Shadows, war, and finding Moomin joy

The Moomins have been a beloved children’s series around the world for decades. And now these bright, whimsical, and colorful Finnish characters are starting to gain steam in America. Today on Throughline, the story of their creator and the tragic circumstances that gave them life. Guests: Boel Westin, professor emerita of literature at Stockholm University, and author of Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words Stina Ekblad, actor (as the voice of Tove Jansson) Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Abrams Books. Don't scramble for a knockout gift this holiday season. Give them the brand new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, Fight or Flight, available wherever books are sold.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  I'll also spin one.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  You, will you hold that?

• 0:16Speaker 03

  This is my niece Alma.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  What's your name?

• 0:20Speaker 01

  I'm Anna. I have a locket.

• 0:25Speaker 03

  And her ringlets bounce as she hops off my bed and toddles over to the closet.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  That's how we close the scene, we finding a book.

• 0:33Speaker 03

  Do you think there are books in there?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 0:36Speaker 03

  Alma is two and a half, and she loves to read.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  What books do you want to read?

• 0:44Speaker 03

  I swear, we go through probably 20 stories in a day. Books in English, books in Swedish. I want to read about the Moomin trolls.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  I want to read about this one.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Janrien Boken. Have you seen this book before?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Moomin.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Moomin is a round, bright white creature. He has a big, bulbous nose like a hippopotamus, but the rounded belly and stumpy legs of a teddy bear. His eyes are big and expressive.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  A little me.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  That's a little me.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  The irritable, yet happy little me lives in the Moomin house.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  My sister and I grew up with these characters, too. The Moomin troll is like a Nordic version of Winnie the Pooh.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  At last, it's spring.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  He lives in a bright blue tower of a house in a magical valley with his parents.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  I know the Moomin mom.

• 1:37Speaker 04

  Moomin mama, quickly.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  What's the matter?

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  And who's that?

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  The dad.

• 1:42Speaker 04

  Have you seen what the children are doing?

• 1:44Speaker 03

  And then there are his friends.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  What's Neve doing there? How's he doing?

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's sitting in a swing.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  It's a whole universe bursting with color, birdsong, fluffy clouds, and bright adventures. One I'm not sure I fully understood when I was Alma's age. There's a darkness, a frankness about what it means to be alive, to experience loss and loneliness, depression.

• 2:16Speaker 05

  I started writing the first Moomin story in 1938, when I was feeling depressed and scared of the bombing and wanted to get away from my gloomy thoughts to something else entirely. I crept into an unbelievable world where everything was natural and benign and possible.

• 2:44Speaker 06

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Until a few months ago, I had never heard the word Moomin. But after Throughline producer Sarah Wyman started talking about them in meetings, I started noticing them everywhere. They're on merch in American bookstores, in airports. This year was the summer of Moomin at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. These cute fairy tale-like characters are really beloved globally. And it turns out, they have a really dark backstory, one even Sarah didn't know about when she was growing up. So today on the show, I'm handing the mic over to Sarah to tell you the story of their creator who lived through something terrible,

• 3:27Speaker 06

  how her brain turned that traumatic experience into art, and finally, how that art has resonated with millions around the world.

• 3:39Speaker 07

  Hi, this is Victoria from South Fulton, Georgia. And you are listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. Support for NPR and the following message come from Legacy Box, preserving family stories by converting home movies, film, and slides into digital files. Co-founder Adam Baselager shares how this brought his own family closer.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  I think one of the magical moments of Legacy Box, for me personally, was being able to show my five-year-old son what dad was like when he was five. I just think that generational connection where you're like, dad was five, too, and, look, I was playing soccer just like you. That's a moment that is near and dear to my heart.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  Learn more at legacybox.com/NPR. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for a dirty air. No one voted for polluted water. That's why SELC is fighting back to defend the healthy environment

• 4:41Speaker 04

  everyone depends on, just as they've done for 40 years. Because clean air, clean water, and a healthy climate aren't political, they're fundamental. Learn more at SELC.org. This message comes from Bombas. Whether you're outdoors or just lounging around the house, cool weather calls for cozier footwear. Bombas makes the perfect slippers and shoes, built with smooth, premium suede, plush sherpa, and warm sheepskin shearling, all with layers of cloud-like cushioning. Perfect for staying in, stepping out, and keeping things cozy all season long. Visit B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash NPR and use code NPR for 20% off your first purchase.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Part one, Små trollen och den stora översvämningen. The Moomins and the Great Flood.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  Almost every day at this time, it's been rainy or overcast. And the last two days, a dense yellow mist rolled in from the sea to settle suffocatingly over us, obliterating everything.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  In summer, the sky off the coast of Finland is often a clear and light shade of blue. Wisps of clouds blow across it like a gauzy kitchen curtain fluttering lazily in the breeze. But in June 1941, a storm was brewing.

