As for Sophia, she wanted to travel more than be an artist. “I had
a go at painting and writing but I felt daunted by the artists in my
family. Tove said you have to do things you’d die if you didn’t do –
and it wasn’t a do-or-die thing.” Instead she wanted to escape “bleak
1970
s Finland”. She went to the States as a teenager, then to Spain
for four years, where she met her husband and moved to London for
the next eight years, importing glasses frames. After Lars had been
diagnosed with cancer in 1997, he proposed that the now-divorced
Sophia move to Helsinki with her two sons and work for the family
business. “It wasn’t my first choice initially,” she admits. “Though
when I came back and started working with the Moomins, it didn’t
seem to be an option to let someone else do this.”
The Sophia I meet is an open interviewee and has a twinkle in
her eyes that you suspect is a Jansson trait. But through the warm,
bohemian side, I sense a steely character, even if she insists that
Kråkström is the business genius. “It’s a fine balance between
the heritage and staying commercial,” she says. “And though the
company keeps growing, we know it can’t be forever – most things
are cyclical. The challenge is to keep it alive, but we have the
big advantage of having all these wonderful books with such
universal themes.”
Though her role is to keep the Moomin brand alive, she admits
she also does it in part for the family. “I do hope, if they’re on some
cloud, they’re proud of me.”
Norwegian flies to Helsinki from29 destinations across Europe. Book
a hotel and a rental car at norwegian.com
films and nice, funny things. It was about being an individual and
seeing beauty in little things.”
Tove was an artist and illustrator as early as the 1930s, designing
postcards and drawing cartoons for Swedish satirical magazine
Garm
(
one depicted Hitler as a baby, being fed cake by Neville
Chamberlain). She wrote and illustrated the first book,
The Moomins
and the Great Flood
,
after the war, disillusioned and determined to
write something defiantly unpolitical. But it was a comic strip for
London newspaper
Evening News
in 1954 that made her famous, not
least as she was said to be Europe’s first female cartoonist.
By the time Sophia was born in 1962, Lars had taken over
writing and illustrating the cartoons, which he did until the last
strip in 1975, as Tove became increasingly reluctant to embrace
her burgeoning fame. Tove also wrote novels and short stories for
adults, and painted her whole life, exhibiting her early impressionist
and later modernist works in seven solo exhibitions.
Sophia says she grew up with little sense of who her aunt was.
“
I increasingly speak about her as a public figure. But growing
up, I had no idea of her public persona. Only now do I realise how
extraordinary and unique she was.” Sophia says her aunt was
“
friendly, funny sharp and loving. She could be verbally direct and
distant if she didn’t like you, but she was always nice to me.”
As a teenager, it also dawned on Sophia that her aunt was gay.
“
It was suddenly, ‘Shit, she lives with a woman,’ but at the same
time it never seemed that important. Tove didn’t flaunt it, because
until 1972 it was a crime to be gay in Finland, but she wasn’t hyper-
concerned about not showing it, either.”
“
It’s not self-evident
to me that the books
wouldn’t have been
forgotten”
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