Olavi Paavolainen

…Torchbearers’ leaders was the essayist Olavi Paavolainen, a brilliant travel writer and analyst of the times, who in Kolmannen valtakunnan vieraana (1939; “As a Guest in the Third Reich”) expressed prophetic alarm at—but also his fascination with—the developments in Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Paavolainen’s last published work was a war diary,…