• 6:16Speaker 05

  The sky was as red as copper and the sea yellow-gray. A strange atmosphere of stillness and expectation over everything.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Tove Jansson was 26 years old, sitting inside a small wooden cabin surrounded by rustling pine trees and mossy rocks that sloped down to the cold sea. She pressed her forehead into her left hand and leaned over the sheet of paper in front of her, where in thick, looping cursive, she composed a letter.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  It's been a peculiar day. Ham and Fafan came out yesterday evening to celebrate midsummer. We had a lovely, happy evening, unpacking all the goodies they brought with them and letting all the glory of summer stream over us. How we've learned to enjoy everything these days.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Tove's dad, who everyone called Fafan, was a well-known sculptor. Her mom, Signa Hamarstien Jansson, or Ham for short, was a painter and the family's breadwinner. While Fafan worked on passion, somebody had to work on commission. In the summers, the whole family, Fafan, Ham, and their three kids, liked to come to this archipelago east of Helsinki. Fafan built himself a temporary studio, and he and his friends would sit and drink and talk late into the night. The Jansson parents treated their kids like artists from the moment they were born. They grew up around the smell of paint, breathing plaster dust in the air. Tove was the oldest, and she was headstrong and serious about her art.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Ham liked to sit with her at the kitchen table, the two of them illustrating and writing in tandem.

• 8:00Speaker 06

  Tove and her mom, Ham, she never really said mommy or mom. They were very, very close, nearly a sort of symbiosis.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  Boeal Vestin knew Tove Jansson personally. They met when Boeal was a grad student, and Tove eventually agreed to give her complete access to all of her journals and letters.

• 8:19Speaker 06

  She was quite small, not fragile, but she reminded me of a ballet dancer. She was absolutely charming. She had a laugh.

• 8:31Speaker 07

  I had a sort of capacity to make the other person relaxed, I think.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  As a young teenager, she wrote in her diary about how busy she was, keeping up on issues of her self-published magazine. By age 14, she'd illustrated her first real magazine cover. And now, at 26, where she sat jotting off a letter from the family's island cabin, Tove had already become an accomplished painter and political cartoonist.

• 9:00Speaker 05

  But in the background, there was a more palpable unease, a sense of waiting that was worsened by the mist. There's been alarm in the air everywhere.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  Everybody knows so much, and yet, nothing.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Talk of war was everywhere. It wasn't a matter of if, but when. In the island house, Tove and her family tried to tamp down their anxiety and enjoy the long summer days.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  But on June 22, the news they'd been waiting for came on the radio.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  The news has suddenly burst from Europe that Germany has declared war on Russia.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  In Finland, the Jansson family saw the writing on the wall. It was only a matter of time before Soviet bombers would cross the border for Finnish land.

• 9:55Speaker 05

  Papa just came in and said, "Well, that's it then." Nothing more was said. We just, each of us, went and got on with packing our own essentials.

• 10:08Speaker 07

  So they just had to pack. No one said anything. And I had to go by boat to Helsinki, and everything was happening very, very fast.

• 10:17Speaker 05

  We left the cottage with its fine array of flowers in every room and the rugs still down. Hum stayed completely calm and went round humming and talking about everyday things. But she was white, under the eyes.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  As the Janssons boxed up their summer plans, gave the blooming garden one last wistful look, Tove savored every detail, tucking them away for later.

• 10:44Speaker 05

  It took us several hours to toil through the woods with all our luggage, stopping for a rest now and then. It was hot, with mosquitoes, and so beautiful, white bog myrtle in all the marshes, new flowers coming into bloom. I had to turn round halfway and dash back for the ration carts, which I'd forgotten.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  At the jetty, where a boat would come to ferry them back to the mainland, other families were already sitting on hastily-packed suitcases.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  And now, here we sit, engaging in small talk and waiting. I haven't really taken it in yet.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  On that day, in late June 1941, as Tove Jansson stood on the deck of a boat and watched the Finnish archipelago grow smaller in its wake, maybe she was imprinting the day's events in her mind, zooming in on memories, like details in pictures, snapshots she might draw later.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  Russia has attacked Finland.

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  And it only took a few days for Soviet planes to rain down the bombs she'd been dreading.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  Churches are destroyed, the tall buildings broken, the streets filled with wreckage. This is the mark of warfare against women and children.

• 12:12Speaker 03

  Finland declared war on Russia. One of Tove's younger brothers was called to the front. And Tove, back in Helsinki, watched her small, proud country hurtle headfirst into a war it almost certainly could not win.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  Finland has not wanted a war, has not desired to be a threat to anyone. All the world has been deeply moved by the tragic yet noble story of a small nation fighting for its life. Long live Finland, up Finland, down with the aggressor.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  When World War II started, Finland, as an independent nation, only had a little more than two decades under its belt. And for Finns, like Tove Jansson's dad, memories of the war that cemented their nation's freedom still felt fresh.

