Alexander Lange Kielland

Alexander Kielland

Alexander Lange Kielland (born February 18, 1849 in Stavanger , † April 6, 1906 in Bergen ) was a Norwegian author .

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Alexander L. Kielland was born in Stavanger on February 18, 1849. He came from an influential, wealthy merchant family. His father Jens Zetlitz Kielland was a reindeer and consul, his sister Kitty Lange Kielland was a successful painter.

He finished his law studies in 1871 with the state examination. A year later he married Beate Ramsland and settled in his hometown as the owner and manager of a small brick factory , which he ran until 1881.

In 1878/79 he went to Paris to become an author. There he met Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson , who supported Kielland's attempts at writing and found an editor for the short prose collection Novelletter (1879). In Denmark he spent two years (1881-1883), during which he kept in close contact with the literary scholars Edvard and Georg Brandes . In 1885, Kielland was at the center of a long debate when the Norwegian Storting refused him a so-called poet's grant, which fellow authors Jonas Lie and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson had applied for for him. The Norwegian representatives saw the peace and order in the country endangered by the now decidedly time-critical writings of Kielland. Seven years later, in 1892, he took over the office of mayor in Stavanger, and from 1902 he was bailiff in Møre and Romsdal . In the meantime he worked as an editor for the newspaper Stavanger Avis . Health problems for a long time, he died on April 6, 1906 in Bergen. In 1928 the city of Stavanger erected a memorial to him .

Monument by Alexander Kielland in Stavanger

During his lifetime, Kielland was one of the so-called "Big Four" of Norwegian literature of the 19th century - alongside Henrik Ibsen , Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Jonas Lie .

Literary career

Alexander Lange Kielland was one of the authors of the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavia who had dedicated themselves to consistent realism . Like his literary colleagues, he dealt socially critically with the class differences in society at that time. The main points of attack of his criticism, which he expressed by means of sharp contrasts and typifying personal representations, were the school system, the hypocrisy in the church and the bourgeoisie , but above all the gap between rich and poor. His best-known novel to this day, Garman & Worse (1880), was to make an impression on Thomas Mann , who in the tradition of Kielland initially set up his Buddenbrooks as a collective “businessman's novel ”. In addition to social criticism, Kielland's often satirical novels often contain valuable cultural-historical descriptions of the economic life of his closer homeland.

His relatively narrow oeuvre, the influences of u. a. Charles Dickens and Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev which was created in the short period between 1879 and 1891. Just to the genre of "Novell Etter" he made an innovative contribution to Norwegian literature, which earned him a well deserved reputation, a pioneer of the American Short Story to be. To this day, Kielland is praised in Norway for his stylistic mastery, which he also developed as a very productive letter writer.

Works

• Novelletter , 1879 (short prose)
• Garman & Worse , 1880 (novel)
• Nye Noveletter , 1880 (short prose)
• Arbeidsfolk , 1881 (novel)
• Else , 1881 (novel)
• Skipper Worse , 1882 (novel)
• To novelletter fra Danmark , 1882 (short prose)
• Poison , 1883 (novel)
• Fortuna , 1884 (novel)
• Sne , 1886 (novel), librivox (German)
• Tre Par , 1886 (drama)
• Sankt Hans Fest , 1887 (novel)
• Bettys Formynder , 1887 (drama)
• Professors , 1888 (drama)
• Jacob , 1891 (novel)
• Brev 1869–1906 , 4 vols., 1978–1981 (edition of his letters)

literature

• Apeland, Owe: AL Kiellands romaner  : kunstnerisk stil og method. - Oslo: Universitetsforl., 1971
• Blochwitz, Helmut: Tendency and satirical writing in the work of Alexander L. Kielland . - Tønder: Scanned, 1988. - ISBN 87-88517-04-7
• Brandes, Georg: Alexander Kielland, in: Samlede Skrifter , Volume 18, København og Kristiania 1910
• Paul, Fritz (Ed.): Fundamentals of the newer Scandinavian literatures . - Darmstadt: Scientific. Buchges., 1982. - ISBN 3-534-08047-5
• Zuck, Virpi (Ed.): Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature . - London: Greenwood, 1990. - ISBN 0-313-21450-6
• Skei, Hans (ed.): Disharmoniens dicter  : Alexander L. Kielland ved 150. - Oslo: Gyldendal, 1999. - ISBN 82-05-25764-7
• Sørbø, Jan Inge: Kielland som melodramatikar . - Oslo: Gyldendal, 2005. - ISBN 82-05-33732-2

See also

• List of Norwegian-speaking writers
• Alexander L. Kielland (oil rig)

Web links

Commons : Alexander Kielland  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Alexander Lange Kielland in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by Alexander Lange Kielland in the Gutenberg-DE project