From LION:
Article Text:
SCANDINAVIAN NOVEL
[SWEDISH NOVEL]
[NORWEGIAN NOVEL]
[ICELANDIC NOVEL]
[FINNISH NOVEL]
[DANISH NOVEL]
Denmark
Losing much of its political importance in Europe in the early 19th century, Denmark experienced an upsurge in national awareness and a flowering of the arts, resulting in what is sometimes referred to as the Danish Golden Age. The Danish novel first arose in this context of vigorous artistic activity. Associated primarily with the middle and upper classes, the novel of the Golden Age is narrowly focused on Copenhagen society and displays a far greater interest in psychological analysis than in social realism or political engagement.
Denmark's close cultural connections with Germany ensured the dominant influence of such romantic writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph von Eichendorff, and E.T.A Hoffmann, which explains why the early Danish novel had little or no concern for realism. The popularity of Walter Scott's historical novels did little to counter that general tendency. However, in conjunction with the rise of Danish nationalism, the vogue for Scott's work did produce a spate of historical novels.
Johannes Carsten Hauch, a dramatist and poet, wrote several ambitious historical novels that generally fall far short of their aspirations. The best known is Vilhelm Zabern (1834), a novel about the 16th-century Danish King Christian II. Evincing an eclectic imagination, his other novels take as their subjects the French Revolution, the invention of the steamboat, and the development of capitalism. Bernhard Severin Ingemann was a more accomplished novelist and won a lasting popularity as "the Danish Walter Scott." His first work was a highly derivative novel in verse, Varners poetiske Vandringer (1813; Varner's Poetic Wanderings), based on Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sufferings of Young Werther) and Ludwig Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798; Franz Sternbald's Travels). His four novels about the Middle Ages--- Valdemar Seir (1826; Waldemar, surnamed Seir or the Victorious), Erik Menveds Barndom (1828; The Childhood of Erik Menved ), Kung Erik og de Fredlose (1826; King Erik and the Outlaws ), and Prins Otto of Denmark (1835; Prince Otto of Denmark) ---became common reading property in all cultured Danish homes. The strength of these novels lies in their detailed settings, their weakness in the characters' rather simple psychology. A third voice in the historical novel belonged to Carl Bernhard, pseudonym of Andreas Nicolai de Saint Aubain, whose short and polished novels were modeled on Prosper Mérimée's Chronique du Regne de Charles IX (1829; Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX). Bernhard's Kroniker fra Christians IIs Tid (1847; Chronicles from the Age of Christian II) and Kroniker fra Erik af Pommerns' Tid (1850; Chronicles from the Age of Erik of Pomerania) won great popularity for their crystalline style and sense of drama.
Ingemann's Varner was not the only verse novel published in Denmark. Christian Winther's very popular historical novel Hjortens Flugt (1855; The Flight of the Stag) is written in the strophic form of the German Nibelungenlied . Fredrik Paludan-Müller also wrote in verse, employing the strophic form of Byron's Don Juan in his Adam Homo (1841, 1848) to brilliant effect.
The strong romantic and idealistic inclinations of these writers also characterize the work of Poul Martin Molller, Steen Steensen Blicher, and Carl Bagger, but tempered by more realistic elements. Moller is remembered for the unfinished novel En dansk Students Eventyr (1845; A Danish Student's Adventures). The absence of a clear plot in the four completed chapters is made up for by the careful characterization of persons and locales. Reminiscent of Eichendorff's Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (1826; From the Life of a Ne'er-Do-Well), En dansk Students Eventyr is often classified as protorealist for its focus on everyday life. Blicher espoused an idiosyncratic regionalism, depicting life in distant and wild Jutland in the crushingly pessimistic stories of Traekfuglene (1838; The Birds of Passage), which stand out for their use of the Jutland dialect. Carl Bagger's reputation also rests on a single work, Min Broders Levned (1835; My Brother's Life), in which the "good" brother, the pastor Johannes, tells the story of his frivolous sibling Arthur. The two characters appear to express different aspects of Bagger's own tormented and unstable self.
As early as the 1830s, a different, more realistic, sensibility had announced itself in Danish fiction. This so-called poetic realism displayed a stronger realist bent, a concern for social issues, and a greater interest in formal considerations. For instance, the novels of Hans Christian Andersen---now forgotten outside Denmark but once very popular in Germany and England---are divided between quasi-autobiographical explorations and attacks on social injustice. The protagonists of Improvisatoren (1835; The Improvisatore), O.T . (1836; O.T .), and Kun en Spillemand (1837; Only a Fiddler ) reflect Andersen's own hopes and self-doubts. De to Baronesser (1848; The Two Baronesses ) is a tightly constructed book about social injustice and the nobility of the spirit, while At voere eller ikke voere (1857; To Be or Not To Be ?) expresses Andersen's philo-Semitism and his quite unorthodox Christianity. Lykke Peer (1870; Lucky Peer ) returns to Andersen's dreams of artistic success.
Thomasine Gyllembourg was Denmark's first woman writer. Her Familien Polonius (1827; The Polonius Family) and En Hverdags-Historie (1828; An Everyday Story) deal with problems of love and marriage, looking forward to the social discussions of the 1880s. To Tidsaldre (1845; Two Ages) is a more ambitious work contrasting the revolutionary spirit of the 1790s with the bourgeois concerns of the 1830s. Gyllembourg was much admired in her time for her wit and the complex structures of her novels and today enjoys a renaissance as a pioneer woman writer.
Looking to such models as Honoré de Balzac and Eugène Sue, Meir Aron Goldschmidt began his creative career with En Jode (1845; A Jew ), which dissects various aspects of anti-Semitism and earned him the enmity of Copenhagen's Jewish community. His subsequent work, Hjemlos (1853-57; Homeless), Arvingen (1863; The Heir), and Ravnen (1867; The Raven), tackled the subject more obliquely. Ravnen has been praised for its depiction of the last years of the reign of Christian VIII (1839-48), the Slesvig Wars (1848-50), and the end of Danish absolutism.
The capstone of the pyschological literature of the Golden Age is Hans Egede Schack's Phantasterne (1857; The Phantasists), which analyzes the empty formalism of Danish government and the lazy dreaminess that is widely thought to be a trait of the Danish national character. One of Phantasterne's dreamers ends his days in a madhouse, while the other manages to retain his sanity only by overcompensating in the direction of an equally extreme objectivity. The novel is remarkable for its destruction of romantic attitudes toward life, its political commentaries, and for its depiction of sexual fantasies.
The Golden Age came to an end with Denmark's ignominious defeat in an armed confrontation with Prussia and Austria over the duchies of Slesvig and Holstein in 1864. Losing territory, Denmark suffered an immense sense of loss that also made itself felt in literature. Several established writers tried to confront the tragedy, but the most popular postwar author, Vilhelm Bergsoe, owed his success to his evasion of the issue. His Fra Piazza del Popolo (1867; From the Piazza del Popolo) is a compendium of seven long novellas told by members of the Danish artists' colony in Rome as they wait for the release of a colleague kidnapped by brigands. The characters, some of whom move from story to story, come from a large range of social levels and national backgrounds--- British lords and ladies, Byronic Danish students, Italian putane and thieves. Fra Piazza del Popolo , retrospective and romanticizing, is a last product of the Golden Age, whose literature, however fascinating in its refinement, is socially narrow. In fact, Bergsoe's Fra den gamle Fabrik (1869; From the Old Factory), a fictionalized account of his own childhood, features one of the first appearances of factory life in the Danish novel, albeit from the perspective of the director's son.
Denmark emerged from the trauma of the 1860s with a strong economy, experiencing a rapid industrialization that transformed the small and cozy capital into a modern metropolis. In literature, the critic Georg Brandes led the so-called modern breakthrough, a shift away from the inward-looking and hyperaesthetic writing of the Golden Age. In amazingly short order, Brandes succeeded in changing the tone of Scandinavian letters from cultural idealism to a realism that no longer ignored social problems and biological factors. In Hovedstromninger i det 19de Aarhundredes Litteratur (1872-90; Main Currents in 19th Century Literature ), Brandes shows himself fully cognizant of the work of Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola in France and George Eliot and George Meredith in England, as well as the writings of Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Hippolyte Taine, Auguste Comte, and Ernest Renan. Brandes also did much to spread the reputation of the new Norwegian dramatists, Henrik Ibsen and Bjornstjerne Bjornson, both in Scandinavia and abroad.
Jens Peter Jacobsen was Brandes' closest Danish follower. The naturalist Fru Marie Grubbe (1876; Marie Grubbe: A Lady of the Seventeenth Century ) recounts a sensational case of downward mobility, telling the story of a noblewoman who ends up as the contented wife of a drunken ferryman and sometime convict. Jacobsen's psychological penetration, his close, quasi-scientific observation, and his evocation of atmosphere make for a radically new approach to the historical novel. Jacobsen's other novel, Niels Lyhne (1880), with a Golden Age setting, paints a portrait of the passive dreamer. In effect a miniature Bildungsroman, Niels Lyhne recalls the major debates of the 1870s on such subjects as realism in art, women's erotic choices, and atheism. Although Jacobsen is Denmark's strongest naturalist writer, Brandes was uncomfortable with his delicate sensualism and lyricism.
Jacobsen's nearest rival was Holger Drachman, who was primarily a poet and devoted much energy to self-dramatization. Drachman's novel En Overkomplet (1876; A Supernumerary) looked back to Bagger's Min Broders Levened , depicting the halfbrothers Erik and Adolf. The gifted but undisciplined Erik, the self-styled supernumerary, is inspired by Ivan Turgenev's superfluous man from Dnevnik lishnego cheloveka (1850; The Diary of a Superfluous Man ), a novel much read in Denmark. Like En Overkomplet , Drachman's Forskrevet (1890; Signed Away) has a pair of contrasting heroes, the Bohemian would-be artist Ulf and the hard-working and productive painter Henrik. Both fall in love with the same woman, a warm-hearted nightclub singer, who in the end opts for Henrik---just as well, since it turns out that she is Ulf's sister. The title may be a thrust at Brandes, whose insistence on strict realism, Drachman thought, could lead to a signing away of artistic creativity to the theory of an imposing but noncreative mind. The sometimes silly extravagances of Forskrevet's plot do not detract from the novel's main strength---an impression of the growing Copenhagen of the 1880s.
Diametrically opposed protagonists likewise turn up in Nutidsbilleder (1878; Modern Images) by the journalist Vilhelm Topsoe, who contrasts the hard-working farmer and politician Harald Holst with the dreamer Flemming. Yet Topsoe gives the story a different twist by letting Holst grow corrupt as a member of the Danish diet, while Flemming casts off his ineffectual self and becomes a principled and disciplined man. Topsoe's earlier novel, Jason med det gyldne Skind (1875; Jason with the Golden Fleece), had also portrayed the ultimate failures of a practical man---an engineer and physician who commits suicide when his mistress betrays him. Topsoe's concern with marriage and sexual morality was shared by many of his contemporaries. Erik Skram's Gertrud Colbjornsen (1879) argued for the necessity of adultery after a woman is pushed by family pressures into an unhappy marriage. This novel, recently rediscovered, ends with Gertrud's divorce and her marriage to the painter Fabricius, a constant "tin soldier" in Andersen's mold. Women writers also took up the subject of marital unhappiness, including Skram's wife, the Norwegian Amalie Skram, whose personal experience in a previous marriage lent force to fictional descriptions of conjugal misery. Olivia Levison provided another harrowing picture of an unhappily married woman's deprived life in Konsulinden (1887; The Consul's Wife). Adele (Adda) Marie Ravnkilde depicted a romantic and misled young woman in Tantaluskvaler (1884; The Torments of Tantalus).
Henrik Pontoppidan's masterful work grows out of the modern breakthrough, showing a connection particularly in its persistent attention to social, economic, and political factors. He described his chef d'oeuvre as "a trilogy in which a connected picture of modern Denmark [is presented] by means of portrayals of human beings and human minds and human fates, in which social, religious, and political conflicts are included." The trilogy consists of Det forjoettede Land (1891-95; The Promised Land ), describing the aspirations, temptations, and ultimate destruction of the pastor Emanuel Hansted; Lykke-Peer (1898; Lucky Peer ), the saga of the plans and, at last, the defeat of the engineer, surveyor, and highway inspector Per Sidenius; and De Dodes Rige (1912-16; The Kingdom of the Dead), about a high-minded Jutland estate owner who wishes to aid the workers on his properties but sees them turn against him. All three of Pontoppidan's protagonists have the best of intentions, but their idealism is their destruction. Seeking happiness in a series of sexual relationships, they either find happiness too late or not at all. Pontoppidan was awarded a shared Nobel prize in 1917 with Karl Gjellerup, a writer justly forgotten. However, Pontoppidan has never won a large international reputation, not even in Germany. The heavy quality of his prose and the pessimism that dominates his novels may be responsible for the fact that he is less well known than he should be.
The contrast between Pontoppidan and Herman Bang could not be greater. Bang's books, all brief, contain a strong element of sheer entertainment in their wonderfully vivid dialogue and their evocative impressionism. As a very young man, Bang created a sensation with his novel of family degeneration and shattered theatrical ambitions, Haablose Sloegter (1880; Hopeless Generations), later revised to remove portions charged with indecency. A classic of decadent literature, the novel anticipates Joris-Karl Huysmans' À rebours (1884; Against Nature ). In subsequent novels, Bang focused on seduced and deserted young women, giving rise to speculations that he described his own unfortunate romantic experiences. Det hvide Hus (1898; The White House) and Det graa Hus (1901; The Gray House), taking place respectively in a country parsonage and the grand Copenhagen mansion of an aging physician (a portrait of Bang's paternal grandfather), are tributes to his mother. Det graa Hus centers on Bang's conviction that sexual passion is the primary root of human suffering. A comic jeu d'esprit, Sommergloeder (1902; Summer Pleasures), the compressed account of a single day in a Danish country inn, is the last work in which Bang is at the top of his form.
The aim of the modern breakthrough---the exposure of society's numerous hypocrisies and deformities---was still pursued by authors around the turn of the century, as in Karl Larsen's sweet-tempered I det gamle Voldkvarteret (1899; In the Old Wall Section), an elegy for an older Copenhagen, and the double novel Hvis ser du Skoeven (1902; If You Spy the Mote) and En modern Huerdagshistorie (1906; A Modern Everyday Story). In stark contrast, the bitterly funny novels about provincial life of the gifted Gustav Wied, Livsens Ondskab (1899; Life's Malice) and Knagsted (1902), are examples of the malicious humor of which Danes are so proud. Seen from a more serious side, Wied's books gave the coup de grâce to the high-minded reforming zeal of the modern breakthrough. Sniping at small-town hypocrisy is also central to the novels of Knud Hjorto, who, in To Verdener (1905; Two Worlds), returned to psychological analysis and the perennial type of the Danish dreamer. Jakob Knudsen's Sind (1903; Disposition) and Harald Kidde's Helten (1912; The Hero), both with remote settings, also focus on the psychology of their characters. Sind , about the main character's discovery that he is as tyrannical as his loathed father, is set in Jutland. In Helten , the pure fool Clemens Bek (who has grown up, undefiled, in a Copenhagen whorehouse) becomes an elementary school teacher on the little Baltic island of Anholt and tries to bring some of its inhabitants to a Christian way of life.