• 12:58Speaker 07

  He had really experienced war, and he was quite damaged by the war.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Tove was just three years old when Finland declared its independence from Russia. And within months, her father had enlisted to defend that independence in a bloody civil war. Tens of thousands of Finns died in the conflict between the Russian-backed Communist Reds and the new Finnish government's so-called White Army. Viktor Jansson, Tove's dad, was vehemently anti-communist. He believed Finland's freedom rested on the outcome of this civil war. So while he went to the battlefront and wrote to his wife, he was prepared to, quote, "joyfully die for the cause." Three-year-old Tove and her mom evacuated to Hum's home country of Sweden.

• 13:44Speaker 07

  Because it was war in Finland, it was a chaotic time. And it was dangerous to be there.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  The war hardened Tove's father. Before, he'd been quick to laugh, with a glint in his eye.

• 13:56Speaker 07

  When he came back from the war, he was a very different, totally different person.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  He almost never laughed, and he detested the Russians and communism. So when World War II started and the Soviet Union sought an opportunity to take back some Finnish territory, patriots like Tove Jansson's dad were incensed and instead sided with the Nazis to protect Finland's borders. Finland had allowed German troops transit through the country to attack the Soviets. Other Finns, though, wanted no part of the conflict that was bubbling up around them and becoming more grim every day.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  Around me, here in Helsinki, I see houses falling together, houses burning in different parts of town, civilians killed in their homes, both grown and children. And Helsinki is not the only place in Finland.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  To the north, south, and east, Finland fended off surging attacks from Russia, and later, the Germans.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  For Finland, the notion of Axis versus Allies did not exist. It had to fight both sides. And for a country of only 4 million people, whose men had little military training, this was far from a fair matchup.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  But the Finns were crafty.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  And Finland's White Army has been conducting a brilliant form of guerrilla warfare. Practically invisible themselves and every man a marksman, these patrols steal silently over the snow to harass and demoralize the Reds.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  They skied alongside Russian tanks, chucking Molotov cocktails.

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  And the rest of the world took notice.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Finns are showing what can be accomplished by courage and a knowledge of the country against overwhelming superiority in men and resources. Watch these soldiers take cover.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  That was satisfying for the ragtag troops pestering the Russians. But at home, Tove Jansson stared at the doormat under her family's mail slot, waiting for news of her brother.

• 15:57Speaker 05

  We were worried when we didn't hear from him for so long. But then we got a letter saying he'd been sent north of Ladokka and was pushing forward to the front line through devastated villages full of dead bodies. It hit Hum terribly hard. She went up onto the roof terrace and refused to come down or eat.

• 16:22Speaker 05

  The tension in the family was awful, an atmosphere charged with political differences about to explode.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Tove's main confidant during the war was her friend Ieva Kolnikov, a Finnish-born Russian Jew who fled to Philadelphia. The two of them exchanged more than 100 letters.

• 16:41Speaker 05

  I'm so tired.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Tove did not share her father's political views. She saw Hitler and Stalin as two sides of the same authoritarian coin.

• 16:52Speaker 05

  Sometimes I feel a jolt of pure rage that really scares me. So I run to the studio and do some scrubbing or write verses, and then try to be as pleasant as I can in the evening.

• 17:09Speaker 07

  She did a lot of political drawings and satirical work.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Often for the Finnish political satire magazine, Garm, Tove's work was brazen. She drew Hitler as a spoiled baby mid tantrum, crying for more cake as world leaders sought to appease him. And then, she drew Stalin, exposed as a two-faced villain.

• 17:31Speaker 07

  They couldn't publish it, they were censored. She was not afraid to take sides. She was quite brave, I think.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  But privately, Tove was feeling more than righteous fury.

• 17:45Speaker 05

  I haven't the stamina to keep screaming inside for so long. I put it away, carry on working, but shrink from the things that bring the outside world up close. Newspapers, the radio, the phone, the newsreels. They churn up everything that's smoldering away deep inside.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  But my head isn't in the sand. I'm intensely aware at every moment, in every part of myself.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Tens of thousands of Finnish soldiers were dying in battle. Tove worried about her brother and her friends, who'd been called to enlist.

• 18:27Speaker 07

  She had to wait, wait all the time, wait for news, wait for a letter. She has often said that the war was the worst time.

• 18:35Speaker 05

  My life because everything became gray. She couldn't paint. The colors became gray and black. And they lost life, so to speak.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  As Tove struggled with depression, she returned again and again to the same image, a little figure who kept finding his way out of the tip of her pen.

• 18:55Speaker 05

  The first troll, it was quite thin and had a very thin nose, a thin body. And it was not in all this roundness that came up later on.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  The troll started popping up in Tove's illustrations for Gadim in the early 1940s. An impish little guy posing cheekily next to Tove's signature. Tove started calling him Moomin. He was an old friend of hers.

• 19:23Speaker 05

  She said it was her uncle in Stockholm who first talked about this movement. I mean troll. I read it in her diaries. She wrote it down when she was about 15.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  When she was a kid, Tove would sometimes sneak into the kitchen at night for a snack. And her uncle used to give her a hard time.

