ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN & ‘THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO’

After a windy day, today has been a day of heavy rain, so heavy that The Grandma has had a bout of laziness and has decided to stay home rereading The Gulag Archipelago, a masterpiece written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918-3 August 2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system.

He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature. His nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state and sold tens of millions of copies.

Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. At a young age he became an atheist and embraced Marxism–Leninism. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Joseph Stalin in private correspondence with another field officer. As a result of his experience in prison and the camps, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian.

During the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. He started writing novels about his experiences and repression in the Soviet Union. In 1962, he published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich -an account of Stalinist repressions- with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. His last work to be published in the Soviet Union was Matryona's Place in 1963.

After Khrushchev lost power, Soviet authorities unsuccessfully tried to discourage Solzhenitsyn from writing. His novels published in other countries included Cancer Ward in 1966, In the First Circle in 1968, August 1914 in 1971 and The Gulag Archipelago in 1973.

The last novel outraged authorities and, in 1974, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and flown to West Germany. He soon moved to Switzerland and then, in 1976, to Vermont in the United States with his family. 

He continued to write and his Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990. He returned to Russia four years later and remained there until his death in 2008.

Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father, Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, was of Russian descent, and his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of Ukrainian descent.

His educated mother encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith.

The Gulag Archipelago was composed from 1958 to 1967, and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system, which drew from Solzhenitsyn's experiences and the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system.

It discusses the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts such as the Kengir uprising, and the practice of internal exile.

On 8 August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown chemical agent (most likely ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill, but he survived.

Although The Gulag Archipelago was not published in the Soviet Union, it was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled Soviet press.

On 19 September 1974, it was approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents.

In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England. He praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'

Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89.

More information: New Criterion

There is nothing that so assists the awakening 
of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts 
about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

ANNIE ERNAUX, THE FRENCH NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Today, The Grandma has read some works written by Annie Ernaux, the French writer awarded with the Nobel Prize on a day like today in 2022.

Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux (born 1 September 1940) is a French writer who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. Her literary work, mostly autobiographical, maintains close links with sociology.

Ernaux was born in Lillebonne in Normandy, France, and grew up in nearby Yvetot, where her parents, Blanche (Dumenil) and Alphonse Duchesne, ran a café and grocery in a working-class part of town.

In 1960, she travelled to London, England, where she worked as an au pair, an experience she would later relate in 2016's Mémoire de fille. Upon returning to France, she studied at the universities of Rouen and then Bordeaux, qualified as a schoolteacher, and earned a higher degree in modern literature in 1971. She worked for a time on a thesis project, unfinished, on Pierre de Marivaux.

In the early 1970s, Ernaux taught at a lycée in Bonneville, Haute-Savoie, at the college of Évire in Annecy-le-Vieux, then in Pontoise, before joining the National Centre for Distance Education, where she was employed for 23 years.

Ernaux started her literary career in 1974 with Les Armoires vides, an autobiographical novel. In 1984, she won the Renaudot Prize for another of her works La Place, an autobiographical narrative focusing on her relationship with her father and her experiences growing up in a small town in France, and her subsequent process of moving into adulthood and away from her parents' place and her class of origin.

Early in her career, Ernaux turned from fiction to focus on autobiography. Her work combines historic and individual experiences. She charts her parents' social progression (La Place, La Honte), her teenage years (Ce qu'ils disent ou rien), her marriage (La Femme gelée), her passionate affair with an Eastern European man (Passion simple), her abortion (L'Événement), Alzheimer's disease (Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit), the death of her mother (Une femme), and breast cancer (L'usage de la photo). Ernaux also wrote L'écriture comme un couteau with Frédéric-Yves Jeannet.

A Woman's Story, A Man's Place, and Simple Passion were recognised as The New York Times Notable Books, and A Woman's Story was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Shame was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, I Remain in Darkness a Top Memoir of 1999 by The Washington Post, and The Possession was listed as a Top Ten Book of 2008 by More magazine.