The passing of the modern breakthrough also made room for a revival of the historical novel. Æbelo (1895; Apple Island), the medievalizing and highly poetic prose narrative of Sophus Michaelis, is a tale of much-tried love on an island of preternatural beauty. But Michaelis' fragile talent was put completely in the shade by the vigor of Johannes V. Jensen. After some floundering, Jensen's actual career began with Danskere (1896; Danes) and Einar Elkjoer (1898), both of which are about contemporary dreams and dreamers. But Jensen turned to a pair of historical dreamers in Kongens Fald (1900-01; The Fall of the King ), which recounts the intersecting lives of a Jutland peasant's son, failed student, and mercenary soldier, Mikkel Thogersen, and the hard-handed but indecisive Christian II: both are brutal, wildly ambitious, given to fantasies, and unable to realize their own potential. Jensen uses poetic prose far more brilliantly and inventively than Michaelis, telling the story in three "seasonal" sections, "The Death of Spring," "The Great Summer," and "Winter." Jensen's incomparable knowledge of the history and folkways of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, employed more in allusion than in direct narration, and his insight into the superstitious minds of the two men made The Fall of the King into what the literary historian Sven H. Rossel calls "the finest historical novel in Danish literature."
Jensen never again equaled this early accomplishment. An admirer of the United States, he wrote two rather original novels set in the New World before returning to the historical genre in Den lange Rejse (1908-21; The Long Journey ), which he regarded as his masterpiece. It begins in the forests of the Tertiary Age, moves to the Ice Age, and trudges forward through the aeons to the Vikings and Christopher Columbus. The epic contains elements of proto-Nazism, celebrating the emergence of the supremely energetic Nordic people. However, the suppression of human bestiality and the triumph of love mitigate Jensen's politics. He continued to write during the German occupation but carefully maintained his distance from the occupiers, believing that the Nazis had destroyed "everything that is called race and evolution"---that they had given racism a bad name. Jensen was awarded the Nobel prize in 1944, partly on the strength of The Long Journey .
The Danish novel took a very different turn with the work of Martin Andersen-Nexo. Nexo, a communist with a working-class background, spoke for landless agricultural workers and the industrial proletariat, which had been signally absent from Danish literature. Nexo established himself with the series Pelle Erobreren (1906-10; Pelle the Conquerer ). The first volume describes the boyhood of a working-class child cursed with a feckless father. Later Pelle rises above the humiliations of his childhood to become a successful labor organizer. Another series, Ditte Menneskebarn (1917-21; Ditte, Girl Alive, Daughter of Man, Towards the Storm ), tells the heart-rending story of poor Ditte, born out of wedlock, who goes to Copenhagen to support her own illegitimate child and is crushed by the forces of capitalism.
Hans Kirk, another communist, wrote the collective novel Fiserne (1928; The Fishermen), a narrative of far greater subtlety and brevity than Nexo's stories. In Fiskerne , a community of fishermen moves from its original home, ravaged by the North Sea, to a safer haven. There, pious Christians, they directly outdo the lazy local inhabitants by their self-discipline and industry, but they pay a high price for their success in selfish personal conflicts.
Jacob Paludan was the political opposite of Nexo and Kirk and used his work to express his reactionary aestheticism, particularly in De vestlige Veje (1922; The Western Roads) and Sogelys (1923; Search Light), which pillories technological developments for the aesthetic and ecological damage they cause. His best work is Jogen Stein (1932-33), a novel chronicling the decline and fall of the cultivated bourgeoisie.
The 1920s saw a great deal of social experimentation, answered by limited technical experimentation in the novel. Tom Kristensen's Hoervoerk (1930; Havoc ) is the most incisive portrait of the age, about the parasitical newspaper critic Ole Jastrau, who slowly goes to pieces despite his hopes of finding an intellectual, political, or religious handhold. The novel was one of the first to use interior monologue and stream of consciousness. Less experimental, Knud Sonderby's work also captures the Jazz Age, particularly his debut novel, Midt i en Jazztid (1931; In the Midst of a Jazz Age). Borge Madsen's strange little Jeg er salig (1933; I Am Blest) is techinically more adventurous, using a first-person narrative interrupted by feigned conversations, mininovels, poems, musical compostions, aphorisms, and so on. The narrator, like so many Danish characters before him, ends as a patient in an insane asylum.
The 1920s and 1930s also saw the arrival of several novelists who explored sexuality. Jens August Schade, for instance, depicted the complete surrender to impulses in the plotless Den himmelske Elsker paa Jorden (1931; The Heavenly Lover on Earth) and in Mennesker modes og sod Musik opstaar i Hjertet (1944; People Meet, and Sweet Music Arises in the Heart). Charges of pornography were brought against the latter for its plot: a man and a woman meet on a train, are attracted to one another, and immediately retire to one of the Danish State Railroad's spacious lavatories. Jorgen Nielsen found more complexity in sexuality, as in his debut novel, Offerbaal (1929; Sacrificial Fire), in which a peasant girl is doubly seduced by men willing to take advantage of her passive nature and by born-again Christianity. Some of Nielsen's characters acquire considerable self-insight, as in De Hovmodige (1930; The Prideful Ones), in which Kathy finally realizes that the she keeps choosing the wrong suitors because they shore up her self-esteem. Jutland farm life provides the background of En Kvinde ved Baalet (1933; A Woman by the Bonfire), a popular success with a melodramatic story about the tortured passion of the devoted Daniel for the promiscusous Lisa.
Other writers dominating the 1930s included Nis Petersen, who established an international reputation with a playfully comical novel about Rome in the age of Marcus Aurelius, Sandalmagernes Gade (1931; The Street of the Sandalmakers ) and the topical Spildt Moelk (1934; Spilt Milk ), about the Irish civil war of the 1920s. The gifted Mogens Klitgaard worte about disreputable characters, including an alcoholic debt-collector in Der sidder en Mand in en Sporvogn (1937; A Man Is Sitting in a Streetcar) and a petty crook in Gud mildner Luften for de klippede Faar (1938; God Tempers the Wind for Shorn Sheep). After April 1940, Klitgaard used the historical novel to make oblique comments on the German occupation, publishing De rode Fjer (1940; The Red Feathers), Ballade paa Nytorv (1940; Row at Nytorv), and Den guddomelige Hverdag (1942; The Divine Everyday Life). Klitgaard had an interest in contemporary narrative technique and used a collage of newspaper reports and narrative snapshots similar to Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and John Dos Passos' U.S.A (1930-36). Another author of the 1930s was Hans Scherfig, who wrote biting social satire. His mystery novel Den forsvundne Fuldmoegtig (1938; The Missing Bureaucrat ) exposes the soul-killing monotony of bureaucratic life. Scherfig's next target was the Danish lyceum system and its ability to deform the spirits of its pupils, in Det forsomte Foraar (1940; Stolen Spring ). Idealister (1945; Idealists) and Frydenholm (1962) portray Denmark in the 1930s and during the occupation, respectively.
The postwar period was dominated by younger novelists, many writing about the occupation. Willy-August Linnemann published Natten for Freden (1945; The Night before the Peace), dedicated to the Danes who openly opposed the Germans. Linnemann's work largely stood in the service of his antinationalism, which, however admirable, did not benefit his fiction. Hans Christian Branner began with Legetoj (1936; Toys), an account of the workings of a toy factory that has been read as a criticism or warning of the dangers of Nazism. Branner then returned to psychological analysis in several novels before achieving a genuine breakthrough with two novels about the occupation, Rytteren (1949; The Riding Master ) and Ingen kender Natten (1955; No One Knows the Night ).
The occupation also left a mark on Martin A. Hansen, whose Jonatans Rejse (1941; Jonathan's Journey) is a picaresque novel that asks how one can oppose evil without becoming to some extent evil oneself. Hansen's two postwar novels--- Lykkelige Kristoffer (1945; Lucky Kristoffer ) and Loxgneren (1950; The Liar )---are considered masterpieces of 20th-century Danish literature. Lucky Kristoffer takes place in the 16th century, telling the story of a young idealist through the reminiscences of one of his companions. The crux of the novel lies in the difficulties of forming a moral judgment about the complex characters. Loyalty and greed are hopelessly mixed in Martin, for example, and in the tears of the turncoat Gabel "duplicity and sincerity are so fervently united." The Liar is a novel written for radio. Its protagonist is a middle-aged schoolmaster on an isolated island who has written a manuscript about his moral and intellectual failings. Vig is a manipulator, a constant falsifier of fact and emotional relationships, but at last he finds peace in renunciation.
The 1950s and 1960s brought more novels about World War II. Ole Sarvig's Stenrosen (1955; Stone Roses) pictures survival in Berlin before and after May 1945. Tage Skou-Hansen's Dagstjernen (1960; The Day Star) describes the fates of an informer and the man designated to kill him. Peter Seeberg's remarkable little Bipersonerne (1956; The Extras) focuses on a group of foreign workers assigned to a film studio in Berlin during the last days of the war. In Hyrder (1970; Shepherds), Seeberg called for a greater sense of mutual responsibility in the relatively untroubled Danish welfare state, an argument that has marked Seeberg's subsequent production. A similar thread also runs through the later work of Sarvig and Skou-Hansen.
Sven Holm's Termush --- Atlanterhavskysten (1967; Termush ) describes an atomic disaster, while short novels such as Langt borte taler byen med min stemme (1976; Far Away the City Speaks with My Voice) focus on lives coming apart in Copenhagen, his favorite setting. Disorientation, if not disintegration, shapes Sven Åge Madsen's Besoget (1963; The Visit), in which a man dwells in a mysterious hotel, directed by some distant authority, and Lystbilleder (1964; Pictures of Lust), in which a rape is seen from several points of view. Madsen called this second work an uroman , or non-novel. Irresponsibility, fey humor, and pervasive melancholy characterize Frank Jæger's mock Wertheriad Den unge Joegers Lidelser (1953; The Sufferings of Young Jæger), Danskere: Tre fortoellinger af Foedrelandets historie (1966; Danes: Three Tales from the History of the Fatherland), and Doden i Skoven (1970; Death in the Forest). The 1960s also saw the rediscovery of the work of Albert Dam, who had written Mellem de to soer (1906; Between the Two Lakes) and Saa kom det ny brodkorn (1934; Thus There Came New Bread-Grain) decades earlier.
The dominant voice of the 1970s and 1980s belonged to Klaus Rifbjerg, who first made a name for himself as a lyric poet. Rifbjerg's oeuvre displays a constant curiosity about humanity that has had a strong appeal for the Danish reading public. His novels are always located in recent or contemporary Denmark (or Europe), even the fantastic De hellige aber (1981; Witness to the Future ), in which two boys in the occupied Denmark of 1941 crawl through a cave and come up 40 years later, finding the city in an uproar at the prospect of nuclear war. Den kroniske oskyld (1958; The Chronic Innocent) is a novel about the entanglements of puberty in the vein of Schack's Phantasterne . No one in Rifbjerg's novels is quite sound. The sybaritic middle-aged mathematics professor in Operaelskeren (1966; The Opera Lover), deeply devoted to his wife, becomes involved with a Norwegian diva, a situation ending for the amateur Don Juan in his total emotional dissolution. In Et bortvendt ansigt (1977) A Face Turned Away), the conventional middle-aged Henrik, also happily married, is nonetheless a kind of Tristan yearning for an Isolde, whom he finds, disastrously, in a student revolutionary. A female protagonist in Rifbjerg's gallery of tormented personalities is Anna (jeg) Anna (1969; Anna [I] Anna). Rifbjerg's vaunted ability to create extraordinary but quite believable female characters has recently found a rival in Peter Hoeg, whose Froken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (1992; Smilla's Sense of Snow ) has become an international best-seller. Hoeg's work is similar to Rifbjerg's in many respects, but he lacks Rifbjerg's highly professional sense of brevity, coherence, and form.
Thorkild Hansen's documentary novels on painful episodes from Danish history challenge traditional genre distinctions in that they could easily be taken for scholarly monographs. Det lykkelige Arabien (1962; Arabia Felix ), on an ill-fated scientific expedition of the 1760s, Jens Munk (1965; The Way to Hudson Bay ), on a catastrophic voyage to the Canadian sub-arctic during the reign of Christian IV, and a trilogy on the Danish slave trade, Slavernes kyst (1967; The Slave Coast), Slavernes Skibe (1968; The Slave Ships), and Slavernes Oer (1970; The Slave Islands), have all been well received. Hansen's investigation of the trial of the aged Knut Hamsun, Processen mod Hamsun (1978; The Case Against Hamsun), won him no friends in Norway. Henrik Stangerup's historical fiction, Vejen til Lagoa Santa (1981; The Road to Lagoa Santa ) on the Danish naturalist Peter Vilhelm Lund and Det er svoert at do i Dieppe (1985; It Is Hard to Die in Dieppe ) on the fate of the Danish critic P. L. Moller, is in much the same vein as Hansen's work.
In Denmark as in the rest of the North, woman's literature underwent a radical expansion after about 1970. But even before then, several women writers had made a mark, including Tove Ditlevsen. Ditlevsen first attracted attention in 1941, when she wrote a novel about child molestation, Man gjorde et barn fortroed (Someone Harmed a Child). She cast a wholly unsentimental light on the slums of Copenhagen she came from in Barndomens gade (1943; Childhood's Street). The much more free-wheeling Elsa Gress wrote largely about her own life in novels and memoirs and offered a model to Suzanne Brogger, whose autobiographical Fri os fra koerligheden (1973; Deliver Us from Love) and Crème Fraiche (1978; Sour Cream) defy genre norms and are highly critical of Danish society. Dea Trier Morch's work has hewed to a much more traditional line, with paeans to motherhood in Aftenstjernen (1982; Evening Star ) and Vinterborn (1976; Winter's Child ). Kirsten Thorup has written "factual novels" about the development of a young girl on the island of Fyn in the 1950s, Lille Jonna (1977; Little Jonna) and Den lange sommer (1979; The Long Summer). In Baby (1976), she explored female sexual degradation in a brittle society devoid of genuine love. Following the persistent urge of Scandinavian authors to write in series, she expanded and continued her Jonna books in Himmel og Helvede (1982; Heaven and Hell) and Den yderste groense (1987; The Outermost Boundary).