• 19:40Speaker 05

  And he said to her, you have to stop go through the kitchen and eat because there are Moomin trolls, some kind of ghosts or small creatures. You don't see them, but they are there. Quite spooky.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  And in the darkness of war, that spooky, mischievous little creature visited Tove again. This time, she embraced him.

• 20:01Speaker 05

  Perhaps it was understandable that I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with, "Once upon a time." What followed had to be a fairy tale. That was inevitable. But I excused myself with avoiding princes, princesses, and small children and chose instead my angry signature character and called him the Moomin Troll.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Across many pages, across the war-torn years, Tove drew a new world into being. With silky strokes of her pen, conjuring a mother and son, a Moomin troll and his mama, hand in hand. Tiny specks swallowed up by a vast, inky landscape.

• 20:51Speaker 05

  It must have been late in the afternoon, one day at the end of August, when Moomin Troll and his mother arrived at the deepest part of the great forest. It was completely quiet and so dim between the trees that it was as though twilight had already fallen.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Moomin and his mama have been forced to flee their home. They haven't heard from Moomin Papa since he was last seen marching off towards the horizon, not unlike Tove's brother, a soldier, and her father before him. Tove, meanwhile, sat alone in a cold apartment in Helsinki, where as she sketched her troll, air raid sirens sounded in the background. And she wondered whether any of them could really survive this.

• 21:35Speaker 05

  Little by little, Moomin Troll began to feel anxious. And he asked his mother in a whisper if she thought there were any dangerous creatures in there.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  And out of Tove's pen came a confidence she was struggling to summon in her real life.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  "I shouldn't think so," she said. "Though perhaps we'd better go a little faster anyway. But I hope we're so small that we won't be noticed if something dangerous should come along." Moomin Mama, she's determined that she's going to protect her child. They're going to make it. And she's also determined that they're going to find Moomin Papa. Everything is going to be OK. It's possible to get through this, even though she's also scared. The whole world is in chaos, a world where all that we thought best, found just and sound, is no longer venerated. And so much that we repudiate

• 22:36Speaker 05

  it has been raised to become the rule of law. I probably wouldn't write about all this if I weren't seriously attempting and even believed I would be able to make it through all this.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  When we come back, that angry signature character takes hold, transforming tragedy to inspiration and strength.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Hi, my name is Tim Berry. I'm calling from Charleston, South Carolina. And you're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 23:16Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for a dirty air. No one voted for polluted water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on, just as they've done for 40 years. Because clean air, clean water, and a healthy climate aren't political, they're fundamental. Learn more at selc.org. This message comes from Bombas, making shoes as cozy as slippers and slippers as comfy as clouds. Smooth suede, plush sherpa, cloud-like cushioning. Visit bombas.com/NPR

• 23:59Speaker 06

  for 20% off your first purchase.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics, proudly presenting the acclaimed new crime thriller, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. The Daily Beast raves, "A perfect crime film." John Turturro gives a career-best performance. Also starring Giancarlo Esposito, Tatiana Maslany, Will Price, and Steve Buscemi. See the film that the LA Times calls "Instantly Classic." Opens only in theaters October 23 in New York and Los Angeles. Nationwide, October 30.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Part two. Comet Jackden, Comet in Moominland. Tove Janssen wrote two Moomin books during the war, putting versions of her experiences on paper. The first story was about a flood. By the second, there were fireballs falling from the sky.

• 24:48Speaker 05

  "It would be a terrible thing if a comet hit the Earth. What would happen then?" whispered Sniff. "Everything would explode," said Moomin Troll gloomily. There was a long silence. Then Snafkin said slowly, "It would be awful if the Earth exploded. It's so beautiful." "And what about us?" said Sniff. There's something in the atmosphere, something unsecure.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Boelvestein wrote the first-ever doctoral thesis about the Moomin books.

• 25:22Speaker 05

  You don't know what's happening, but something is going to happen. Yes, of course, it's a metaphor, of course.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  Tiny Finland, its peaceful cities and countryside, are soon laid waste by the ravages of the giant bombers whose missiles rain death and destruction from the skies.

• 25:43Speaker 05

  It's 7:00 in the morning, and we are sitting in the air raid shelter feeling sleepy.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Just a few days after the Jansson family heard the radio transmission announcing Germany's invasion of Russia, Tove wrote to her friend Ieva from a bomb shelter in Helsinki.

• 25:59Speaker 05

  Terribly long air raid warning, this one. There are big bangs outside.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  Again, the Russian bombers zoom over Helsinki.

• 26:07Speaker 05

  I knocked slivers of glass out of the windows. Three more alarms.

• 26:12Speaker 04

  Just feel your own heart beating faster as you see the bombs explode.

