Hunger, by Knut Hamsun.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Hunger, by

Knut Hamsun

this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project

Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the

header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the

eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is

important information about your specific rights and restrictions in

how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a

donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.

**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****

Title: Hunger

Author: Knut Hamsun

Release Date: June, 2005 [EBook #8387]

[This file was first posted on July 6, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: iso-8859-1

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, HUNGER ***

Produced by Eric Eldred, Robert Connal, and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team

HUNGER

Translated from the Norwegian of

KNUT HAMSUN

by GEORGE EGERTON

With an introduction by Edwin Björkman

Knut Hamsun

Since the death of Ibsen and Strindberg, Hamsun is undoubtedly the foremost creative writer

of the Scandinavian countries. Those approaching most nearly to his position are probably

Selma Lagerlöf in Sweden and Henrik Pontoppidan in Denmark. Both these, however, seem to

have less than he of that width of outlook, validity of interpretation and authority of tone that

made the greater masters what they were.

His reputation is not confined to his own country or the two Scandinavian sister nations. It

spread long ago over the rest of Europe, taking deepest roots in Russia, where several

editions of his collected works have already appeared, and where he is spoken of as the equal

of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski. The enthusiasm of this approval is a characteristic symptom that

throws interesting light on Russia as well as on Hamsun.

Hearing of it, one might expect him to prove a man of the masses, full of keen social

consciousness. Instead, he must be classed as an individualistic romanticist and a highly

subjective aristocrat, whose foremost passion in life is violent, defiant deviation from

everything average and ordinary. He fears and flouts the dominance of the many, and his

heroes, who are nothing but slightly varied images of himself, are invariably marked by an

originality of speech and action that brings them close to, if not across, the borderline of the

eccentric.

In all the literature known to me, there is no writer who appears more ruthlessly and

fearlessly himself, and the self thus presented to us is as paradoxical and rebellious as it is

poetic and picturesque. Such a nature, one would think, must be the final blossoming of

powerful hereditary tendencies, converging silently through numerous generations to its

predestined climax. All we know is that Hamsun's forebears were sturdy Norwegian peasant

folk, said only to be differentiated from their neighbours by certain artistic preoccupations

that turned one or two of them into skilled craftsmen. More certain it is that what may or may

not have been innate was favoured and fostered and exaggerated by physical environment

and early social experiences.

Hamsun was born on Aug. 4, 1860, in one of the sunny valleys of central Norway. From there

his parents moved when he was only four to settle in the far northern district of Lofoden--that

land of extremes, where the year, and not the day, is evenly divided between darkness and

light; where winter is a long dreamless sleep, and summer a passionate dream without sleep;

where land and sea meet and intermingle so gigantically that man is all but crushed between

the two--or else raised to titanic measures by the spectacle of their struggle.

The Northland, with its glaring lights and black shadows, its unearthly joys and abysmal

despairs, is present and dominant in every line that Hamsun ever wrote. In that country his

best tales and dramas are laid. By that country his heroes are stamped wherever they roam.

Out of that country they draw their principal claims to probability. Only in that country do

they seem quite at home. Today we know, however, that the pathological case represents

nothing but an extension of perfectly normal tendencies. In the same way we know that the

miraculous atmosphere of the Northland serves merely to develop and emphasize traits that

lie slumbering in men and women everywhere. And on this basis the fantastic figures created

by Hamsun relate themselves to ordinary humanity as the microscopic enlargement of a cross

section to the living tissues. What we see is true in everything but proportion.

The artist and the vagabond seem equally to have been in the blood of Hamsun from the very

start. Apprenticed to a shoemaker, he used his scant savings to arrange for the private

printing of a long poem and a short novel produced at the age of eighteen, when he was still

signing himself Knud Pedersen Hamsund. This done, he abruptly quit his apprenticeship and

entered on that period of restless roving through trades and continents which lasted until his

first real artistic achievement with "Hunger," In 1888-90. It has often been noted that

practically every one of Hamsun's heroes is of the same age as he was then, and that their

creator takes particular pain to accentuate this fact. It is almost as if, during those days of

feverish literary struggle, he had risen to heights where he saw things so clearly that no

subsequent experience could add anything but occasional details.

