Knut Hamsun (1859 - 1952) was a Norwegian novelist, playwright and poet awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 for the novel Growth of the Soil. His early work, above all Hunger (1890), pioneered a psychological realism that influenced twentieth-century modernism; his open support for Nazi Germany during the occupation of Norway permanently divided assessments of his life and work. [1]
Early life
Knud Pedersen was born on 4 August 1859 in the Gudbrandsdalen valley of central Norway, into a poor family of tailors and smallholders. When he was three the family moved north to Hamarøy in Nordland. From the age of about nine he was sent to work for an uncle who treated him harshly, an experience he later described as formative, and his formal schooling ended early. [1]
He worked as a shop assistant, itinerant peddler, schoolteacher and road labourer, and made two extended journeys to the United States in the 1880s, taking work as a farmhand and streetcar conductor in the Midwest. The experience produced a hostile account of American cultural life published in 1889. [2]
Breakthrough
In 1890 he published Hunger, the first-person narrative of a starving writer wandering the streets of Kristiania. It dispensed with conventional plot in favour of the unstable inner life of its narrator, and is regarded as one of the founding works of literary modernism. [1]
He set out his programme in lectures and essays attacking the social realism of the previous generation, calling for fiction attentive to "the whisper of the blood, the pleading of the bone marrow." Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894) and Victoria (1898) developed the same method, combining lyrical intensity with unpredictable, self-deceiving protagonists. [3]
Later fiction
Hamsun's later novels turned towards rural life and a suspicion of modernity, industry and urban civilisation. Growth of the Soil (1917), the story of a settler clearing land in the northern wilderness, was cited by the Swedish Academy when it awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Other works of the period include the Segelfoss novels, The Women at the Pump and Wayfarers. [1]
Nazism and disgrace
Hamsun held anti-British and pro-German views from early in his life, and during the Second World War he supported the German occupation of Norway and the collaborationist regime of Vidkun Quisling. He met Hitler in 1943 and, after Hitler's death in 1945, published an obituary describing him in admiring terms. He also gave away his Nobel Prize medal to Joseph Goebbels. [1]
After the liberation he was detained, examined by psychiatrists who declared him to have "permanently impaired mental faculties," and, rather than being tried for treason, was fined a large sum that effectively ruined him financially. His final book, On Overgrown Paths (1949), written in his late eighties, defended his mental competence and gave his account of the proceedings. He died at Nørholm, near Grimstad, on 19 February 1952. [2]
Legacy
Hamsun's standing in Norway remained contested for decades, with public commemoration of the 2009 sesquicentenary of his birth prompting renewed debate. Critics and writers have generally maintained a separation between the technical achievement of the early novels, which remain widely taught and translated, and the political conduct of his last years, which is treated as an unmitigated stain on his record. [4]
