A reflection on Olivier Norek’s historical novel and the wartime Finland that shaped Tove Jansson

“War often takes us by surprise, and there has to be a first death on our land for us to truly believe in it.”
– Olivier Norek (July 2025)

This isn’t the sort of story I would normally choose to read before drifting off to sleep at night. Planet Paula is a humdrumish sort of place, with creaking TBR piles as far as the eye can see and ‘too many books, not enough bloody time’¹ in the day to go out looking for a fight, so this is one book that certainly wouldn’t have ambushed me on my way through the library. Not that I’m especially averse to military‑themed historical novels, but there are titles enough on my shelves already jostling for attention. Nevertheless, since commencing Reading Around Tove as part of my ongoing Tove Trove project, I have begun diving into a diverse (for me) assortment of literature – fiction, non‑fiction, poetry, journals, newspapers, you name it – on subjects and by writers that would otherwise have passed me by. And, somewhat surprisingly, I’m rather enjoying the experience. 

So, why The Winter Warriors, and what is its connection to Tove Jansson? The simple answer is that the novel is set during the Russo‑Finnish, or Winter War – a short but significant conflict fought from 30^th November 1939 to 13^th March 1940 – during which Jansson and her family were living and working in Helsinki. She knew young men who were sent to the front, and the capital endured repeated air‑raid alarms and bombing, making it a dark and anxious period in her life when viewed within the wider context of the Second World War.

It is well documented that Tove was frightened, depressed and creatively blocked during this period. In a letter to her close friend, the photographer Eva Konikoff,² written in the immediate aftermath of the Winter War, she said that it had “destroyed [her] pleasure in [her] painting”, explaining that she had been unable to paint for many months because the anxiety had drained her of inspiration.

It was with this knowledge that I embarked on reading Olivier Norek’s excellent novel, hoping to gain a deeper sense of how the Winter War shaped the lives of ordinary Finns and, by extension, the artist and writer Tove Jansson. 

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“You’ve no doubt heard of Hell. It is the same here. But not even the Devil would understand what is happening here.”
– Soldier Tšurkin, 150^th Infantry Division, Soviet Army³

If, like me, you were only vaguely aware of the Winter War – the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland on 30^th November 1939, during what the wider world came to call the Phoney War⁴, you may well wonder why this David‑and‑Goliath conflict remains so little known, despite the 150,000–195,000 lives lost, including around one thousand Finnish civilians.

Finland was part of the Russian Empire from 1809 until 1917⁵ – before that it had belonged to Sweden for six centuries⁶ and only gained full independence at the end of the First World War, following the collapse of the Tsarist regime. After the Finnish Civil War and the October Revolution, Russians were widely associated with Communism and Finno‑Soviet relations in the interwar years remained tense.

When Stalin’s Soviet Union invaded Finland three months after the outbreak of the Second World War, demanding that the Finns cede substantial border territories in exchange for land elsewhere (ostensibly for the protection of Leningrad), Helsinki refused. The Soviets then set out to conquer the whole country, assuming their superior military strength would make it a swift operation. Instead, Finland’s hastily assembled, ill‑equipped army mounted a remarkable defence, and the Red Army suffered severe losses. The Soviet leader was spectacularly humiliated.

We are told⁷ that Joseph Stalin’s Red Army were “the largest in the world” and that they “swept through this neutral, poorly armed nation,” deluging it with twenty million shells – to the extent that the “Earth almost cracked in two when Russia pounded its crust in the same place day after day for more than a hundred days.” There were a “million Red Army soldiers against workers and peasants”, but as we know from past and present conflicts, “it takes five soldiers to face a single man fighting for his land, his home country and his own people,” his “hands clutching his carbine, a sentinel behind the door of his barricaded farm.”

In a brief author’s note of dedication⁸ at the start of the book, Norek tells us that while this is a novel, “the passages of dialogue often come from archives or have been provided by enthusiasts, military sources and historians.” He explains that “none of the battle scenes have been invented. No act of bravery has been exaggerated.” And although “these events will soon have taken place a century ago, they point us to contemporary history and serve as a warning.”

“At the heart of the harshest of its winters, at the heart of the bloodiest war in history, Finland saw the birth of a legend.”
– Olivier Norek⁹

Central to the narrative is a young man from southern Finland who, until hostilities broke out, was a simple farmer and a volunteer militiaman in the Civil Guard. Known for his exceptional accuracy and success in shooting competitions – indeed, it was said he was able to estimate distances up to 150 m (490 ft) within a margin of error of 1 m (3 ft 3 in)¹⁰ – he was sent to the front with the 6th Company of Infantry Regiment 34. There, he is believed to have killed over 500 enemy soldiers with his Finnish‑produced M/28‑30 rifle (the highest number of sniper kills in any major war) before being severely wounded in action. The legend that was Simo Häyhä (1905–2002), known to friends and foe as the White Death, is now thought to be the deadliest sniper in history.