Iceland
The first Icelandic novels were written by Jón Thorodssen, whose Piltur og stúlka (1850; Bachelor and Girl) seems to have been inspired by the comical characters in the novels of Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. Madur og kona (1876; Man and Wife) has the same cheerful mood and happy ending as its predecessor. Both novels, in their good spirits and peasant coloring, are equivalents of Norwegian poetic realism. A more disturbing and original work was the burlesque Sagan af Heljarslódarorrustu (1861; The Saga of the Battle on Hell Field), Benedikt Sveinbjarnarson Gröndal's retelling of the Battle of Solferino. This satirical narrative uses the language of the Icelandic chivalric sagas ( riddara sögur ) but with a strong admixture of the slang spoken by Icelandic students in Copenhagen.
In the next decades, Icelandic novelists tried to apply the social realism advocated by Georg Brandes. Einar Hjörleifsson Kvaran wrote a pair of novels, Ofurefli (1908; Overwhelming Odds) and Gull (1911; Gold), that concerned themselves with the capital's growing bourgeoisie and its materialism. Jón Stefánsson, who published under the pseudonym Thorgils Gjallandi, wrote about the difficulties of life in extreme isolation in Upp vid fossa (1902; Up by the Rapids). Jón Trausti, pseudonym of Gudmundar Magnússon, wrote about farm life in Halla (1906) and Heidarbylid (1911; The Heath Farm), turning to political themes in Leysing (1907; Spring Floods), Borgir (1909; Castles), and Bessi gamli (1918). Finally, he tried historical subjects in Sögur frá Skaftáreldi (1912-13; Stories from the Skafta Eruption) and Gódir stofnar (1914-15; Good Stock).
Gunnar Gunnarsson was determined to break out of the geographical and linguistic isolation of his native country, leaving Iceland at 18 and creating the largest part of his work in Danish to reach a larger public. He began with a family tetralogy under the collective name Af Borgsloegtens Historie (1913-14; From the History of the Family at Borg). Salige er de enfoldige (1920; Seven Days' Darkness ) is a disaster novel about the eruption of Mount Hekla and the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. After a five-volume autobiographical suite, Gunnarsson entered a historical phase, choosing sensational or stirring episodes from Icelandic history, as in the tightly constructed Svartfugl (1929; The Black Cliffs ), on a double murder that took place in 1802 amid the "pestilential atmosphere" of an inaccessible farm, and Jón Arason (1930), the dramatic story of the last Catholic bishop of Iceland, executed with his two sons in 1550.
Kristmann Gudmundsson wrote novels dealing---in Norwegian---with erotic passion, earning him a reputation as a northern D.H. Lawrence, particularly for Livets morgen (1929; Morning of Life ). Gudmundur (Jónsson) Kamban's European reputation was based on his Danish-language dramas and the historical novel Skálholt (1930-35; partially translated as The Virgin of Skalholt ), based on a notorious 17th-century family conflict. Jeg ser et stort skont land (1936; I See a Great Fair Land), portraying masterful Nordic men, brings out his racial politics.
Gudmundar Gíslason Hagalín's work is distinguished by his use of the speech of the Western Fjords in Vestan úr fjördum (1924; From the West out of the Fjords), a celebration of the independent patriarch who battles nature. The novel may have been influenced by Knut Hamsun's Nobel prize-winning Markens grode (1917; The Growth of the Soil ). Unlike Hamsun's, Hagalín's old-fashioned hero succumbs to the forces of the modern world. The clash between the old and the new and an admiration for obstinacy recurs in almost all of Hagalín's novels, most memorably in the portrait of a stubborn old woman in Kristrún í Hamravík (1933; Kristrún at Hamravík).
Thórbergur Thórdarson's whimsical eccentricity finds expression in the unusual Bréf til Láru (1924; Letter to Laura), a giant letter in 36 sections to a young woman in northern Iceland. The letter serves as a framework for yarns, essays, fragments of autobiography, and reflections on superstition, spiritism, socialism, and communism. In the semi-autobiographical Íslenzkur adall (1938; partially translated as In Search of My Beloved ), Thórdarson turned his gift for comedy on himself, as he did in the autobiographical Ofvitinn (1940-41; The All Too Wise One).
Halldór Kiljan Laxness made a breakthrough as a novelist with Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír (1927; The Great Weaver from Kashmir), a veiled autobiographical work about a gifted and sensitive youth. Laxness then spent some time in the United States, an experience that seems to have driven him back to his Icelandic roots, because his next novels--- Thú vínvidur hreini (1931; Thou Pure Vine) and Fuglinn í fjörunni (1932; The Bird on the Beach), later issued together as Salka Valka ---portray a small Icelandic fishing community struggling to retain its identity despite the encroachments of commercial interests. Laxness' internationally most popular work, Sjálfstoett folk (1934-35; Independent People ) is a de-romanticization of the Icelandic small farmer. The four-volume Heimsljós (1937-40; World Light ) is a remarkable extended character portrayal based on the life of the minor poet, Magnús Hjaltason. The historical trilogy Íslandsklukkan (1943-46; Iceland's Bell) is set around 1700, when Iceland's impotence under Danish rule and German mercantile power was at its worst. Its unadorned style is said to have been influenced by Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), which Laxness had translated in 1941. Gerpla (1952; The Happy Warriors ), written in mock-saga style, reaches back to the 11th century, using Fóstbroedra saga (The Foster Brothers Saga) as the basis for reflections on World War II and the Cold War. Laxness was awarded the Nobel prize in 1955.
No subsequent Icelandic novelist has been able to escape from Laxness' giant shadow. Agnar Thórdarson's Ef sverd thitt er stutt (1955; The Sword ) is a recasting of the Hamlet story, in which the narrator, sensing that something is rotten in the state of Iceland, attempts to placate his late father's spirit by a futile act of violence. Thórdarson's Hjartad í bordi (1968; A Medal of Distinction ) penetrates further still into the moral decay of Iceland's urban society. Jakobina Sigurdardóttir charges that all authenticity has been lost in Icelandic life in the long monologue Snaran (1968; The Snare) and in Lifandi vatnid (1974; Living Water). Gudbergur Bergsson's Tómas Jónsson metsölubok (1966; Tómas Jónsson Best-Seller) and Thor Vilhjálmsson's Madurinn er alltaf einn (1950; The Man Is Always Alone) and Fljótt, fljótt sagdi fuglinn (1968; Quick, Quick Said the Bird) offer a similar picture of emptiness, falseness, and self-delusion. Other novels portray a longing for home and traditional ways no longer within reach, such as Indridi G. Thorsteinsson's 79 af stödinni (1955; 79 from the Station) and Land og synir (1963; Land and Sons). Svava Jakobsdóttir's Leigjandinn (1969; The Lodger) is an allegory of the American military presence. Her Gunnladar saga (1987; The Saga of Gunnlöd) seeks to legitimate feminine creativity in traditional myth.
In the 1970s, Thorgeir Thorgeirsson wrote a documentary novel on the last execution in Iceland (1830), following it with the more unusual Einleikur á glansmynd (1976; Solo on a Shining Image), which Thorgeirsson described as "a surrealistic documentary novel," told in a series of dialogues and repeating motifs. The traditional historical novel was represented by Njördar P. Njardvík, whose Daudamenn (1982; Dead Men) is a Lutheran pastor's account of his own successful efforts to have a father and son burned at the stake for witchcraft. Einar Kárason's Thar sem djöflaeyjan ris (1983; Where the Devil's Island Rises) and Gulleyjan (1985; Gold Island), burlesque narratives about Camp Thule, an abandoned American installation squatted by a group of social outcasts, give a very different picture of modern Iceland.
Norway
The first Norwegian novel is Camilla Collett's Amtmandens Dotre (1854-55; The District Governor's Daughters), a fictionalized account of Collett's unrequited love for the poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven. The novel offers a detailed portrait of life among the privileged official and clerical classes of Norway, forming the basis for the development of the realist novel.
After this auspicious start, the Norwegian novel entered a golden age. The idealizing peasant stories of Bjornstjerne Bjornson--- Synnove Solbakken (1857; Trust and Trial ), Arne (1858), En glad gut (1860; A Happy Boy ), Fiskerjenten (1868; The Fisher Girl )---established a distinctly Norwegian regionalism. Bjornson's novels in the realistic style are less successful because of weak characterization.
Jonas Lie was one of the principal representatives of the realist novel of the later 19th century. Den Fremsynte eller Billeder fra Nordland (1870; The Visionary or Pictures from Northland , also translated as The Seer ), Tremasteren "Fremtiden " (1872; The Barque "Future "), and Lodsen og hans hustru (1874; The Pilot and His Wife ) deal with maritime life in the far north. Livsslaven (1883; One of Life's Slaves ), more disillusioned, was influenced by Émile Zola. Familjen paa Gilje (1885; The Family at Gilje ) and Kommandorens dotre (1886; The Commodore's Daughters ) portray the constraints on women and other problems of Norway's increasingly irrelevant upper class. Lie stands out for his impressionistic style, picking out only significant details of setting, atmosphere, and speech.
Alexander Kielland was drawn to the formal polish and social engagement of French literature. His masterpiece, Garman og Worse (1880), telling of the decline of a family and a firm, served as a model for Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901). Kielland combined stylistic elegance with a pronounced reformatory zeal: Skipper Worse (1882) is an indictment of religious fanaticism; the harrowing Else (1881; Elsie, A Christmas Story ) attacks the sexual exploitation of women; Arbeidsfolk (1881; Workers) is critical of the cynical tyranny of Kristiania officialdom; and Gift (1882; Poison) and Fortuna (1884; translated with Gift as Professor Lovdahl ) expose the shortcomings of classical education. However, Kielland's contempt for the ill-bred and unrefined, surfacing in his last novel, Jacob (1891), reaffirms the traditional class structure.
Amalie Skram, married to the Danish novelist Erik Skram, settled in Copenhagen and became a leading champion of women's rights. Constance Ring (1885), exposing the constraints of marriage on women, is a fascinating psychological study. Lucie (1888), Fru Inès (1891), and Forraadt (1892; Betrayed ) are also concerned with the problems of marriage. Skram told the generational story of a fisher-family's rise and fall in the tetralogy Hellemyrsfolket (1887-98; The People of Hellemy), but returned to the short form in two autobiographical novels about her own mental illness, Professor Hieronymus (1895) and Paa St. Jorgen (1895; translated together as Under Observation ). Skram boldly broached sexual topics at which Lie and Kielland only hinted, but her novels are weighed down by her clumsy style.
Arne Garborg reinvigorated regionalism, writing in a self-constructed landsmål , or country language, subsequently called nynorsk , or New Norwegian. Landsmål was closer to the speech patterns of country folk than normative Dano-Norwegian, which was later transformed into riksmål . Garborg employed landsmål for his naturalist Bondestudentar (1883; Peasant Students), Mannfolk (1886; Men), and Hjaa ho mor (1890; At Mother's). However, Troette Moend (1891; Tired Men), the diary of a decadent government clerk, was couched in a brilliant Dano-Norwegian and became Norway's prime contribution to the continental literature of the fin de siècle. Fred (1892; Peace ), again in landsmål , portrays the religion-ridden home of Garborg's boyhood and his difficult relationship with his father, which remained a theme in his last novels.
Another significant novelist of the late 19th century was Trygve Andersen, whose I cancelliraadens dage (1897; In the Days of the Councillor ) is a historical novel made up of connected stories. His Mot Kvoeld (1900; Toward Evening) describes the end of the world as beheld in a Norwegian coastal town. Another great stylist, Hans Kinck brought out two novels about a sensitive man caught between Norway's ever more fragile official class and the world of vigorous peasants, Sus (1896; Soughing) and Hugormen (1898; The Adder), which were eventually combined under the title Herman Ek (1928).
Knut Hamsun called for a break with the realism and naturalism that had dominated Scandinavian literature for the latter part of the 19th century in an essay entitled "From the Unconscious Life of the Soul." His Sult (1890; Hunger ) and Mysterier (1892; Mysteries ) exemplified a new emphasis on psychological analysis; particularly of the irrational forces underlying human behavior. His novels of the 1890s are also notable for their lyrical descriptions of nature and their powerful depictions of love. In subsequent decades, Hamsun's work gravitated to a more traditional realism, including such works as Born av tiden (1913; Children of the Age ), Markens grode (1917; The Growth of the Soil ), and Landstrykere (1927; Wayfarers). The Growth of the Soil , in particular, exemplifies a strong nationalist tendency, idealizing a traditional Protestant Norwegian family and its dedication to hard work and obedience. Hamsun received the Nobel prize in 1920, but his achievement was tarnished by his collaboration with the Nazis during World War II, which also throws a suspicious light on the idealism of The Growth of the Soil .
Sigrid Undset also set a new direction with her first three novels--- Fru Marta Oulie (1907; Mrs. Marta Oulie), Jenny (1911), and Splinten av troldspeilet (1917; Images in a Mirror )---which focus on the contradictions between new opportunities for women and their traditional duties. But Undset's greatest importance for Norwegian literature lies in her historical trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-22), set in the Middle Ages and chiming in with the growing patriotism of the age. Although the role of women was one of Undset's principal concerns, her masterful depiction of the medieval culture of Norway earned her the Nobel prize in 1928. Undset's subsequent work showed a growing preoccupation with religious questions.
Norwegian nationalism found a counterpoint in Nini Roll Anker's elegies for the old Norway in such novels as Huset i Sogaten (1922; The House on Lake Street), I Amtmandsgaarden (1925; On the District Governor's Estate), and Under Skraataket (1927; Beneath the Slanting Roof), and in Christian Elster's significantly titled Av skyggernes sloegt (1919; From the Realm of Shadows). However, the nationalist novelists who championed peasant culture were generally more successful. Peter Egge trotted out the sturdy people of the hinterland of Trondheim in his Inne i fjordene (1920; Within the Fjords) and other novels. Gabriel Scott's historical novel Jernbyrden (1915; The Burden of Iron ), set in the south of Norway, pits good peasants against evil officials. Inge Krokann's I Dovre-sne (1929; In Dovre Snow) considers the troubled 15th century, when Norway was on the eve of Danish rule. The novel is written in nynorsk , which Krokann apparently did not see as incompatible with his hope for the preservation of an older, more authentic Norway.
John Bojer grappled with the question of the power of falsehood in public life, as in Et folketog (1896; A Procession of the People) and Troens magt (1903; The Power of a Lie ). The idealistic Den store hunger (1916; The Great Hunger ) sees human and national selfishness as the root of all evil. But Bojer's subsequent work also revolves around the notion that Norwegians possess unusual virtue and strength, whether they live on the Lofoten Islands or in the American Midwest, as in Den siste Viking (1921; The Last of the Vikings ). Ole E. Rolvaag, writing in Minnesota, similarly glorifies Norwegian immigrants in the Midwest in I de dage and Riket grundloegges (1924-25; translated together as Giants in the Earth ) and other novels. The nationalist fervor of Bojer and Rolvaag does not make up for the technical weaknesses of their work.
