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How do we understand identity historically? How do theories of identity depict historical change? Has our conception of who we are changed rapidly in the last century? Was there ever a time when identities were simple? This paper investigates representation and articulation of national identity in the works of two writers, Aino Kallas (nee Krohn, 1878-1956) and Hella Wuolijoki (nee Ella Murrik, 1886-1954). Aino Kallas was born in Finland and married the Estonian Oscar Kallas. In literary introductions and surveys she is described alternately as a Finnish and an Estonian author. Kallas wrote primarily in Finnish, but also in Estonian, in dialect and in archaic language. Her style can be placed in the realistic and neo-romantic literary tradition. Kallas was active in the Noor-Eesti movement [Young Estonia], a literary group that sought to formulate a modern Estonian identity, often through historical themes. Hella Wuolijoki, in contrast, was born in the Estonian town of Helme and received her education in Tartu, in an elite school in St. Petersburg, and at the University of Helsinki. She married the Finnish lawyer, journalist and social democratic politician Sulo Vuolijoki (divorced in 1923) and settled in Finland, where she made a career as a businesswoman, political activist, literary author and playwright. In the 1920s?? and 1930s Hella Wuolijoki hosted a political and cultural salon in Helsinki, which was frequented by many prominent artists, politicians, diplomats and international traders from both the eastern and the western block. Wuolijoki's leftist sympathies were a hindrance for her career and at first she was played mainly at workers theatres and initially she wrote under the male alias Juhani Tervap??. The cinema adaptations of her series on the women of the Niskavuori estate and its fate, has reached cult status in Finland, and a contributing factor to her popularity was her ability to capture (what was perceived as) the genuinely Finnish national characteristics. Clearly, nationality and nationalism, had meaning for Kallas and Wuolijoki. The paper takes a closer look at how the authors' nationality influences the interpretation of their aesthetic works in their new home countries, in situations of political and nationalist conflict.

Abstract: Autobiography can be thought of as, among other things, a speech of defence. The Estonian-Finnish author Hella Wuolijoki started writing her autobiography in prison and it very much reads as a legitimization of her political life choices. The article investigates how Wuolijoki depicts her own politicization, and how she plays with different author names in order to destabilize a taken-for-granted author position. The material used is her three part autobiography/memoirs, in which she explicitly declares that she is less interested in the facts of her life, but rather wants to keep them in their original memory-form. This gives her the freedom to recount events she deems important for her self-formation, rather than events or general interest. Feminist and autobiographical theory is used as a tool to investigate how dislodging the authorial position can open new ways of emphasising a woman's political development. Thus, the literary formation of a political and feminist persona can be studied through her works. In this article I relate Wuolijoki's writing to a way of theorizing the position of the political woman that could be found in Alexandra Kollontai's pamphlet on the socialist New Woman written in 1918. The article analyses how Wuolijoki legitimizes her political activities by recounting her life as always intricately connected to contemporary political events. The article shows that political autobiography is a concept that can open new perspectives on women's life writing and that the construction of an autobiographical persona that combines the concepts of woman and political may rely, as in this case, on types or models found in literature rather than life. Swedish: Självbiografi kan ses som, bland annat, ett försvarstal. Den estnisk-finska författaren Hella Wuolijoki började skriva sin självbiografi i fängelset för att legitimera sina politiska livsval. Artikeln undersöker hur Wuolijoki skildrar sin egen politisering och hur hon leker med olika författarnamn för att destabilisera en förgivet tagen författarposition. Det analyserade materialet utgörs av hennes självbiografi/memoarer i tre band i vilka hon explicit deklarerar att hon är mindre intresserad av fakta och snarare vill behålla händelserna så som hon minns dem. Detta ger henne friheten att behandla skeenden som hon anser viktiga för sin egen formering snarare än sådant som kan vara av allmänintresse. Feministisk och självbiografisk teori används som ett verktyg för att undersöka hur förskjutningen av författarens ställning kan öppna nya sätt att betona en kvinnas politiska utveckling. I artikeln jämför jag Wuolijokis skrivande med Alexandra Kollontajs sätt att teoretisera den nya kvinnan i pamfletten den socialistiska Nya Kvinnan från 1918. Artikeln analyserar hur Wuolijoki legitimerar sina politiska aktiviteter genom att ständigt relatera till samtida politiska händelser. Artikeln visar att en läsning ur ett politiskt självbiografiskt perspektiv kan öppna för nya perspektiv för kvinnors life-writing och att konstruktionen av ett självbiografiskt persona som kombinerar begreppen kvinna och politik, åtminståne i det här fallet, är beroende av typer och modeller som finns i skönlitteraturen snarare än livet.

"Films are integral to national imagination. Promotional publicity markets "domestic films" not only as entertaining, exciting, or moving, but also as topical and relevant in different ways. Reviewers assess new films with reference to other films and cultural products as well as social and political issues. Through such interpretive framings by contemporaries and later generations, popular cinema is embedded both in national imagination and endless intertextual and intermedial frameworks. Moreover, films themselves become signs to be cited and recycled as illustrations of cultural, social, and political history as well as national mentality. In the age of television, "old films" continue to live as history and memory. In Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions, Anu Koivunen analyzes the historicity as well as the intertextuality and intermediality of film reception by focusing on a cycle of Finnish family melodrama and its key role in thinking about gender, sexuality, nation, and history. Close-reading posters, advertisements, publicity-stills, trailers, review journalism, and critical commentary, she demonstrates how The Women of Niskavuori (1938 and
1958), Loviisa (1946), Heta Niskavuori (1952), Aarne Niskavuori (1954), Niskavuori Fights (1957), and Niskavuori (1984) have operated as sites for imagining "our agrarian past", our Heimat and heritage as well as "the strong Finnish woman" or "the weak man in crisis". Based on extensive empirical research, Koivunen argues that the Niskavuori films have mobilized readings in terms of history and memory, feminist nationalism and men's movement, left-wing allegories and right-wing morality as well as realism and melodrama. Through processes of citation, repetition, and re-cycling the films have acquired not only a heterogeneous and contradictory interpretive legacy, but also an affective force."