“Without Simo’s courage, […] nobody can imagine what Europe or the world would be like today, nor what forces would hold power. Nobody in our day really knows how much we owe to the Finnish soldiers of the Winter War.”
– Olivier Norek (‘First Epilogue’)

In an interview with Georgina Godwin for Monocle, Norek says that when he “visited [Finland] after the book’s publication, [he] was received by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” All his bookshop signings were full to capacity and, during his stay, he “heard the Finnish president say that there was a book written by a French author that everyone must read.” He describes the experience as “incredible.”

By using historical characters to portray the horrors of trench warfare in temperatures of between –30 °C and –50 °C¹¹, this compelling novel brings its cast vividly to life – from the frontline soldiers and the Finnish Commander‑in‑Chief, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, to the morally bankrupt political officers of the Soviet army (unperturbed by shooting their own men when they consider it necessary), such as foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov.

Both harrowing and deeply moving, The Winter Warriors proved to be my ideal introduction to a war the world forgot. When Norek tells us that “the Finnish capital was plunged into Hell” as twelve Russian aircraft “dropped 100 kilos of bombs [on Helsinki] – that is, more than seven tonnes of incendiaries”, swiftly reducing whole neighbourhoods to ashes – I understand why Tove Jansson was traumatised to such an extent that she almost stopped functioning. I also fully intend to explore this dark part of European history further and in greater detail.

“Rivers of fire ran down the streets of the Finnish capital. Where before there had been air, now there were flames.”¹²

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My hardback copy of The Winter Warriors was purchased recently from Blackwell’s. It runs to 352 pages; the jacket was designed by Libanus Press, and the book was published by Open Borders Press in 2025, in a translation from the French by Nick Caistor.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

The French writer and screenwriter Olivier Norek, a former captain of the judicial police in Seine‑Saint‑Denis, was born in Toulouse in 1975. He is best known for crime novels that tackle politically and socially engaged themes.The Winter Warriors (Les Guerriers de l’hiver) was his first work of what is known in France as ‘white literature’.

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USEFUL LINKS 

• AnnaBookBel: The Winter Warriers by Olivier Norek – blog tour (Annabel Gaskell, 22 September 2025)
• BookBlast: The Winter Warriors Olivier Norek Review (Georgia de Chamberet, 14 September 2025)
• Finland at War: Decorations of Finland – Winter War Campaign Crosses 
• The Irish Times: An imagination shaped by war (Eileen Battersby, 9 August 2014)
• Moomin: The shadow of war in the first Moomin story – watch the mini documentary (2020-2025)
• Peter turns the page: The Winter Warriors by Olivier Norek (Peter Fleming, 17 September 2025)
• Wikipedia: Finland–Russia relations

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NOTES

1. Apologies to Frank Zappa, to whom this well‑known saying is usually attributed, for mangling his words.
2. “Konikoff left for the United States in July of 1941 as fighting started between Finland and Russia during the [1941-44] Continuation War” (from ‘Eva Konikoff’, Stephen Daiter Gallery).
3. The spelling “Tšurkin” reflects Finnish transliteration conventions, in which š represents the Russian “sh”; the name corresponds to Shurkin (Шуркин). The 150^th Infantry Division did not serve in the Winter War, so the unit attribution attached to this quotation – p.6 of The Winter Warriors – is almost certainly a slip of translation rather than a historical detail.
4. Tove Jansson was born on 9^th August 1914, meaning she was 3 years old when Finland declared independence.
5. Until 1809.
6. An eight-month period at the outset of World War II, lasting from September 1939 to May 1940, during which there were virtually no Allied military land operations on the Western Front.
7. ‘First Prologue’, p. 9.
8. ‘First Prologue’, p. 9.
9. From ‘In Memory of All the Lives Lost’, The Winter Warriors, p. 5.
10. ‘War legend Simo Häyhä’s shooting skills continue to serve as a model in today’s sniper training’, Yle, Petri Kivimäki, 29 March 2017.
11. Chapter 65, p. 306.
12. Chapter 19, p. 77.

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“Now everything was changed. She walked about with cautious, anxious steps, staring constantly at the ground, on the lookout for things that crept and crawled. Bushes were dangerous, and so were sea grass and rain water.”
– Tove Jansson
The Summer Book

Image of Tove Jansson © Moomin Characters™

Categories: Historical Fiction, Tove Jansson

Tags: #ToveTrove, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, Finland, Finnish History, French Literature, Helsinki, Joseph Stalin, Olivier Norek, Open Borders Press, Russo-Finnish War, Simo Häyhä, Soviet Union, Tove Trove, War, Winter War, World War II