THE COMEDIANS

Author: Józef Ignacy Kraszewski
Year: 1968 (1854)
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Literackie Kraków
Language: Polish

Unknown heirs materialising at the reading of a will. Lovers discovering, at the worst possible moment, that they share a parent. Love triangles sustained by pride and silence. Scheming matriarchs. Secret debts. Broken promises delivered under chandeliers. Honour invoked hourly and violated daily. Tears, slaps, duels, declarations. Such are the dependable ingredients of the telenovela.

On the surface, “Komedianci” (not available in English but a translation might be “The Comedians”) by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski might appear to belong in that universe. There is pride. There is deceit. There are broken assurances and carefully staged appearances. A grand household presides over a web of obligations and resentments. The title itself suggests performance, artifice, theatricality.

And yet Kraszewski is not interested in melodrama for its own sake. He is interested in structure. Where the telenovela thrives on sensationalism, “Komedianci” is concerned with the slow burn of social hypocrisy. Its drama does not hinge on blood ties unexpectedly rearranged but on credit extended too far. Its climaxes are not interrupted weddings but the sudden implosions of reputation that they trigger.

Set in the 19^th century Volhynian countryside among the rural szlachta, the novel dissects a social world built on land, lineage, and mutual dependence. At its centre stands the Dendera family, aristocratic in demeanour and confident in entitlement. They perform generosity with elegance. They host, flatter, and cultivate admiration. Around them lesser landowners orbit like satellites, eager for recognition and proximity to prestige.

If this were a telenovela, Count Dendera and his family would be unambiguous villains, their downfall punctuated by confession and disgrace. Kraszewski is subtler. The aristocrats are not scheming conspirators. They are embodiments of a class that has come to confuse appearance with substance. They believe in their own performance. That is precisely their weakness.

The metaphor of the stage governs the novel. Social life is theatre, rank is costume, courtesy is choreography. But unlike melodrama where performance heightens truth, here performance obscures it. The Dendera estate becomes a set on which aristocratic virtue is acted out while, behind the scenes, economic reality deteriorates.

Kraszewski’s insight is that exploitation need not be dramatic to be devastating. The Denderas do not ruin their neighbours through a single spectacular betrayal, nor do they in essence aim to do so. Rather, they draw upon their trust incrementally by extending loans, assuming obligations, grant deference, and avoid payments. Each gesture appears small. Collectively, they amount to extraction.

The surrounding community is not innocent in the way a betrayed heroine might be. The lesser szlachta participates in the illusion. They want to believe in the Count’s grandeur because that belief reflects well on them. Association with high nobility confers symbolic capital. Reputation becomes collateral. In this sense, “Komedianci” offers a more unsettling message than any melodrama: deception persists because it is mutually convenient.

When Count Dendera’s true position finally comes to light, the revelation lacks the thunderclap theatrics of serialised television. There is no shocking revelation of secret parentage, no courtroom confession. Instead, there is gradual exposure, the quiet, devastating recognition that the performance has outstripped reality. Financial and moral insolvency converge.

For modern readers, the novel feels unexpectedly contemporary. We, too, inhabit a world rich in performance but poor in productivity. Personal branding and curated identities are valued higher than industriousness and hard work. As of early 2025, Tesla’s market cap was higher than the next 15 car producers, including Volkswagen, Toyota, General Motors, Ford and Daimler Benz, combined despite producing less than 15% of the amount of vehicles that Toyota alone did that year.   reputational management. To a banker in particular, Count Dendera’s complacency and sense of entitlement will bear an eerie resemblance to the events preceding the collapse of the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008. “Komedianci” reminds us that the temptation to substitute optics for substance seems perennial.

If I may have one remark about this book, it is that it somewhat obscures who the main characters of the novel are going to be. While the first of the novel’s four parts centres around one of the orbiting szlachta noblemen, the mellow but shrewd Cavalry Captain Kurdesz, subsequent parts see his importance fading, and the narrative arc increasingly requiring the reader’s investment to shift to other characters. Once, the recalibration has been finalised, the story continues to flow smoothly.

In the end, I am a bit surprised that this novel has not found a larger audience because, much like a telenovela, this is a most supremely entertaining story. Yet while a telenovela resolves itself through catharsis, Kraszewski offers something more sober. He demonstrates that exposure does not restore innocence; it restores proportion. The social order survives, chastened. Illusion yields to reality, not with fireworks, but with consequence. Sooner or later, the stage set gives way, and the comedians find themselves without a script. In that unguarded moment, the illusion breaks, and the telenovela that has been the comedians’ life all along embarks on its final season.

THE LITTLE PRINCE

Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Year: 1952 (1943)
Publisher: Rabén & Sjögren
Language: Swedish (translator Gunvor Bang)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Lille prinsen” (“The Little Prince”) is often, correctly or not, classified as a children’s book, a categorisation that itself reproduces one of the central faults the text quietly dismantles: the adult tendency to sort meaning into rigid taxonomies that obscure lived experience. Beneath its deceptively simple narrative lies a potent ethnography of adulthood, observed through the eyes of a child positioned as The Other within the dominant social order of grown-ups.

