Toast, joints, mulberry trees

Pehr Kalm, a Swedish-Finnish explorer and botanist, died 140 years ago today. He’s best known for being one of Carolus Linnaeus’s students, and for spending several years in North America seeking out seeds and plants - not least the red mulberry - to bring back and improve agricultural possibilities in his home land.

Kalm was born in 1716, in Sweden, where his Finnish parents had taken refuge during the Great Northern War. His father died weeks after Kalm was born; and a few years later his mother and he returned to Finland (but academics argue over Kalm’s exact nationality). He studied sciences at the universities in Turku and Uppsala, and was a student of the naturalist Carl Linnaeus (dubbed the ‘father of modern taxonomy’). Kalm became much interested in the useful application of botany in agriculture and industry.

During the mid-1740s, Kalm was engaged in field research in Sweden, Russia and Ukraine. Then, in 1747 he was appointed Professor of Economic Natural History at the University of Åbo in Turku. Very soon after, though, he set off on a mission, planned by Linnaeus, to collect economically-useful plants - particularly red mulberry for silk worms - in North America.

On his journey, Kalm spent six months in England, before arriving in Pennsylvania in 1748 where he met the leading American naturalists. He made the Swedish-Finnish community of Raccoon (now Swedesboro in New Jersey) his base of operations. There, he acted as a substitute pastor in the local church, and even married the widow of the former pastor. Two major trips took him north, firstly to New York, Albany, Lake Champlain, and Canada, and, secondly, to Canada again.

Kalm returned to Turku in May 1751, where he remained for the rest of his life, teaching and writing. He died on 16 November 1779. Wikipedia has a good short summary of his life, as does one found at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. Here is how the latter concludes: ‘Kalm was one of the outstanding utilitarian Linnaean botanists, one genus and 90 species of plants being named for him. His major legacy, his book, stimulated natural history in Sweden and provided Europeans with an accurate and wide-ranging account of North American conditions and customs. Kalm’s descriptions of Canadian life and mores are among the best found in travel literature concerning the country.’

Kalm’s diary of his journey was first published in Stockholm in the 1750s as En Resa til Norra America. This was translated into English by John Reinhold Forster and sold in England in three volumes in the early 1770s. The full English title reads: Travels into North America; containing its natural history, and a circumstantial account of its plantations and agriculture in general, with the civil, ecclesiastical and commercial state of the country, the manners of the inhabitants, and several curious and important remarks on various subjects.

Original copies are available through Abebooks costing hundreds or thousands of pounds, but a 1970s reprint can by bought much cheaper. However, the full texts are freely available at Internet Archive. Here are several extracts taken from volume two of Kalm’s original volumes as found at Internet Archive. (These are relatively short diary entries though most are much longer with detailed descriptions of the flora/fauna, culture and society he finds).

14 April 1749
‘This morning I went down to Chester: in several places on the road are saw-mills; but those which I saw today had no more than one saw. I likewise perceived that the woods and forests of these parts had been very roughly treated. It is customary here, when they erect saw-mills, wind-mills, or iron-works, to lead the water a good way lower, in case the ground near a fall in the river is not convenient for building upon.’

24 April 1749
‘To-day the Cherry-trees began to fhew their bloffoms; they had already pretty large leaves. The Apple-trees likewife began to bloffom; however the Cherry-trees were more forward: They likewife got a greenifh hue from their leaves. The Mulberry-trees were yet quite naked and I was forry to find that this tree is one of the lateft in getting leaves, and one of the firft which gets fruit.’

6 May 1749
‘The Mulberry-trees (Morus rubra) about this time began to bloffom, but their leaves were yet very fmall. The people divided them into male and female trees or flowers; and faid that thofe which never bore any fruit were males, and thofe which did, females.’

22 May 1749
‘The locusts began to creep out of their holes in the ground last night, and continued to do so to-day. As soon as their wings were dry, they began their song, which is almost sufficient to make one deaf, when travelling through the woods. This year there was an immense number of them.’
 
4 June 1749
‘I found vines in several gardens, got from the old countries. They bear annually a quantity of excellent grapes. When the winters are very severe, they are killed by the frost, and die quite to the ground; but the next spring new shoots spring up from the root.’ 

This article is a revised version of one first published 10 years ago on 16 November 2009. 