Before he reached those heights, he had tried life as coal-heaver and school teacher, as road-

mender and surveyor's attendant, as farm hand and streetcar conductor, as lecturer and free-

lance journalist, as tourist and emigrant. Twice he visited this country during the middle

eighties, working chiefly on the plains of North Dakota and in the streets of Chicago. Twice

during that time he returned to his own country and passed through the experiences pictured

in "Hunger," before, at last, he found his own literary self and thus also a hearing from the

world at large. While here, he failed utterly to establish any sympathetic contact between

himself and the new world, and his first book after his return in 1888 was a volume of studies

named "The Spiritual Life of Modern America," which a prominent Norwegian critic once

described as "a masterpiece of distorted criticism." But I own a copy of this book, the fly-leaf

of which bears the following inscription in the author's autograph:

"A youthful work. It has ceased to represent my opinion of America.

May 28, 1903. Knut Hamsun."

In its original form, "Hunger" was merely a sketch, and as such it appeared in 1888 in a

Danish literary periodical, "New Earth." It attracted immediate widespread attention to the

author, both on account of its unusual theme and striking form. It was a new kind of realism

that had nothing to do with photographic reproduction of details. It was a professedly

psychological study that had about as much in common with the old-fashioned conceptions of

man's mental activities as the delirious utterances of a fever patient. It was life, but presented

in the Impressionistic temper of a Gauguin or Cezanne. On the appearance of the completed

novel in 1890, Hamsun was greeted as one of the chief heralds of the neo-romantlc movement

then spreading rapidly through the Scandinavian north and finding typical expressions not

only in the works of theretofore unknown writers, but in the changed moods of masters like

Ibsen and Bjornson and Strindberg.

It was followed two years later by "Mysteries," which pretends to be a novel, but which may

be better described as a delightfully irresponsible and defiantly subjective roaming through

any highway or byway of life or letters that happened to take the author's fancy at the moment

of writing. Some one has said of that book that in its abrupt swingings from laughter to tears,

from irreverence to awe, from the ridiculous to the sublime, one finds the spirits of

Dostoyevski and Mark Twain blended.

The novels "Editor Lynge" and "New Earth," both published in 1893, were social studies of

Christiania's Bohemia and chiefly characterized by their violent attacks on the men and

women exercising the profession which Hamsun had just made his own. Then came "Pan" in

1894, and the real Hamsun, the Hamsun who ever since has moved logically and with

increasing authority to "The Growth of the Soil," stood finally revealed. It is a novel of the

Northland, almost without a plot, and having its chief interest in a primitively spontaneous

man's reactions to a nature so overwhelming that it makes mere purposeless existence seem a

sufficient end in itself. One may well question whether Hamsun has ever surpassed the purely

lyrical mood of that book, into which he poured the ecstatic dreams of the little boy from the

south as, for the first time, he saw the forestclad northern mountains bathing their feet in the

ocean and their crowns in the light of a never-setting sun. It is a wonderful paean to untamed

nature and to the forces let loose by it within the soul of man.

Like most of the great writers over there, Hamsun has not confined himself to one poetic

mood or form, but has tried all of them. From the line of novels culminating in "Pan," he

turned suddenly to the drama, and in 1895 appeared his first play, "At the Gates of the

Kingdom." It was the opening drama of a trilogy and was followed by "The Game of Life" in

1896 and "Sunset Glow" in 1898. The first play is laid in Christiania, the second in the

Northland, and the third in Christiania again. The hero of all three is Ivar Kareno, a student

and thinker who is first presented to us at the age of 29, then at 39, and finally at 50. His wife

and several other characters accompany the central figure through the trilogy, of which the

lesson seems to be that every one is a rebel at 30 and a renegade at 50. But when Kareno, the

irreconcilable rebel of "At the Gates of the Kingdom," the heaven-storming truth-seeker of

"The Game of Life," and the acclaimed radical leader in the first acts of "Sunset Glow,"

surrenders at last to the powers that be in order to gain a safe and sheltered harbor for his

declining years, then another man of 29 stands ready to denounce him and to take up the

rebel cry of youth to which he has become a traitor. Hamsun's ironical humor and whimsical

manner of expression do more than the plot itself to knit the plays into an organic unit, and

several of the characters are delightfully drawn, particularly the two women who play the

greatest part in Kareno's life: his wife Eline, and Teresita, who is one more of his many

feminine embodiments of the passionate and changeable Northland nature. Any attempt to

give a political tendency to the trilogy must be held wasted. Characteristically, Kareno is a

sort of Nietzschean rebel against the victorious majority, and Hamsun's seemingly cynical

conclusions stress man's capacity for action rather than the purposes toward which that

capacity may be directed.

