The cozy world of the Moomin family

Eighty years have passed since Tuve Janson published the first story about the Moomini family. Moomins are a symbol of Finnish identity and cultural pride and one of the most famous literary characters in the world, primarily because of their love of nature, simplicity and the importance of community.

On the occasion of their birthday, the Embassy of Finland, together with the Children's Department of the City of Belgrade Library and the publishing house Kreativni centar, organized a workshop with first-grade students of the Belgrade school "Drinka Pavlović".

In "Vremen" from December 26, 2016, Jovana Prešić wrote that Tuve Jansen is one of the most successful children's writers, she is the winner of the highest recognition in that field - the "Hans Christian Andersen" Award, and her picture books have sold tens of millions of copies.

It was a war winter.

"It was the winter of the war in 1939. My work was at a standstill, it was pointless to create pictures. Perhaps it is understandable why I suddenly felt the need to write something that begins with - Once upon a time, once upon a time... What followed had to be a fairy tale, it was inevitable, but I respected myself and avoided princes, princesses and small children, and instead chose an angry creature with which I signed my drawings, and named it Mummy," she said. is Tuve Jansson's how the Moomins came to be.

Her Moomins drink, smoke, and sometimes swear, survive floods, active volcanoes and comet falls - they are not typical children's heroes. For them she created a world that was a comfort zone, tucked away, safe, full of airy clouds, lighthouses, trees and caves by the sea, a world of mystery, unpredictability and sensitivity.

That world was Tuva Jansson's personal struggle against depression caused by World War II.

She wrote the first and second of four books about the Moomin family and their friends in the shadow of war, and the motives of sadness due to the separation of families, refugees and the fear of bombs are evident in the titles themselves: The Moomin family and the great flood i The comet is coming..

"The war had a big impact on Tuva and her family. One of her brothers, Per Olov, was on the battlefield. They didn't know where she was, if she was okay, or if she was coming back," her longtime friend and biographer Bol Westin later said. Even then, in the forties of the last century, Tuve showed a feminist trait and a lack of adaptation to the society in which she lives: "This is a man's world. I see what will happen if I get married, I will either become a bad painter or a bad wife, and I don't want to have children only to be killed in a future war," she stated in one of her letters to a friend.

The ruby ​​must remain a secret.

In the same period, she is unhappy because she falls in love with a woman for the first time and realizes that she must not share that feeling with other people, either because of the law (homosexuality was considered a criminal offense in Finland until 1971), or because of widespread social prejudices. Again under the strong influence of events in his private life, the third book about the Moomin family was also created in that period - Finn Family Moomintroll (1948), in which the beautiful ruby ​​that the family finds must remain a secret, as a parallel to the secret lesbian love that the author feels at that moment.

The translation of that book into English marked the beginning of the popularity of the Moomin family, and the opportunity for Tuve Jansson to publish a new story once a week in comic form. The comics instantly became an instant hit, in the next two years they were published by 120 news outlets, and reached 12 million readers worldwide, which Tuve Jansson commented like this: "All I want is to live in peace, plant potatoes and dream."

A book about abandonment

We had to wait more than 20 years for a new Moomin book - short stories and comics were published in the meantime. That last Moomin book, Moominvally in November, is a melancholic story about the abandoned Moomin Valley that reflects feelings from the author's private life. This time, Tuve does not know how to deal with problems and grief: his mother's death happened at the same time as the book was written, so it is described as "a book about abandonment, adult orphanhood and living in spiritual solitude."

Tuve Janson never became popular in Serbia or the Balkans to the extent that it is in Western Europe or, for example, in Japan, although several of her books were translated here and a synchronized series of cartoons was broadcast.

Moomin with us

The Moomin comic strip was published in Yugoslavia between 1958 and 1961, in "Illustrated Politics". After that, it was not available in this area in written form until 2001, when, under the auspices of the Finnish Literary Information Center and the Swedish Cultural Center from Finland, five albums of Moomin comics were published in Serbian. Then novels were published Wizard's hat (People's Book) i The comet is coming. (Odyssey), and a picture book What happened then? The story of Moomin, Mimla and little Me (The Odyssey). In 2014, when Tuva Jansson's two great anniversaries were celebrated in the world - 100 years since her birth and 70 years since the publication of the first book about Moomin, a collection of comics about Moomin (Komiko) and a collection of stories were published in Serbia. Messages published by the Cultural Center Grad. The most read work of Tuva Jansson in our country is a novel for adults Year (The Odyssey).

"Cultural Center" published two years ago Adventures in Moomin's Valley Amanda Lee, a collection of nine stories based on the animated 3D series Moominvalley from 2019, which introduced viewers to warm and unusual characters from the fairy tale world of Moomin. After this, last year, the "Creative Center" also published a book New adventures in Moomin's Valley by the same author.