Nothing to fear from the Soviets

Juho Kusti Paasikivi, the Finnish statesman who successfully guided his country towards peaceful relations with its much bigger and more powerful neighbour, the Soviet Union, died 60 years ago today. His diaries have been published in Finnish, but no translation exists in English. However, a few translated extracts can be found in history or biography volumes, such as Containing Coexistence: America, Russia, and the “Finnish Solution’, which, in fact, opens with a quotation from Paasikivi’s diary.

Johan Gustaf Hellsten was born in 1870 in the Häme region of central Finland, though he was brought up further south in Lahti. His mother died when he was four, and his father when he was 14, whereupon he was looked after by an aunt. He was educated at one of the first schools founded by the Fennomans (Finnish nationalist movement), and, in 1885, he Finnicised his name to Juho Kusti Paasikivi. He went on to study history at the Imperial Alexander University, focussing on Russian history and language, graduating in 1892, thereafter switching to law for postgraduate studies. Paasikivi achieved his masters in law in 1897 and, in the same year, married Anna Forsman. They had four children.

Paasikivi completed his doctoral thesis in 1902, and became an associate professor at the university. The following year, though, he was appointed director general at the state treasury of, what was still, the Grand Duchy of Finland, a position he kept until he resigned in 1914. From 1907 to 1913, with a short gap, he was also a Finnish Party member of parliament. Eschewing the direction of the Finnish Party politics, he took over as president of KOP bank, piloting the company, within the newly independent Finland over the next 20 years, to one of the country’s most successful. After the death of his wife, in 1931, he resigned his position at the bank, and returned to politics, as head of the right-wing National Coalition Party, successfully steering it away from radical right wing policies. In 1934, he married Allina Valve.

Having stepped down as chairman of the National Coalition Party, Paasikivi was persuaded to take the important diplomatic role of ambassador to Sweden. During the war years, he was brought into government as a kind of political adviser; and his negotiations with the Soviet Union (Finland and the Soviet Union were at war for much of the 1939-1944 period) brought him much respect both in Moscow and in Helsinki. Immediately after the war, in 1944, he was appointed prime minister. He brought a radically different kind of politics to the country, based on wanting a peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union. In 1946, he became Finland’s seventh president, holding that position until 1956. He died later that same year, on 14 December. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, National Biography of Finland or the University of Helsinki.

Paasikivi kept diaries for most of his life. These were edited by Yrjo Blomstedt and Matti Klinge and published in 1985 in two volumes as Paasikiven paivakirjat, 1944-1956 (Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1985). However, as far as I can tell, there is no English translation. A few snippets from the diaries appear in translation here and there, in biographies and/or history books, such as Containing Coexistence: America, Russia, and the “Finnish Solution” by Jussi M. Hanhimaki (Kent State University Press, 1997).

Containing Coexistence is the first full-scale study of Finland’s role in Soviet-American relations during the onset of the cold war, says the publisher. For the book, Hanhimaki drew on a wide range of multinational source material, including newly released archival materials, employing a comparative approach interrelating American, British, Finnish, Russian, and Swedish perspectives. Containing Coexistence will be of interest, the publisher claims, to historians and political scientists as well as to any scholar interested in American and Soviet foreign policies during the cold war, post-World War II international relations, or twentieth-century European history.

The following extracts from Paasikivi’s diary are quoted below in the context of the Hanhimaki’s narrative.

[Opening paragraph]
‘When Juho Kusti Paasikivi sat down to write in his diary on September 2, 1944, he was angry. “Our foreign policy has not been led with brains, but with buttocks,” the seventy-four-year-old conservative banker, politician, and former prime minister complained. “We should never have joined this war,” he added, accusing both the wartime leaders and the newly appointed president, Marshall C. G. E. Mannerheim, of shortsightedness and incompetence in handling Finnish foreign policy. The worst sin, Paasikivi would argue repeatedly in private conversations and public speeches until his retirement from Finnish political life in early 1956, had been to ignore the geopolitical realities of Finland’s position, that is, the country’s proximity to the Soviet Union. Such neglect had, according to Paasikivi, led to such recent disasters as the 1939-40 Winter War and Finland’s cobelligerency with Nazi Germany in 1941-44. This, he added, had led Finland to the brink of collapse by the fall of 1944 when Soviet occupation appeared imminent.’

[Page 91]
‘Paasikivi was also annoyed by Kekkonen’s decision to launch an active run for the presidency, complaining frequently about Kekkonen’s “American style” of campaigning in late 1949 and early 1950. “A president’s most important qualities are not talent in speech writing and propaganda, but wisdom and experience,” Paasikivi sarcastically remarked in his diary. For Kekkonen, however, the 1950 presidential campaign was a good opportunity to make his name more widely known to the general Finnish public, which payed dividends six years later.’