Ernaux's 2008 historical memoir Les Années, well received by French critics, is considered by many to be her magnum opus. In this book, Ernaux writes about herself in the third person ('elle', or 'she' in English) for the first time, providing a vivid look at French society just after the Second World War until the early 2000s. It is the story of a woman and of the evolving society she lived in. The Years won the 2008 Prix François-Mauriac de la région Aquitaine, the 2008 Marguerite Duras Prize, the 2008 Prix de la langue française, the 2009 Télégramme Readers Prize, and the 2016 Strega European Prize. Translated by Alison L. Strayer, The Years was a finalist for the 31st Annual French-American Foundation Translation Prize, was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2019, and won the 2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Her popularity in anglophone countries increased sharply after The Years was shortlisted for the International Booker.

On 6 October 2022, it was announced that Ernaux would be awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. Ernaux is the 16th French writer, and the first Frenchwoman, to receive the literature prize. 

Many of Ernaux's works have been translated into English and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Seven Stories Press. Ernaux is one of the seven founding authors from whom the latter Press takes its name.

More information: The White Review

  

Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing 
is to find out whether other people have done 
or felt the same things or, if not, 
for them to consider experiencing 
such things as normal. 
Maybe I would also like them to live out 
these very emotions in turn,
 forgetting that they had once read 
about them somewhere.

Annie Ernaux

NADINE GORDIMER, WRITER & ANTI-APARTHEID ACTIVIST

Today, The Grandma continues reading. She has chosen Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer and political activist who died on a day like today in 2014.

Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923-13 July 2014) was a South African writer and political activist. 

She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer who through her magnificent epic writing has... been of very great benefit to humanity.

Gordimer was one of the most honoured female writers of her generation. She received the Booker Prize for The Conservationist (1974), and the Central News Agency Literary Award for The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter (1979) and July's People (1981).

Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organisation was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She later became active in HIV/AIDS causes.

Gordimer was born to Jewish parents near Springs, an East Rand mining town outside Johannesburg. She was the second daughter of Isidore Gordimer (1887-1962), a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant watchmaker from Žagarė in Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), and Hannah "Nan" (née Myers) Gordimer (1897-1973), a British Jewish immigrant from London.

Gordimer's early interest in racial and economic inequality in South Africa was shaped in part by her parents. Her father's experience as a refugee from Tsarist Russia helped form Gordimer's political identity, but he was neither an activist nor particularly sympathetic toward the experiences of black people under apartheid. Conversely, Gordimer saw activism by her mother, whose concern about the poverty and discrimination faced by black people in South Africa led her to found a crèche for black children. Gordimer also witnessed government repression first-hand as a teenager; the police raided her family home, confiscating letters and diaries from a servant's room.

Gordimer was educated at a Catholic convent school, but was largely home-bound as a child because her mother, for strange reasons of her own, did not put her into school (apparently, she feared that Gordimer had a weak heart).

Home-bound and often isolated, she began writing at an early age, and published her first stories in 1937 at the age of 13. Her first published work was a short story for children, The Quest for Seen Gold, which appeared in the Children's Sunday Express in 1937; Come Again Tomorrow, another children's story, appeared in Forum around the same time. At the age of 16, she had her first adult fiction published.

Gordimer studied for a year at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she mixed for the first time with fellow professionals across the colour bar. She also became involved in the Sophiatown renaissance. She did not complete her degree, but moved to Johannesburg in 1948, where she lived thereafter. While taking classes in Johannesburg, she continued to write, publishing mostly in local South African magazines. She collected many of these early stories in Face to Face, published in 1949.

In 1951, The New Yorker accepted Gordimer's story A Watcher of the Dead, beginning a long relationship, and bringing Gordimer's work to a much larger public. Gordimer, who said she believed the short story was the literary form for our age, continued to publish short stories in The New Yorker and other prominent literary journals. Her first publisher, Lulu Friedman, was the wife of the Parliamentarian Bernard Friedman, and it was at their house, Tall Trees in First Avenue, Lower Houghton, Johannesburg, that Gordimer met other anti-apartheid writers. Gordimer's first novel, The Lying Days, was published in 1953.

