Knut Hamsun - the story of a love

Knut Hamsun was born as Knud Pedersen on August 4, 1859, in the small town of Vogo, located in the central part of Norway. He is the fourth of seven children, his father, Peder Pedersen, is a tailor. In 1873 he graduated from school and began work at a merchant's shop in Tranoy. His first attempts at literature in the late 1970s, Den Gaadefulde, was his first book. Meanwhile, Knut Hamsun works as a policeman, then as a teacher. In the period 1880 - 1881 he read August Strindberg and the French naturalists. In 1882 he emigrated to the United States, but for him the American dream did not succeed. He was severely ill, he was forced to return to Norway in the autumn of 1885. From that moment he was called Hamsun. In 1886, he again went to America, working in various places, including as a conductor in the San Francisco trams. In 1888 he returned to his homeland . Knut Hamsun married with his first wife, Berggott Gupfert, in 1898. In the summer of the following year, he embarked on a long journey covering Russia, the Caucasus and Turkey, and in 1900 also visited the Middle East.

In 1906, he divorced his wife, who in the meantime had a daughter. Then in 1909 he married actress Anne Marie Andersen (1881 - 1969), who is at the forefront of a promising career but gives up the theater. Knut Hamsun and Anne Marie Hamsun have four children and she remains with him for the rest of his life. In her memoirs Anne Marie Hamsun describes her life with Knut Hamsun. In 1920, Hamsun received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel Grace of the Earth (1917). Knut Hammun systematically promotes German culture by opposing the Anglo-Saxon culture. During the Second World War, he stood on the Third Reich side and co-operated with the Government of Vidkin Quisling. After the war, he was tried, but he did not go to jail because of his elderly age. Knut Hamsun dies on February 19, 1952, at his Neorholm mansion near the town of Grimasta in southern Norway.

The criticism of Americanism also has its representatives in England - Dickens, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene, but Hamsun is on his way to these insights. The following year he published his psychological book "Suit" (1890) in Copenhagen and became a celebrity. He formulates his concept of subjective prose in the essay "From the Subconscious Life of the Soul" . His reputation as a serious writer was reinforced by the novels ("Mystener", 1892), "Editor Luige" and "Pan" . During this first period of his literary work, Hamsun is a proponent of psychology and irrational, relying on Dostoevsky's and Strindberg's artistic experience. In a number of articles and three polemical reports he criticized his native literature for the absence of psychological depth. True world fame comes to Hamsun via Germany. The first book about him was written by German Karl Mörburger in 1910. When in 1898 Hamsun was denied a state scholarship, the German publisher Albert Langen and Germany supported the writer materially and created conditions for the writing of Victoria. This novel ends the cycle of works created in the 1990s. At the beginning of the 20th century the epic beginning of his work was intensified, the writer turned to topics of folk life and folk culture. A peasant peasant himself, Knut Hamsun loves to repeat that his roots are in "the land, in the peasant labor". After years of tumultuous reflection, he came to the conclusion that rural life, earth labor, is the ideal form of human existence.

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