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Updated: June 13, 2025
Solitude and quiet, Nature, and his own foolish feelings these are the "last joys" left him now. The book might have seemed a fitting, if pathetic, ending to the literary career of the author of Pan. Certainly it holds out no promise of further energy or interest in life or work. The closing words amount to a personal farewell. Then, without warning, Hamsun enters upon a new phase of power.
Schafroff paused until the cigarette was lighted, and then continued his list: "Tchekhof, Ibsen, Knut Hamsun " "But we've read them all!" exclaimed Sina Karsavina. Her delightful voice thrilled Yourii, and he said: "Of course! Schafroff forgets that this is not a Sunday school. What a strange jumble, too! Tolstoi and Knut Hamsun "
Knut Hamsun, H. G. Wells, and Jack London were certainly more popular than any living Russian novelist, except perhaps the Russian Miss Dell, Mme. Verbitsky. In writers like Jack London and H. G. Wells the reader found what he missed in the Russian novelists a good story thrillingly told. For no reader, be he ever so Russian, will indefinitely put up with a diet of "problems" and imitation poetry.
When Hamsun speaks of Isak passing across the yearning, spring-stirred fields, "with the grain flung in fructifying waves from his reverent hands," he pictures it deliberately in the light of a religious rite the oldest and most significant known to man.
Taking it all in all, one may well call Hamsun old-fashioned. The virtues winning his praise and the conditions that stir his longings are not of the present day. There is in him something primitive that forms a sharp contrast to the modernity of his own style.
The issuance of two such books from the same pen suggests to the superficial view a complete reversal of position. The truth, however, is that Hamsun stands today where he has always stood. His objective is the same. If he has changed, it is only in the intensity of his feeling and the mode of his attack.
To be himself was his cry and his task. With this consummation in view, he plumbed every depth of human nature. This one thing achieved, all else became insignificant. Hamsun begins where Ibsen ended, one might say. The one problem never consciously raised by him as a problem is that of man's duty or ability to express his own nature. That is taken for granted.
At about fifteen, Hamsun had an experience which is rarely mentioned as part of the scant biographical material made available by his reserve concerning his own personality. He returned to the old home of his parents in the Gudbrand Valley and worked for a few months as clerk in a country store a store just like any one of those that figure so conspicuously in almost every one of his novels.
Greatness is to them inseparably connected with crowdedness, and what they call sophistication is at bottom nothing but a wallowing in that herd instinct which takes the place of mankind's ancient antagonist in Hamsun's books. Above all, their standards of judgment are not their own. From what has just been said one might conclude that the spirit of Hamsun is fundamentally unsocial.
The figures populating the works of Hamsun, whether centrally placed or moving shadowlike in the periphery, are first of all themselves agressively, inevitably, unconsciously so, In other words, they are like their creator. They may perish tragically or ridiculously as a result of their common inability to lay violent hand on their own natures.
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