Vladimir Fomin's Kalevala series includes about a hundred works -- graphics and oils on canvas.

Several works, which bear a common title, The Miraculous Transformation, represent the same subject -- creation of the world. According to the first rune of the epic, the daughter of the air, Ilmatar, tired of living alone in the realm of the air, descended to the sea and became the mother of the water. Hurting and cold, she implored the great god, Ukko, to help her. Suddenly, she saw a goldeneye. The duck was also alone and it was looking for a dwelling to make a nest. The following lines from Kalevala provide the leitmotiv for the paintings:

So then the mother of the water,
Mother of the water, virgin of the air,
Raised her knee from the sea,
Her shoulder blade from a billow,
For the goldeneye as a place for a nest,
As an agreeable dwelling place.*

Interpreting in his works the idea of the creation of the world, the artist draws inspiration from his belief that man is an inseparable part of the Universe and that his soul is eternal.

Fomin believes that man's soul belongs to the dry cosmos, while man himself dwells in the wet cosmos. Such division of space into the dry and wet cosmos was as natural for the ancient man, who understood that life without water is impossible and that he himself is just one wet creature among other wet creatures. However, when a man dies, his soul always goes back. That's how people live after death. They come from paradise and go to paradise. The dry cosmos is only an illusion of existence. You are eternal, you are limitless, and everything is possible. But nostalgia for the present never leaves the soul. This is why Ilmatar is also a symbol of yearning to leave a mark wherever possible. Such yearning is characteristic for a simple mortal who had been chosen.

The duck in The Miraculous Transformation represents an otherworldly power, which participates in the creation of the world. In the same way as the soul's yearning to become material allows it to return home -- to the wet cosmos, so the duck's help, described in the first rune, allows the main parts of the world become material:

The eggs do not get into the ooze,
The bits not get mixed up with the water.
The bits were turned into fine things,
The pieces into beautiful things:
The lower part of one egg into the earth beneath,
The top half of another egg into the heavens above.
The top half of one yolk gets to glow like the sun,
The top half of one white gets to gleam palely as the moon;
Any mottled things on an egg, those become stars in heaven,
Anything black on an egg, those indeed become clouds in the sky.

The creation subject is also present in the painting Ilmatar's Creation. The first rune describes how, amidst the watery expanses, the mother of the water performs her acts of creation:

Where she touched bottom with her foot,
She hollowed out deep spots for fish;
Where, moreover, bubbles came up,
There she deepened deep places.
She turned her side against the land;
There she made the coasts smooth;
She turned her feet against the land;
There she formed places to seine for salmon.

Fomin suggests that his Ilmatar's Creation can be interpreted as an artistic and topographic representation of the creative mission of Ilmatar. This idea finds its reflection in a distinctive composition, filled with conventional imagery. The future plots from the scenario, according to which the events in the epic Kalevala unfold, symbolically participate in the painting. Imagination allows one to see in some outlines the sunny village of Kalevala, the dark dwelling of the villains, Pohjola, and the island of love, where Lemminkainen seduced many maidens and women, upsetting the men so much that they wanted to kill him. Other heroes of Kalevala -- the bear, which Vainamoinen has to kill, and the pike, out of which he makes a kantele, are also included in the composition.

The imprint of Ilmatar is in itself a symbol of her creation, as well as a symbol of possibilities given to man to leave on earth (in the wet cosmos) his divine trace.

In the artist's interpretation, the mortal woman Aino becomes one of the metamorphoses of life, a running stream in its eternal flow, an always changing, but never disappearing part of it. Life itself is like a woman: tempting and slipping away; it becomes as much a heroine of the pictures Wandering Aino and Tapiolan immet as Aino herself. The first work was inspired by the thematically related lines from two different parts of the fourth rune:

Often now the thoughts of melancholy me,
Often those of the melancholy child
Walk about in the withered grass,
Crawl about in the grass, tumble about in bushes.
Then she set out to walk across one clearing, along the next;
She proceeded over fens, proceeded over fields,
proceeded through gloomy wildernesses.

Both paintings are executed in disturbing mystical tones. The colors seem to bring in the dusk and the lines convey the unfinished nature of the image of the girl's apparition. These are paintings-premonitions, paintings-predictions of fate. In contrast to the text of the Kalevala, in the painting cycle these themes seem to be brought to the fore and revealed. In the second painting's subject and composition one can recognize the work of a classic Finnish master, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, already reworked in Fomin's own manner, in lubok style, in the spirit of contemporary art. It is a gift from one artist to another.

The Kalevala series extensively depicts the pagan world, in which people and animals speak the same language.

Enchanted by the image of the hare, the sorrowful messenger from the fourth rune, the artist devoted to it the works Who Is to Bring the Word and The Carrier of the Word. Death, equated with this character, brings sadness. However, sadness is also a carrier of poetry. For that reason birth and death in the poem are so natural and poetic. Precisely they, birth and death, lie at the opposite ends of the circle called life.

