Achievements
In 1916, Verner von Heidenstam was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which bore the apt inscription “The leader of a new era in our literature.” Beginning with his first book of poems, Vallfart och vandringsår, in 1888, and continuing until the publication of Nya dikter in 1915, Heidenstam challenged the literary trends of his time. He rebelled against the bleak worldview and confining aesthetics of naturalism in his early works and was responsible for ushering in the new poetry of the 1890’s. First and foremost a poet, Heidenstam embraced the creative power of the imagination above any attempt in his writing simply to imitate everyday life. His rejection of naturalism did not, however, take him to opposite extremes: Decadence, or art for art’s sake, was not an answer for Heidenstam. He tried to blend realism and the inspired creations of the imagination. Disgusted by the pessimism in the writing of his contemporaries, Heidenstam increasingly turned to the past to find a cultural heritage and a set of values powerful enough to launch a new national literature. His three historical novels and Nya dikter succeeded in doing so.
The Swedes recognized Heidenstam’s important role in revitalizing their national literature. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Heidenstam received several other honors, including membership in the Swedish Academy in 1912 and an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1909. It is important to point out, however, that Heidenstam’s cultural nationalism does not have at its core a narrow chauvinism. Heidenstam’s frame of reference, ultimately, is a classical humanism, based on the love of ideals, beauty, and the creative powers of the human mind.
Biography
Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam was born at the family manor, Olshammar, Sweden, on July 6, 1859. He was the only child of Nils Gustaf von Heidenstam, chief engineer for the Royal Coast Guard, and his wife, Magdalena Charlotta Rütterskiöld. The family lived in Stockholm, where Verner attended the prominent Beskowska School. He spent his summers at Olshammar, where his vivid imagination was nurtured by his grandmother and several other women of the household. During these early years, Heidenstam developed a love for Lake Vättern and the Tiveden landscape, a feeling for the land and its history that he never lost. Because both his health and his academic performance were poor, Heidenstam was taken out of school and sent south to travel. From 1876 to 1878, he toured southern Europe, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Greece, recording his impressions in drawings and paintings. These impressions later found expression in the striking vividness and immediacy of the settings in his early works.
In 1879, Heidenstam settled in Rome to become a painter, but he spent an increasing amount of time writing poetry. Against his father’s wishes, he married a childhood friend, Emilia Uggla, in 1880, causing a break between father and son. Heidenstam spent the next several years in middle and southern Europe, studying, painting, and writing—striving to find his own artistic form. In 1884, he made contact with Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg, at that time living in Switzerland, and the two men began an intense and inspiring series of discussions on all topics, particularly literature and politics. Although Heidenstam presented himself as a radical, his first published volume of poetry, Vallfart och vandringsår, with its colorful Eastern exoticism, had little in common with the doctrines of naturalism that Strindberg, at that time, championed.
Heidenstam returned to Sweden in 1887 and was reconciled with his father, who, terminally ill, killed himself the next year. Back in Sweden, the new head of his family, Heidenstam concentrated on his writing. His debut volume of poetry was published in 1888, and in Renässans and Pepitas bröllop, published in 1889 and 1890, respectively, Heidenstam developed his theories about art, rejecting the naturalism and documentary realism of the 1880’s and instead embracing the power of the imagination and love of beauty.
In the late 1890’s, Heidenstam wrote increasingly about the issue of cultural nationalism. In both his essays and his creative literature, Heidenstam attempted to define and express the Swedish national character. Mining Swedish history, Heidenstam focused on Charles XII (in The Charles Men), Birgitta (in Heliga Birgittas pilgrimsfärd), and Folke Filbyter (in The Tree of the Folkungs) to explore in historical novels the circumstances and temperament that formed and best expressed the Swedish character. Reacting against the materialism of his day and fearing the influence of foreign countries such as the United States on traditional Swedish social and cultural values, Heidenstam lectured and wrote to raise Swedes’ consciousness about their history and cultural heritage. He interrupted a planned series of historical novels to research and write a history textbook, The Swedes and Their Chieftains, from 1908 to 1910, a project that exhausted him and apparently drained his creative resources. Although he continued to write essays after completing that text, Heidenstam, with one brilliant exception, Nya dikter, was never again able to concentrate his creative powers. Some of his poems, memoirs, and essays were published posthumously, and many were fragments.
