As a geopolitically strategic and newly independent country recovering from the trauma of a civil war in 1918, the socio-cultural constraints on artistic freedom were considerable in Finland between the wars. Art and literature were to a varying extent connected to political projects on the left or the right. Leading critics played a key role in the negotiations between art, politics and ideology. Few artists or writers, however, adjusted uncritically to external ideological demands. Those that challenged the subordination of art to political agendas or the national imperative often relied on the accumulation of symbolic capital abroad.
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