Olav Duun's Juvikfolke (1918-23; The People of Juvik ), a more skillful epic, is written in a highly idiosyncratic nynorsk , little resembling the supple riksmål of Hamsun and Undset. Kristofer Uppdal, another nynorsk epicist, took up the cause of industrial workers in his ten-volume Dansen genom skyggeheimen (1911-24; The Dance Through the Realm of Shadows). The best of Johan Falkberget's historical novels, Den fjerde nattevakt (1923; The Fourth Night Watch ), gives a portrait of a community of miners in the early 19th century.
Novelists who struck out in different directions included Johannes Thrap-Meyer, who celebrated the beauty of Oslo in Anakreons dod (1928; Anacreon's Death), and Cora Sandel (pseudonym of Fabricius), whose Alberte trilogy--- Alberte og Jakob (1926; Alberte and Jacob), Alberte og friheten (1931; Alberte and Freedom ), and Bare Alberte (1939; Alberte Alone )--- resaged many other accounts of women unwilling to take on traditional roles. Sandel's painful and laconically expressed vision had its most bitter expression in Kranes Konditeri (1945; Crane's Café ), which ends with the defeat of the heroine. Tarjei Vesaas, one of the greatest nynorsk stylists, initially seemed destined to become a typical peasant writer with such novels as Det store spelet (1934; The Great Cycle ). But he later wrote a series of symbolic and allegorical narratives, including Kimen (1940; The Seed ), which obliquely addresses the dangers of mass hysteria, Huset i morkret (1945; The House in the Dark ), about occupied Norway, and Is-slottet (1963; The Ice Castle ), an allegory of love. Vesaas' symbolic apparatus can be heavy-handed, but admirers argue that his stripped-down narrations have a hypnotic effect.
Sigurd Hoel, on the other hand, was a vigorous advocate of riksmål and published two satirical novels about Norway's linguistic battles, Sesam Sesam (1938; Open Sesame) and Sprogkampen i Norge: En kriminalfortelling (1951; The Language Struggle in Norway: A Detective Story). Long interested in psychoanalysis, Hoel applied its theories in Syndere i sommersol (1927; Sinners in the Summer Sun ), En dag i oktober (1931; One Day in October ), and Fjorten dager for frostnettene (1934; Two Weeks before the Frost Nights). His Trollringen (1958; The Troll Circle ), which has a strong political component, makes extensive use of folklore and symbols.
More spiritual approaches to the psychological novel were explored by Ronald Fangen, a Christian humanist, in Allerede nu (1937; Even Now), and by Sigurd Christiansen in Vort eget liv (1918; Our Own Life), Ved Golgota (1920; At Golgotha), and two trilogies, a family saga and a fictional autobiography. Aksel Sandemose, the most self-revelatory of the explorers of the psyche, wrote his first six works in Danish, then translated the most striking of them, Klabautermanden (1927; The Klabauterman), a tale of strange beliefs at sea, into Norwegian in 1932. His work is a disturbing mixture of the tormented Strindberg and the self-aggrandizing Jack London. En sjöman går iland (1931; A Sailor Goes on Land) begins a long series about Sandemose's alter ego. He continued to plumb the depths of erotic and other behavior in Det svundne er en drom (1944; The Past Is a Dream), written in Swedish, and Tjoerhandleren (1945; The Tar Dealer). Sandemose's Varulven (1958; The Werewolf ) is about the destructive force of the libido and the trauma of adolescence.
World War II and the experience of occupation and collaboration, as well as the aftermath of recrimination and trials, provided material for authors who came into their own during the postwar years. The journalist Sigurd Evensmo scored overnight with his Englandsfarere (1945; Boat for England ), about the Alesund Gang, a band of Norwegians who, trying to escape to Britain, were apprehended and executed. Johan Borgen, who was imprisoned in the domestic concentration camp of Grini, wrote a trilogy about a character who eventually serves as a border guard for the Nazis and as a guide for Jewish refugees escaping to Sweden. As the war ends, he is hunted down as a collaborator by a mob and drowned. The protagonist of Kåre Holt's Det store veiskillet (1949; The Great Crossroads) is split into three different identities, a black marketeer, an informer for the Nazis, and a leader of the home front---a clever way to present the choices Norwegians made in the occupation years. Holt also wrote a long fictional history of organized labor, beginning with Det stolte nederlag (1956; The Proud Defeat) and a historical trilogy with the collective title Kongen (1965-69; Kings), in which a pretender to the Norwegian throne, in his lust for power, plunges Norway into civil war. Holt also wrote three documentary novels, following the example of Thorkild Hansen in Denmark and Per Olof Enquist in Sweden, that demystify national heroes, including Kapplopet (1974: The Race: A Novel of Polar Exploration ), about the polar explorer Roald Amundsen.
Alfred Hauge's historical novels, less realistically detailed and more spiritual, include Mysterium (1967; Mystery) and a trilogy about Norwegian migration to the United States consisting of Hundevakt (1961; Dog Watch), Landkjenning (1964; Landfall), and Ankerfeste (1965; Anchorage), translated together as Cleng Peerson . Hauge's later novels, including Perlemorstrand (1974; Mother-of-Pearl Shore), conjure up a present-day Norway beset by avarice and anxiety.
Terje Stigen tried theme after theme and setting after setting in novels about the Norwegian past, about World War II, about industrialization, and about imaginary authoritarian states. But his most convincing performances have come in the short novel of psychological tension, including the early Vindstille undervejs (1956; An Interrupted Passage ) and Besettelse (1970; Obsession), in which a middle-aged teacher falls in love with one of his charges.
Nevertheless, a feeling of estrangement dominates many postwar novels, including Torborg Nedreaas' Av måneskin gror det ingenting (1947; Nothing Grows from Moonshine ), Finn Carling's documentary accounts of groups feared or ignored by society (the blind, homosexuals, the terminally ill), and Carling's novel about nuclear disaster Museumstekster (1982; Museum Texts). Brutality became the specialty of Jens Bjorneboe in his trilogy comprised of Frihetens ojeblikk (1966; Moment of Freedom ), Kruttårnet (1969; The Powder Tower), and Stillheten (1972; The Silence).
Agnar Mykle provoked one of the last obscenity trials because of the unabashed sexual descriptions in his novels about the super-potent Ask Burlefot, Lasso kring fru Luna (1954; Lasso Round the Moon ) and Sangen om den rode rubin (1956; The Song of the Red Ruby ). Mykle's sensationalism has long since been outdone by Knut Faldbakken, who peers into corners of erotic experience such as incest and necrophilia in Maude danser (1971; The Sleeping Prince ) and other novels.
The second half of the 20th century has also seen many novels with a strong political motivation, possibly inspired by Nedreaas' De varme hender (1952; The Warm Hands), in which the writer polemicized against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Dag Solstad's Marxism resulted in Arild Arnes 1970 (1941), in which the protagonist learns to be an "organized communist" in conduct and language. Solstad also wrote three documentary novels on the immediate pre-occupation and occupation years: Svik: Forkrigsår (1977; Betrayal: Pre-War Years), Krig, 1940 (1978; War, 1940), and Brod og vapen (1980; Bread and Weapons), about Oslo's working people under the pressure of occupation.
Although the Norwegian novel has never strayed far from realism, a resurgence of traditional realist narrative is notable in new regional narratives. Edvard Hoem, writing in nynorsk , showed how honest people have become disoriented and aimless in Kjoerleikens ferjereiser (1974; The Ferry Crossing ), in which the mind-deadening movement back and forth across a fjord, from dismal town to dying factory, stands for uneasiness and decay. Kjartan Flogstad described the changes wrought in a community and family by the shift away from fishing, farming, and---a favored Norwegian calling---the merchant marine to an industrial society, as in Rasmus (1974). Jan Kjaerstad's Speil: Leseserie fra det 20, århundre (1982; Mirror: A Series of Readings from the Twentieth Century) also avoids the broken narrative line and constant retrospections of postmodernism as it mulls the century's violence and penchant for war. However, Kjaerstad's Homo falsus eller: Det perfekte mord (1984; Homo Falsus or The Perfect Murder) does experiment with narrative technique. Herbjorg Wassmo also uses a straightforward realism in her series about Tora, the child of a German soldier and a Norwegian mother, shunned by her self-righteous north Norwegian community and sexually abused by her stepfather, beginning with Huset med den blinde glassveranda (1981; The House with the Blind Glass Windows ).
Sweden
The first Swedish novel, Urban Hiärne's Stratonice , written between 1665 and 1668, circulated in manuscript among the members of his Uppsala circle. A roman à clef modeled on Honoré d'Urfé's L'Astrée (1607-27), the novel features characters based on the late Karl X Gustaf, his son Karl XI, Hiärne himself, and members of his family and is set in thinly disguised cities of the Swedish empire. Stratonice had no progeny, remaining the sole novel of the Swedish baroque. Another early novel, Adalrik och Giöthildas äfventyr (1742-44; The Adventures of Adalrik and Giöthilden), by Jacob Mörk and Anders Törngren, inspired by the medieval Icelandic sagas, also remained an isolated effort.
The true beginning of the Swedish novel comes with Frederik Cederborgh's Uno von Thrazenbergh (1809-10), the adventures of a naive and much traveled nobleman, and Ottar Trallings Levnads-Målning (1810-18), a considerably more concentrated account with strong autobiographical elements. Both narratives are critical of class privilege. Clas Livijn's Spader Dame (1824; The Queen of Spades), a "tale in letters, found at Danviken" (an insane asylum outside Stockholm) and another criticism of class prejudice, showed a debt to the German romantics. Its multiple plots and its hero's mental dissolution as a result of a romantic attachment both derive from the tales of E.T.A. Hoffman.
Other early novels, including the work of Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, mixed romantic traits with proto-realism and social criticism. Almqvist's Det går an (1839; Sara Videbeck , also translated as Why Not? ) has remained the most widely read of his many narratives because of its topicality, its attractive heroine, and its descriptions of the central Swedish landscape. His Amorina (1822, 1839) is a Gothic story of incest and murder that describes the formation of a criminal personality. Almqvist's masterpiece, Drottningens juvelsmycke (1834; The Queen's Diadem ) recounts the assassination of Gustaf III at the Stockholm Opera in 1792. Concentric circles of political and erotic intrigue center on the androgynous Azouras Lazuli Tintomara, both a clarinetist in the opera orchestra and a danseuse.
Fredrika Bremer's "family novels"--- Grannarne (1827; The Neighbors ), Hemmet (1839; The Home or Life in Sweden ), Hertha, eller en själs historie (1856; Hertha )---praised virtue at the same time that they advocated nonrevolutionary social change, including greater freedom for women. Bremer has been called "the mother of the Swedish novel," because her work, despite its sentimentality, carved out a convincing realism in its description of the prosperous middle class.
Sophie von Knorring initially wrote about the (generally unhappy) upper nobility in Cousinerna (1834; The Cousins). She subsequently startled her readership with Torparen och hans omgifing (1843; The Peasant and His Landlord ), noteworthy as the first Swedish novel about peasant life, replete with drink, seduction, and murder. The incredibly prolific Emilie Flygare-Carlén developed a colorful regionalism filled with believable dialogue and fast action. Her best known novel is one of the earliest, Rosen på Tistelön (1842; The Rose of Tistelön: A Tale of the Swedish Coast ), which set the tone for later regional novels with a focus on sinister deeds and insanity on a remote island.
Viktor Rydberg wrote horror stories as a young man and made a name for himself with the historical adventure novel Fribytaren på Östersjön (1857; The Freebooter of the Baltic ), which rose above the genre with its attack on contemporary religious fanaticism. But Rydberg is best known for Singoalla (1856), which leaves realism in the dust with its interest in para-psychological phenomena---the protagonist becomes a split personality as a consequence of being haunted by a disowned child. For many years Singoalla was standard reading in Swedish schools, its antique style and heartrending plot provoking much admiration. Den sista atenaren (1859; The Last Athenian ) is a historical novel set in the age of Julian the Apostate and follows Charles Kingsley's Hypatia (1853) in its condemnation of ignorant fanaticism. Vapensmeden (1891; The Armorer), set during the Swedish reformation, again combines polemics with careful historical reconstruction.
August Strindberg's Röda rummet (1879; The Red Room ), a satire about the professional and emotional training of a journalist in a Sweden just getting used to a certain liberalization of its political life, has been called Sweden's first modern novel. Offering a remarkable picture of contemporary Stockholm, the novel has a highly episodic structure and intertwined plots. Hemsöborna (1887; The Natives of Hemsö ), more traditional and more widely read, is a broad comedy with tragic undertones. His historical novel Tschandala (1889, 1897), revolving around a 17th-century Übermensch , focuses on sexual obsession and debasement. I havsbandet (1890; By the Open Sea ) is an interesting formal experiment, combining elements from JorisKarl Huymans' À rebours (1884; Against Nature ), geological and ichthyological treatises, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the peasant murder story as practiced by Flygare-Carlén.
Gustaf af Geijerstam, an exceptionally derivative author, is chiefly notable for a naturalist novel, Erik Grane (1887). His Medusas hufvud (1895; Medusa's Head) incorporates neoromantic elements. The depiction of extreme psychological and emotional states, pursued by strindberg and Geijerstam, was also a central concern in Ola Hansson's Sensitiva amorosa (1884), a short novel made up of stories on the "secret processes [by which] we are ruled."
The novels of Strindberg, Geijerstam, and Hansson tend to have a strong regional flavor, a tendency brought out more clearly by Victoria Benedictsson, who wrote under the nom-de-plume Ernst Ahlgren. Benedictsson used Scania as the background for her stories in Från Skåne (1884; From Scania). Her autobiographical novel Pengar (1885; Money) is based on the events of her unhappy marriage and a plea for women's social and intellectual emancipation. August Bondeson's Skollärare John Chronschougs memoarer (1897-1904; Schoolteacher John Chronschoug's Memoirs) is an embodiment of a more comic regionalism. Written in an intentional and exaggerated imitation of academic rhetoric, it describes the struggles of the culturally ambitious Chronschoug with peasants, pupils, and the fair sex.
The 1890s saw an upsurge in neoromantic historical fiction in response to a growing nationalism. Verner von Heidenstam called for a rejection of the treatment of social problems---or "shoemaker's realism"---and a return to imagination, a sense of beauty, and wit. His Hans Alienus (1892), partly written in verse, is best described as a phantasmagoria and exploits the exoticism of its Near-Eastern setting to the fullest. Karolinerna (1897-98; The Charles Men ) is a series of stories connected by the figure of "the warrior king," Karl XII, seen together with his devoted men at several stages of his career, particularly during the disastrous invasion of the Ukraine that ended at Poltava in 1709. The cycle's true heroes are the patient and loyal Swedish soldiers, willing to make any sacrifice. Heidenstam, who now may have seen himself as the voice of the nation, continued with Heliga Birgittas pilgrimsfärd (1901; Saint Birgitta's Pilgrimage), another devoted but not uncritical portrait of a Swedish idol. His Folkungaträdet (1905-07; The Tree of the Folkungs ) describes the foundation of the kingdom of Sweden. Heidenstam won the Nobel prize in 1916.
