“Vill ‘Hem’, Men Vet ej var Hemmet Ligger”: Migration and the Aesthetics of Estrangement in Verner von Heidenstam’s Formative Art and Prose

Abstract

This essay argues that Nobel laureate Verner von Heidenstam’s campaign against naturalist aesthetics in late nineteenth-century Swedish literature was motivated, in part, by the sense of estrangement he developed from Swedish cultural life during his adolescent years as a migrant. It also contends that the aesthetic discontent he experienced in his early career foreshadowed a wider sense of alienation from place and nation that would accompany the rise of globalization and normalized migration in the twentieth century. While recent scholarship on Heidenstam’s early oeuvre situates the writer’s bibliography within the fin de siècle, this project refocuses the discussion on the contemporaneous artistic debates Heidenstam addresses in his polemic Renässans, as well as the migratory themes he explores in his 1892 novel, Hans Alienus. This approach illuminates how Heidenstam’s youthful quest for aesthetic reinvention upended the notion that artists and writers can be tethered to singular points of origin, offering new pathways for understanding the emergence of a distinct migrant literature and visual art in Sweden. Although Heidenstam’s later works took a sharp nationalistic turn and have receded from popular consciousness in contemporary times, reexamining his earliest paintings and prose as products of a migrant imagination can help scholars more firmly affix his legacy to modern and Modernist traditions, inviting fresh perspectives on his paradigm-shifting aesthetic of estrangement.