‘The mysteries of the nerves in a starving body’

Abstract

Thomas Mann described the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) as ‘a descendant of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche’ in a festschrift compiled for Hamsun’s 70th birthday, featuring articles by Heinrich Mann, Musil, Schoenberg, Hesse, Gorky, Masaryk and Gide. However, Hamsun’s reputation subsequently declined so much that on his eightieth birthday he received tributes only from Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg and Hitler. Although Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, his controversial political views overshadowed his literary reputation, and the influence of Nietzsche on his later work has received more attention than that of Dostoevsky. Examination of his novels and correspondence, however, reveals the considerable importance of Dostoevsky in Hamsun’s literary development. Hamsun felt that contemporary fiction was only concerned with psychology as a serviceable element within a specific plot. He contrasted this with the unpredictability of Dostoevsky’s characters, which he saw as true to his own experience of subsisting through menial jobs, and planned to make the basis of his own writings. Despite visiting Russia and the Caucasus, Hamsun never mastered Russian, and read Dostoevsky only in translations. This essay examines those works available to Norwegian readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the evidence in Hamsun’s novels and plays of their impact on his creative life. While overviewing the reception of Russian literature in both Sweden and Norway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I focus on three of Hamsun’s novels, Sult (Hunger: 1890), Mysterier (Mysteries; 1892) and Pan (1894), analysing the influence of Dostoevsky on Hamsun’s portrayal of poverty, hunger and their effects on his protagonists’ behaviour, and on his treatment of religious and existential themes. I also note the reciprocal process by which Hamsun’s works were translated into Russian, achieved considerable popularity, and had a strong influence on Gorky.