Abundance
Not as wealth and not as reward, but as a question of what feeds the world and what a human being does with what is received.
Radiance — Northern Tales of the True History of the World
Sampo
Book I of the literary-philosophical cycle Radiance. A northern tale of a thing that turned out to be more than a thing: of abundance, possession, participation and a world where myth has not yet separated from labour, cold, house and fire.
We do not retell the Kalevala. We show the world from which such stories could have arisen.
Selected chapter
Chapter One. A Small Event
Fragment from the first chapter
At Helsinki Airport, the earth did not grind.
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It merely endured.
Suitcases rolled over it, heels struck it, doors beeped, and the air smelled of coffee, wet wool, duty-free perfume and the tiredness of people who had not yet had time to understand whether they had arrived somewhere or had merely exchanged one queue for another.
Beyond the glass wall, the end of August hung in the air.
It did not resemble the end of summer in those places where summer says goodbye to a person with heat, dust and exhausted generosity. Here it left almost unnoticed: with a low grey sky, wet asphalt, and a light that still held on to the day while already knowing it would soon have to yield earlier.
The selected fragment shows the entrance into the book: the North begins not with legend, but with earth, tiredness, air and the almost invisible shifting of the ordinary world.
About the book
for readers
Sampo opens the Radiance cycle not with a museum legend and not with a ready-made mythological symbol. The book enters the northern world before history becomes ornament: a world of house, forest, water, work, lack, waiting and the human need to call the source one’s own.
Here Sampo is not only a lost object and not only a mythical machine of abundance. It is a question: why does a human being strive to possess the source while already living inside the world that feeds him?
The book is written as fiction, but works as research: through scene, object, speech, silence and choice, it tests whether an ancient image can become a living form of understanding again.
Without spoilers
what the reader will encounter
The northern house
The house in Sampo is not decoration and not a postcard of comfort. It is a place where people can gather, warm themselves, argue, remain silent, eat, listen and endure one another’s presence.
The thing and the source
At the centre of the book is not the hunt for an artefact, but a test of the human wish to receive abundance without participating in the order that holds it.
Ivar and measure
Ivar does not explain the world as a teacher and does not decorate it with mysticism. His presence holds something important: not every depth needs speech, and not every thing becomes yours because you have understood it.
Myth before myth
The book does not reconstruct folklore. It enters an imagined density of the world in which such stories could have become necessary because otherwise a person could not have held the law in memory.
Artistic research frame
for foundations and partners
Radiance is a literary-philosophical, practice-based research cycle about how ancient stories preserve imaginal instructions for the world. The Finno-Karelian and Kalevala material forms the main northern backbone of the cycle.
Sampo researches the instruction of abundance and participation. It is not an academic study of epic and not a fantasy decoration built on mythological material. Artistic form becomes a way of testing what an ancient image preserves, what it warns against, and what kind of human participation it requires.
Sampo is not a question of where the source is. It is a question of why a human being wants to possess the source while being inside it.
Themes
first research nodes of the book
Possession
The desire to call the source one’s own becomes the point where gratitude may turn into seizure.
Participation
The book asks whether one can receive the fruit of the world without agreeing to be part of its living order.
Labour and wonder
Wonder in Sampo does not cancel work, cold, body, craft or responsibility. It passes through them.
House
The house becomes a place of measure: it receives people, but does not turn meeting into a comfortable illusion of safety.
North
The North here is not exoticism and not costume. It is a way of hearing the world where excess quickly becomes dangerous.
For whom
reader’s entrance
This book may speak to readers who need slow mythopoetic prose, northern atmosphere without fantasy cliché, philosophical depth without a lecture, and an ancient image acting through daily life, body, labour and human choice.
Sampo does not require prior knowledge of the Kalevala. Something else matters more: the willingness to enter a world where tale has not yet become invention, and a thing still remembers that it was a sign.
Language and publishing status
current map
RURussian version completed.
ENEnglish literary transcreation completed.
PLPolish version in preparation.
FIFinnish version possible as a next partnership stage.
For foundations, publishers and cultural partners
points of collaboration
What already exists
- Completed Russian Book I of the Radiance cycle.
- Completed English literary transcreation.
- Prepared visual package for Russian, English and Polish presentation.
- Connection with a long-term literary-philosophical cycle and practice-based research frame.
What is possible
- Partnership around Polish and Finnish versions.
- Publishing, translation and editorial collaboration.
- Literary readings, public talks and presentations of artistic research through fiction.
- Cultural programmes connected with northern mythopoetic material, language, memory and artistic research.
Place in the cycle
Radiance
Sampo is the first entrance into Radiance. The next book, Song, continues the method through word, hearing, language and attunement.
Further books unfold craft, threshold, trauma, return, birth, forest, measure and responsibility as the next nodes of the long-term cycle.
— mark of presence