• 26:17Speaker 05

  How nervous people are. How tattered and torn we have all become.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  During the day, Finns stood in line to collect food rations. Tove sold paintings to pay for tobacco and heating fuel. And all around her, families wondered if their country was still safe for their children. They wanted their kids out of there, the parents. When you sit there and you hear the bombs falling, how do you know what to do? So that was when Sweden opened its borders and told that we could send the kids there. Of course, they did. Some 70,000 Finnish children were sent away, mostly to Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, where they lived for months, sometimes years, with foster families. In oral history interviews,

• 27:08Speaker 03

  they remember evacuating villages that were on fire. Everything was burning around us. Running across frozen lakes, dressed to blend in so Russian planes wouldn't spot them. And we were, of course, then dressed in white sheets when we moved out onto the ice. They remember their mothers dropping them off at train stations, name tags around their necks, loaded into train cars with stiff wooden benches. I do remember that someone told me, "If you see reindeer and laps, you're probably on the Swedish side. Then you are safe." In their memories, the real is mixed with the fantastical. You hear horror mingle with wonder. It was a big adventure. Fear with courage.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  For a 90-year-old, 10-year-old kid, it was neat to get in new places and, you know, to see new things. Were you always scared or? No, not really. No? Yeah. I don't know.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Funny, I just get never scared of anything.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  Tove's family was being torn apart in a different way. Her dad, Vafan, was a Nazi sympathizer, and he and Tove were getting into it at the dinner table. She wrote to her friend Ieva in America.

• 28:24Speaker 05

  We've had the big clash that I've feared and expected for several years. This time, it's final. Vafan and I said outright that we hate each other. I feel very sorry for him, but I don't feel any guilt or sorrow or anything. I feel like a stone, damn the war.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Tove packed up her wardrobe, her inks, her paints and easel, even her ration cards, and she moved out, a decision she hoped would set her free.

• 28:57Speaker 05

  All of a sudden, I just knew I couldn't bear it any longer, not for a single hour. I knew part of me would break somehow, and I knew I'd never become a happy person or a good painter if I stayed.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  By late summer 1944, the Soviet Union was negotiating a ceasefire with Finland, promising to end one conflict and setting the stage for another with Germany. In Helsinki, Tove stood on a wide patch of sidewalk and tilted her head up. Towering over her were six stories of a light pink apartment building, and perched on top of them, like the lantern room of a lighthouse, was the studio. One of Tove's friends, another artist, had lived there before he was killed in the war, but now it was empty. Tove's footsteps echoed as she stepped out of the elevator and crossed the threshold into her new home. She saw it with an artist's eyes.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  The first time I came into the studio, there was an alarm, and the artillery gave me a salute, a welcome. I just stood and looked and was happy. The wind was coming in through the broken windows and chimneys, and big piles of rubble were lying under the cracks in the walls, 12 windows reaching out to the light and as high as a church. I planted my easel in the middle of the floor. I was utterly happy.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  Light reflected off the tall ceilings. There was a little loft where she could sleep, a nook where she could install a hot plate, and lots of open space for her to paint, draw, and store her collection of books and sculptures. But there was also no glass in the windows.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  It was damaged by the war.

• 30:47Speaker 05

  Large sections of the wall fallen down, stove and radiators wrecked, piles of mortar and cracks here and there because it's still not fully repaired after the bombing.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  She thought it was wonderful when she came in my studio, and it was very, very cold, so she had to have a big coat and boots on or so much she started painting. But it was heaven for her.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  This has been quite the ugliest year of the war, but now things are getting going again, and I'm full of confidence.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Tove was so inspired in this new space, she did not want to stop working. Even when fall turned into winter and the temperature dropped well below freezing, she burned peat and piled on coats to stay warm in the studio because it felt so good to keep filling the pages in front of her.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  She's writing her own life, so to speak. She never wrote an autobiography, but you can find herself in her books. She says somewhere that every painting, every drawing is a self-portrait, even on the Intervatuoportretta.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Even if it isn't a self-portrait. They were portraits of a society, too. As news headlines spelled out countries' threats to drop bigger, more destructive bombs on each other, Tove drew a comet falling from the sky and fantastical versions of the kinds of people around her.

• 32:22Speaker 05

  You always want adventures, Sniff, and when they come, you're so frightened you don't know what to do.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Like Muman's buddy Sniff, who was so scared that he just runs away.

• 32:32Speaker 05

  Well, I am not a lion, said Sniff reproachfully. I like small adventures, just the right size.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  The muskrat, whose doomsday chatter scares little kids and who lazes around in the hammock reading fatalist philosophy books. Or the snork.

• 32:49Speaker 05

  First of all, I elect myself president and secretary of this meeting.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Who self-medicates by scheduling a million meetings.