Heidenstam's great neoromantic rival was Selma Lagerlöf, winner of the Nobel prize in 1909 and the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy, in 1914. Growing up, Lagerlöf had been an avid listener to stories about the glorious past of the great estates in the Värmland region, a world of cavaliers, sleighing parties, and superstitions that she recreated in her novels. The floridly romantic Gösta Berlings saga (1891; The Story of Gösta Berling ) is predicated on a double vision. In accordance with the plan of the evil Sintram, in league with the devil, an estate is run to wrack and ruin by the 12 wild "cavaliers of Ekeby," among them the drunken sometimes pastor and ladies' man Berling. Yet the cavaliers, and certainly Gösta, bring a sense of adventure (the equivalent of Heidenstam's beauty) to the place they plunder. The novel's charm lies in the ambiguity of Lagerlöf's attitude, both moralizing and loving, toward her creations, and in her unique storytelling style, melodramatic and even sensational but nonetheless altogether convincing. Gösta Berling was followed by a novelistic geography and history lesson, Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906-07; The Wonderful Adventures of Nils )---a children's classic with a double vision of life in the air (on the back of a giant goose) and on the ground. Antikrists mirakler (1897; The Miracles of Anti-Christ) also belongs to the spirit of the neoromantic 1890s, but shows an awareness of such social ills as child labor. Such realist elements were eventually drowned out by Lagerlöf's interests in Christianity and extreme emotional states.
Hjalmar Söderberg rejected regionalism in favor of pessimistic, often cynical, psychological studies of middle-class life in Stockholm, including Förvillelser (1895; Aberrations) and Martin Bircks ungdom (1901; Martin Birck's Youth ). The latter novel shows a Danish influence, featuring a dreamer in the Danish mold, sensitive, unable to act, aware that his talents are second rate---the quiet prisoner of a sadly stunted life. The protagonist of Doktor Glas (1905; Doctor Glas ) is another incarnation of the type. The novel's dream sequences constitute an important advance in the Swedish psychological novel. The importance of Stockholm as a literary background was even greater in Sigfrid Siwertz's En flanör (1914; A Stroller), in which well-to-do young men wander aimlessly through well-tended streets and cafés.
Siwertz built a more substantial reputation with Selambs (1920; Downstream ), about a family driven by avarice, egotism, lust, or, in one instance, unfulfilled Nietzscheanism, giving expression to a general dissatisfaction with contemporary middle-class values that pervaded Swedish literature in the wake of World War I. Sven Lidman's Huset med de gamla fröknarna (1918; House with the Old Ladies) is a defense of old-fashioned values voiced by three admirably snobbish ladies and a pendant to Lidman's five-volume series about the Silfverstäähls (1910-13), an ambitious picture of the inevitable decline of old and honorable traditions, which is marred by flashes of anti-Semitism. Elin Wägner wrote about the corruption of a good woman by her marriage into a wealthy but notoriously dishonest peasant family in Åsa-Hanna (1918). Gustaf Hellström, with Snörmakare Lekholm fär en idé (1927; Lace-Maker Lekholm Has an Idea ), is another critic of Swedish social striving and the narrowness of the Swedish small town. Birger Sjöberg's Kvartetten som sprängdes (1924; The Quartet That Went to Pieces) and Ludvig Nordström's Tomas Lack och hans familj (1912, 1930; Tomas Lack and His Family) belong to the same group. In many respects the authors of the 1910s and 1920s hark back to the 1880s in their wish to indicate the folly of the middle class.
The most important of the authors who seemed to regret the passing of the old-fashioned provincial town and its ingrown society, even as they applauded its demise, is the regionalist Hjalmar Bergman. Most of his work centers on "Wadköping" (a fictional re-creation of Örebro and the Bergslagen mining region just to the north). Novels such as Loewenhistorier (1913; Loewen Stories), Mor i Sutre (1917; Mother of Sutre), and Farmor och vår Herre (1921; Thy Rod and Thy Staff ) are inspired by Lagerlöf's romantic melodrama. Interestingly, Bergman was one of the few Swedish novelists to embrace the technical experimentation of modernism in his family novel En döds memoarer (1918; A Dead Man's Memoirs), which plays with factual and subjective time. His next novel, the satirical Markurells i Wadköping (1919; God's Orchid ), abandons technical innovation, and Herr von Hancken (1920; Mr. von Hancken) is an imitation of the literary style of the early 19th century. Bergman delivered a dark commentary on his own dedication to entertaining the reader in his final work, Clownen Jack (1930; Jack the Clown ), in which the main character, a projection of the author, insists that a clown's art springs from terror: the clown must frighten himself so that "children and fools would have the chance to laugh at their fear."
Voices of a new kind began to appear in the Swedish novel around 1930, with writers from a proletarian background who represented a distinctly working-class point of view in both autobiographical and historical novels. Vilhelm Moberg's work deals with the impoverished, tradition-bound Småland peasant society from which he came, particularly in the autobiographical trilogy Sänkt sedebetyg (1935; Memory of Youth ), Sömnlös (1937; Sleepless Nights ), and Giv oss jorden! (1939; The Earth Is Ours ). In Soldat med brutet gevär (1944; partially translated as When I Was a Child ), Moberg idealizes himself as a fighter for the common man, for pacifism, and for the Social Democratic Party. Moberg's greatest accomplishment was a tetralogy about emigration to the United States, consisting of Utvandrarna (1949; The Emigrants ), Invandrarna (1952; Unto a Good Land), Nybyggarna (1956; The Settlers ), and Sista brevet till Sverige (1959; Last Letter Home ).
Jan Fridegård's historical novels, Trägudars land (1940; The Land of Wooden Gods), Gryningsfolket (1944; People of the Dawn ), and Offerök (1949; Sacrificial Smoke ), feature a thrall as a fighter for social justice in a pre-Sweden of human sacrifice and wooden idols. A later series on the fates of ordinary soldiers in the wars of imperial Sweden, from Svensk soldat (1959; Swedish Soldier) to Hemkomsten (1963; Homecoming), clings to a central democratic message---the constant disregard of the Swedish crown for its cannon-fodder.
Among the working-class novelists, Ivar Lo-Johansson had the least concern with history and the greatest commitment to the correction of present miseries. His God natt, jord (1933 ; Breaking Free ), a collective novel on the wretched existence of day laborers, is thought to have helped to prompt extensive reform measures by the government. Lo-Johansson also wrote an autobiographical series, starting with Analfabeten (1951; The Illiterate), through Gårdfarihandlaren (1942; Peddling My Wares ), to Författaren (1957; The Author). Josef Kjellgren is associated with the urban working-class man in Swedish literature, and his Människor kring en bro (1935; People Around a Bridge) is a classic example of the collective novel.
Moa Martinson (née Helga Swartz), the only woman writer among the worker-novelists, rose from the miserable existence of day-laborers on the great central Swedish estates. Her Kvinnor och äppelträd (1933; Women and Appletrees ) and Sallys söner (1934; Sally's Sons) describe the hard lives of defiant women. The attempts of women to free themselves also form the subject of an autobiographical trilogy by Martinson, beginning with Mor gifter sig (1936; Mother Gets Married ). Martinson served as a role model for women writers in Swedish Finland as late as the 1970s, and feminist criticism has recently refurbished her reputation.
Eyvind Johnson began as a worker-novelist with Stad i mörker (1927; Town in Darkness) and Avsked till Hamlet (1930; Farewell to Hamlet), the latter novel being the first in a series of five books about Måren Torpare, a character with a background like Johnson's own, who learns to reject his ambivalence toward his simple past. During stays in Berlin (1921-23) and Paris (1925-30), Johnson read the work of John Dos Passos, Alfred Döblin, Marcel Proust, André Gide, and James Joyce, as well as Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud. His own novels show the influence of his reading. Minnas (1928; Remembering), for instance, is a study of repressed memory that uses interior monologue. In Regn i gryningen (1933; Rain in the Dawn), Johnson embraced a form of primitivism, briefly becoming a follower of D.H. Lawrence. Strändernas svall (1946; Return to Ithaca ) uses myth---the story of Ulysses' return from Calypso's island to Ithaca---to comment on Allied excesses during World War II. A similar dual perspective dominates Drömmar om rosor och eld (1949; Dreams of Roses and Fire ), which looks at political trials and executions through the witchcraft trial of the 17th-century French priest Urbain Grainier. Molnen över Metapontion (1957; Clouds over Metapontion) combines Xenophon's Anabasis with the fate of a Swedish survivor of a German concentration camp. Johnson's political idealism and his undoubted technical virtuosity were rewarded by a Nobel prize in 1974, shared with Harry Martinson, who is best known for his travel books, his poetry, and his vision of the end of the world in the space epic Aniara , 1956.
In startling contrast to the worker-novels of the 1930s, Agnes von Krusenstjerna's chronicles of Sweden's moribund nobility carry such deceptive titles as Tony växer upp (1922; Tony Grows Up) and Fröknarna von Pahlen (1930-35; The Misses von Pahlen). The novels grow ever darker, describing the nervous breakdown and institutionalization of Tony and delving into the sometimes lurid sexual lives of the nobility. Krusenstjerna's admirers compare her with Proust and D.H. Lawrence, although a comparison with Radclyffe Hall, the author of the once popular lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), may be more to the point.
Sweden also produced two comic novelists at mid-century. Fritiof Nilsson Piraten, best known for his Bombi Bitt novels ( Bombi Bitt och jag [1932; Bombi Bitt: The Story of a Swedish Huckleberry Finn ] and Bombi Bitt och Nick Carter [1946; Bombi Bitt and Nick Carter]), both inspired by American sources. Frans G. Bengtsson is chiefly notable for his great Viking burlesque, Röde Orm (1941-45; The Long Ships ), which parodies romantic Viking pageants, in poetry and prose.
Writers responded in various ways to the rise of the Nazis and to World War II. Sweden's neutrality was morally tainted by the fact that the country supplied iron ore to Germany and that German troop trains traveling from Norway to Finland were given free passage. Pär Lagerkvist, who received the Nobel prize in 1951, was a particularly outspoken critic of totalitarianism, publishing a series of novels that raise a protest against political oppression and inquire into the nature of evil, beginning with Bödeln (1933; The Hangman). Dvärgen (1944; The Dwarf ), an allegorical novel about the struggle between good and evil, is often cited for its stylistic achievements. His later novels--- Sibyllan (1956; The Sibyl ) and Ahasverus död (1960; The Death of Ahasuerus )---were chiefly concerned with religious themes. Karin Boye's futuristic Kallocain is another allegorical novel about the totalitarian threat, but it registers a great deal of ambivalence. The scientist Leo Kall invents a truth serum, "kallocain," which brings out a person's innermost thoughts. Besides its obvious negative uses, Kall realizes after some hesitation, the drug can be employed for good in that it breaks down the defenses that prevent human contact.
Sivar Arnér grappled with the moral questions raised by World War II in Plånbok borttappad (1943; Lost Wallet), a study of the motivation and costs of resistance to oppression. Arnér's historical novel Knekt och klerk (1945; Soldier and Clerk) and his Fyra som var bröder (1955; Four Who Were Brothers) argue for pacifism, justifying Sweden's neutrality. The very young Stig Dagerman captured the pervasive anxiety of the war years in Sweden in Ormen (1945; The Snake ), which set the tone for the rest of his dark oeuvre, including De domdas ö (1946; Isle of the Condemned), a fantasy on the fear of death, Bränt barn (1948; Burnt Child ), a family novel in which a father and son are caught in a torturous Oedipal relationship, and Bröacute;llopsbesvär (1949; Wedding Difficulties), which describes the drunken, sometimes grossly comical, and finally tragic events of a peasant wedding.
The work of Lars Ahlin mingles the grotesque with the spiritual, as in Min död är min (1945; My Death Is Mine), in which a traveling salesman is given away by his wife to a laundress, who needs a husband to legitimize her children. They have a mystical sexual experience and, in due time, fall in love. The climax of the novel is set in a morgue, where the salesman and a friend overcome their fear by drinking alcohol intended for the bathing of corpses. Constantly mixing sexual involvements and mystical experiences, Ahlin's novels are marked by complex narrative situations using such techniques as interior monologue, as in Bark och löv (1961; Bark and Leaf).
Lars Gyllensten's work resembles Ahlin's in its often grotesque characters, but Gyllensten substitutes a pervasive questioning for Ahlin's mysticism. Senilia (1956) has a 30-year-old protagonist who tries to protect himself against shocks by pretending to be an old man. Proceeding dialectically, Gyllensten then wrote a reply to his own book in Juvenilia (1965). In Sokrates död (1960; The Death of Socrates), the philosopher (who does not actually appear in the novel) seeks shelter in his teaching of scepticism and then in the imminence of his death. His daughter Aspasia believes that he is incapable of feeling normal human love, and his wife Xanthippe is convinced that his desire to die is an expression of his will to power. In Kains memoarer (1961; The Testament of Cain ), a quasi-Christian sect, having decided that God, if He exists, must be evil, because of the wretchedness of the world, venerates Cain and others who have revolted against God. Palatset i parken (1970; The Palace in the Park) brands compassion as a selfish or ineffectual emotion. Gyllensten's scepticism resolved itself in Det himmelska gästabudet (1991; The Heavenly Banquet), essentially an affirmation of the greatness of the creation. Gyllensten's mental experiments find a counterpart of sorts in the mini-novels of Willy Kyrklund, such as Mästaren Ma (1952; Ma the Master), while Sven Fagerberg takes flight in the abstractions of Eastern philosophy, particularly Zen, in such novels as Höknatt (1957; Hawk Night) and Svärdfäktarna (1963; The Fencers).
Besides these more unusual novels, the 1950s and 1960s witnessed a flourishing of traditional realism, sometimes expressing a strong sense of social engagement. Per-Anders Fogelström published several semi-historical and autobiographical series set in Stockholm. Pår Rådström's Greg Bengtsson series ( Tiden väntar inte [1952; Time Doesn't Wait], Greg Bengtsson och kärleken [1953; Greg Bengtsson and Love], and Ärans portar [1954; The Gates of Honor]) are interesting today for their remarkable stylistic variety and their ebullient humor. Another series with an international cast of characters, consisting of Paris---en kärleksroman (1955; Paris---A Novel of Love) and Ballong till månen (1958; Balloon to the Moon), is remembered for Rådström's oblique criticism of a burgeoning celebrity cult.