[Page 136]
‘By late 1955 Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the leader of the Soviet Union. But despite Khrushchev’s eventual success the days of undisputed one-man rule were over as a new era dawned in Soviet history in the spring of 1953. “We shall see how this affects our relationship with the Soviet Union and our general position in the world,” President Paasikivi wrote in his diary on March 4, 1953. It was to have a major impact in both respects.’

[Page 164]
‘Relieved [. . . ] had not meant a shift in Soviet attitudes toward Finland, Paasikivi wrote in his diary on July 29, 1954, “This proves that our relations with the Soviet Union are still good and we have nothing to fear from the Soviets.”  At the same time, however, Paasikivi was concerned about “the loss of good will in the U.S.” toward Finland.’

[Page 174]
‘That Finland was left to fight its internal battles without outside interference became clear during the Kemi strikes of August 1949. In this lumber town located at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia the Communist-dominated lumberjacks’ union began a strike on August 18. President Paasikivi had no sympathy for and few illusions about this labor action. He interpreted it as a communist effort to bounce back from the losses they had suffered in Finnish internal politics since the spring of 1948. As Paasikivi noted in his diary on August 18, 1949, “The Communists seem to want to regain their position of power and become dominant in Finland.” Paasikivi, however, trusted the Fagerholm government, which controlled a large part of the labor movement through the Social Democratic party, to have the ability to neutralize the strikes. Accordingly, Prime Minister Fagerholm declared that the strike was illegal and authorized the local police to break up the picket lines. On the same day, however, a riot ensued between the strikers and the local police; shots were fired, and one striker was killed. Paasikivi ordered a general alert of the armed forces; the government sent army troops to Kemi and arrested twenty-two leading activists. Meanwhile, the violence propelled a series of sympathy strikes around the country by other Communist-dominated labor unions such as the harbor workers and many metal union workers.’

An inner confession

‘A symphony is not just a composition in the ordinary sense of the word; it is more of an inner confession at a given stage of one’s life.’ This is Jean Sibelius, Finland’s greatest composer and a national hero born 150 years ago today, writing in his diary. While sometimes demonstrating such considered wisdom, though, his diary often descends into existential angst as well, like in this entry written a few months later: ‘Don’t give in to tobacco or alcohol. Better to write rubbish in your “diary”. Confide your miseries to paper. In the long run it’s better so! Yes - in the long run.’

Johan (colloquially Janne, and later Jean) Christian Julius Sibelius was born on 8 December 1865 in Hämeenlinna, a small garrison town in the Grand Duchy of Finland, part of the Russian Empire. His father was the city medical officer, but he died young leaving his estate bankrupt. Sibelius was brought up in the household of his maternal grandmother, with summer holidays at his paternal grandmother’s in Loviisa. In 1872, Sibelius started at the Swedish preparatory school of Eva Savonius, but soon moved to Lucina Hagman’s Finnish-language preparatory school.

Early music instruction came from relatives; and, as Sibelius and his two siblings grew up, so they would play in a trio, he preferring the violin. On graduating from high school, he began to study law at the Imperial Alexander University in Finland but quickly switched to the Helsinki Music Institute (now the Sibelius Academy) from 1885, remaining until 1889. For the next two or three years, Sibelius travelled in Europe, studying in Berlin and Vienna, starting to compose in earnest, and absorbing many different musical experiences. In late 1891, he appeared for the first time in public as a conductor at a concert in Helsinki. And, in 1892, he completed Kullervo, a suite of symphonic movements.

Sibelius, having wooed Aino, the daughter of a Baltic aristocrat for several years, married her in mid-1892, her parents, apparently, having warmed to the penniless Sibelius thanks to the success of Kullervo. They would have six children, and live, from 1904, in a newly-built family home, Ainola, on Lake Tuusula, Järvenpää. For several years, Sibelius supplemented his income with teaching work, which left him insufficient time for composing. Biographers note that the influence of Wagner which could be heard in some of his compositions faded eventually; and, as the century neared its end, the Finnish senate awarded him a significant annual grant, allowing him more freedom to compose.

