Abstract

The article brings the critical reading of Knut Hamsun’s <em>På turné</em> – the collection of Hamsun’s three polemic lectures entitled: <em>“Norsk litteratur”</em>, <em>“Psykologisk litteratur”</em> and <em>“Modelitteratur”</em>. These texts make up Hamsun’s theoretical and literary manifesto (1891), which up to the present has remained an important introduction to his early and most acclaimed work. In two first sections of the text I follow Hamsun’s scornful arguments against Norwegian realistic literature (as represented mainly by “the great four” writers: Bjørnson, Ibsen, Lie and Kielland) in an attempt to concisely present Hamsun’s reformatory plan according to which Norwegian literature should be freed from its entanglement in didacticism and social bias and redirected onto a path of a deeper psychology. The final part of the article presents a critical assessment of Hamsun’s endeavor. I believe some of Hamsun’s opinions in the matter of literature are still up-to-date and thoughtprovoking. These insights, however, have to be separated from Hamsun’s hasty generalizations concerning the work of Bjørnson, Lie, Kielland, and Ibsen which I defend against Hamsun’s malicious argumentation. In the final part of the paper <em>På turné</em> is assessed with regard to the ways of how Hamsun’s oeuvre has evolved in time. This approach enables one to grasp some of <em>På turné</em> paradoxes, e.g.: the discrepancy between Hamsun’s early literary stance (neo-romanticism and militant, anti-bourgeois views) and the shape his work assumed later on (didacticism, the tendency to morally judge his heroes, support for the vulgar ideology of fascism, etc.).

Highlights

  • In Hamsun’s subsequent novels one can find motives, characters, and situations very similar to those depicted by Kielland, Bjørnson or Lie: balls, funerals, suicides of unhappy lovers, the world of simple folks and nature, and so on54

  • It is difficult not to see a dark irony in the fact that the stance of a radical individualist and a literary rebel Hamsun adopted back in 1890s, has in the course of years hardened into „a moral and intellectual paralysis”56 radicalizing into the callous mania that was soon to make of him a fanatical defender of the fascist regime

  • 54 This inconsistency has been observed by Tore Hamsun in his Forword to Hamsun’s På turné, op. cit., p. 12, Rolf N

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Summary

Introduction

If one were to assess På turné from the perspective of time, one might be surprised to see that after several years Hamsun himself became interested in writing precisely this kind of fiction he was once so dismissive of. In Hamsun’s subsequent novels one can find motives, characters, and situations very similar to those depicted by Kielland, Bjørnson or Lie: balls, funerals, suicides of unhappy lovers, the world of simple folks and nature, and so on54.

Results
Conclusion

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