Sara Lidman represents a new development in the Swedish novel with several early novels expressing a profound political engagement. Tjärdalen (1953; The Tar Valley), a story of collective guilt, is the first of a series of novels set in remote Norrland, followed by Hjortronlandet (1955; The Cloudberry Land), Regnspiran (1958; The Rain Bird), and Bära mistel (1960; Carrying Mistletoe). All save the first concentrate on the oppressed, providing portraits of sensitive women caught in or tainted by their unforgiving surroundings. Two of her novels have African settings. Jag och min son (1961; I and My Son) tells the story of a Swede living in Johannesburg who sympathizes with the plight of the blacks but feels compelled to betray his friends in order to provide for his physically fragile son. Med fem diamanter (1964; With Five Diamonds) is set in Kenya and has an entirely black cast. In the 1970s, Lidman wrote a series of novels that focus on the building of a railroad to Norrland in the last years of the 19th century and the inevitable upheaval it caused in that primitive world, from Din tjänare hör (1977; Your Servant Hears) to Jernkronan (1985; The Crown of Iron). The series is notable for its close observation of dialectical and social differences.
Birgitta Trotzig, less political than Lidman, wrote several historical novels that also evince a strong concern with human suffering. Her novels are usually set in Scania, in the far south of the country. De utsatta (1957; The Exposed Ones) takes place during the Danish-Swedish wars of the 17the century, while En berättelse från kusten (1961; A Tale from the Coast) is set at the end of the 15th century. Later novels center on the relationship between a father and a daughter in Sveket (1966; The Betrayal); between father and son in Sjukdomen (1972; The Illness); and between mother, daughter, and grandson in Dykungens dotter (1985; The Bog King's Daughter). The bog king, inspired by a tale by Hans Christian Andersen, is a sailor who long ago seduced the grandmother, thus starting a chain of unhappiness and degradation. The legendary quality of Trotzig's novels presages Torgny Lindgren's Ormens väg på hälleberget (1982; Way of a Serpent ), a tale about sexual exploitation and revenge told in a dialectically colored and old-fashioned Swedish.
The "new provincialism" prevalent in the Swedish novel in the second half of the 20th century (see Lidman's and Lindgren's Norrland, Trotzig's Scania, even Fogelström's Stockholm) took a different turn in the small but extremely provocative oeuvre of Per Olof Sundman. Sundman's work, describing action without commentary or emotional exploration, bears a resemblance to the French nouveau roman . The main source of Sundman's laconic art is the Icelandic saga, a debt particularly clear in Berättelsen om Såm (1977; The Story about Såm), a modern retelling of Hrafnkels saga Freysgoda (The Saga of Hrafnkel, Priest of Frey). Sundman's Swedish landscape of preference was Jämtland, the mountainous region stretching along the Norwegian border in Sweden's northwest, as in Jägarna (1957; The Hunters) and Två dagar, två nätter (1965; Two Days, Two Nights ). Sundman also played an important role in the development of the documentary novel with his Expeditionen (1962; The Expedition ), modeled on Henry Morton Stanley's safaris in the Congo, and Ingeniör Andrés luftfärd (1968; The Flight of the Eagle ), closely based on the documentation surviving from a disastrous attempt to cross the North Pole by balloon by three Swedish aeronauts in 1897. Another documentary novelist is Per Olof Enquist, who wrote Magnetisörens femte vinter (1964; The Magnetist's Fifth Winter ), based loosely on the life of the German hypnotist Franz Anton Mesmer, Hess (1966), about Rudolf Hess, and Legionärerna (1968; The Legionaries ), which dealt with a group of Baltic refugees, mostly Latvians, who had served in the Wehrmacht against their will and fled to Sweden when the German eastern front collapsed. Buckling under Soviet pressure, the Swedish government eventually turned them over to the Soviet authorities. Still another documentarist is Per Gunnar Evander, whose early works again have the nature of factual reports. However, Evander's characters turn out to share a great propensity for lying (as in Uppkomlingen---en personundersokning [1969; The Upstart ---A Personal Investigation]), which seriously compromises the documentary status of the novels they appear in.
Sven Delblanc's oeuvre is marked by great variety. Eremitkräftan (1962; The Hermit Crab) is an allegory revealing a debt to Franz Kafka; Prästkappan (1963; The Cassock) is a picaresque tale set in 18th-century Germany; Homunculus (1965) is a fantasy; and Åsnebrygga (1969; Ass' Bridge) is the fictionalized account of a guest professorship at the University of California at Berkeley. The "Hedeby" tetralogy ( Åminne [1970; River Memory], Stenfågel [1973; Stone Bird], Winteride [1974; Winter Lair], and Stadsporten [1975; The Town Gate]) and the Samuel tetralogy ( Samuels bok [1981; Samuel's Book], Samuels döttrar [1983; Samuel's Daughters], Kanaans land [1984; Canaan's Land], and Maria ensam [1985; Maria Alone]) appealed to the nostalgia of a Swedish public comfortably settled in the modern cities of the welfare state. Delblanc's creative urge also found an outlet in short historical novels, including Kastrater (1975; The Castrati ), which featured in its cast of characters the great soprano castrato Luigi Marchesi, the besotted sometime "Bonnie Prince Charlie," and Gustaf III of Sweden, staying incognito in Rome, and Speranza (1980), which showed the transformation of an idealist into an oppressor onboard a slave ship.
Kerstin Ekman began with a set of eight detective novels, culminating in the open-ended mystery Pukehornet (1967; The Devil's Horn). Her next work was a semi-documentary novel, Menedarna (1976; The Perjurers), focused on the Swedish-American agitator Joe Hill. Her major social-historical tetralogy ( Häxringarna [1972; The Witches' Rings], Springkällan [1976; The Spring], Änglahuset [1979; The Angel's House], and En stad av ljus [1983; A Town of Light]) shows the transformation of a Swedish railroading community during a century of radical change, from 1870 on. The epic has a feminist point of view. With Rövarna i Skuleskogen (1988; The Robbers in Skule Forest), Ekman undertook a historical-mythological experiment, creating as a protagonist a troll who has watched human behavior for some 500 years. Hunden (1986; The Dog) also offers a commentary on human behavior from a nonhuman perspective. A detective novel, Händelser vid vatten (1993; Blackwater ) reverts to Ekman's beginnings.
Taken together, Lidman, Delblanc, and Ekman offer a vast panorama of Sweden in transition. Göran Tunström's canvas is more modestly scaled, but his plainly autobiographical stories are presented with great narratological virtuosity, as in his three Sunne novels, De heliga geograferna (1973; The Holy Geographers), Guddöttrarna (1975; The Goddaughters), and Prästungen (1976; The Pastor's Boy). A strong Christian interest becomes apparent in Ökenbrevet (1978; The Letter from the Wilderness), Jesus' account of his life before he enters upon his public mission. Juloratoriet (1983; The Christmas Oratorio) displays a magic realism (in the appearance of Selma Lagerlöf and the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin) not often found in the Swedish novel. The same blend of imaginative flights with great good humor puts a special stamp on Tjuven (1986; The Thief).
The historical novel enjoyed a come-back in Sweden in the 1970s. Lars Widding, Lars Ardelius, Hans Granlid, and Gunnar E. Sandgren explored the riches of Sweden's prehistory and history, from the fancied connection with the Ostrogothic empire in Italy to the great Baltic empire of the 17th century, its abrupt destruction, and the country's subsequent role as a theatre of grand illusions, as in the Gustavian age.
P.C. (Per Christian) Jersild has made a specialty of satirizing the perils and absurdities of the welfare state and its possible transmogrifications in the future, as in Till varmare länder (1961; To Warmer Lands), in which a housewife's visions of warmer climes turn out to be hell; Ledig lördag (1963; Free Saturday), in which the participants in a company party are trapped in a subway train; and Prince Valiant och Konsum (1966; Prince Valiant and the Co-Op), about a girl's dreams of a comic-book hero in the monotony of a Swedish grocery store. In Grisjakten (1968; The Pig Hunt), a skewering of Swedish bureaucracy and brainless obedience, a respectable government official is given the assignment of killing all the pigs in Sweden, starting with the island of Gotland. At several points in his career, Jersild has extrapolated from the icy efficiency of modern health care to visions of the future, as in Djurdoktorn (1973; Animal Doctor) and En levande själ (1980; A Living Soul ). Like other Scandinavian authors, Jersild envisioned a post-nuclear-disaster world in Efter floden (1982; After the Flood ). In Holgerssons (1991), he made fun of an icon of Swedish's children's literature, confronting a dignified and distinctly uncomfortable Selma Lagerlöf with Nils Holgersson from The Wonderful Adventures of Nils .
George C. Schoolfield
See also KNUT HAMSUN 1859-1952 (NORWEGIAN); PÄR LAGERKVIST (1891-1974 SWEDISH); SIGRID UNDSET 1882-1949 (NORWEGIAN)
Finland and Finnish-Language Literature
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Finland had a very rich oral tradition, with the Kalevala epic and the folk songs of the Kanteletar, but Finnish became a written language only with the Bible translations of the Reformation and did not receive official status until 1863, by order of the liberal czar Alexander. Every educated Finnish speaker also spoke Swedish and could read Danish and Dano-Norwegian, making for strong connections between the different literatures, reinforced by the fact that many Finnish novels were immediately translated into Swedish and so became available to Finland's Swedish speakers and the rest of Scandinavia.
Soon after the official recognition of Finnish, Aleksis Kivi (pseudonym of Alexis Stenvall) wrote a novel of world rank, Seitsemän veljestä (1870; Seven Brothers ), a story of seven youths who flee to the wilderness to evade the Lutheran Church's requirement that they learn to read and write before confirmation. At first attacked because of its boisterous depiction of willful ignorance and sloth, its mixture of comical, mythological, pedagogical, and tragic elements was slowly but surely appreciated, and it became a national novel, enjoyed and interpreted at many levels.
During the remarkable expansion of Finnish literature in the 1880s and 1890s, the impact of realism, primarily in the depiction of social problems, was quickly evident. The playwright Minna Canth assailed sexual inequality in the novel Hanna (1886), while Köyhää kansaa (1886; Poor Folk) demanded responsible care for the mentally ill. Teuvo Pakkala was a pioneer of the collective novel long before Denmark's Hans Kirk exploited the genre in Fiskerne . Pakkala's best collective novel is Vaaralla (1891; On the Hill), focusing on social class rather than individuals. Pakkala also experimented with narrative strategy, as in Pieni elämäntarina (1902; A Little Story of a Life), which tells its story not consecutively but in flashes. His work is particularly strong in psychological analysis.
Juhani Aho (born Johannes Brofeldt) is better known for his short stories, but his novels are also important in the Finnish canon. Rautatie (1884; The Railroad) reflects the impact of the railroads on a small community. Papin tytär (1885; The Parson's Daughter) and Papin rouva (1893; The Parson's Wife) consider the aspirations and ultimate disappointments of the intellectually gifted and emotionally thwarted Elli. Aho's later work departs from his realist beginnings: his neoromantic historical novel Panu (1897), set in 17th-century Karelia, presents its eponymous hero, a shaman, as the last champion of paganism. Juha (1911), again set in Karelia, is a novel about adultery and suicide that casts the border province as a hotbed of passion.
Other writers carried this neoromanticism forward into the 20th century. Volter Kilpi's early short novels in poetic prose, Bathseba (1900), Parsifal (1902), and Antinous (1903), took up in turn three great themes of the European fin de siècle: overwhelming passion, artistic vocation and purity, and the contemplation of beauty. Echoes of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde can easily be heard. Johannes Linnankoski (pseudonym of Vihtori Peltonen) was responsible for a pleasantly vulgar contribution in somewhat the same vein, with Laulu tulipunaisesta kukasta (1905; The Song of the Blood-Red Flower ), a great success at home and abroad, thanks to its operetta-like plot and its improbably virile hero.
A disciple of Lev Tolstoi and an ardent nationalist, Arvid Järnefelt wrote novels marked---and sometimes weighed down---by his patriotism. Isänmaa (1893; The Fatherland) offers a particularly clear example of Järnefelt's politics. One of his characters, with the author's evident approval, demands that all Swedish-speakers leave Finland. Although his novels were widely read, he found complete critical favor only with Greeta ja hänen Herransa (1925; Greeta and Her Lord), in which an elderly Swedish-speaking woman, whose son has married a Finn, tries to come to terms with the son's suicide, both in her relationship to the widow and to her Christian faith. Järnefelt's fictionalized account of his gifted but difficult parents, Vanhempieniromaani (1928-30; My Parent's Novel), depicts the new Finnish intelligentsia of the 1880s and 1890s.
By the turn of the century, Swedish hegemony in Finland's economic, governmental, and cultural life was rapidly waning. Czarist rule showed little respect for Finnish autonomy. The landless people of the countryside were growing restive, and the new urban proletariat was drawn toward a radical socialism. In response to a program of Russification, a persistent demand for independence arose, particularly among younger intellectuals. Internal unrest erupted repeatedly during the first decade of the new century, and news of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 was followed by a wave of political killings, mostly carried out by members of the revolutionary Red Guard, opposed by a conservative "defense corps." On 6 December 1917, Lenin granted Finland independence; on 30 January 1918, a short and brutal civil war broke out between the Whites and the Reds, who were sometimes joined by officerless Russian army units left behind in Finland. Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, who had served in the imperial Russian army, commanded a White officer corps made up in good part of Finlanders who had volunteered in the German army. The Whites triumphed, with the aid of a German expeditionary force, and terrible acts of reprisal ensued. After the end of World War II, Finland officially became a republic.
During these tumultuous years, the novel often served as an indicator of moods in the country. The imperious Maila Talvio had started out with a cogent demand for much needed reform of the tenant farm system in Pimeänpirtin hävitys (1901; The Destruction of the Dark Cottage). Her subsequent work, once much read, contrasted the purity of the Finnish countryside with the rottenness of the capital, which still had a significant Swedish presence. Her Niniven lapset (1915; Children of Nineveh) indicates by its very title what her argument was: Finns were corrupted by high living and Swedish associations. She moved ever farther to the right with Kurjet (1919; The Cranes), about the civil war, and the historical trilogy Itämeren tytär (1926-30; The Daughter of the Baltic), in which she presents the city as throwing off its Swedish beginnings in order to fulfill a Finnish destiny.
Aino Kallas (born Aino Krohn) was the first Finnish-language author to attract substantial attention in the anglophone world. Married to an Estonian, Kallas wrote about Estonia. Her early novel Ants Raudjalg (1907) expresses her shock at the double oppression of Estonian peasants by the German aristocracy and the Russian bureaucracy. Reverting to neoromanticism, she came fully into her own with her short, tragic "ballad novels," written in an archaizing language, about 16th- and 17th-century Estonia, including Barbara von Tisenhusen (1923), in which a blue-blooded girl is tried and drowned by her family for falling in love with a clerk. In Reigin pappi (1926; The Pastor of Reigi ), the wife of the pastor on the island of Hiiumaa falls in love with her husband's curate. They run away and are apprehended and executed. (The story is told by the cuckolded husband.) Sudenmorsian (1928; The Wolf's Bride ) is the tale of a forester's wife who can assume a wolf's shape and is killed by her husband's silver bullet.
