Hunger (novel)

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Hunger ( Norwegian and Danish : Sult ) is the first novel by Knut Hamsun . With him, Hamsun achieved his literary breakthrough.

Emergence

Hamsun began writing the novel in the summer of 1888 on the way back from his second visit to America. The Danish steamer Thingvalla moored in Kristiania for one day on the route to Copenhagen . The city awakened in him unpleasant memories of the year 1886, when he had to go through a severe starvation here unemployed. Hamsun did not leave the ship and wrote the first lines of the novel that night, which already capture the oppressive atmosphere of the whole book:

Det var i den Tid, any gik omkring and sulted i Kristiania, denne forunderlige By, som ingen forlader, for han han han faaet Mærker av den ...
("It was at the time when I was walking around and starving in Kristiania, in this strange city that no one leaves until it has been drawn by it.")

In Copenhagen he rented an attic and, again hungry, continued to write. He presented the unfinished manuscript to Edvard Brandes , the editor's head of the Politiken newspaper . The deeply moved Brandes persuaded Carl Behrens to publish parts of it anonymously in the Danish magazine Ny jord (Eng. New Earth) in November. The work immediately caused a sensation because of the radical nature of its description and the break with the still young conception of the new realism . Dagblad magazine soon revealed the identity of the author. Hamsun continued to work on the work, which then appeared in full in 1890, but still anonymously. In the same year it was published in German translation by Samuel Fischer .

content

From an ultimately unclear narrative perspective, the novel describes the physical and mental decline of a young unsuccessful writer and journalist in Kristiania, today's Oslo. Occasionally he can sell an article to a newspaper, but the income is barely enough to pay for food and housing, so he wanders the city starving and homeless. By trying to hide his precarious situation, he makes it worse. The mental state of the narrator is described in great detail and vividly and fluctuates violently between madness, hope, despair and shame.

Reception and effect

The work received mostly positive to exuberant reviews from the start. The Danish author and critic Erik Skram praised the work as “a literary event of the first order”, and the Norwegian critic Carl Nærup wrote in 1895 that it “laid the foundation for a new literature in Scandinavia”. Many critics consider the novel to be Hamsun's best work. Hamsun was known overnight, was a welcome guest in intellectual circles and was invited to readings in the USA.

Many important writers of the 20th century such as Franz Kafka , Hermann Hesse , Thomas Mann , Marcel Proust , Ernest Hemingway , James Joyce and Henry Miller were influenced by the novel spelling of Hamsun's first work. The novel is considered an important milestone in the development of the narrative technique of stream of consciousness (stream of consciousness). In 1966 Henning Carlsen filmed the subject with Hunger .

Reception in the 21st century: In her 2017 novel Suleika Opens the Eyes , Gusel Jachina revisits a picture of Hamsun: People try to conquer hunger by cutting themselves with a knife and sucking their own blood from their fingers.

Hunger has been included in the ZEIT library of 100 books .

expenditure

On the occasion of Knut Hamsun's 150th birthday, a revised German translation of the novel by Siegfried Weibel was published in 2009, supplemented by an afterword by Daniel Kehlmann .

A reading by Uwe Friedrichsen is available as an audio book , produced by Hessischer Rundfunk in 1973 .

The publisher Norsk Gyldendal published the original first-hand edition from 1890 as an e-book at the end of 2013 . Hamsun had deleted the most provocative erotic and blasphemous passages in the later editions up to 1934. Norsk Gyldendal has so far published the last edition from 1934, while the Danish Gyldendal publishing house in Copenhagen is printing the version from 1907.

filming

In 1966, the eponymous film adaptation appeared Hunger , directed by Henning Carlsen with Per Oscarsson and Birgitte Federspiel in the lead roles.

Dramatization

At the Salzburg Festival 2018, Frank Castorf brought the novel together with Hamsun's Mysteries as an adaptation on the stage; with his text version and under his direction.

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Martin Beheim-Schwarzbach: Knut Hamsun - with self-testimonials and picture documents , Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Hamburg, 1990, p. 37
  2. ↑ Martin Beheim-Schwarzbach: Knut Hamsun - with self-testimonies and picture documents , p. 37
  3. ^ Introduction by Sverre Lyngstad in Knut Hamsun, Sverre Lyngstad: Hunger , Rebel Inc., 1996, p. VII
  4. ↑ Hündür Erikson: Hunger - Knut Hamsun (1888). Retrieved May 25, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Ask Hansen: Norsk Gyldendal udgiver original versions af 'Sult' (Danish) information.dk, December 5, 2013
  6. ↑ Hunger (1966). Retrieved August 30, 2017 .
  7. ↑ https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/schauspiel/hunger-2018