In 1899, at a time when the Russian emperor Nicholas II was restricting the Grand Duchy’s powers, Sibelius premiered his First Symphony, as well as patriotic compositions, Song of the Athenian Boys and Press Celebration Music (including, what become known as, Finlandia). These brought him much wider attention, and fame as a national figure. And soon he was making a name for himself abroad, as he accompanied, in 1900, his friend Robert Kajanus and orchestra on a tour of European cities - playing Sibelius’s new works. The following year, Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2 in D Major was conducted by Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin, and the British composer Granville Bantock commissioned his Symphony No. 3 in C Major in 1907.

After an operation to remove a throat tumour in 1908, Sibelius abstained from alcohol and tobacco; some see a link between this and the darker, more uncompromising music that followed, En Saga, for example, and Symphony No. 4 in A Minor. During the war years, he continued to compose smaller works, and made progress on his Fifth Symphony, but he also started drinking again. In 1918, he conducted a march in Helsinki at the conclusion of the Finnish Civil War, reinforcing his position as a national hero.

After the war, Sibelius travelled to Denmark, and also to England, giving successful concerts. Two further symphonies followed, but, from 1926 onwards he barely produced any new compositions. Biographers believe he was working on an eighth symphony, perhaps through to the early 1930s, but, in the mid-1940s, he burned a large number of papers, and left behind no trace of any such new symphony. His 90th birthday, in 1955, was widely celebrated in Finland, but two years later, in 1957, he died in Ainola. For more biographical information see The Finnish Club of Helsinki’s Sibelius website, Wikipedia, Sonos, or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Sibelius began to keep a diary while in London in February 1909, jotting down his travel finances, but also confiding, as if to a friend about his life and thoughts. He continued writing in this journal until the end of 1913; and in mid-1914 he began a new journal, which he wrote in regularly until the 1920s. The two diaries contain around 90,000 words (in Swedish, Sibelius’s native language).

The Sibelius website gives this overview of the diary: ‘Sibelius writes down weather reports, finances, natural phenomena, the names of people he has met and discussions he has had. He reports everyday incidents, his journeys and family gatherings. The diaries also reveal the composer’s times of gloom. Negative criticism depressed him, as did the temporary - and often well-founded - periods when his wife would not speak to him. To his family he sometimes said that he would go and get rid of his bad moods in his diary, and once he called his diary his “spittoon”. In fact, the diary tends to portray Sibelius as a more melancholy person than he actually was.’

Although the diaries have not been published in their own right, they are available to researchers at the Finnish National Archive; and Erik Tawaststjerna used them extensively for his biography of Sibelius. In Finnish and Swedish this was published in five volumes. However, for the English market, they were condensed by Tawaststjerna, translated by Robert Layton, and published (between the 1976 and 1997) by Faber & Faber in three volumes. Each one can be previewed at Amazon (Vol. I - 1865-1905, Vol. II - 1904-1914, Vol. III - 1914-1957) or Googlebooks (Vol. I, Vol. II, Vol. III).

Indeed, Tawaststjerna opens his biography, in the first volume, with a Sibelius diary entry that, he says, ‘resembles in certain respects the Finland he himself knew as a child’: (12-13 April 1915) ‘When I shut my eyes I can picture in my mind a small town with one-storey barracks from the Swedish epoch. It is a late summer’s day between five and six in the afternoon some time during the 1820s. The sun is slowly sinking towards the horizon; an officer is visiting a family with two daughters, their mother and brother, and is obviously not his first visit. They have been enjoying themselves, reading novels, playing the piano; there are geraniums in the window and the house is an old-fashioned one of considerable style. Tea is served and afterwards the party breaks up; they are all fond of each other and there is an atmosphere of real friendship, perhaps love.’

Otherwise, however, it is not until the second volume that the chronology of Sibelius’s diary entries becomes useful for Tawaststjerna’s narrative. The translator, Layton, adds a note: ‘The style of the diaries is very difficult to convey. They make even fewer literary aspirations and convey the feeling of an information dialogue with an alter ego; they are cryptic jottings, highly idiosyncratic in their vocabulary and more often than not unsyntactical and badly punctuated. Indeed, at times they are difficult to make much of and in order to convey what Sibelius’s intentions are, I have found myself drawing on idioms that may not have enjoyed currency in English in the early part of the century. However, I hope that something of their flavour and also what he is trying to say to himself comes across.’

Here are several of Sibelius’s diary entries as found in Volume II of Tawaststjerna’s biography.