Such neoromantic work stands in strong contrast to the social criticism of Ilmari Kianto, whose Punainen viiva (1909; The Red Line) is an indictment of the grinding poverty of the Finnish backwoods and the empty promises of democracy. The red line is the mark of illiterate voters, and it is the bloody mark left when the central character is killed by a bear. Punainen viiva also has strong elements of humor and continues the tradition established by Kivi. In his Ryysyrannan Jooseppi (1924; Joseph of Ryysyranta), Kianto likewise treats his lazy protagonist, a bootlegger and the father of many children, with affectionate contempt. Joel Lehtonen---whose first novel, Paholaisen viulu (1904; The Devil's Violin), was in the neoromantic mode---also deconstructed the time-honored literary picture of the backwoods hero in Putkinotko (1919-20). The novel is a condemnation of the pastoral dreams of the bourgeoisie and the inability of the peasantry to understand or even to imagine an improvement in their lot.
Other authors who began writing in the troubled years before the civil war similarly portrayed feckless and irresponsible country and village folk. Maria Jotuni began with cynical short stories about love in Rakkautta (1907; Love ) and then wrote a collective novel, Arkielämää (1909; Everyday Life), in which the central character persuades the inhabitants of a remote village to confess their secret sorrows and pleasures. The radical journalist Maiju Lassila, pseudonym of Algoth Tietäväinen-Untola, published his Tulitikkuja lainaamassa (1910; Borrowing Matches), in which a naïve but goodhearted farmer sets out to borrow matches and, with a crony, manages in short order to get himself thrown into jail.
During the civil war, the variously idealized or smiled-at inhabitants of the Finnish countryside suddenly became monsters in White eyes, capable of terrible atrocities. Frans Eemil Sillanpää exposed the political motivation of this demonization in Hurskas kurjuus (1919; Meek Heritage ). Ground down by years of poverty, the protagonist is swept along by the Red Guards, captured, and executed by the Whites after a court-martial of which he understands almost nothing. Sillanpää's sympathy with harmless little people, often victimized, was also the inspiration of Nuorena nukkunut (1931; The Maid Silja ), a story of an innocent girl who blissfully dies young, and Ihmiset suviyössä (1934; People in the Summer Night ), which portrays people who are good because they have not been abused. Sillanpää was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1939.
The 1920s and 1930s brought more variety to the Finnish novel. In 1928, Mika Waltari published Suuri illusioni (The Great Illusion), about Helsinki's well-educated and well-to-do middle-class Finnish youth. Waltari proved to be startlingly prolific, and his short psychological novels, including Ei koskaan huomispäivää ! (1942; Never a Tomorrow ) and Fine van Brooklyn (1943), received much critical acclaim. But he won an international reputation with his historical epics, compared in their day to Thomas Mann's Joseph novels. Sinuhe egyptilainen (1945; Sinuhe the Egyptian ) became a Hollywood film. Waltari then quickly wrote Mikael Karvajalka (1948; Michael the Finn ), Mikael Hakim (1949; The Sultan's Renegade ), and Johannes Angelos (1952; The Dark Angel ). With Turms, kuolematon (1955; The Etruscan ) he repeated the feat of Sinuhe the Egyptian , hanging an amazingly detailed reconstruction of an ancient civilization on a somewhat flimsy plot.
Pentti Haanpää's Kenttä ja kasarmi (1928; Exercise Field and Barracks), an unsparing attack on the brutal training methods of the Finnish army, so upset patriotic reviewers that for the next seven years no publisher would touch his work. During this enforced silence, he wrote Noitaympyrä (1956; The Magic Circle), considered to be his best work, which takes up the theme of a retreat into the wilderness from an unbearable and hypocritical "civilized" world. Vääpeli Sadon tapaus (1956; The Case of Sergeant Sato) deals with the sadism of petty authority. Pessimism and grim humor also mark Jauhot (1949; Grain), which is based on a historical event, when peasants seized a government granary during the great famine of 1867-68.
At about the same time, Volter Kilpi embarked on a second career as a novelist, leaving his neoromantic beginnings far behind and associating himself with the tradition of sly humor and tragic undercurrents begun by Kivi. In 1933, he published the giant Alastalon salissa (In the Hall of Alastalo), in which he tried to capture, almost minute by minute, the doings of the shipowners, captains, fishermen, and farmers who had been his forebears in extreme southwestern Finland. The slow tempo of the work, which relies on minutely recalled conversation and slowmotion action, has limited its popularity, but admirers regard him as a neglected colleague of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Hermann Broch, and Robert Musil.
For Finland, World War II began with the "Winter War" of 1939-40, which put an end to the class hatred and the language squabble left over from the civil war. Even Haanpää could bring himself to adopt a patriotic stand in Korpisota (1940; Wilderness War), one of the many works of fiction to emerge from what was rightly seen as a justified and heroic conflict. Yet the "Continuation War" (1940-44), in which the Finnish army invaded Soviet Karelia with the grandiose goal of creating a "Great Finland" on the model of Hitler's "Grossdeutschland," was viewed with a vast scepticism, as expressed by Haanpää's Yhdeksän miehen saappaat (1945; Nine Men's Boots), in which the same pair of boots passes from one trooper to another. The "Lapland War" took place in the winter and spring of 1944-45, when an army made up of young draftees was sent to the north of Finland to drive German forces into Arctic Norway. Parts of Karelia were permanently incorporated into the Soviet state, Finnish reparations to the Soviets caused economic hardships, and war crimes trials contributed to a mood of great anxiety. Positive developments included the emergence of a more egalitarian society, a rapprochement to the rest of Scandinavia, and a more questioning attitude toward long-accepted norms, allowing a more open mentality and a more experimental literature.
The most striking novel to come out of the war was Tuntematon sotilas (1954; Unknown Soldier ) by Väinö Linna. Using the conversations and experiences of a small group of enlisted men, Linna demonstrates the grimy valor of the Finnish soldier without glorifying the war itself. Linna's other great accomplishment was the trilogy Täällä Pohjantähden alla (1959-62; Here Beneath the North Star), which comments on the difficult moments in Finnish history by following three generations of a poor farm family.
Lauri Viita made a contribution to social realism with Moreeni (1950; The Moraine), set in working-class Pispala, a run-down but fiercely independent community. Moreeni parallels Linna's trilogy in that the time span is roughly the same, but it focuses on the industrial, not the agricultural, proletariat. Viita also displays a stronger sense of irony. In somewhat the same spirit, Eeva Joenpelto took a small town in Uusimaa in southern Finland as her bailiwick in a series of novels beginning with Neito kulkee vetten päällä (1955; The Maiden Walks upon the Water ). Her work, particularly Elämän rouva, rouva Glad (1982; The Bride of Life ), portrays strong women and is popular among moderate feminists.
The psychological novel was developed by Jorma Korpela, who depicted a disappointed idealist in Martinmaa, mies henkilö (1948; Martinmaa, A Male Being) and an icy individualist who undergoes a shattering mental crisis in Tohtori Finckelmann (1952; Doctor Finckelmann). The psychological novels of Marja-Liisa Vartio--- Se sitten kevät (1957; This Then Is Spring), Mies kuin mies, tyttö kuin tyttö (1958; Man as Man, Girl as Girl), Kaikki naiset näkevät unia (1960; All Women See Dreams), and Tunteet (1962; Feelings)---mostly focus on love and are distinguished by their spare and objective style. In Hänen olivat linnut (1967; Hers Were the Birds), the satiric undertones of her work develop into wry comedy.
Marko Tapio, pseudonym of Marko Vihtori Tapper, explored the emotional torments of a war veteran in a long interior monologue in Aapo Heiskanen viikatetanssi (1956; Aapo Heiskanen's Scythe Dance). Tapio also completed two parts of a planned tetralogy exploring Finnish national psychology and tellingly named Arktinen hysteria (Arctic Hysteria): Vuoden 1939 ensiluma (1967; The First Snow of 1939) and Sana todella rakastatko minua (1968; Tell Me That You Really Love Me).
Paavo Rintala drew on a radical application of Christian tenets in Kuolleiden evankellumi (1954; The Gospel of the Dead) and Rikas ja köyhä (1955; Rich and Poor). Disturbed by the perversion of moral values during the war, Rintala portrays adolescents led astray by the hectic atmosphere of the times in Pojat (1958; The Boys). He dealt with Finland's troubled history during the last Russian years and the first days of the republic in Mummoni ja Mannerheim (1980; My Grandmother and Mannerheim) by following the parallel lives of an obscure and humble country-woman and Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, the vainglorious scion of the Finland-Swedish upper class. His war novel Sissiluutnantti (1963; The Long Distance Patrol ) created a scandal because it included an episode in which an officer develops a sexual relationship with a member of the Finnish women's auxiliary corps, whose "purity" was still a source of national pride.
Veijo Meri also drew on material from the wars but presented it with a sardonic humor. Manillaköysi (1957; The Manilla Rope), Irraliset (1959; The Rootless Ones), Vuoden 1918 tapahtumat (1960; Events of the Year 1918), and Sujut (1961; Equal) are highly episodic and revolve around distinctly unheroic characters. Meri also made fun of the absurdities of military life in Yhden yön tarinat (1967; Tales of a Single Night) and Everstin autokuljettaja (1966; The Colonel's Driver).
Meri's short novels display a resemblance to the nouveau roman , which is also the case with the minimalist novels of Antti Hyry, who described his childhood in Kotona (1960; At Home), Isä ja poika (1971; Father and Son), and Silta liikkuu (1975; The Bridge Moves). Similarities to the nouveau roman notwithstanding, Hyry's stance also seems disconcertingly like that of the Austrian Adalbert Stifter, another master of noncommittal prose. Paavo Haavikko also espoused an apparent objectivity, writing about a fact-and-object-obsessed salesman who refuses to become involved in Yksitysiä asoita (1960; Private Matters), dissecting events leading to a double suicide in Toinen taiva ja maa (1961; Another Heaven and Earth), and dispassionately describing the life of a tramp in Vuodet (1962; The Years).
The radicalism of the 1960s (even then very muted) was gradually replaced by a belief in the efficacy of political ideologies in the 1970s and by the individualism of the prosperous 1980s. Then, in the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union caused an economic recession. In the novel, these shifts of atmosphere were reflected in the exploration of previously tabooed subjects. A drunken mock-sermon with remarks about Christ's sex life delivered by a character in Hannu Salama's Juhannustanssit (1964; The Midsummer Dance) incurred a charge of "intentional blasphemy of God." Found guilty, Salama was sentenced to three months in jail but pardoned by President Kekkonen. Since then, authors have been free to write about whatever they want. Salama himself gave a fictionalized history of a communist group in the working-class community of Pispala in Siinä näkijä missä tekijä (1972; Where the Doer Is, There's the Witness). The novel features Harri Salminen, a character who stands in for the author and makes an appearance in almost all of Salama's novels. In Finlandia (1976- ),Salminen, periodically insane, moves through a similarly psychotic Finnish society.
Alpo Ruuth, who made a debut with Kämppä (1969; The Den), set in a working-class neighborhood of Helsinki, is another politically engaged novelist, concerned with such problems as the migration of workers to Sweden ( Kotimaa [1974; Homeland]) and strife within the People's Democratic Party ( Nousukausi [1967; Boomtime]). Korpraali Julin (1975; Corporal Julin) is similar to Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk , portraying a character who flouts authority in a comparable way.
Kerttu-Kaarina Suosalmi long stood out among women writers because of her obvious unwillingness to espouse a feminist program, sparing neither gender in Jeesuksen pieni soturi (1976; The Little Warrior of Jesus), in which a slow-witted junk dealer is caught between a tough business woman and his nervous wife. Onnen metsämies (1982; The Huntsman of Happiness) focuses on an egomaniacal male author. Ihana on Altyn-Köl (1988; Lovely Is Altyn-Köl) illuminates the emotional and intellectual confusions of the postwar period. Anu Kaipainen, looking farther into the past, comments on the present in Arkkienkeli Oulussa (1967; The Archangel in Oulu), about the Russo-Swedish War of 1808-09 and the peace movement of the 1960s. In Magdaleena ja maailman lapset (1969; Magdalena and the Children of the World), she uses a dual perspective that encompasses biblical and contemporary matters. Kaipainen may be seen as a magic realist writer, because she incorporates the miraculous in such novels as Kellomorsian (1977; The Bell Bride) and Poimisin heliät hiekat (1979; I'd Collect the Shining Grains of Sand). Eeva Kilpi achieved international fame with Tamara (1972), depicting the quasi-erotic relationship between an impotent paraplegic and a sexually active woman. Kilpi is more interested in solving larger social problems in Elämä edestakaisin (1964; Life Round Trip) and Häätanhu (1973; The Wedding Dance).
Timo K. Mukka acquired literary-historical importance as the harbinger of a new regionalism. His Maa on syntinen laulu (1964; Earth Is a Sinful Song) is a historical account of the struggle between born-again Christianity and the fleshly temptations besetting the people of the far north. Laulu Sipijan lapsista (1966; The Song of the Children of Sipija) is also set in the far north. Kalle Päätalo's Koillismaa series, including Koillismaa (1960; Our Daily Bread ) and Myrsky Koillismaassa (1963; Storm over the Land ), set against a background of wilderness farming, exemplifies a similar regionalism. Heikki Turunen's Joensuun Elli (1974; Elli of Joensuu) and Kivenpyörittäjän kylä (1976; Stoneroller's Village) romanticize North Karelia in a similar way. His series about a small farmer and his family ends, inevitably, with a move to the city and complete corruption in Maan veri (1987; Blood of the Land). Antti Tuuri depicted his native Ostrobothnia---long notorious for the legendary hot tempers and unreasonableness of its inhabitants---in Pohjanmaa (1982; Ostrobothnia), a generational novel bordering on the burlesque in its depictions of a family's peculiarities and festivities. His subsequent work has a more open perspective. Amerikan raitti (1986; The Open Road of America) is about migrants from Ostrobothnia in the new world. Uusi Jerusalem (1988; The New Jerusalem) is set in the mines of western Canada and the beach towns of Florida. Maan avaruus (1989; Breadth of the Earth) searches for a utopian community that turns out not to be so utopian after all.
An altogether different and little observed side of Finland emerges from the work of Daniel Katz, a member of Finland's minute Jewish community. His Kun isoisä Suomeen hiihti (1969; When Grandfather Skied to Finland) stands in the Yiddish tradition of the episodic-comic novel. Jewish themes also dominate in Orvar Kleinin kuolema (1976; The Death of Orvar Klein) and Saksalainen sikakoira (1993; German Schweinehund). The likableness and ambivalence of Katz's heroes inevitably calls to mind characters in Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud.
