Library Visit

In the late summer of 1993 I visited the city of Viipuri – also known as Vyborg, its Swedo-Russian name – with a Finnish friend. We had been to the city once before, a couple of years earlier, just after the fall of the Soviet Union, but had not stayed long. On this occasion we wanted to try to get some impression of the place from a Finnish perspective, to see if we could uncover at least a sense of what the city had been like back in the 1930s, before the Soviet takeover, when it still lay within Finnish territory and was the most important cultural and economic centre of Eastern Finland.

Walking around the city was a strange experience after Helsinki, for one could quite clearly see that there were many similarities between the two cities – in the layout of the streets, for example, in the art nouveau (Jugend) architecture and the marine view of islands and islets. Yet while Helsinki was bright and modern, a shining example of how to make and keep a city both stylish and comfortable, Viipuri looked sad and dilapidated: the paintwork and masonry on many of the houses and buildings was in a sorry state of disrepair, and the streets were scarred with cracks and potholes. Viipuri lost the last of its Finnish inhabitants in 1945-6, and all the shop-front signs and street signs were in Russian. Yet, if one half-closed one’s eyes, one could imagine the original Finnish names and signs.

The main purpose of our visit, though, was to see the exterior and interior of one of the two most important works by the Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto – Viipuri Library, which was completed in 1935. The other great and influential work of this period by Aalto is the Paimio Sanatorium near Turku in south-western Finland, and the two buildings are usually grouped together in studies of Aalto’s building design.

We soon found the library building, which is situated in a park in the centre of the city, but were rather taken aback by what we found. The structure was still standing and was clearly identifiable as the original Aalto work, though parts of it seemed to be sagging, and it bore an air of rust and neglect. In the post-war Soviet era, it had represented a genre of architecture that was frowned on and forbidden. It also stood as a symbol of a Finnish neighbour who was, to put it mildly, disliked. Some half-hearted renovation work on the building had begun in 1958, when it was decided to restore its municipal library function, but for some ten years it had been left open to the elements, and had lost most of its inner and outer surfaces, as well as much of the Aalto-designed furniture. As a historical account makes clear, “ the original function and layout of the library spaces were retained, as was the heating system. The renovation was carried out on the basis of old photographs and fragments found in the building. In those days, contact with Aalto's office in Finland was not possible.”

Going inside, we found while that some restoration work was going on in the central lending area, the Lecture Hall and side galleries were in a truly remarkable state of wreckage and disrepair, with wood fittings warped and sprung away from their fastenings, and chairs, desks and tables damaged and left at random, keeled over on the floor. The large, plate glass windows had been restored, however, and while there were leaks in the roof, the interior spaces did give one a sense that with some effort the interior could be brought back to something like its original condition.

It’s encouraging to see that this year – 2005 is the library’s 70th anniversary – the roof leaks have been fixed and the famous Lecture Hall has been restored, after a lengthy spell of work funded by a co-operative venture whose sponsors include the governments of Finland, Russia, Sweden and a number of institutions in other countries, including the U.S.A. Perhaps eventually the process of restoration will be extended to the rest of the city – though somehow it seems doubtful that this will happen while Viipuri and Karelia remain within the Russian Federation.

P.S. I should add that the prompting for this post came from reading Veronica Khokhlova's graphic and vivid account of her visit to Viipuri (Vyborg), published in 2004.