It would seem that the hare is just an insignificant creature in the world of the forest, but in the poem the hare's news is quite important. By the will of the masters of the word and of the brush, in the epic and in Fomin's works, the role of this animal assumes tragic proportions. In the painting Who Is to Bring the Word, the hare seems to be hovering over the entire village, while the mother, lamenting the death of her drowned daughter, becomes just one of the little hills occupied by perching cuckoos -- the harbingers of the merciless time.

The Demon Elk with magical powers is the central character of the paintings He Runs After the Demon's Elk, The Young Demon's Elk, and After the Magic Demon's Elk. The first painting is based on the following lines from the thirteenth rune:

He skied after the elk;
But when he once gives a kick,
The left ski cracked at the strap,
The ski broke by the footplate,
The right ski broke off at the heel,
The spear-like pole broke off at the spike,
The ski pole at the disk.
The Demon's elk ran so fast
that there was no sign of its head at all.

The painting After the Magic Demon's Elk, captures the culminating moment of the magical hunt. Fulfilling the conditions set by the mistress of Pohjola, whose daughter Lemminkainen wants to marry despite many obstacles, the hunter does not give up on his prey. Using magic incantations and prayers, he assures his success. The inspiration for this work came from the lines in the fourteenth rune:

He skied one day, skied a second, now on the third day
he went to a big hill, got up on a big rock,
cast his eyes to the northwest, to the north across the fens.
Tapio's dwelling appeared…

The story of Lemminkainen's courtship of the daughter of the old woman Louhi continues in the painting Finally, Lemminkainen Holds the Demon's Colt. Like the previous one, this picture was also inspired by the lines in the fourteenth rune:

Ukko, creator on high, a god above the clouds,
Tore the sky to shreds, the vault of heaven in two.
Down came sleet, down came ice, down came iron hail
smaller than a horse's head, bigger than a man's head,
onto the mane of the good horse,
on the flanks of the Demon's horse with a blaze…

The Demon's brown horse, the Demon's foamy-jawed colt
pressed its golden mouth, thrust its silver head
into the golden ring-adorned bridle…

The image of the bear attracted the artist primarily by the refinement of its word portrait. Fomin devotes to this hero of the epic the painting entitled Bear, Apple of the Forest and gives the "honey-paws beauty" rounded shape, in accordance with the description in the forty-sixth rune. The inspiration for the other painting, My Bear, My Darling, is a fragment from the same rune:

Steadfast old Vainamoinen then encountered the bear;
He upset the satiny beds, overturned the lovely couches.
He says these words, made this remark:
Thanks be, God, be praised, sole Creator,
for having given me the bear as my share,
the gold of the wilderness as my booty.

The artist's depiction of the bear's birth in the painting with the same title is also based on the forty-sixth rune:

The bear was born, honey-paws given birth to
at the Moon's, in the womb of the Sun,
on the shoulders of the Great Bear,
at the virgin's of the air, at Nature's daughter.
A virgin was treading the border of the sky,
a maiden the heavenly pole;
she was walking along the edge of a cloud,
along the border of the heavens
in blue stockings, in parti-colored shoes with heels
with a basket of wool in her hand…

Man's animalistic evil principle is represented in the paintings Kullervo the Shepherd and The Wild Song (rune thirty three). Both works are a part of the same storyline; in one part the hero chases a herd of cattle into a marsh, and in the other transforms wild animals into a herd. The Wild Song is a song of revenge, while the painting The Spirited Steed Races, the Journey Speeds On (rune thirty five) is a picture-lament, a picture-return. It describes how Kullervo met his sister, how he seduced her without realizing who she was, and how she killed herself. This way, an answer to the end of one life is the end of another life; the all-devouring revenge returns to its point of departure.

The theme of the complex harmony with the world and nature reaches its apotheosis in the painting The Banquet in Kalevala (rune forty six). The unity of the inner and the outer, the desire to be happy and the actual experience of happiness are compositionally solved by placing the banquet inside the outlines of a bear. This is a continuation of an ancient custom of sacrifice, concluded with giving thanks to the god and to its victim traveling the incomprehensible loop of life. Fomin equates it with nature, happiness, and love.

The artist captured Vainamoinen, lamenting the death of his bride to be (the sister of Joukahainen) in the paintings The Crying Old Man, The Crying Vainamoinen, and Vaino the Fisherman.

Tears express the most real emotions. In the paintings they also express the old age, which kills all that is alive, regardless of how powerful it might be. In order to show the situation of Vainamoinen, described in the fifth rune, the artist employs an original composition. Depicting Vaino the Fisherman in the boat at the moment of his meeting with his beloved maiden-fish, Fomin places him in the middle of uncontrollable colorful funnel which symbolizes the eternal bustle of life. The approaching morning dawn also forms, not by chance, a funnel in the sky.

The artist's works, like fairy-tales of the world, accentuate the miracle, enchantment, metamorphosis, and circular motion. As in The Miraculous Transformation, here cosmos appears thanks to miraculous circular motion, miraculous energy, penetrating everything that is alive. In the same way Vainamoinen, created out of water like all the other mortals, abandons the earthly world and turns into something out of which he was born (The Birth of Vainamoinen according to the first rune).

