Scholarly legacy of Eino Genrikhovich Karhu: celebrating the centenary of the scholar

The article is devoted to the centenary of a prominent philologist E. G. Karhu, the Doctor of Philology and Professor at the Institute of Linguistics, Literature and History of the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The author systematizes, describes, and summarizes his academic achievements, which determines the novelty of the reported research. The article is aimed at describing Karhu’s contribution to the study of Karelian and Finnish literatures, Russian-Finnish literary relations, and Karelian-Finnish folklore. The main stages of Karhu’s academic biography and his key works are investigated with the special focus on his translation work. Karhu was the pioneer in the study of Russian-Finnish literary and cultural relations, he investigated the evolution of Finnish literature written in Finnish and Swedish, from its origins to the post-war modernism (the “second modernism”), and conducted a historical review of the main genres of Karelian and Ingrian folklore taking into account the connection between folklore and literary traditions. Karhu also studied Elias Lonnrot’s biography as well as the genre specifics and problematics of the Kalevala epic. The scholar explored local material in the light of European and world traditions placing it within a wide historical and cultural context. The reported study led to the conclusion that Karhu’s main research tools, the historic approach and the use of a wide context, enabled him to solve large-scale problems of Russian philological science in the field of comparative literature studies and the systematic study of the history of Finnish literature.