Of three subsequent plays, "Vendt the Monk," (1903), "Queen Tamara" (1903) and "At the

Mercy of Life" (1910), the first mentioned is by far the most remarkable. It is a verse drama in

eight acts, centred about one of Hamsun's most typical vagabond heroes. The monk Vendt has

much in common with Peer Gynt without being in any way an imitation or a duplicate. He is a

dreamer in revolt against the world's alleged injustice, a rebel against the very powers that

invisibly move the universe, and a passionate lover of life who in the end accepts it as a joyful

battle and then dreams of the long peace to come. The vigor and charm of the verse proved a

surprise to the critics when the play was published, as Hamsun until then had given no proof

of any poetic gift in the narrower sense.

From 1897 to 1912 Hamsun produced a series of volumes that simply marked a further

development of the tendencies shown in his first novels: "Siesta," short stories, 1897;

"Victoria" a novel with a charming love story that embodies the tenderest note in his

production, 1898; "In Wonderland," travelling sketches from the Caucasus, 1903;

"Brushwood," short stories, 1903; "The Wild Choir," a collection of poems, 1904;

"Dreamers," a novel, 1904; "Struggling Life," short stories and travelling sketches, 1905;

"Beneath the Autumn Star" a novel, 1906; "Benoni," and "Rosa," two novels forming to some

extent sequels to "Pan," 1908; "A Wanderer Plays with Muted Strings," a novel, 1909; and

"The Last Joy," a shapeless work, half novel and half mere uncoordinated reflections, 1912.

The later part of this output seemed to indicate a lack of development, a failure to open up

new vistas, that caused many to fear that the principal contributions of Hamsun already lay

behind him. Then appeared in 1913 a big novel, "Children of the Time," which in many ways

struck a new note, although led up to by "Rosa" and "Benoni." The horizon is now wider, the

picture broader. There is still a central figure, and still he possesses many of the old Hamsun

traits, but he has crossed the meridian at last and become an observer rather than a fighter

and doer. Nor is he the central figure to the same extent as Lieutenant Glahn in "Pan" or

Kareno in the trilogy. The life pictured is the life of a certain spot of ground--Segelfoss

manor, and later the town of Segelfoss--rather than that of one or two isolated individuals.

One might almost say that Hamsun's vision has become social at last, were it not for his

continued accentuation of the irreconcilable conflict between the individual and the group.

"Segelfoss Town" in 1915 and "The Growth of the Soil"--the title ought to be "The Earth's

Increase"--in 1918 continue along the path Hamsun entered by "Children of the Time." The

scene is laid in his beloved Northland, but the old primitive life is going--going even in the

outlying districts, where the pioneers are already breaking ground for new permanent

settlements. Business of a modern type has arrived, and much of the quiet humor displayed in

these the latest and maturest of Hamsun's works springs from the spectacle of its influence on

the natives, whose hands used always to be in their pockets, and whose credulity in face of the

improbable was only surpassed by their unwillingness to believe anything reasonable. Still

the life he pictures is largely primitive, with nature as man's chief antagonist, and to us of the

crowded cities it brings a charm of novelty rarely found in books today. With it goes an

understanding of human nature which is no less deep-reaching because it is apt to find

expression in whimsical or flagrantly paradoxical forms.

Hamsun has just celebrated his sixtieth birthday anniversary. He is as strong and active as

ever, burying himself most of the time on his little estate in the heart of the country that has

become to such a peculiar extent his own. There is every reason to expect from him works that

may not only equal but surpass the best of his production so far. But even if such expectations

should prove false, the body of his work already accomplished is such, both in quantity and

quality, that he must perforce be placed in the very front rank of the world's living writers. To

the English-speaking world he has so far been made known only through the casual

publication at long intervals of a few of his books: "Hunger," "Fictoria" and "Shallow Soil"

(rendered in the list above as "New Earth"). There is now reason to believe that this

negligence will be remedied, and that soon the best of Hamsun's work will be available in

English. To the American and English publics it ought to prove a welcome tonic because of its

very divergence from what they commonly feed on. And they may safely look to Hamsun as a

thinker as well as a poet and laughing dreamer, provided they realize from the start that his

thinking is suggestive rather than conclusive, and that he never meant it to be anything else.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: