Diary of Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf
Diary of Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (original title: Dagbok för Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf ) is the third and last part of the autobiography of the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf . The book was published in 1932 and is Selma Lagerlöf's last completed work.
General
The diary describes a few weeks in the winter and spring of 1873 during which Selma Lagerlöf, at the age of fourteen, stayed with an aunt and uncle in Stockholm in order to have her congenital hip disease treated through physiotherapy, while also taking private English lessons. The book is designed as a diary novel and thrives on the fiction that it was written by Selma Lagerlöf when she was fourteen. Selma Lagerlöf succeeded so well in creating this impression that one critic stated that Selma Lagerlöf had never written as well as an adult as she did as a child.
The diary deals with the encounter between the author and the big city, which here becomes a symbol for the world. This encounter always leads to disappointments: even before leaving, she learns through an indiscretion that the aunt and uncle would rather have one of their siblings with them, a visit to the building of the Masonic Lodge does not keep its promises, the boy , who seems sympathetic to the first-person narrator and whom she speaks to, mocks her because of her limp, Ms. H. does not, as hoped, tell exciting stories from the Swedish colony of St. Barthélemy , and the trip to the spring festival in Uppsala , which is the crowning glory turns into a fiasco: the first-person narrator wanders through the city with an old woman and misses the party.
The motif of disappointment is closely related to the recurring motif of death : references to death happen again and again, from the black paneling in the Masonic house to the corpse of the dead Prince August, which the narrator inspects with her aunt, and the painting “ Karl X. Gustav on the deathbed of Axel Oxenstierna ”to a visit to the“ Underworld ”, the morgue of the Karolinska Institutet .
A small but important motif is that of dirt: it is introduced seemingly irrelevant when the narrator forgets to take off her overshoes and soils the carpet in the living room. The motif returns in the central scene with the Trasfröken ("Lumpenfräulein"): a woman who has been abandoned by her fiancé, has gone mad and is constantly walking through the city in her dirty wedding dress. In this context, the sentence that contradicts all praises of love in Selma Lagerlöf's work falls: Ms. H. notes that love is something terrible.
The first-person narrator finds consolation in the enthusiastic admiration of a student whom she met on the train ride to Stockholm. This student really existed, he was the external role model for the characters of Gösta Berling in the novel of the same name, for Gunnar Hede in Eine Gutsgeschichte and for Karl-Artur Ekenstedt in the Löwensköld trilogy. In the diary , the student recurs as a leitmotif: the first-person narrator thinks of him, believes she recognizes him, and even thinks she has found out that he is really of royal descent. An initial disappointment when she found out that he was engaged, she can still overcome: As a budding writer, she doesn't want to get married anyway. When you visit Uppsala, however, the final disappointment comes here too. The diary author finds out that he is an unhappy person and by no means the adored shining hero.
For the diary author, art is the counter-image to the darkening world. In a key scene, she imagines how she covers the dead she saw at the Karolinska Institutet with the beautiful draperies depicted in the painting by Axel Oxenstierna, and finds solace in this. Here the concern of the diary becomes clear: Selma Lagerlöf presents her art as a cover letter against a gloomy world.
The diary is a pessimistic book. In the end, however, more friendly tones can be heard: Aunt Lovisa is visiting Stockholm. This, also dressed in white and red, but not dirty, is the positive counter-image to the "rag lady". She brings a touch of home Mårbacka to the big city, and the diarist is looking forward to her return home, because “there are no worries on Mårbacka”. This is not true: in the diary it is openly stated that the author's father will soon die and that Mårbacka will then have to be sold. but that is not the point. Once again, the image of the home, in which security and security prevail, is praised as a place of refuge in an uncanny world, and at the same time the three-part autobiography is concluded with a reference to the home.
literature
- Vivi Edström: Selma Lagerlöf. Stockholm 1991