The main character, in social anthropological sense, functions as an etic observer. He moves between worlds, asteroids, deserts, and human institutions, and interacts with their respective societies without fully belonging to any of them. In the adult world, he is systematically misconstrued. Adults interpret through institutionalised parameters: numbers, ownership, rank, productivity. The child, by contrast, operates with relational epistemologies: care, curiosity, attachment, and presence. This mismatch renders the child an outsider, not because of juniority, but because of incompatibility.

The grown-ups Saint-Exupéry depicts are not individualised characters so much as social types. The king, the businessman, the geographer, and the lamp lighter are caricatures of actors captured in their roles. These are all people who have mistaken symbolic systems for reality itself and whose identities have consequently collapsed into their functions. Their lives are governed by what I call “self-imposed futility”: activities sustained not because they generate meaning, but because they reproduce the illusion of purpose. The businessman counts stars he can never use; the geographer records landscapes he has never seen.

Self-imposed futility resembles what Sartre called “mauvaise foi” or “bad faith”, but while self-imposed futility proposes to name a collective condition in which people inhabit empty roles sustained by social norms rather than lived meaning, mauvaise foi is the individual’s conscious self-deception that denies personal freedom by mistaking role for destiny. Both diagnose role capture, but Sartre moralises it whereas Saint-Exupéry anthropologises it, as it were.

Another concept akin to self-imposed futility is the Marxist notion of “estrangement” which describes how people can become disconnected from the fruit of their labour, and by extension from their context in society, which may lead to apathy and nihilism. However, in the most basic Marxist understanding this alienation is experienced, whereas self-imposed futility, I submit, encapsulates the continuous illusion of meaning into a state of the subconscious.  

What makes “Lille Prinsen” remarkable is that it, kills two birds with one stone, without announcing its didacticism. First, it reassures the child reader that they do not need to understand, or envy for that matter, the adult world. The book subtly delegitimises adult norms by revealing their arbitrariness. Children that are used to hearing “you will understand when you grow older” may find this refreshingly liberating as it legitimises not only their childhood, but also their worldview. Childhood here is not a preparatory stage but a fully realised cultural environment with its own logic and value system.

Second, the book offers grown-ups a mirror that is gentle but unsparing. By adopting the child’s point of view, Saint-Exupéry uncloaks adult practices, making them visible as odd, ritualised, and absurd. This is a classic ethnographic manoeuvre, externalising the familiar allowing for outside scrutiny. The result is an invitation for adults to recognise the arbitrariness of their life choices and the ways they have normalised nonsense in the name of seriousness. In Millennial vernacular: adulting.

Crucially, the text resists nostalgia. It does not argue that children are purer or morally superior. Instead, it suggests that adulthood often involves a narrowing of perception, a loss of interpretive plurality. The tragedy is not growing up per se, but forgetting that other ways of being remain possible. The little prince does not reject adulthood. He simply refuses to normalise it. Being an adult, he teaches us, does not have to follow a pattern. We could choose to break the routine, but we have grown blind to that option. And even if we saw it, having forgotten what it is like to be a child, we would no longer grasp the value of it. We are victims of self-imposed futility.

In the end, “Lille Prinsen” endures because it operates simultaneously as a fable, a philosophical critique, and a soft ethnography of modern life. It speaks to children without condescension and to adults without accusation. By positioning the child as The Other, Saint-Exupéry exposes how adulthood, far from being an inevitable norm, is itself a culturally specific, and perhaps questionable, way of organising existence.

KALEVALA

Author: Elias Lönnrot
Year: 2001 (1849)
Publisher: Atlantis bokförlag
Language: Swedish (översättare Lars Huldén and Mats Huldén)

It is easy to fall into the trap of reading “Kalevala”, compiled by Elias Lönnrot in the nineteenth century from oral traditions throughout the Finnish heartland, as a national epic in the heroic tradition of Homer or Virgil. Yet the key to understanding this work, seems to be the realisation that its virtue lies not in grand heroics but in the realistic representation of human frailty, contumacy, and recklessness. The three central figures, Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäinen are not heroic in any conventional, triumphant sense. Their pedestrian habits, repeated failures, and moral ambiguities form a mirror of Finnish cultural self-understanding and of a folklore tradition that values endurance, craft, and restraint over glory.

Väinämöinen, the nominally supreme hero, is defined not by martial prowess but by experience, song, and verbal skill. He is a singer and a seer, whose power is manifested in words carefully remembered, spoken, or sung. Even so, he is hardly idealised. Väinämöinen is stubborn, prideful, and often slow to adapt. His wisdom does not prevent him from making errors, nor does it grant him control over events. He loses contests, fails in courtship, and ultimately departs not in victory but in resignation. This portrayal resists the epic convention of heroic ascent; instead, it emphasises the limitations of knowledge and the inconspicuous dignity of persistence. Väinämöinen’s authority is provisional, rooted in experience rather than domination, and this modesty resonates with a cultural ethos that values patience and tacit understanding over spectacle.

