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Henrik Knif et al., eds. Biografiskt lexikon för Finland 2: Ryska tiden. Helsingfors: slf and Stockholm: Adantis, 2009. Pp. 1047.
The tourists who pour offcruise ships for a day of sightseeing in HelsingforsHelsinki will be marched past Carl Ludwig Engel's edifices on the Market Place and Senate Square (and Walter Runeberg's statue of Alexander II), a section quaindy called "the Old Town" in dieir brochures. (Upenski Cathedral, generously funded by Alexander, looms behind them on its knoll.) Perhaps they will feel some vague sympathy for doughty Finland, burdened by an extended century (1809-1917) of Russian rule. Then they will be bussed to Tölö-Tölö to see wonders from the 1960's, EiIa Hiltunen's Sibelius monument- its many pipes called a plumber's nightmare by local wits- and the "Church in the Rock" or the Temple Church, carved out of Finnish granite by the firm of T. and T. Suomalainen. Shuttled southward again for a stop at the National Museum, they will behold effigies of the nineteen Finno-Ugric peoples, amidst oval doorways, reproducing die architecture of a mythic Karelian past. In all probability, they will not be ushered across Mannerheimvägen-Mannerheimintie to the City Museum, formerly Villa Hagasund (designed by Engel's successor, another German, E.B. Lohrmann), where dwelt Aurora Karamzin, "the most beautiful woman in Finland." She was the serial widow of die sickly Russian millionaire, Paul Demidov, and the dashing Captain Andrej Karamzin (son of the great historian), slaughtered with his entire troop by the Turks in the Crimean War, a savage episode prefiguring the fate of Custer at the Little Big Horn. Like her elder brother, Emil Stjernvall-Walleen (a confidant of Alexander II), Aurora warrants her sizable article in BlF 2: the siblings "belonged to the immediate circle of the imperial family in St. Petersburg."
At last, the sightseers will come to rest at Stockmann's vast department store, purchasing imitation Lappish hats and genuine Finnish glass, the end of what may have seemed a boring excursion, measured against other Baltic ports of call. Yet, Arthur Conan Doyle's words about PortsmouthSouthsea fit Helsingfors perfectiy: "There is a great deal of glamour there to anyone with the historic sense."
During the Russian time, Finland became a cultural entity of considerable reknown. Elias Lönnrot put the Ktdevala together (transmitted to a...