The arrest of her best friend, Bettie du Toit, in 1960 and the Sharpeville massacre spurred Gordimer's entry into the anti-apartheid movement. Thereafter, she quickly became active in South African politics, and was close friends with Nelson Mandela's defence attorneys (Bram Fischer and George Bizos) during his 1962 trial. She also helped Mandela edit his famous speech I Am Prepared to Die, given from the defendant's dock at the trial. When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, she was one of the first people he wanted to see.

During the 1960s and 1970s, she continued to live in Johannesburg, although she occasionally left for short periods of time to teach at several universities in the United States. She had begun to achieve international literary recognition, receiving her first major literary award, the W. H. Smith Commonwealth Literary Award, in 1961. Throughout this time, Gordimer continued to demand through both her writing and her activism that South Africa re-examine and replace its long-held policy of apartheid.

More information: The Guardian 

In 1973, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Artur Lundkvist of the Swedish Academy's Nobel committee.

During this time, the South African government banned several of her works, two for lengthy periods of time. The Late Bourgeois World was Gordimer's first personal experience with censorship; it was banned in 1976 for a decade by the South African government. A World of Strangers was banned for twelve years.

Other works were censored for lesser amounts of time. Burger's Daughter, published in June 1979, was banned one month later. The Publications Committee's Appeal Board reversed the censorship of Burger's Daughter three months later, determining that the book was too one-sided to be subversive.

Gordimer responded to this decision in Essential Gesture (1988), pointing out that the board banned two books by black authors at the same time it unbanned her own work. Gordimer's subsequent novels escaped censorship under apartheid.

In 2001, a provincial education department temporarily removed July's People from the school reading list, along with works by other anti-apartheid writers, describing July's People as deeply racist, superior and patronising -a characterisation that Gordimer took as a grave insult, and that many literary and political figures protested.

In South Africa, she joined the African National Congress when it was still listed as an illegal organisation by the South African government. While never blindly loyal to any organisation, Gordimer saw the ANC as the best hope for reversing South Africa's treatment of black citizens. Rather than simply criticising the organisation for its perceived flaws, she advocated joining it to address them. She hid ANC leaders in her own home to aid their escape from arrest by the government, and she said that the proudest day of her life was when she testified at the 1986 Delmas Treason Trial on behalf of 22 South African anti-apartheid activists.

Her works began achieving literary recognition early in her career, with her first international recognition in 1961, followed by numerous literary awards throughout the ensuing decades. Literary recognition for her accomplishments culminated with the Nobel Prize for Literature on 3 October 1991, which noted that Gordimer through her magnificent epic writing has -in the words of Alfred Nobel- been of very great benefit to humanity.

Gordimer's activism was not limited to the struggle against apartheid. She resisted censorship and state control of information, and fostered the literary arts. She refused to let her work be aired by the South African Broadcasting Corporation because it was controlled by the apartheid government.

Gordimer also served on the steering committee of South Africa's Anti-Censorship Action Group. A founding member of the Congress of South African Writers, Gordimer was also active in South African letters and international literary organisations. She was Vice President of International PEN.

Gordimer died in her sleep at her Johannesburg home on 13 July 2014 at the age of 90.

Gordimer achieved lasting international recognition for her works, most of which deal with political issues, as well as the moral and psychological tensions of her racially divided home country. Virtually all of Gordimer's works deal with themes of love and politics, particularly concerning race in South Africa. 

Always questioning power relations and truth, Gordimer tells stories of ordinary people, revealing moral ambiguities and choices. Her characterisation is nuanced, revealed more through the choices her characters make than through their claimed identities and beliefs. She also weaves in subtle details within the characters' names.

More information: Universidad de Zaragoza

The creative act is not pure. 
History evidences it. 
Sociology extracts it. 
The writer loses Eden, writes to be read 
and comes to realize that he is answerable.

Nadine Gordimer

ERNEST MILLER HEMINGWAY, LITERATURE & JOURNALISM

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Ernest Hemingway, the American novelist, who dies on a day like today in 1961.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899-July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. 

 

Best known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle, and outspoken and blunt public image.

Most of Hemingway's works were published between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, including seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works. His writings have become classics of American literature; he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, while three of his novels, four short-story collections and three nonfiction works were published posthumously.

Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois in the Chicago area. After high school, he spent six months as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star before enlisting in the Red Cross. He served as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I and was seriously wounded in 1918.

His wartime experiences formed the basis for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms. He married Hadley Richardson in 1921, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s' Lost Generation expatriate community. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926.

He divorced Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had worked as a journalist and which formed the basis for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. He and Gellhorn separated after he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. He maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida, in the 1930s and in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s.

On a 1954 trip to Africa, he was seriously injured in two plane accidents on successive days, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959 he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho, where, on July 2, 1961, he shot himself in the head.

More information: The Ernest Hemingway Collection

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, an affluent suburb just west of Chicago, to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician.

Hemingway wanted to go to war and tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but was not accepted because he had poor eyesight. Instead he volunteered to a Red Cross recruitment effort in December 1917 and signed on to be an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross Motor Corps in Italy.

Hemingway had been following developments in Spain since early in his career and from 1931 it became clear that there would be another European war. Hemingway predicted war would happen in the late 1930s. Baker writes that Hemingway did not expect Spain to become a sort of international testing-ground for Germany, Italy, and Russia before the Spanish Civil War was over. Despite Pauline's reluctance, he signed with North American Newspaper Alliance to cover the Spanish Civil War, and sailed from New York on February 27, 1937. Journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn accompanied Hemingway.

In November he visited the location of the Battle of the Ebro, the last republican stand, along with other British and American journalists. They arrived to find the last bridge destroyed and had to retreat across the turbulent Ebro in a rowboat, Hemingway at the oars, pulling for dear life.

Hemingway sank into depression as his literary friends began to die: in 1939 William Butler Yeats and Ford Madox Ford; in 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald; in 1941 Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce; in 1946 Gertrude Stein; and the following year in 1947, Max Perkins, Hemingway's long-time Scribner's editor, and friend.

In October 1954, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He modestly told the press that Carl Sandburg, Isak Dinesen and Bernard Berenson deserved the prize, but he gladly accepted the prize money.

Hemingway's behavior during his final years had been similar to that of his father before he killed himself; his father may have had hereditary hemochromatosis, whereby the excessive accumulation of iron in tissues culminates in mental and physical deterioration. Medical records made available in 1991 confirmed that Hemingway had been diagnosed with hemochromatosis in early 1961. His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also killed themselves. Hemingway's health was further complicated by heavy drinking throughout most of his life.

Following the tradition established by Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway was a journalist before becoming a novelist.

Hemingway's writing includes themes of love, war, travel, expatriation, wilderness, and loss.

Hemingway's legacy to American literature is his style: writers who came after him either emulated or avoided it.

Mary Hemingway established the Hemingway Foundation in 1965, and in the 1970s she donated her husband's papers to the John F. Kennedy Library.

In 1980, a group of Hemingway scholars gathered to assess the donated papers, subsequently forming the Hemingway Society, committed to supporting and fostering Hemingway scholarship, publishing The Hemingway Review.

Download A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

I don't like to write like God.
It is only because you never do it, though,
that the critics think you can't do it.

 

Ernest Hemingway

LUCILA GODOY ALCAYAGA AKA GABRIELA MISTRAL

Today, The Grandma has been reading some poetry. She loves it. She has chosen some works written by Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, the Chilean poet also known as Gabriela Mistral, who was born on a day like today in 1889.

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga (7 April 1889-10 January 1957), known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and humanist.

In 1945, she became the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature, for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world.

Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences. Her portrait also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note.

Mistral was born in Vicuña, Chile, but was raised in the small Andean village of Montegrande, where she attended a primary school taught by her older sister, Emelina Molina. She respected her sister greatly, despite the many financial problems that Emelina brought her in later years.

In 1904, Mistral published some early poems, such as Ensoñaciones, Carta Íntima and Junto al Mar, in the local newspaper El Coquimbo: Diario Radical, and La Voz de Elqui using a range of pseudonyms and variations on her civil name.

In 1906, Mistral met a railway worker, Romelio Ureta, her first love, who killed himself in 1909. Shortly after, her second love married someone else. This heartbreak was reflected in her early poetry and earned Mistral her first recognized literary work in 1914 with Sonetos de la muerte.

