© Opale

Pär LAGERKVIST

prix Nobel 1951

 

Par Lagerkvist was born in 1891 in Vaxjo, a small episcopal town in Sweden where his father was a railway worker. He was raised within a bourgeois, religious milieu, where his family read from the Bible at night, accompanied by the sound of trains whistling past. His childhood and adolescence were calm, but he was troubled, probably as a result of his religious education, by a sense, which was passed over in silence at the period, of the overwhelming mystery of existence.
At secondary school he lost his faith. He expressed his radicalism in numerous ways; he frequented the Red Club, a group with progressive opinions. He explored socialism, Darwinism and scientism. Despite his radical tendencies, he retained an affection and a nostalgia for a pure faith for its own sake, although he disapproved of the forms in which it found expression.
When Lagerkvist became a student in 1910, he was convinced that his vocation was to write. In 1913 he decided to abandon his History of Art studies at the University of Uppsala to move to Paris. He had already published two collections of short stories. A Swedish critic remarked that the first collection contained 1200 words and 12000 suspension marks…

In Paris, however, he renounced suspension marks, and discovered Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism. The work of Picasso, in particular, was an epiphany. Under the influence of the painter, he wrote his manifesto, The Art of the Word and the Art of the Image. On the Decadence of Modern Literature. On the Vitality of Modern Art (1913). He advocated the pursuit of ‘pure poetry’ and lambasted a stagnant and constrained naturalism. He claimed that a rigorous symbolism, powerful and constructive (such as is found in primitive art and classic religious works) was better able to represent reality than so-called ‘realist’ texts. It was in the text that he affirmed his commitment to idealism in art.

He spent the war years in Denmark where he published Angest (Anguish, poems, 1916), which contained the first expressionist poems to appear in Sweden. He married a Danish woman. Several years, later, however, the couple separated, and Lagerkvist remarried in Sweden. But it was in Denmark that he began to study theatre. An admirer of Strindberg and critic of naturalism, he wrote in his essay, Theatre (1918) that: “Our era is, through its lack of equilibrium and heterogeneity, baroque and fantastic – much more fantastic than realism can convey.” Lagerkvist’s success as a writer lies precisely in the combination of a symbolist agenda with an eye for realist detail. Between 1918 and 1928 he demonstrated a considerable diversity as a dramatic writer.
In the 1920s he spent long periods of time in Italy and France. He published Cruel Stories in 1924, and Guest of Reality, in 1925. The latter, often described as the most autobiographical of his works, dealt not only with the confusion engendered by his crisis of faith, but also with the metaphysical meditation which this inspired.

In 1930 Lagerkvist settled in Sweden, near Stockholm. In the years that followed he would write in the shadow of the Nazi state forming to the South of Sweden’s borders. He engaged in a resolute ideological battle against totalitarianism. In 1933, already over 40 years of age, he published his first major novel, The Executioner, which describes the brutality of the human race, bent on self-destruction, and the irremediable loneliness of existence. This short novel is saturated with the sense of an impending catastrophe, when the storm clouds of punishment gather above the characters. Nevertheless, Lagerkvist is also a painter of the greatness of the human soul, even in those moments where it appears most feeble.

In 1940 he was elected to the Swedish Academy, the same year that The Dwarf appeared. This novel, like Barabbas and The Sybil, probes the relationship of man to God, through powerful allegories. Based on history or legend, these works evoke folklore or epic fantasy. Within them re-emerge questions about faith, war, plague, and being sentenced to death. These novels do not shun questions about the physical state of man, any more than questions about his spiritual state. Characterised by a lucid exploration of the human condition in its glory and absurdity, they are rich in eloquent symbolism.

Barabbas very quickly attracted the attention and plaudits of the international literary community. This work led to Lagerkvist winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1951, which he accepted with his accustomed modesty; “It is such an honour that I must ask myself whether it is deserved. But this is a question which I dare not even pose. Fortunately, this decision has been taken without consulting me, and I have the agreeable sense of not being responsible for it.”

Among his admirers Andre Gide, also a Nobel Laureate (1947), wrote in a letter to Lucien Maury, the novel’s translator: “There can be no doubting that Lagerkvist’s Barrabas is a remarkable book.” According to Gide, its success was “to have walked without falling that tightrope stretched across shadows, between the real world and the world of faith.”
In 1956 Lagerkvist won another European prize: the Grand Prize for Literature of the City of Paris.
In 1960 he published The Death of Ahasverus, and in 1962 The Pilgrim of the Sea. The Holy Land followed in 1964. The three novels were all inspired by the legend of the Wandering Jew.

Despite the honours, Pär Lagerkvist always maintained in his life the same simplicity as is found in his books, a rhythmic simplicity, he would say, like that found in African tribal songs and Aztec hymns. “A believer without faith or a religious atheist,” as he defined himself, Pär Lagerkvist died on the 11th January 1974.