While Heidenstam’s literary productivity ended in 1915, he lived until 1940. After three failed marriages, to Emilia Uggla (1880-1893), Olga Widberg (1896-1903), and Anna Sjöberg (1903-1906), Heidenstam spent the last decades of his life in a successful relationship with Kate Bang. After 1915, he began another period of travel, revisiting the Riviera, Switzerland, and Italy as well as spending several years in Denmark. In 1925, he retired to Övralid, an estate he built overlooking Lake Vättern. He made occasional public appearances (for example, to speak before the Swedish Academy), but for the most part he lived his last years secluded at Övralid. He died on May 20, 1940, after several years of worsening senility. He is buried at Övralid; his former home has been converted into a museum.
Analysis
Verner von Heidenstam came of age as a writer when he organized and defined his thoughts about literature in Renässans and Pepitas bröllop. These essays stimulated a new literary and cultural movement in Sweden, one that rejected the doctrines and methodology of naturalism and the philosophical pessimism that Heidenstam saw as its product. Heidenstam called for a new national literature, developing out of and expressing the Swedish national character. Its impulse was to come from Swedish sources, particularly Esaias Tegnér and Victor Rydberg, along with the classical idealism of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, and was to unite realism with the “subjective…the imagination, the sense of the beautiful.” In Pepitas bröllop, Heidenstam asks if Mephistopheles and Peer Gynt do not exist with the same intense reality as some of the shadows we talk to on the street corner: “It is not only the purely concrete that comprises reality!”
For Heidenstam, the creative power of the imagination—not the ability to imitate everyday life—was the essence of artistic expression. Heidenstam placed his faith in the insight of the poet; his gifts were more lyric thannarrative. His career as a poet began with the publication of Vallfart och vandringsår; the work that marks the beginning of Heidenstam’s mature period is also a collection of poems, Dikter; and Nya dikter, perhaps his greatest work, ends his literary production. Between the two volumes of poetry that mark his mature period, however, Heidenstam wrote three historical novels, The Charles Men, Heliga Birgittas pilgrimsfärd, and The Tree of the Folkungs, works that rank Heidenstam among major historical novelists. Historical fiction provided the form Heidenstam needed to express his ideas and offer an alternative to the pessimism and decadence he saw as characteristic of the literature of his time. By writing about the past, Heidenstam believed, he could revitalize traditional values and illustrate aspects of the Swedish national character that he hoped would lead to a humanism based on classical ideals.
Heidenstam’s first work, the collection of poems Vallfart och vandringsår, added a fresh, vivid, exotic flavor to Swedish poetry. Not only did Heidenstam draw on his travels to provide an exotic setting for many of his poems, but also the lively tone and dynamic, colorful imagery, as well as the themes glorifying youth, beauty, and pleasures of the moment, were a shocking antidote to readers accustomed to the darker settings and themes of naturalism.
Endymion
Heidenstam’s first novel, Endymion, worked similar ground; the reader enters a world of harems, baths, Bedouin caravans, and bazaars. Although viewed from a foreigner’s perspective, the scenes have vitality because they are seen through the eyes of a sensitive, receptive protagonist. Heidenstam depicts the decline of Arabic culture and, with it, the life spirit that had characterized that ancient culture. Although some critics dismissed Heidenstam’s first prose work as a travel book disguised as a novel, “a romanticized Baedeker,” in this work Heidenstam raised the issues of cultural nationalism and the tragic role of national heroes that he later successfully developed in his major novels.
Hans Alienus
Hans Alienus is a more original book, interesting for its insights into Heidenstam’s evolving philosophy, but a chaotic blend of verse and prose—more a book of thoughts than a successfully wrought novel. The protagonist, Hans Alienus, is a stranger in his own time, searching for an ideal image of humanity, a meaning for which he can live. He travels freely through time and space, studying, experiencing, and ultimately rejecting the life philosophies he encounters in places ranging from the Vatican to the court of Sardanapalus to Hades. The last section of the book, strongly autobiographical, finds Hans Alienus in Sweden, reconciled with his father and embracing a belief in beauty and the imagination. The father, however, takes his own life, and the novel ends with Hans Alienus isolated, resigned, and wanting to die.
