Paper short abstract:

The presentation explores the trope of childhood's end in the articulation of national and transnational positioning in regard to Ingria, Finland, and the Soviet Union in autobiographical memoirs of Ingrian-Finnish author, Juhani Konkka.

Paper long abstract:

Juhani Konkka (1904-1970) was an Ingrian-Finnish author and a translator of classic Russian literature who migrated from Ingria to Finland in the 1920s after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Ingrian Finns are a historical Finnish-speaking minority people of Russia descending from a Finnish population that migrated around the present-day city of Saint Petersburg during the 17th century. This presentation focuses on the trope of childhood's end - that is, growing from childhood to adulthood - in articulations of various spatial, societal, and symbolic borders and their crossings in autobiographical memoirs. By analyzing the two memoirs of Konkka, titled Kahden maailman rajalla (1939) [At the Border of Two Worlds] and Pietarin valot (1958) [The Lights of Saint Petersburg], from the perspective of the genres of bildungsroman and modern autobiography, the presentation discusses the trope of childhood's end as a figuration of temporal and spatial aspects related to human life and as a reflection of various societal and spatial transitions and mobilities. The presentation illustrates how Konkka uses the trope of childhood's end in the articulation of national and transnational belonging in regard to Ingria, Finland, and the Soviet Union.