'We writers are, of course, all servants of the state,' an older colleague once remarked to me when I wondered why writers are often expected to represent not just literature but their country.      Finnish literature is, indeed, like our capital city, Helsinki: it was founded for administrative and governmental reasons. That is why it developed into such an important national monument.      Literature has lent credibility to the state as the common home of its citizens, and it has itself gained extra-literary support because the national story, history and identity would not exist without writers.      That, at least, has been the opinion of many writers, Finnish teachers, ministers of culture and other state workers. The literary canon is not merely an aesthetic construction, but also a political one: prose, in particular, has repeated the national survival story. The mirror has shown the ordinary Finnish person who is an important part of the national story: a pillar of national unity.      Väinö Linna is one of those who has enjoyed respect as a unifier of the nation: his trilogy of novels, Täällä Pohjantähden alla ('Here beneath the North Star',1959-62), depicted the trauma of the civil war of 1918, while another work, Tuntematon sotilas ('The unknown soldier'), chronicled the role of very different individuals in the common war against the Soviet Union of 1939-40. It was a book about dialects. From these was born a wide-screen image of the Finnish language, a nation which was ready to wage a common war.      In recent years, there has been great nostalgia for Linna: someone, after all, should write the great Finnish novel about a nation shattered by unemployment in the early 1990s. That novel would provide a one-to-one reflection of the current state of society. No new Linna has appeared, and for this reason there has been talk of the alienation of literature and the disappearance of its importance.      But perhaps literature has merely become literature. Although the literary canon has broadened and lost its importance to the state, relics have petrified in its reading habits. They are reflected in the canon, because writers naturally try to please their critics.      The most important relic of state-centred literature in criticism is the vulgar sociological mode of reading: the Finnish soul is still sought in literature, so that a clear mirror relationship is seen between society and literature. This is the easiest way of reading books: the aesthetic artifices of literature are transparent, and sociological processes can be seen in a clear way and yet with a human face. For this reason, realism is still a guarantee of quality. The aesthetic artifices of a bad book, on the other hand, are opaque; between the reader and the text's sociological message is noise, like a transmission disturbance.      Happily, it is not necessary to read literature merely through sociological eyes. It is not necessary for tradition to be monolithic and provincial, and there is no need to take an inimical attitude to foreign influences. It is only the skinheads who continue to shout in the streets: 'Finland for the Finns.'      The attitudes of the intelligentsia are more open.      Jyrki Kiiskinen      Editor-in-chief Top of page