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from the time of Napoleon. It was Napoleon who, to bring pressure on Sweden, persuaded the Czar to annex Finland. Down near the South Harbor stand the prodigious Russian Orthodox Cathedral and, at the top of the St. Petersburg-like Senate Square, the pale-gray Lutheran Cathedral. Though raised as a Lutheran, I had never seen a Lutheran cathedral before, and was charmed by the unexpectedly austere and symmetrical interior—its bare walls, its box pews, and its square nave, which had at its four corners, counterclockwise, a cylindrical marble pulpit and statues respectively of Melanchthon, Luther, and Michael Agricola, whose translations from the Bible created literary Finnish much as Luther’s Bible established written German. Senate Square, rimmed by Italianate Empire façades housing government,university, and police offices, has in its center one of the few statues of a czar left standing anywhere in the world—of Alexander II, whose government granted Finland, organized as a grand duchy with its own language and institutions, more autonomy than had the Swedes. When, in 1917, the czarist regime in Russia collapsed, the Finnish Parliament declared first limited, and then total independence. In the course of a brief but bloody civil war between Reds and Whites, the Germans came in to help drive the Russians out. After the Winter War, Finland was dragged into World War II as a reluctant co-belligerent with the Germans; in 1944, as part of the terms of their separate truce with the Russians, the Finns were compelled to drive the Germans out, and they did, up through Lapland into Nazi-occupied Norway. Such are the shifts of keeping intact a small nation among mighty ones. As part of the price of their peace with the Soviet Union, the Finns paid immense reparations and ceded the long-disputed Karelian region west and north of Lake Ladoga, which meant that one in ten Finns had to be relocated, and that the homeland of the Finnish epic the
Kalevala
was lost.
    It is a fashion, now, in Scandinavian countries for blond girls to dye their hair shoe-polish black, and to dress in black jumpsuits, so they suggest a race of lissome trolls. Punk goes well with the mischievous Finnish looks. The English language sweeps in all day long, as English and American rock throbs over the radio and from restaurant walls, and as American television serials play, with subtitles, on state-run Finnish television. Whatever the makers of
Dallas
and
Dynasty
and
Falcon Crest
intended, it was probably not to give English lessons to millions of European children. This is, however, what such programs do. With a Swedish-speaking minority of about six percent, Finland is officially a bilingual country, and has signs in two languages, as Canada does; yet in its schools English has thumpingly replaced Swedish as the second language of choice. My publisher, Matti Snell, who knows Swedish as well as English and Russian and French and German, lamented to me that younger Finns can talk to the Swedes in English only, and that Finland is generally losing its old cultural contacts with the Continent, as the electronic winds blow in from London and Los Angeles. Three-quarters of the books used by college students are in the English language, and four-fifths of all works translated are American or English titles. American-style football, even, has caught on here, and the Finns were hosts of the European championships at the time of my five-day visit.
    On my last night, I was free in Helsinki, and took a looping trolley-carride that my guidebook had recommended, promising that it would return me to where I began. In my Finnish hat I sat disguised as a workaday passenger and let the city glide by. Some of the neighborhoods looked rather sullen, architecturally, but none of them looked poor, and there were streets that still had wooden houses, in the complicated gabled style. The trolley passed the stadium for the 1952 Olympic games, its entrance marked by a quite naked