Oscar Levertin: Swedish Critic of French Realism

Abstract

THE NAME of Oscar Levertin, Swedish poet, writer, critic, and literary historian is scarcely known beyond the limits of Scandinavian literary-historical circles. His considerable achievements, particularly in the field of cultural interchanges, deserve wider recognition among students of comparative literature. He introduced to a Sweden largely ignorant of them the great writers of nineteenth-century France, and he did this in large part by developing the then little-used techniques of journalistic criticism. Born in 1862 in Stockholm, of Jewish parents, Levertin was always to feel somewhat a stranger in his passionately loved native land. In 1906, when he was 44, he died of the tuberculosis which had haunted him for many years. His life was full, not of external events, but of literary, intellectual, emotional, artistic adventure. At Uppsala, he took his doctorate under the guidance of the noted Henrik Schiick, writing his dissertation on a French subject. His docentship was earned through a piece of research which involved both French and Swedish theater in the eighteenth century. He lectured in Uppsala, was appointed professor of literary history at the University of Stockholm, and continued in that position, while also writing poetry and daily reviews and articles in Svenska Dagbladet, until his death. By training and temperament, Levertin was disposed to love French literature. His interest had its origin in his early reading of Brandes, whose Hovedstr0mninger, won as a school prize in 1880, made an immediate and tremendous impression on him. In a review in 1890 Levertin says that coming from school books to Brandes was like moving from a little strictly divided and limited garden plot into a wonderfully rich and endless park... it was an overwhelming feeling of the immeasurably great and incalculably rich in humanity's cultural activity.. . From Brandes Levertin learned the importance of foreign literature, particularly French, both in terms of cultural history and as human document.2 He did not follow Brandes-or any other critic-blindly