Mistral was awarded first prize in a national literary contest Juegos Florales in the Chilean capital, Santiago. Writing about his suicide led the poet to consider death and life more broadly than previous generations of Latin American poets. While Mistral had passionate friendships with various men and women, and these impacted her writings, she was secretive about her emotional life.

More information: ThoughtCo

She had been using the pen name Gabriela Mistral since June 1908 for much of her writing. After winning the Juegos Florales she infrequently used her given name of Lucila Godoy for her publications. She formed her pseudonym from the names of two of her favorite poets, Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral or, as another story has it, from a composite of the Archangel Gabriel and the mistral wind of Provence.

In 1922, Mistral released her first book, Desolación) with the help of the Director of Hispanic Institute of New York, Federico de Onis. It was a collection of poems that encompassed motherhood, religion, nature, morality and love of children. Her personal sorrow was present in the poems and her International reputation was established. Her work was a turn from modernism in Latin America and was marked by critics as direct, yet simplistic. In 1924, she released her second book, Ternura.

The poet Pablo Neruda, Chile's second Nobel Prize recipient, met Mistral when she moved to his hometown of Temuco. She read his poems and recommended reading for him. They became lifelong friends.

Mistral's work is characterized by including gray tones in her literature; sadness and bitterness are recurrent feelings on it. These are evoked in her writings as the reflection of a hard childhood, plagued by deprivation coupled with a lack of affection in her home. However, since her youth as a teacher in a rural school, Gabriela Mistral had a great affection for children that shows throughout her writing.

Religion was also reflected in her literature as Catholicism had great influence in her life. Nevertheless, she always reflected a more neutral stance regarding the concept of religion. Thus we can find the religious combined with feelings of love and piety, making her into one of the worthiest representatives of Latin American literature of twentieth century.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the image of Gabriela Mistral was appropriated by the military dictatorship of Pinochet presenting her as a symbol of submission to the authority and social order.

Mistral had diabetes and heart problems. Eventually she died in Hempstead Hospital in New York City on 10 January 1957, at 67 years of age.

More information: Poetry Foundation

 At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune,
I am the direct voice of the poets of my race
and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues.

Gabriela Mistral

SELMA LAGERLÖF, SWEDISH NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Today, The Grandma has been reading Gösta Berling, an amazing saga written by Selma Lagerlöf, the Swedish author who become the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature on a day like today in 1909.

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (20 November 1858-16 March 1940) was a Swedish author and teacher.

She published her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, at the age of 33. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909.

Additionally, she was the first woman to be granted a membership in the Swedish Academy in 1914.

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was born on 20 November 1858 at Mårbacka, Värmland, Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway.

Lagerlöf was the daughter of Erik Gustaf Lagerlöf, a lieutenant in the Royal Värmland Regiment, and Louise Lagerlöf (née Wallroth), whose father was a well-to-do merchant and a foundry owner.

Lagerlöf was the couple's fifth child out of six. She was born with a hip injury, which was caused by detachment in the hip joint. At the age of three and a half, a sickness left her lame in both legs, although she later recovered.

She was a quiet, serious child with a deep love for reading. She wrote poetry but did not publish anything until later in life. Her grandmother helped raise her, often telling stories of fairytales and fantasy. Growing up, she was plain and slightly lame, and an account stated that the cross-country wanderings of Margarethe and Elisabet in Gösta Berling's Saga could be the author's compensatory fantasies.

She received her schooling at home, since the Volksschule compulsory education system was not fully developed yet. She studied English and French. After reading Osceola by Thomas Mayne Reid at the age of seven, she decided she would be a writer when she grew up.

More information: Selma Lagerlöf

In 1868, at the age of 10, Selma began reading the Bible. At this time, her father was very ill, and she hoped that God would heal him if she read the Bible from cover to cover. Her father lived for another 17 years. In this manner, Lagerlöf became accustomed to the language of Scripture.

The sale of Mårbacka in 1884 had a serious impact on her development. Selma's father is said to have been an alcoholic, something she rarely discussed. Her father did not want Selma to continue her education or remain involved with the women's movement. Later in life, she would buy back her father's estate with the money she received for her Nobel Prize.

