Mårbacka (book)
Mårbacka is the title of the first part of the autobiography of the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf , published in 1922 . The title refers to the Mårbacka estate , where Selma Lagerlöf grew up.
content
Mårbacka treats Selma Lagerlöf's first decade. Selma Lagerlöf does not tell chronologically, but describes in five parts the life and the people at Gut Mårbacka and the stories she heard as a child. Selma Lagerlöf takes her own person back completely in the book and reports from a considerate and slightly ironic distance. She writes about herself in the third person (“Selma”), but mostly she only appears with her sisters under the name “the little girls”. She always describes her father as "Leutnant Lagerlöf" or just "the lieutenant", her mother is simply called "Frau Lagerlöf".
In the first part, Strömstadsresan (“The Journey to Strömstad ”), Selma Lagerlöf describes how she was suddenly paralyzed when she was three years old and how she suddenly recovered later. The second part, Den gamla hushållerskans historier (“Stories of the Old Housekeeper”), is about her paternal grandparents and their families. The history of the Mårbacka manor and its people is the subject of the third part, Gamla byggnader och gamlaomanniskor (“old buildings and old people”). In the fourth part, Det nya Mårbacka (“The new Mårbacka”), Selma Lagerlöf tells about her father and his plans - carried out and not carried out - to expand and expand Mårbacka. The final fifth part, Vardag och fest (“Everyday life and festival”) describes the life of Selma Lagerlöf's family. As is typical for Selma Lagerlöf, the individual parts consist of chapters, each of which represents self-contained episodes and which, as a whole, give a good impression of Mårbacka and the people who live there.
Mårbacka is not only interesting because it gives a good picture of life on a remote manor in Sweden of yesteryear. The book is also of interest because here the biographical background of many of Selma Lagerlöf's works becomes clear: The story of her paternal grandparents described in the second part forms the material for the novel Liljecrona's home , the story of the tame gander who pulls himself out in spring She joined the wild geese and returned in the fall, found its way into Nils Holgersson , her father's birthday party appears in The Emperor of Portugal , and Selma uses the story of the lonely former soldier living in the forest who cannot cope with being reminded of the war Lagerlöf in the chapter Skogstorpet ("The farm in the forest") in Gösta Berling . Finally, Selma Lagerlöf processed the experience of a sudden paralysis and an equally sudden healing in the figure of Karin Ingmarsdotter in Jerusalem .
Current German edition
- Marbacka. Childhood memories . Langen-Müller, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7844-3141-3
literature
- Vivi Edström: Selma Lagerlöf , Stockholm 1991