Undated in the biography
‘Don’t you understand now? By being so open, you have forefeited the respect that you feel to be your entitlement. Keep your thoughts to yourself and guard your tongue in talking to others. And then your pupils (!), stand fast by them. Otherwise the best and first will have every right to treat you in kind.’

Undated in the biography
‘Don’t worry about your being 44. There’s still time. All major composers found their way to the stars by discipline and self-study. Don’t be so overawed by youth that your creativity is stifled. They won’t be able to silence your art.’

Undated in the biography
‘Don’t change the colouring before it’s necessary. In scoring one should, as a rule, avoid leaving a paragraph without any strings. The sound can seem rough. Remember the differences in wind instruments in different countries, layout of strings and so on, keep a flexible balance that can be adjusted depending on circumstances. A satisfactory sonority still depends to a large extent on the purely musical substance, its polyphony and so on. In small orchestras the oboe, usually badly played, has to be treated with the same caution as the trumpet. In some orchestras the bassoon in its middle and high register cannot play piano. Only the bottom seems capable of that. In such orchestras the lower register of the flute is almost only usable in forte. Usually both in the wind and brass, the initial entry can be tentative and leave much to be desired in terms of intonation and ensemble. Beginning must be carefully marked. Also there is need for great care when the main burden of the melodic line moves from one instrument to another.’

21 April 1910
‘Again in the deepest depression. Working hard at the newcomer.’

27 April 1910
‘Light, expectant, hopeful thoughts. Worked in my own way. Try to concentrate. ‘A must.’ Now or never.’

7 May 1910
‘Took a ten-kilometre walk while composing, forged the musical metalwork and fashioned sonorities of silver.’

12 August 1910
‘This business of concerning yourself with practical affairs when you are a creative artist. Think of all the time and energy you waste on them every day. For you this is corrosive. But press on, in spite of all the derision and abuse. Worked well today on the development of the first movement. Don’t lose the sense of life’s pain and pathos!’

16 August 1910
‘When will I get this development finished? i.e. be able to concentrate my mind and have the stamina to carry it all through. I managed when I had cigars and wine, but now I have to find new ways. I must!’

17 August 1910
‘Crossed out the whole of the development. More beauty, and more real music. Not just scoring or crescendos but stereotyped writing. Now I have to speed up. Now or never!’

5 November 1910
‘Worked well. Forged onwards into the finale. Wonderful day with snow interlacing the trees and their branches - typically Finnish.

A symphony is not just a composition in the ordinary sense of the word; it is more of an inner confession at a given stage of one’s life.’

25 December 1910
‘Christmas - ! Aino sick . . . Continue to work. Money worries begin again! Of my State Prize only 400 remains. Eight doctors’ bills unpaid. Misery wherever one turns.’

31 August 1911
‘Don’t give in to tobacco or alcohol. Better to write rubbish in your “diary”. Confide your miseries to paper. In the long run it’s better so! Yes - in the long run.’

Waltari’s Dark Angel

Mika Waltari, one of Finland’s most widely known and translated writers, was born a hundred years ago today. He became best known for his historical novels, but he was a prolific and adaptable writer, turning his pen to many different forms. He is not, however, known as a diarist. Nevertheless, it seems that he did once keep a travel diary, and that it provides an interesting insight into how he did research for his historical fiction. Of particular interest is the way he tracked down the 15th century diary of Nicolo Barbaro, which tells of the fall of Constantinople, and how he then used it as a source for one of his best known novels, The Dark Angel, written in diary form.

Waltari was born on 19 September 1908 into a religious family, but lost his father at the age of 5. He studied philosophy and literature at university, and became a prominent figure in the Finnish literary movement known as Tulenkantajat (the Flame-bearers), which sought to open up Finnish literature to the rest of Europe. His first novel, Suuri Illusioni (Grand Illusion), published in 1928, depicted, according to WSOY (Finland’s leading publisher), the lost generation following the first world war - ‘à la Fitzgerald’. It proved an early success.

Both Wikipedia and Books from Finland provide biographical summaries. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Waltari worked hectically as a journalist and reviewer, and travelled widely in Europe. He also continued writing books, in many different genres, poetry, horror, crime and even scripting popular cartoons, and authoring a guidebook for aspiring writers. During the war years, he wrote propaganda for the government, and soon after published his first historical novel, The Egyptian, which became an international bestseller. He wrote seven more historical novels, placed in different ancient cultures, among which The Dark Angel, set during the fall of Constantinople in 1453, is considered one of his best.