Lagerlöf lived there for the rest of her life. She also completed her studies at the Royal Seminary to become a teacher the same year as her father died.

Lagerlöf studied at the Högre lärarinneseminariet in Stockholm from 1882 to 1885. She worked as a country schoolteacher at a high school for girls in Landskrona from 1885 to 1895, while honing her story-telling skills, with particular focus on the legends she had learned as a child. She liked the teaching profession and appreciated her students.

She had a talent for capturing the children's attention through telling them stories about the different countries about which they were studying, or stories about Jesus and his disciples. During this period of her life, Selma lived with her aunt Lovisa Lagerlöf.

Through her studies at the Royal Women's Superior Training Academy in Stockholm, Lagerlöf reacted against the realism of contemporary Swedish-language writers such as August Strindberg.

She began her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, while working as a teacher in Landskrona. Her first break as a writer came when she submitted the first chapters to a literary contest in the magazine Idun, and won a publishing contract for the whole book.

At first, her writing only received mild reviews from critics. Once a popular male critic, Georg Brandes, gave her positive reviews of the Danish translation, her popularity soared.

She received financial support of Fredrika Limnell, who wished to enable her to concentrate on her writing.

A visit in 1900 to the American Colony in Jerusalem became the inspiration for Lagerlöf's book by that name. The royal family and the Swedish Academy gave her substantial financial support to continue her passion. Jerusalem was also acclaimed by critics, who began comparing her to Homer and Shakespeare, so that she became a popular figure both in Sweden and abroad.

By 1895, she gave up her teaching to devote herself to her writing. With the help of proceeds from Gösta Berling's Saga and a scholarship and grant, she made two journeys, which were largely instrumental in providing material for her next novel. With Elkan, she travelled to Italy, and she also travelled to Palestine and other parts of the East.

In Italy, a legend of a Christ Child figure that had been replaced with a false version inspired Lagerlöf's novel Antikrists mirakler (The Miracles of the Antichrist). Set in Sicily, the novel explores the interplay between Christian and socialist moral systems. However, most of Lagerlöf's stories were set in Värmland.
 

In 1902, Lagerlöf was asked by the National Teachers' Association to write a geography book for children. She wrote Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils), a novel about a boy from the southernmost part of Sweden, who had been shrunk to the size of a thumb and who travelled on the back of a goose across the country.

More information: Nobel Prize

Lagerlöf mixed historical and geographical facts about the provinces of Sweden with the tale of the boy's adventures until he managed to return home and was restored to his normal size. The novel is one of Lagerlöf's most well-known books, and it has been translated into more than 30 languages.

She moved in 1897 to Falun, and met Valborg Olander, who became her literary assistant and friend, but Elkan's jealousy of Olander was a complication in the relationship. Olander, a teacher, was also active in the growing women's suffrage movement in Sweden.

Selma Lagerlöf herself was active as a speaker for the National Association for Women's Suffrage, which was beneficial for the organization because of the great respect which surrounded Lagerlöf, and she spoke at the International Suffrage Congress in Stockholm in June 1911, where she gave the opening address, as well as at the victory party of the Swedish suffrage movement after women suffrage had been granted in May 1919.

Selma Lagerlöf was a friend of the German-Jewish writer Nelly Sachs. Shortly before her death in 1940, Lagerlöf intervened with the Swedish royal family to secure the release of Sachs and Sachs' aged mother from Nazi Germany, on the last flight from Germany to Sweden, and their lifelong asylum in Stockholm.

More information: Nordic Women's Literature

Hon hade lärt sig älska kärleken med all dess plåga,
dess tårar, dess längtan.

She had learned to love with all its torment,
its tears, its longing.

Selma Lagerlöf

ODYSSEAS ELYTIS, A GREEK NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The Grandma loves classic Greek, and she likes reading Greek poets. Today, she has chosen Odysseas Elytis, the Nobel Prize in Literature, who was born on a day like today in 1911.

