafure of the journeys of exploration is frequently mentioned in her letters. Although travel accounts written by women became more common in Europe in the 19th century, in Finland Talvio was one of the first when she began in 1893. By contrast with her famous male predecessor, Juhani Aho, Talvio did not write about politics or technology but about people and feelings. According to Sara Mills, women travel writen usually aimed at entering into the lives of their subjects, even merging with the local inhabitants. Of the rypes of travel writers outlined by Mills, Talvio mainly represents the sentimental commentator. When she began her travel letten Talvio was only just becorning a writeq her first work appeared in 1895. V. A. Koskenniemi, in his biography of Talvio (1946), states his opinion that it was Lithuania that made Talvio a writer.
