Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In the spring of 1945, Tove Jansson wrote a long letter from her Helsinki atelier to her close friend Eva Konikoff, a Jewish photographer who had emigrated to the US during the second world war. In it, the Finnish artist and author fleetingly mentions “publishing a story”. She spends more time describing her leaking roof than she does The Moomins and the Great Flood, the book that introduced her beloved clan of white hippo-shaped trolls to a generation of children and sparked a literary phenomenon.A year-long series of 80th anniversary events now brings Tove’s trolls to the fore. A survey of Jansson’s public murals, Tove Jansson: Paradise, opened recently at Helsinki Art Museum, coinciding with a special edition of The Moomins and the Great Flood, published in the UK by Sort of Books. The celebrations bring to light an enduring tale of family ties, both on the page and off, then and now.Sophia Jansson, Tove’s niece and heir, became the custodian of a vast legacy — and a thriving business — following the death of the Finnish cultural icon in 2001. I meet Sophia in Tove’s atelier, a corner tower at the top of an apartment building close to Helsinki’s harbour. With its huge domed windows, it’s like a city-bound lighthouse. Domesticity wasn’t Tove’s thing: when told there was enough plumbing for a bath or a kitchen, she went with the tub and made do with a two-ring hob and a moka pot.The property is still in the family. There are no visiting hours, there is no gift shop. “For some people, Tove was sacred,” says Sophia as we sit down. “And I came in here like I still do. I don’t have gloves on when I pick out a book from the bookshelf. . . I mean, this is her home, our home. This is where we lived.”The border between reality and fiction is very fluid. What is a real memory? What is something Tove wrote on paper that comes from her imagination?Tove Jansson was born in 1914 into a family both bohemian and bourgeois. Her father Viktor lived the grand life of a sculptor, while her mother Signe (or “Ham”) kept the family financially afloat as a graphic artist (she designed some 220 Finnish postage stamps). One brother, Lars, was a writer; the other, Per Olov, a photographer. Conversation at the dinner table was a feast of artistic views. “For Tove, I think it was a given that the whole family would be involved,” Sophia recalls. For many years, Lars would be the first to see and comment on his sister’s Moomin manuscripts. And for 15 years he took over drawing the Moomin newspaper comic strips, allowing Tove to focus on bigger projects. Meanwhile, Per Olov became Tove’s semi-official photographer, helping to shape her public image. His pictures capture her enjoying island life — swimming, cutting firewood — as well as painting and model-making in her studio. She was a guarded sitter, her brother noted: “I saw the same sovereign mind control which is present in her drawings and handwriting.”The Moomins and the Great Flood is an origin story about the titular trolls creating a sanctuary in an idyllic valley. The Moomins themselves originated in Jansson family lore. “When I was a small child, I used to steal food,” recalled Tove. “And then my uncle said, ‘Watch out for the cold Moomintrolls. They rush out of their hidey-holes the moment a larder thief shows herself.”Did Sophia, Lars’s only child, feel qualified to inherit Tove’s estate? “Definitely not. I had absolutely no idea. It was all new to me and there was a lot of jealousy. Not so much within the family, but sure, also in the family, because it just sort of legally fell into my lap. But from the outside also, people were asking what are you going do with all this money?”Today, Moomin Characters, the company founded by Tove and Lars in the 1950s, has more than 800 licensees worldwide, including Barnes & Noble, Adidas and Arket, with sales of Moomin products exceeding $700mn. It’s not just the novels and picture books, there are Moomin mugs, pyjamas and juice blenders.Years ago, representatives of the Roald Dahl estate asked if they could come to Helsinki to see how the Janssons managed their business. But the Dahls repeatedly rescheduled the trip. “Maybe they had problems agreeing,” Sophia says diplomatically. “In the end, they didn’t come.” In 2021, the Dahl family sold its literary estate to Netflix for a reported $1bn. To the Janssons, such a buyout seems inconceivable.As well as creating the Moomins, Tove was a prolific painter and the author of fiction for adults. Aspects from her rustic lifestyle — the eccentric atelier, the tiny cabin on the Finnish island of Klovharu — melded with those in her creative realms. It was a world to which Sophia had privileged access. Tove, who spent half a century in a same-sex partnership with the printmaker Tuulikki Pietilä, never had children and Sophia had lost her mother at an early age. In 1972, Jansson published The Summer Book, a novel about a grandmother and her granddaughter summering on a Finnish island, a scenario inspired by holidays spent with Sophia and Tove’s mother Ham on Klovharu (a film adaptation starring Glenn Close as the grandmother premiered at this year’s London Film Festival). “The border between reality and fiction is very fluid,” acknowledges Sophia. “What is a real memory? What is something Tove wrote on paper that comes from her imagination?”At Moomin Characters’ offices on the harbourside, Per Olov’s granddaughter Hanna Ahlström oversees Tove’s archive, working alongside archivist Maria Andersin. The advantage of a family archive, notes Andersin, is that participants are on hand to “confirm or overturn your own assumptions”. A series of recently discovered sketches for Tove’s public commissions feature in the Helsinki Art Museum exhibition, fairytale compositions created for schools, factory canteens and hospitals that often featured Moomins hidden behind trees and objects.The family business, she says, is a little like ‘Succession’ but ‘without the nasty bits’Sophia is now handing the estate on to the next generation. Her two sons, James and Thomas, have joined the family company as creative director and head of business development respectively. “It’s important to our mother that we are in some way involved,” Thomas tells me at the opening of the exhibition. “For her it’s so visceral, the whole thing. It’s what she grew up with.” There was no pressure on them to join the company. “The family has this fantastic, very non-obvious way of steering you,” observes Sophia, adding that it’s a little like Succession “without the nasty bits”.They still develop the brand together within carefully formed parameters that keep characters firmly in the Moomin universe. “There are no Moomin-Star Wars crossovers, no Moomins riding a Chinese dragon,” says James. However, the brothers agree that a Lego Moominhouse might be a possibility. That, at least, would keep it in the Nordic family.To April 6, hamhelsinki.fiFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