• 32:57Speaker 05

  Are there any objections? Nobody had any objections.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  But the Mumanstron, like Tove, is desperate for some agency, so he does what Tove cannot. He takes off on a grand expedition towards a tower on top of a faraway mountain where the experts, the people in charge, can give him some answers. But when Mumanstron and his friends finally get there, the scientists are barely willing to stop chain-smoking cigarettes long enough to talk to them.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  Is that the comet? He whispered. Yes, said the professor. When will it arrive? Asked Sniff, staring in fascinated curiosity at the little red spark through the telescope. According to my reckoning, it should hit the Earth on the 7th of October at 8:42 PM, possibly four seconds later, said the professor. And what will happen then? Asked Sniff. What will happen? Said the professor in surprise. Well, I hadn't thought about that, but I shall record the events in great detail. You may be sure.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  There are two sides of how to act. You could do it as a scientist. You could just study it, and then you don't think about what's just going to happen. But there are other sides, like Mumanstron and Sniff, trying to find how to go on living. I think that is also a theme through this book, that you can act in different ways when the catastrophe is coming. They want to live, and I want to find out how to do it.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  In the end, it's a near miss. The professor's math was off, and the comet whizzes over Muman Valley with mere inches to spare. The family takes refuge in a cave, along with a cake Muman Mama insisted on bringing along, because of course she did.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  They are quite funny. I mean, at the end, for example, when the comet really is coming, and they're trying to, well, we have time to eat our cake. And the cake has disappeared. Eventually, it's the muskrat who has been sitting in the cake, but they just remove some of his fur, and they are eating the cake. Anyway, and then just before the comet is coming.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  Tove Jansson's first language was Swedish. It's the language she wrote the Muman books in. And there's this expression, "Det somliva verforsia." It's kind of dark. It means, "He who lives will find out. Stick around, survive, and you'll see what happens next." Are these books about death?

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Death.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course, they are about the, I mean, we shall all die. But then, in the end, the life is coming back, so there is hope.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  By the spring of 1945, German troops had fully withdrawn from Finland. The wars were over. Tove saw the light in her studio change.

• 36:07Speaker 05

  In the sunshine, there's dripping on all my 14 window sills, and reflections of the sun are dancing around the whole tower. It's so nice here now, a profusion of colors and objects.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  And inside herself, Tove felt sparks of hope, an optimism that things could be different now, and an urge to let herself feel again.

• 36:36Speaker 05

  Before, all that mattered was for my pictures to live on when I was gone. That's important now, too, but more powerful than the longing to be great, to be famous, is the longing for joy, for happiness. I'm going to make up for those lost years many times over. They've been so dreadful, but now I don't want to think about them or write about them. I want to be, I will be, happy.

• 37:11Speaker 06

  When we come back, Tove chases joy, and in the process, her Muman's find fame at home and abroad.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  My name's Amanda. I'm calling from Portland, Maine, and you're listening to Throughline.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for a dirty air. No one voted for polluted water. That's why SELC is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on, just as they've done for 40 years. Because clean air, clean... Clean water and a healthy climate aren't political, they're fundamental. Learn more at S E L C dot org. This message comes from Bombas, making shoes as cozy as slippers and slippers as comfy as clouds. Smooth suede, plush sherpa, cloud-like cushioning. Visit B O M B A S dot com slash N P R for 20% off your first purchase.

• 38:16Speaker 00

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• 38:31Speaker 02

  Part three. Seint in November. Moomin Valley in November.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  Do you remember your father coming back from the war a different person? Yeah, it was quite clear that it had taken a lot out of him.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  He came home, but he lost his nerves there. He stopped drinking heavily and he had very bad dreams.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  Did he ever talk to you about it? You don't?

• 39:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  When the war ended, some of the kids who'd been sent away to foster families started to return to Finland. The country had changed, and they had too.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  So when my mother made a call at Christmas time, I didn't understand a word she was saying. She didn't understand a word I was saying. And she was crying her heart out on the other end, and I was just shrugging my shoulders.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  I remember somebody said, aren't you gonna cry? No, I'm a Fin.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  Roughly a quarter of Finnish children were now orphans, evacuees, refugees, or a combination. 30,000 had lost their fathers in the war. A post-war silence descended on Finland. It was a time for rebuilding, not processing.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  So what happened after the war? What were you doing? Everybody worked hard. It just, you know, things got better and I really, I think everybody did. So as long as there was work, we worked.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Tove Jansson was working too.

• 40:11Speaker 05

  Painting and thinking. Perhaps I shall be able to catch up so I can overtake myself. Perhaps I'm on entirely new paths and have passed my old latitude.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  In her rooftop studio, the light streamed in as she whipped up a torrent of new illustrations, wrote and wrote some more. And Tove felt something inside of her release.

• 40:36Speaker 05

  But oh, I feel such a strong urge to build. Work, home atmosphere, a relationship with another person I love. Before the war, I couldn't. During the war, I wasn't allowed to. Now I want to.

• 40:55Speaker 06

  She has so many stories inside her. She had just had to get it out. She has a great need of writing to get it out.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Boel Vestin is the author of the first authorized biography about Tove Jansson. And she says during this period, Tove wrote in her diary that she was so energized by the Moomin stories that she sometimes had to hide her manuscripts from herself so she could get other work done.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  I'm standing on my head today and am a proud Moomin squiggle maker. I'm longing to spread a new and happy forcefulness of color, bigger and simpler than before.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  Tove's first two Moomin books had not been an immediate success. The first one, which came out in 1945, only sold 219 copies after a year on the market. Tove's publisher called it a shelf warmer. The second one only improved on that number by a couple dozen. Her third book is in English, Fin Family Moomin Troll, Troll Karin's Hart. This is the story that makes her famous.