Finnish Literature in Swedish
The great strength of Finnish-language literature lies in the novel, while Swedish-language (or "Finland-Swedish") literature has been preeminent in the lyric. However, during the national awakening of the first half of the 19th century, almost all literature was composed in Swedish. The first Finland-Swedish novelist was Zachris Topelius, who primarily wrote historical fiction, such as Hertiginnan af Finland (1850; The Duchess of Finland), marred by psychologically simplistic characterization. Fredrika Runeberg also wrote historical novels, including the carefully constructed Fru Catharina Boije och hennes döttrar (1859; Mistress Catharina Boije and Her Daughters), about the Russian occupation of Finland from 1712 to 1721, and the clumsier Sigrid Liljeholm (1862), about the civil wars at the end of the 16th century.
The first novel to recognize the Finland-Swedish community as a minority was Karl August Tavaststjerna's Barndomsvänner (1892; Childhood Friends), about a singer who ends up as the inglorious inspector of an isolated railroad station. Tavaststjerna's Hårda tider (1891; Hard Times) contrasts the self-sacrifice of some members of the Finland-Swedish upper class with the unthinking selfishness of others. Lille Karl (1897; Little Karl) recounts the author's own childhood as the son of an estate owner and retired general.
In Gustav Alm, pseudonym of Richard Malmberg, the language struggles of the early 20th century found a bitterly sardonic observer, who condemned both Finnish zealotry and Finland-Swedish narrowness and materialism in his Höstdagar (1907; Autumn Days). Alm turned his unblinking gaze on the Swedish-speaking small town in Herr Agaton Vidbäck och hans vänner (1915; Mr. Agaton Vidbäck and His Friends). A more fully realized talent belonged to Mikael Lybeck, whose short novels Den starkare (1900; The Stronger), Tomas Indal (1911), and Breven till Cecilia (1920; The Letters to Cecilia) read almost like the late dramas of Henrik Ibsen in their compression and ambivalence. The poet Arvid Mörne described the disillusionment of a sometime activist and socialist in his autobiographical novel Ett liv (1925; A Life). In later life, he came to think of his language group as proud remnants of history, standing with their backs to the sea.
Modernism, generally reckoned to be Finland-Swedish literature's greatest age with respect to poetry, also produced some interesting experiments with the novel, including Henry Parland's Idealrealisation (1929; Sale of Ideals), about a youthfully cynical visit to the jazz age, and Diktonius' Janne Kubik (1932). The latter is a series of cameos, accompanied by authorial commentaries, of a member of the Red Guard, a rumrunner during Finland's prohibition, a fascist sympathizer, a prematurely aged dockworker, and other disreputable characters. Diktonius, who was completely bilingual, claimed that Janne Kubik was conceived in Finnish and published the "original," Janne Kuutio , in 1946.
Hagar Olsson, the premier modernist literary critic, made her mark as a novelist as well. Her one unflawed triumph is the Dickensian and autobiographical Chitambo (1932), named after the village in Africa where David Livingstone died. Her fairytale novel, Träsnidaren och döden (1940; The Woodcarver and Death ), tells the story of a woodcarver who, drawn to mysterious Karelia, learns to understand the nature of existence when he witnesses the death of the unintentionally abused child of an irresponsible horse-trader. Eva Wichman's Mania (1937) and Ohörbart vattenfall (1944; Inaudible Waterfall) and Margit Niininen's Tora Markman och hennes syster (1936; Tora Markman and Her Sister) are notable for their portraits of female characters.
Jarl Hemmer made a powerful statement about the civil war in his En man och hans samvete (1931; A Fool of Faith ), in which a defrocked pastor, a volunteer chaplain who witnesses the White atrocities committed at the concentration camp on Suomenlinna in Helsinki harbor, takes the place of a married prisoner about to be executed. Sigrid Backman's Ålandsjungfrun (1919; The Åland Maid) is a legend about the last days of the civil war involving a seamstress, a kind of Undine figure who drowns herself when her lover is executed by a White court-marttial. Three of Backman's novels are set in Punavuoret, a bilingual working-class district in Helsinki. Familjen Brinks öden (1922; The Fates of the Brink Family) describes the tragedies and injustices of the war; Bostadslaget Sjuan i Lergrädnen (Condominium Company Number Seven in Mud Alley) chronicles the comic errors of a housing cooperative; and De fåvitska trollen (1932; The Foolish Trolls) is a novel in praise of free spirits like the heroine, a stand-in for the author.
A general disengagement from reality marked Finland-Swedish novels of the 1930s and 1940s. Narratives from these years have the air of ignoring their own Helsinki background. Many are set in a dream-like Karelia, including Olof Enckell's Ett klosteräventyr (1930; A Cloister Adventure) and Göran Stenius' Det okända helgonets kloster (1934; The Cloister of the Unknown Saint), or in the Russian Orthodox refugee enclaves of Estonia, as portrayed by the convert Tito Colliander in Korståget (1937; The Procession with the Cross). A comparable exoticism can be found in the classic novels of childhood by Oscar Parland, who had already painted a lightly concealed family portrait of great sophistication and subtlety in Förvandlingar (1945; Transformations), which is influenced by Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and the Russian novelist Juriy Olyeshya. Taking place during World War I and the Russian Revolution on a tumble-down Karelian estate, Parland's Den förtrollade vägen (1953, 1974; The Enchanted Way ) is an account of a loving if bizarre extended family and almost mythical natural surroundings. Intimations of violent death appear in Tjurens år (1962; The Year of the Bull ).
Christer Kihlman caused a change of mood by accusing the Finland-Swedish novel of bloodlessness, total estrangement from the rest of Finland's population, and empty devotion to tradition. His Se upp Salige! (1960; Watch Out, Ye Blest!) gives a merciless commentary on the willful irrelevance of the Finland-Swedish community. The novel is set in "Lexå," from the Latin lex , or law, a name coined to emphasize the exaggerated Finland-Swedish respect for the Swedish legal code. The novel provoked a towering dislike among conservative Finland-Swedes, who spoke of birds that dirty their own nest. Den blå modern (1963; The Blue Mother ) is a sequel examining a Finland-Swedish industrial family. Madeleine (1965), using some of the same characters, is an attack on the bourgeoisie in the wake of the murder of John F. Kennedy. Dyre prins (1978; Sweet Prince ) and Gerdt Bladhs undergång (1987; The Downfall of Gerdt Bladh ) are the first volumes of a multivolume family novel about another Finland-Swedish family. Despite his early call for a novel reflecting the whole of Finland's society, then, Kihlman's novels confine themselves to the narrow upper-class Finland-Swedish community.
Jörn Donner began with a familiar sort of autobiographical novel, Jag, Erik Anders (1955; I, Erik Anders), and Bordet (1957; The Table). Much later, he wrote a serial family novel beginning with Nu måste du (1974; Now You Must). Because of the skill with which he moves through the minefields of patrician intrigue, industry, and finance, Donner has been called a Finland-Swedish Balzac, but his characters do not always come to life.
Henrik Tikkanen made a career of parading the real or fancied eccentricities of the Finland-Swedish upper-middle class. His early novels Hjältarna är döda (1961; The Heroes Are Dead) and Ödlorna (1965; The Lizards) are about his experiences as a young volunteer in the Continuation War. He then launched an autobiographical series, beginning with Brändövägen 8. Brändö. Tel.35 (1975; A Winter's Day ), in which he recounts all the embarrassing details of his family's life. His 30-åriga kriget (1977; The Thirty Years' War ) is based on his own Unohdettu sotilas (1974; The Forgotten Soldier), an earlier Finnish-language text, and on newspaper stories of a Japanese soldier left behind on Guam in 1945, unaware that the war had ended. Efter hjältedöden (1979; After the Hero's Death) is a sequel.
Märta Tikkanen embarked on her literary career in Nu imorron (1970; Now Tomorrow) and Ingenmansland (1972; No Man's Land), narratives about a troubled couple, easily recognizable in hindsight as the Tikkanens themselves. She branched out into more objective discussions of male dominance and brutality such as Män kan inte våldtas (1975; Manrape ), in which a woman, offended by a man's improper advances, takes revenge by raping him. Her subsequent work has been mostly in verse.
Other novelists of considerable talent have pursued a less sensational kind of narrative. Hans Fors' Livets bryggor: En berättelse om Österbotten (1980; Life's Bridges: A Tale about Ostrobothnia) and Under höga träd (1990; Beneath Lofty Trees) have their roots in his home province. Anders Cleve's dithyrambic novels, influenced by Thomas Wolfe, are hymns of love to his native Helsinki. Johann Bargum's tightly made, laconic novels often specialize in family mysteries.
The Finland-Swedish novel displays a greater diversity since 1960. Kjell Westö has taken up a much younger generation's identity problems. Pirkko Lindberg's Byte (1991; Prey) registers a sharp awareness of the possibilities of linguistic play. Fredrik Lång's Porträttet av Direktör Rask (1988; The Portrait of Director Rask) tells of the rise and fall of the founder of a timber-export firm, determined to erase the stigma of his father's rumored communism. In Lars Sund's Colorado Avenue (1990), a young woman migrates to America before World War I, marries a fellow Ostrobothnian who is later killed in a labor dispute at Telluride, and goes back to Finland as a veritable "Dollar Hanna." Sund is a virtuoso narrator, full of feints and dodges, appealing to an altogether different audience than did the venerated Anni Blomquist, whose tales of skerry life in Åland were made into a long-running television series. Ulla-Lena Lundberg created a special kind of family novel out of the great Åland sailing tradition in Leo (1989), Stora världen (1991; The Great World), and Allt man kan önska sig (1995; Everything One Could Wish For). These fictions answer Kihlman's call for a more open Finland-Swedish novel.
The Faroe Islands
The Faroe Islands possess a rich popular heritage of ballads and folktales, but the novel developed only in the 20th century. A first novel in Faroese, Bábelstornid (1909; The Tower of Babel), by Regin i Líd, pseudonym of Rasmus Rasmussen, was issued in newspaper installments. It dealt with the contrasts between the Faroese and Danish temperaments, with the tensions between an extremely conservative peasant mentality and currents for reform, and with the islands' desire for independence from Denmark.
The literary critic Jorgen-Frantz Jacobsen left an almost finished novel, Barbara (1939), at his death. A singular work about sexual compulsion and sexual destruction, Barbara became a classic in Denmark, fitting well into the tradition of short erotic novels by such authors as Jens Peter Jacobsen and Jorgen Nielsen. His cousin, William Heinesen, gave the book a final polishing. Heinesen emerged as a novelist in his own right with Bloesende Gry (1934, 1961; Stormy Daybreak) and Noatun (1938; Niels Peter ), both collective novels in the fashion of Hans Kirk's Fiskerne (1938). Den sorte Gryde (1949; The Black Cauldron) is a satirical picture of the moral decay fostered in Tórshavn by the prosperity of World War II, a rot embodied in the profiteer Oppermann. De fortabte Spillemoend (1950; The Lost Musicians ) is again set in Tórshavn, but now at the beginning of the century. With its musical structure in four movements and its core group of amateur musicians, all portrayed with whimsical affection by the creator, it is the most immediately appealing of Heinesen's works. Moder Syvstjerne (1952; The Kingdom of Heaven ), containing several characters from The Lost Musicians , recounts the various spiritual and emotional experiences of a small boy. Det gode Håb (1946; The Lively Hope) is set in Tórshavn in 1669 and 1670 when the islands were held in personal fief by King Fredrik III's privy councillor and his son. This most disciplined of Heinesen's works is an epistolary novel in which the Danish pastor Peder Borresen describes the evils he attempts to oppose.
The third important novelist from the Faroes, Hedín, Brú, pseudonym of Hans Jacob Jacobsen, was the first novelist of artistic importance to write in the mother tongue. His semi-autobiographical novels about village life--- Lognbrá (1939; Mirage) and Fastatokur (1935; Firm Grip)---take a sensitive farmboy out to sea, into the world of love, and back to the family homestead. Leikum fagurt (1948; Fair Play) is a satirical account of Faroese political life and the struggle for self-determination. Brú's Fedgar á ferd (1940; The Old Man and His Sons ) presents traditional Faroese ways as no longer tenable in the 20th century.
Further Reading
Björck, Staffan, Romanens formvärld: Studier i prosaber ättarens teknik , Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1953
Brondsted, Mogens, editor, Nordens Litteratur , 2 vols., Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1972
Bronner, Hedin, Three Faroese Novelists , New York: Twayne, 1973
Budd, John, Eight Scandinavian Novelists: Criticism and Reviews in English , Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981
Einarsson, Stefán, A History of Icelandic Literature , New York: Johns Hopkins Press for the American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1957
Friese, Wilhelm, Nordische Literaturen im 20. Jahrhundert , Stuttgart: Kröner, 1971
Gustafson, Alrik, Six Scandinavian Novelists , New York: Princeton University Press for the American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1940
Holmberg, Olle, Lovtal över svenska romaner , Stockholm: Bonnier, 1957
Höskuldsson, Sveinn Skorri, editor, Ideas and Ideologies in Scandinavian Literature since the First World War , Proceedings of the 10th Study Conference of the International Association for Scandinavian Studies, held in Reykjavík, 22-27 July 1974, Reykjavík: Institute of Literary Research, University of Iceland, 1975
Karkama, Pertti, Sosiaalinen konfliktiromaani: Rakennetutkimus suomalaisen yhteiskunnallisen realismen pohjalta , Helsinki: Tammi, 1971
Kristensen, Sven Moller, Impressionismen i dansk prosa 1870-1900 , Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1955
Kristensen, Sven Moller, Den store generation , Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1974
Mawby [Garton], Janet, "The Norwegian Novel Today," Scandinavia 14 (1975)
Mazzarella, Merete, Det trå rummet: En finlandssvensk romantradition , Helsinki: Söderström, 1989
Mjöberg, Jöran, De sökte sanningen: En studie i fem romaner (1879-1886 ), Stockholm: Raben and Sjögren, 1977
Naess, Harald S., editor, A History of Norwegian Literatures , volume 2, A History of Scandinavian Literatures , Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993
Nettum, Rolf Nyboe, editor, I diktningens brennpunkt: Studier i norsk romankunst, 1945-1980 , Oslo: Aschehoug, 1982
Paul, Fritz, editor, Grundzüge der neueren skandinavischen Literaturen , Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982
Polkunen, Mirjam, editor, Romaani ja tulkinta , Helsinki: Otava, 1973
Rossel, Sven H., editor, A History of Danish Literatures , volume 1, A History of Scandinavian Literatures , Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992
Schoolfield, George C., "The Postwar Novel of Swedish Finland," Scandinavian Studies 34 (1962)
Schoolfield, George C., editor, A History of Finland's Literature , volume 4 of A History of Scandinavian Literatures , Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988
Scottie, Irene, editor, Aspects of Modern Swedish Literature , Norwich: Norvik Press, 1988
Warme, Lars G., editor, A History of Swedish Literature , volume 3, A History of Scandinavian Literatures , Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996
Weinstock, John M., and Robert Rovinsky, editors, The Hero in Scandinavian Literature , Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975
Zuck, Virpi, editor, Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature , New York: Greenwood Press, and London: St. James Press, 1990
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