Finland was a part of the Russian Empire from 1809 and the Napoleonic Wars to independence during the revolutions in 1917, but it had been a part of the Kingdom of Sweden for centuries before this. Composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) was born to a family from the Swedish-speaking minority. He became a committed patriot and learned the Finnish language, abandoned his law studies at Helsinki and devoted himself entirely to music. He was especially fascinated with Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala. From 1897 to the end of his life he was supported by the Finnish government as a national artist. His major tone poem Finlandia was written in 1899, but because of its nationalistic-sounding name it had to be renamed so as to avoid Russian censorship. Sibelius was original in his treatment of form and reworked the sonata form in novel ways, some of which were anticipated in the Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. He drew inspiration in his work from the Nordic landscape, as did the prominent Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto (1898-1976).

After the Mongols destroyed the city of Kiev in the thirteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded its territory to include parts of the former Kievan Rus. In 1385 it entered into a dynastic alliance with the Kingdom of Poland, which was deepened in 1569 and became the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The emerging Russian state, now centered on Moscow rather than Kiev, thus had to face a Polish rival in Slavic lands. The westward pressure of Russia was reasserted after 1613 under the new Romanov dynasty. Nicholas Ostler explains in Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World:

The French Interior Ministry has issued orders to the prefects not to communicate to the media the crime statistics for the nights of July 13-15. The cartoon at the top shows Marianne, the woman symbolizing the French Republic, watching the "official" weather report, “More sun tomorrow” it says, as it pours outside. Le Monde has a long article about the news blackout:

George Handlery about the week that was. From autocracy to democracy and through socialism back to dictatorship. Chauvinism can make heroes out of murderers. Virtue and the people’s dictatorship. The revised truth of malevolent systems. Visions, lies and servitude. The Lehman collapse and kindergarten stuff. About Sotomayor, Ricci and well sounding nonsense.
 
1. Women in Black. On July 11, this organization went on the street. Its relatives were slaughtered in Srebrenica when Yugoslavia dissolved. The action commemorated what is with some accuracy called the greatest mass murder of post-war Europe. In Belgrade, and this is the “good news”, Serbian civil rights organizations supported the march that memorialized the victims of extremists that claimed to have acted in behalf of Serbs. The onlookers cursed the marchers and the Moslem victims. Add loud approval of Mladic and Karadzic. Srebrenica’s victims should be remembered, while the sufferers of other massacres, whose memory is (PC!) suppressed, should not be forgotten. Nor shall we ignore that, until crimes can be converted into heroism and the victims into vermin not deserving to live, there will be no peace.

In an article published in Newsweek this week, William Underhill tells the magazine’s readers that “fears of a Muslim takeover [in Europe] are all wrong.”

The article was published one week after Muslim youths, during consecutive nights of rioting, torched hundreds of cars and burnt the entire business district of the French town of Firminy to the ground.

A critique of cultural relativism by an ethnologist and anthropologist of longstanding high repute, Robert B. Edgerton’s Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (1992) has implications not only for how one might evaluate the pre-modern, non-Western folk-societies (primitive societies) studied by professional ethnographers and anthropologists, but for how one might understand both institutions and social practices – and perhaps even political ones – more generally. Sick Societies provoked moderate controversy when it appeared, but probably few remember the book today. Nevertheless, Sick Societies deserves not to disappear into the oblivion of the library stacks. Revisiting it nearly twenty years later indeed holds promise of intellectual profit. Sick Societies might well be a meditation on culture urgently relevant to the current phase of the West’s seemingly interminable crisis at the end of the first decade of the Twenty-First Century.

George Handlery about the week that was. To Moscow with Love. Is one law for all “discrimination”? From autonomy to separatism. Criminal is what is not understood. Who to support? Conformity in culture and its rewards. Limited power is the test of lived democracy.
 
1. Obama in Moscow. In dealing with foreign cultures, it is crucial to know their MO and their assumptions. The liberal bias is that people shaped by other political systems are “like we are”. The related problem is that it becomes hard to accept that “looking in the eyes” of the other guy reveals little about his substance. What you see might be your own reflected image. Given the background of Obamists, the inclination to err in the direction of such projections is considerable. Regarding the Moscow visit, the problem is not the well-phrased intention to “reset” relations. The difficulty is that Obama operates under self-imposed pressure. He must bring home something that can be spinned as success.

The Austrian Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) was the most celebrated composer of his day, prolific in every medium, but best remembered for his numerous symphonies and string quartets, which established standards of form and quality that others emulated. “Haydn has been called ‘the father of the symphony,’ not because he invented the genre but because his symphonies set the pattern for later composers through their high quality, wide dissemination, and lasting appeal.” He was born in a village near the border of Hungary and became a choirboy at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna at the age of seven, where he acquired practical experience in music and learned signing, harpsichord and violin. He spent most of his career serving the Esterházy family, the most powerful Hungarian noble family. For years he was responsible for composing on demand at a prodigious rate, but this also allowed him the opportunity to experiment and to hear his music performed under excellent conditions.

The era from roughly 1600 to about 1750 has in retrospect been called the Baroque period in European history. The creativity among musicians during this age paralleled new ideas in science, politics and economics embodied in the Scientific Revolution. In art and architecture as well as in music, the Baroque began in Italy. Many great works of art had been made in Renaissance Italy, among them the Pietà sculpture in St. Peter’s Basilica and the decoration of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo and those created in the Vatican by Raphael.

The theatricality of the Baroque period’s art can be seen in the works of the Italian sculptor and architect Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), who served no less than eight popes in his lifetime. Bernini’s life-size marble sculpture of the Biblical David (1623) depicts movement in an entirely new way and hence looks more dramatic than Michelangelo’s masterly nude depiction David (1501-4). Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1645-52) in Rome is another of his greatest marble sculptures. His most famous architectural works include the design for the spectacular square in front of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Bernini was a deeply believing Roman Catholic who felt that the purpose of Christian art was to inspire the faithful.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama promised that he would “reboot America’s image” around the world. Indeed, many Americans who voted for Obama believed that his global popularity would somehow reverse the tide of anti-Americanism that so vexed his predecessor. Echoing this sentiment of Obama as saviour of America’s image abroad, presidential advisor David Axelrod recently asserted that “anti-Americanism isn’t cool anymore.”