• 42:01Speaker 06

  It is.

• 42:03Speaker 06

  I mean, it's a book about happiness, like a long summer of freedom.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  To be blunt, there's one major difference between the first two Moomin books and the third one. The premise of Fin Family Moomin Troll makes it sound like a book that was actually written for kids. There's no floods, no fireballs falling from the sky, just a happy Moomin troll, his growing cast of weird and lovable friends and nonstop, low-stakes shenanigans.

• 42:33Speaker 06

  And the hemmubland, there's one hemmub featuring in this book. And he's very tired of the Moomin family.

• 42:41Speaker 06

  He wants peace, peace and quiet. And he says that everything is upside down since I came into the Moomin family. And then Snafkin says, but life is not peaceful. And I think this is some sort of key statement for this book. It's happy, but it's not peaceful.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  And even though Tove's third Moomin book is happy and summery, it also captures this other aspect of what it's like to come out on the other side of something terrible. There's a new character in this story, the grok.

• 43:15Speaker 05

  Suddenly, a cold breeze swept over the grass. The sun went behind a cloud and the garden looked dull.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  She looks like a dark gray ghost with beady eyes and sharp little teeth. She doesn't speak, but as she glides, she leaves a frozen trail behind her.

• 43:33Speaker 05

  She sat motionless on the sandy path at the bottom of the steps and stared at them with round, expressionless eyes. She was not particularly big and didn't look dangerous either, but you felt that she was terribly evil and would wait forever. And that was awful.

• 43:53Speaker 06

  She's the, not the enemy, but she's someone to be afraid of. With her, it comes quite a different atmosphere that is frightening and perhaps some kind of anxiety. Perhaps you're not just scared, in a way, perhaps you're facing yourself.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  Fin Family Moomin Troll was the first of Tove Jansson's books to get an English translation. And that helped it become a breakthrough on a totally different scale. Tove was not ready.

• 44:24Speaker 05

  I'm starting to feel out of my depth with all this Moomin business. There are constant interviews and book events. I make stupid mistakes in commercial agreements, which then have to be sorted out, and the whole thing gets out of hand.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  This level of attention was so over the top, it was baffling, even hilarious to her.

• 44:48Speaker 05

  The journalists are swarming like gray cats. And La Sopiste is singing Moomin songs on the radio.

• 45:01Speaker 05

  So by this point, he must be pretty much a social misfit.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  And the contracts kept coming.

• 45:11Speaker 05

  Including sheets of pictures for scrapbooks.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  For more books.

• 45:15Speaker 05

  Greeting cards.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  A TV series.

• 45:17Speaker 05

  Moomin houses.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  A comic strip in a British paper.

• 45:21Speaker 05

  Blankets, curtains, dress fabrics. I won't make you read through all the rest, but there are new products all the time. And it seems as if, well, I hadn't realized just how important TV is to people. It's incredible.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  While the Moomin world spread around the real world, from Europe to Japan, where it became an even bigger hit, Tove took refuge in her studio and on the Finnish archipelago. And as the years passed, the places and the people who inspired her became part of her stories. She and her dad reconciled, and she made sense of their relationship by writing about another version of him, Moomin Papa. The love of Tove's life, Tuliki Piatte, shows up as the wise and level-headed tutiki. And then there's Moomin Mama, who has a solution for every problem, who in many ways is the heart of the series.

• 46:18Speaker 06

  I mean, this Moomin Mama, she's Ham. They were close all their lives. I mean, they had the art and the illustrations and all that in common. But also they did things together and she was always there.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  But Ham was getting older. And after Tove's dad died in 1958, Ham came to stay with her daughter in the studio on weekends. She watched as Tove worked on new Moomin illustrations. She gave feedback on early drafts of the books. And she understood when Tove was ready to move on.

• 46:52Speaker 06

  There came a point, a time, when the Moomins were beginning to take over her life. And they became bigger and Bigger and then she wanted to do other things. She had rewritten books for adults a couple of years earlier, and she wanted to move on.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  Tove was commissioned to illustrate new versions of The Hobbit and Alice in Wonderland, and new projects piqued her interest. So, three decades after Tove Jansson started working on her first Moomin story, it was time to let Moomin Troll go.

• 47:25Speaker 05

  He has been such a release for me, but he's in the process of changing. I'm becoming unable to escape any longer to the security of my secret cave. It's beginning to shut me in.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  So, in 1970, as her mother was dying, Tove was busy working on what would be her final Moomin story, Moominland in November.

• 47:49Speaker 06

  The whole book is about saying goodbye. She's saying goodbye to Moomin Valley, and she also guides the readers to say, it's time to say goodbye.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Tove made a brave, kind of wild, choice with this last book. None of the main Moomin characters are in it, at all.