But he has to carry his fate and his song (paintings Vainamoinen's Song and The Evening Song) through his entire life. Why in the fiftieth rune does he leave the people? "Perhaps," explains Fomin, "there was a moment of misunderstanding with the new generation of Kalevala. And perhaps his Great song is ending? Perhaps people no longer need the wise song of the old man? And he, born from the maiden Ilmatar, is the epitome of the real truth and sees farther than the others… Therefore, his song will sound as long as the creator of this world wants it to sound."

The hidden meaning of one of the largest works of the Kalevala series, On the Shoulders of a Dog of the Water (based on the fortieth rune), depends precisely on the fact that the power given to Vaino cannot be used by anyone else. The pike-kantele, which nobody else except Vaino can play, becomes in the painting an expressive and grotesque image. In the background, as if by analogy with the famous Last Supper, the thirteen hunters with Vaino in the middle are emphatically helpless.

In The Red Boat, the artist connected the image of Vainamoinen departing for a bride with the hero's song, the words of which could be imagined to sound like the lines from the eighteenth rune:

Wind, rock the vessel; wave, drive the ship
without rowing with fingers,
without disturbing the water's gleaming surface,
on the broad expanse of the sea,
on the wide open sea.

The symbolic painting, The Island of Love, based on the twenty-ninth rune, also deals with the power of love:

There the trees shone red, the trees red, the ground green,
the tall evergreen branches silvery, the heather-blooms gold.
There the hills were of mead…

Love is cosmic and self-contained; joys and sorrows alternate in it like in a circle. It is always an island, illuminated in the painting with golden tones and slightly muted with darker, cloudier colors.

One of the main miraculous themes -- creation through circular or spherical shapes -- found its reflection in the works devoted to the miraculous grinder, entitled The Birth of Sampo and Sampo. In those works there are many elements indicating motion, spinning, transformation, energy, which, according to the artist, stresses the connection of this miracle to life. The leitmotiv for the painting The Birth of Sampo comes from the lines in the tenth rune:

A crossbow poked out of the fire, a golden bow out of the glow,
a golden bow, a silver tip, a shaft ornamented with copper.
The crossbow is fine-looking but is not well-mannered:
everyday it demands a head, on a really good day two heads…
Now indeed the day after craftsman Ilmarinen
bent down to look at the bottom of his forge:
a boat pokes up out of the fire, a red craft out of the glow,
bow and stern adorned with gold, tholepins cast of copper.
The boat is fine-looking but is not well-mannered:
for no reason it would set out to war, needlessly go to battle…
Now on the third day craftsman Ilmarinen
bent down to look at the bottom of his forge:
a heifer pokes up out of the fire, a golden-horned one out of the glow,
on its shoulder is the constellation of the Great Bear, on its head the sun's disk.
The heifer is fine-looking but is not well-mannered:
in the forest it keeps lying down, keeps spilling milk on the ground…
Now on the fourth day craftsman Ilmarinen
bent down to look at the bottom of his forge:
a plow pokes up out of the fire, the blade of gold out of the glow,
blade of gold, shaft of copper, silver on the hilt.
The plow is fine-looking but is not well-mannered:
it plows up the community fields, furrows cultivated lands…
The winds blew and fanned the flames, the east wind blew, the west wind blew,
the south wind blew still more, the north wind roared loud.
It blew one day, blew a second, forthwith it blew a third day, too…
At the end of the third day craftsman Ilmarinen
bent down to look at the bottom of his forge:
he saw that a Sampo was being born, a lid of many colors forming…

The painting articulates the essential meaning of the text -- it tells about the forming of human consciousness. It claims that happiness, perhaps also understood as the very life in time, needs to acquire a tangible form and shape. Man develops his virtues and vices in time. Time is the condition of happiness' crystallization. The leading motif for the painting Sampo derives from the lines in the tenth rune:

Then the new Sampo ground away,
the lid of many colors went round and round;
it ground a binful in the dawn,
one binful of things to eat…

The artist considers happiness to be creation, work. That is the meaning of life on earth. One needs to work because dreams cannot be a substitute for actions.

In the painting The Old Woman Louhi Carrying Sampo to the Crag we again see the story of happiness. Happiness, like life, has its roots. And since happiness is always surrounded by evil, in the fifth rune Louhi steals from the people of Kalevala their most prized possession and buries Sampo's roots.

Consequently, in Fomin's paintings the old woman Louhi is slightly deformed, to make her even uglier, and is rendered in "horrifying colors." She represents the very unpredictability, fatalism, deforming conscience, that what makes the soul ugly. "She is," claims the artist, "the outer revelation of the darkness inside us. But even in her evil hands Sampo continues to work. Therefore, the painting shows the juxtaposition of creative and destructive forces." The same effect of juxtaposition and circular motion can be seen in the painting Louhi's Attack and the Destruction of Sampo, based on the forty-third rune.

It is not an accident that in the thirty ninth rune (which inspired the painting For Sampo to Sariola), the heroes of Kalevala set out in a boat to find happiness. Each of them dreams about his own happiness, but the search for individual happiness leads to the heroes' unity. "We all sit in one boat," says the artist. "And, what is most interesting," he adds, "the road is not getting shorter..."

Svetlana Gromova
Translated by Alexander Boguslawski