Despite the novel’s obvious autobiographical elements, Heidenstam, fortunately, moved beyond the despair and spiritual bankruptcy that defeat Hans Alienus. In his remaining novels, he turned to the history of the Swedish nation to discover and illustrate those values and beliefs with which to face life and give it meaning.
The Charles Men
In his desire to create a new literature based on Sweden’s cultural heritage, Heidenstam looked to the historical past to find subjects capable of infusing a literary national consciousness. In the figure of King Charles XII, Heidenstam found a character whose complexity and stature could express the Swedish national character. Heidenstam read diaries and original documents to gain an accurate sense of the period about which he was writing, but his most important source was Anders Fryxell’s history of Charles XII and the men who served under him. Heidenstam’s reliance on historical sources, however, was to provide a framework and background for his sketches of the king and of the fates of individual Swedes on campaign during the long war years. Heidenstam depicts these characters, representative of the Swedish people, in revealing anecdotes, which he believed to be the building blocks of historical fiction. The novelist, Heidenstam argued, must select anecdotes of dramatic power and arrange them in an order that most effectively expresses the conception of the novel as a unified whole.
Unity, however, is not easily achieved, as The Charles Men demonstrates. Its structure is a series of short stories, much like that of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) or Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1924, 1925). All three works are complete in themselves but provide composites of central characters—George Willard for Anderson, Nick Adams for Hemingway, and, in Heidenstam’s work, Charles XII as well as one other significant composite “character”: the Swedish people. Though the stories illuminate the character of Charles XII and provide insight into the moral dilemma he faces, they are not essential parts of an organic whole; they can stand by themselves, and, indeed, some were published several years before they reappeared as chapters in The Charles Men. The structure does, however, emphasize Heidenstam’s strength as a writer. Instead of a detailed, sweeping historical narrative, Heidenstam gives his readers the individual event, striking and immediate, without rhetorical or interpretive comment. He wastes no words, using the means of the poet to provide meaning—symbol, image, suggestion. Fredrik Böök, coeditor with Kate Bang of Heidenstam’s collected works, likened Heidenstam’s style to a “monumental fresco,” an epic style with limited use of detail whereby even the decorative is simplified and concentrated.
Heidenstam chose to write about a time in history when Sweden was a major power led by a king who gained an international reputation. The Charles Men, however, is not a glorification or a romanticized interpretation of Sweden’s role in shaping European history. Heidenstam’s emphasis is on the defeat of the king and the nation. Charles XII is a complex character, and the reader senses Heidenstam’s ambivalent attitude toward his hero. Charles XII is shown as cold and indifferent to other people’s suffering; much of the time he is lost in a world of his own thoughts, melancholy and isolated even when surrounded by his men. On the other hand, he is also courageous, leading his soldiers on the battlefield and commanding their loyalty to the bitter end. He is driven by his convictions and willingly sacrifices his men, the country’s resources, and ultimately himself in his mission to keep Sweden undivided. Though some of his people question whether the king is not tempting God, a soldier answers, after Charles has been shot: “He believed in the righteousness of his own conduct. Such defiance God forgives. Such defiance even men forgive.”
Heidenstam’s portrait of Charles XII assumes tragic overtones. The king and his men are doomed to defeat, but, as Heidenstam has written, war can shape brave and stable personalities, “even mold new life in an entire people.” The Charles men, hungry, cold, besieged, and imprisoned, are transformed from selfish, weak individuals to self-sacrificing, dutiful men. In Heidenstam’s fiction, defeat can be ennobling; greatness can arise out of terrible suffering and self-sacrifice.
Heliga Birgittas pilgrimsfärd
Heidenstam continued his examination of the heroic character under stress in Heliga Birgittas pilgrimsfärd, a transitional novel published between his two major prose works. Again the setting is historical, the fourteenth century, and the novel focuses on one of Sweden’s most famous figures. The concerns coming under Heidenstam’s scrutiny are mainly religious ones, as opposed to the military and political concerns that are primary in The Charles Men. In both works, however, Heidenstam is less interested in the broad sweep of historical circumstances than he is in depicting the psychic tensions and pressures they impose on the consciences of his heroes.