• 48:10Speaker 05

  Suddenly, Fillyjung dashed upstairs.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  As B and C plot characters from the other books start showing up at the Moomin house, they're surprised, angry, sad to find it totally empty.

• 48:24Speaker 05

  It was even chillier there, the kind of stagnant cold you find in a summer house that has been closed up for the winter. "Where are they? Where are they?" shouted Fillyjung. Tove dropped his book and crept against the wall. She smelt of fear. He said, "I don't know."

• 48:44Speaker 03

  If the earlier Moomin books can be read as stories of survival, how to really live amidst catastrophe and terror, this final book is a story about grief, how it warps your memories, how it changes the way you see the world around you.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  Tove's mom died in the summer of 1970, in a hospital near the islands where her family spent their summers. And when Tove returned to her island home after Ham was gone, it felt cold and alien to her.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  The summer continues as beautiful as ever, and work goes on. Today, there's a thick fog. All four windows are white, and the cottage seems to be sailing through empty space.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  It was the greatest loss of Tove's life. November in Moominland was published just a few months later.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  And then, Tove passed the torch to her company, Moomin Characters Oi Limited, who tell us, "We're in the business of passing on the flame." They're working on a Hollywood movie and looking for new ways to, quote, "breathe the new life into the very universal work of art created by Tove Jansson."

• 50:10Speaker 06

  I mean, the Moomins became, is her legacy. She knew that she would be remembered as the, I won't say the mother of the Moomin trolls, because I don't like that expression, but I think perhaps she wanted to be remembered as a great artist and a great human being, actually, because she was so very interesting. She's so, she's so complex, and she has written so many beautiful texts.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  Tove Jansson was a bestselling author, a trailblazing illustrator, a proud Finn who turned down Walt Disney when he asked for the exclusive rights to the word "Moomin", an artist who lived through a war and succeeded in building a life she loved afterwards. She could have written a great autobiography if she wanted to. During the war, she could have just drawn exactly what she saw happening outside her studio windows. It was exciting enough. Instead, Tove created a new world out of the most beautiful and most terrifying parts of her own reality. It's a world we can see ourselves in, but it's not our world. And maybe that's why the Moomin Valley endures.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  It captures something fundamental about how it feels to be alive and choose to live when everything is uncertain, and fear and wonder overwhelm in equal parts.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Tove Jansson spent the last decades of her life doing what she loved, living on an island, making art, writing letters, and new books.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  She died in 2001, at 86 years old.

• 51:59Speaker 05

  You've never seen the island as it looks now, tipping over into autumn. There are no bright colors out here to signal departure. They are simply erased, a withered tangle of grays and browns. The island shrinks and is somehow absorbed into the rain and sea, and the evenings are dramatic with their desolate sunsets and banks of cloud.

• 52:30Speaker 05

  The darkness on an island such as this is like standing at the end of the world, and all the night sounds are intensified, giving an impression of utter solitude. Suddenly, it's just the sea and vast, dramatic autumn skies.

• 52:53Speaker 05

  I'm not so Filifjungishly scared of catastrophes anymore, and I don't waste so much time on unproductive thoughts. So, we'll have to see where that takes us. Good night, and a big hug from your own Tove.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Rand Abdelfatah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and... Sarah Wyman.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Julia Redpath. Leanna Simstrom. Amy Padula. Molly Marcello.

• 53:43Speaker 05

  Lou Olkowski. Irene Noguchi.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. The actor Stina Aikblad performed excerpts from Tove Jansson's letters and diaries for this episode. Moomin excerpts were read by Karita Garcia. Those excerpts came from Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boal Vestin, translated by Sylvester Mozzarella. Letters from Tove, edited by Boal Vestin and Helen Svensson, translated by Sarah Deff. And The Moomins and the Great Flood, Comet in Moominland, Finn Family Moomin Troll, and Moominland in November, all by Tove Jansson, translated by David Macduff, Elizabeth Porch, and Kingsley Hart.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  You heard excerpts from oral history interviews from the Nordic American Voices collection, part of the National Nordic Museum. Special thanks to everyone who lent their support and expertise to this episode, including... Clarissa O'Reilly, Alden Denton, Dana Wyman, Christina Kim, and Casey Minor. At the National Nordic Museum, Laura Burgos, Siri Linz, and Marnie Freeland. At Tampere University, Tanya Vaticari and Auntie Malinen. And, Dorothee Palle, Renee Slot, Rakev Pack Media. Thanks also to Johannes Dergi, Josie Geto, and Jeff Leon. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  Music for this episode was composed by Hania Rani and Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. And finally, tell us about the kids' book that helped you make sense of the world. Was it The Moomins, another series? Write us at [email protected], or give us a call at 872-588-8805 and leave a voicemail. Don't forget to tell us your name, where you're calling from, and please say you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.

• 55:46Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Mint Mobile.

• 55:52Speaker 00

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