The smith Ilmarinen embodies another deeply unglamorous form of excellence: labour. His defining achievement, the forging of Sampo, is not an act of conquest but of skilled craftsmanship carried out at great personal cost and against his will. Ilmarinen is diligent, reliable, and technically brilliant, yet emotionally inarticulate and unlucky in love. He forges wonders but cannot secure happiness for himself. His exploits in love end in death or bitterness, and his attempts to repair loss only underline the limits of craft as a solution to human grief. In Ilmarinen, “Kalevala” elevates work and technical competence while declining to romanticise them. Creation is necessary and valuable, but it does not legitimise existence or guarantee fulfilment. This sober view of labour aligns closely with Finnish folklore’s emphasis on work as a duty rather than a path to excellence.

Lemminkäinen, by contrast, appears at first glance to be the most conventional hero: youthful, handsome, adventurous, and impulsive. Yet his narrative arc is a sustained critique of reckless bravado. Lemminkäinen ignores warnings, provokes needless conflicts, and pursues honour without reflection. His death in Tuonela is not tragic heroism but the predictable outcome of carelessness. Even his resurrection, accomplished through his mother’s painstaking labour rather than his own merit, reinforces the poem’s scepticism toward individual glory. Lemminkäinen survives, but he does not mature. He remains a cautionary figure whose energy lacks direction. Through him, “Kalevala” suggests that courage without judgment is not admirable but dangerous, and that survival often depends on communal care rather than personal valour.

Taken together, I find that these figures articulate a vision of humanity grounded in limitations. None of the heroes achieves lasting success, moral purity, or final victory. Their world is governed by scarcity, weather, and fate, not by destiny shaped through will alone. There are no castles, only farms. There are no monsters, only forest animals and evil humans. There are deities, most prominently Ukko, the father of all gods, but they play a minor role and, much like forces of nature, show no sign of any will of their own. Conflicts in “Kalevala” are rarely resolved cleanly; instead, they fade, fracture, fluctuate, and rely largely on coincidence. This narrative texture reflects a folklore tradition shaped by harsh environments and long historical marginality, where survival depended less on conquest than on adaptability and cooperation. “Kalevala’s” heroes are thus not ideals to emulate but companions in endurance; figures whose flaws make them recognisable rather than exemplary.

The poem’s geography further underscores this mundane perspective. While “Kalevala” is rich in spatial imagination, moving between Kaleva, Pohjola, Tuonela, and distant lands, it is notable for what it omits. As a Swede, I am made aware that despite its long political and cultural dominance over Finland, Sweden is conspicuously absent from this work. By contrast, regions to the east and south are more readily invoked, and I noted references that point toward Russia and even Germany as part of a wider mythic horizon. Russia symbolises distance. Germany luxury and flair. This asymmetry is striking. The stories were collected in a time where Finland was still recovering from its violent and sudden decoupling from the Swedish realm, which it had been a part of for 800 years, and yet, Sweden is neither idealised nor demonised. It is, much to my surprise, completely ignored.

I choose to read the silence regarding Sweden not as ignorance but as a meaningful absence: an epic drawn from vernacular tradition does not centre on imperial power but instead maps a world defined by trade, rumour, and cultural contact beyond official authority. At the time Elias Lönnrot collected his stories in the mid-19^th century, Karelia in the easternmost parts of Finland was considered the heart of Finland, and the farther west he travelled, the less genuine and more “swedenised” he may have perceived the people and the lands. In this sense, “Kalevala” reflects a folk worldview that resists dominant narratives and preserves its autonomy through curated collective memory. Russia and Germany never threatened to pollute Finnishness and so reference to these lands may have appeared safe.

On a final note, despite the ostensibly chronological storyline and recurring heroes, I propose that each of the 50 songs is best read in isolation. Each carries its own secret and its own message. The songs sometimes interact with one another, and jointly describe a chain of events, and yet there are logical gaps and plot holes everywhere. One soon learns to overlook them.

There is infinitely more to say about this curious work, and scholarly coverage continues to develop, not only in Finland but around the world. Ultimately though, “Kalevala” is an epic of restraint. Its heroes are weary, flawed, and often morally weak; its values are practical rather than transcendent. By refusing the consolations of heroic triumph, the poem offers something rarer: a meditation on how ordinary virtues such as skill, patience, care, and memory, sustain life in an indifferent world. In this way, the non-heroic qualities of Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäinen are not shortcomings but the very substance of the epic’s wisdom and a peephole into the Finnish soul. I can only fantasise about what the 50 songs must sound like to a Finnish ear in their original tongue.