By happy coincidental chance (for this blog), Waltari - not a diary-keeper by habit - did once keep a diary, a travel diary, published in 1948, when he was researching The Dark Angel. The Finnish author Panu Rajala, who is currently working on a biography of Waltari, says this travel diary is the ‘best introduction to Waltari’s working methods’ - something the National Library of Finland asked him to write about for their 2008 bulletin.

The last two paragraphs are worth reproducing verbatim for Rajala, in using the author’s own diary, explains how the famous diary written by Niccolo Barbaro inspires Waltari to use the diary form for his next novel.

‘On this trip to Venice or the next, Waltari ascends the steps to the National Library of St. Mark along the Piazzetta opposite the old Doge’s Palace. He has read a printed version of the diary written by Niccolo Barbaro, a participant in the battle, describing the Siege of Constantinople, but now he wants to see the original manuscript in its original decorative leather binding. He reads the 67-page diary, hand-written in the calligraphic script of its time, in which a young Venetian patriot describes the tragic phases of the siege. An unknown commentator’s marginal annotations in red ink provide Waltari with his most cogent insights. This is just what Waltari has maintained - of greater importance to the author are often the footnotes and minor details, not always the broad strokes. When Niccolo Barbaro accuses the Genovians of embezzlement, written on the page is ‘Angelo Zacaria, Greek embezzler for the Turks’.

Johannes Angelos is born and begins to grow as the novel’s main character. Simultaneously the form of the future novel - a diary - is found. Waltari is already in a rush to his destination, Istanbul.’

There is not much biographical information about Barbaro himself on the internet, but The Diary Junction gives a little, and also provides links to online texts of his diary. A near full version can be found here.

At the end of his description of the last day of the siege, Barbaro writes: ‘The fighting lasted from dawn until noon, and while the massacre went on in the city, everyone was killed; but after that time they were all taken prisoner. Our Bailo, Jeruolemo Minoto, had his head cut off by order of the Sultan; and this was the end of the capture of Constantinople, which took place in the year one thousand four hundred and fifty-three, on the twenty-ninth of May, which was a Tuesday.’

I am a super-person

‘I want this to be remembered forever. Maybe I'll even have a follower; after all, I am a super-person, almost God.’ This is one of many disturbing diary entries made by Pekka-Eric Auvinen, a Finnish student, in the run-up to his shooting of eight people and himself at Jokela High School in November 2007. Information about the diaries has recently come to light thanks to publication of a final report by the Finnish Bureau of Investigation.

The shooting was one of the worst such incidents ever reported, and certainly the most terrible in Finland. At the time, the Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen called it a ‘great tragedy’ and said the shooting had ‘deeply undermined the sense of security in society’, according to BBC News. The facts are carefully explained in an excellent Wikipedia entry.

There are many extraordinary and indeed disturbing aspects of this tragedy, not least that Auvinen was on SSRI antidepressants (which, it is now thought, can lead to suicidal tendencies in teenagers), and that his murderous shooting spree happened just three weeks after getting a gun licence.

But also disturbing is the extent to which Auvinen’s obsession was publicly visible on the internet for a long time prior to the tragedy. The Wikipedia article gives details of a video posted to YouTube, hours before the shooting, announcing the massacre, and of other videos, posted earlier, showing an unhealthy interest in violent incidents, such as the Columbine High School massacre, the Waco Siege, and the Tokyo sarin gas attack. Auvenin even left a media package explaining his actions and his motives for the shooting. The Odd Culture website carries much of Auvinen’s own material, while The Trenchcoat Chronicals, which is fairly obsessed in its own way, has much to say about the Jokela tragedy and other school shootings.

It has now been revealed - thanks to a final report from the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation - that Auvenin also kept a diary. It shows, a Bureau press release states, that ‘Auvinen had started to plan the school shooting in March 2007 and given it the name ‘Main Strike’. The diary entries display the will and the plans of the perpetrator and their realisation as well as the possibility that the perpetrator himself could die in the incident. No traces were found in the investigation that an outsider would have read the diary.’

I don’t think the text of the diaries has been made public (at least not in English), but various extracts have made their way into news reports. WikiNews has these:
- ‘In the best case, this (attack) would create massive destruction and chaos, or even a revolution’;
- ‘In any case, I want this to be remembered forever. Maybe I'll even have a follower; after all, I am a super-person, almost God’;
- ‘kill as many of you bastards as possible’.