For Birgitta, the conflicts are between her “call” and her life as a sexual woman, mother, and wife; between her desire for Christian humility and her selfishness and unyielding pride. Her fanaticism makes her insensitive, even brutal, in her treatment of her children—and herself. She is compared to an octopus, consuming those who come within her reach while “her devilish eyes are directed upward toward the stars.” Like Charles, she willingly sacrifices all to follow steadfastly her own will. Heidenstam suggests that an unyielding drive and self-sacrifice are necessary for greatness. Heliga Birgittas pilgrimsfärd does delineate, however, as Alrik Gustafson has demonstrated in his study of Heidenstam’s works, a new and evolving conception of the tragic hero. Birgitta finds purity and fulfillment in her faith because she transforms her fanaticism through humility and resignation. She discovers that aggressive zealousness can do evil even when she most desires to do good: “So is it Thy meaning that also they who most intensely burn with desire to serve Thy love and righteousness shall do evil.” The human condition, she finally recognizes, is both good and evil; resigned to her own imperfections, she can empathize with the feelings of others and become truly humane.
The Tree of the Folkungs
In his last novel, The Tree of the Folkungs, Heidenstam returned to the foundation of the Swedish state itself. Part 1 of the novel is set at the end of the Viking period, when Christian worship is slowly replacing heathen beliefs and landowners wield political power. Heidenstam follows the basic history of that period, but because knowledge of the period is sketchy at best, his imagination is given free reign as he transforms names in historical documents into passionate, ambitious human beings. The founder of the Folkungs is Folke Filbyter, a Viking chieftain, who decides to acquire land and domestic animals at home instead of plundering abroad. Folke is a coarse, hulking man, interested in only one thing beyond his physical needs—the accumulation of wealth. He has no regard for social rules or law; in fact, he sends his thralls to rob people on the roads, and he becomes a blood brother with an outlaw. He even kidnaps his neighbor’s daughter after his son’s request to marry her has been rejected by the neighbor’s family. It is on such suspicious beginnings that the Swedish state is founded.
Nevertheless, Heidenstam is able to make Folke sympathetic at the end of part 1. Folke grows to love his grandson; after the boy has been kidnapped by a Christian preacher, the reader can feel Folke’s anguish as he scours the country looking for the boy. Decades later, Folke finds him, an earl in the king’s service, but the old man is told to keep quiet about the earl’s questionable background. Folke, the patriarch, is rejected by his own sons and grandson because he has no culture, no beliefs, no conscience.
In one lifetime, Swedish society has undergone vast changes: Folke’s offspring belong to a rising nobility who will establish the central power of the Folkungs. Paganism is being suppressed: The sacred grove of the heathens is burned by young Christian priests in the king’s retinue. Weary, displaced, a man left behind by the times, Folke cannot win the love of his sons. Nevertheless, he feels no bitterness; indeed, he is proud of his sons. As the young Folkungs ride off, dreaming of their destiny, Folke assumes a tragic grandeur when he opens his veins and prepares for a house sacrifice, faithful to his own customs and resigned to his fate.
Part 2 takes up the story of the Folkung family two hundred years after Folke Filbyter’s death. The Folkungs have consolidated their power. Through the characterizations of two brothers, Valdemar and Magnus, Heidenstam is able to explore what qualities of leadership are necessary to establish effective social and political order. The brothers end up fighting for the crown because Valdemar is indifferent about his duties as a ruler. He seeks the pleasures of the moment, much like the characters in Heidenstam’s early fiction, but such irresponsibility is fatal for a leader. His brother Magnus fills the power vacuum.
The state is unified under Magnus’s rule. Laws are codified and enforced; ties with the church are strengthened; a state army of knights is trained and mobilized. Despite his success as a temporal leader, however, Magnus is an anguished man, torn by internal conflicts. He feels guilty about imprisoning his brother and usurping Valdemar’s power, yet, as a politician and leader, Magnus recognizes the necessity of having done so. He is both selfish and hypocritical, but he is also motivated by a real desire to establish order and justice.
A tortured spirit like Heidenstam’s other heroes, Magnus is not able to find happiness. His personal compromises, however, do not overshadow the fact that he has molded a nation striving for peace and a more just society. Heidenstam suggests that his heroes are a mixture of good and evil, possessed of both virtues and vices, and that these heroes reflect the character of the nation as a whole. Though Heidenstam shows Magnus as flawed, one can take heart in the fact that civilization has made great strides from Folke Filbyter’s day to Magnus Folkung’s: In his last novel, Heidenstam offers the hope of progress.