Odysseas Elytis, in Greek Οδυσσέας Ελύτης, pen name of Odysseas Alepoudellis, in Greek Οδυσσέας Αλεπουδέλλης; 2 November 1911-18 March 1996) was a Greek poet, essayist and translator, regarded as a major exponent of romantic modernism in Greece and the world.

He is one of the most praised poets of the second half of the twentieth century, with his Axion Esti regarded as a monument of contemporary poetry.

In 1979, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Descendant of the Alepoudelis, an old olive oil industrial family from Lesbos, Elytis was born in Heraklion on the island of Crete, on 2 November 1911. His family later moved to Athens, where the poet graduated from high school and later attended courses as an auditor at the law school at the University of Athens.

In 1935, Elytis published his first poem in the journal New Letters (Νέα Γράμματα) at the prompting of such friends as George Seferis. His entry with a distinctively earthy and original form assisted to inaugurate a new era in Greek poetry and its subsequent reform after the Second World War.

From 1969 to 1972, under the Greek military junta of 1967-1974, Elytis exiled himself to Paris. He was romantically linked to the lyricist and musicologist Mariannina Kriezi, who subsequently produced and hosted the legendary children's radio broadcast Here Lilliput Land. Elytis was intensely private and vehemently solitary in pursuing his ideals of poetic truth and experience.

In 1937, he served his military requirements. As an army cadet, he joined the National Military School in Corfu. He assisted Frederica of Hanover off the train and on to Greek soil personally when she arrived from Germany to marry hereditary Prince Paul.

More information: Poetry Foundation

During the war he was appointed Second Lieutenant, placed initially at the 1st Army Corps Headquarters, then transferred to the 24th Regiment, on the first-line of the battlefields. Elytis was sporadically publishing poetry and essays after his initial foray into the literary world.

He was a member of the Association of Greek Art Critics, AICA-Hellas, International Association of Art Critics.

He was twice Programme Director of the Greek National Radio Foundation (1945-46 and 1953-54), Member of the Greek National Theatre's Administrative Council, President of the Administrative Council of the Greek Radio and Television as well as Member of the Consultative Committee of the Greek National Tourists' Organization on the Athens Festival.

In 1960, he was awarded the First State Poetry Prize, in 1965 the Order of the Phoenix and in 1975 he was awarded the Doctor Honoris Causa in the Faculty of Philosophy at Thessaloniki University and received the Honorary Citizenship of the Town of Mytilene.

In 1948-1952 and 1969-1972 he lived in Paris. There, he audited philology and literature seminars at the Sorbonne and was well received by the pioneers of the world's avant-garde (Reverdy, Breton, Tzara, Ungaretti, Matisse, Picasso, Francoise Gilot, Chagall, Giacometti) as Tériade's most respected friend.

More information: All Poetry

Teriade was simultaneously in Paris publishing works with all the renowned artists and philosophers (Kostas Axelos, Jean-Paul Sartre, Francoise Gilot, René Daumal) of the time. Elytis and Teriade had formed a strong friendship that solidified in 1939 with the publication of Elytis first book of poetry entitled Orientations. Both Elytis and Teriade hailed from Lesbos and had a mutual love of the Greek painter Theophilos.

Starting from Paris he travelled and subsequently visited Switzerland, England, Italy and Spain.

In 1948, he was the representative of Greece at the International Meetings of Geneva, in 1949 at the Founding Congress of the International Art Critics Union in Paris and in 1962 at the Incontro Romano della Cultura in Rome.

In 1961, upon an invitation of the State Department, he travelled through the U.S.A.; and -upon similar invitations- through the Soviet Union in 1963 and Bulgaria in 1965.

Odysseas Elytis had been completing plans to travel overseas when he died of a heart attack in Athens on 18 March 1996, at the age of 84. He was survived by his niece Myrsene and his older brother Evangelos, who received a writ of condolence from the mayor of Athens on behalf of the nation at the funeral at the First Cemetery of Athens.

More information: Poetry International

Elytis' poetry has marked, through an active presence of over forty years, a broad spectrum of subject and stylistic touch with an emphasis on the expression of that which is rarefied and passionate.

He borrowed certain elements from Ancient Greece and Byzantium but devoted himself exclusively to today's Hellenism, of which he attempted -in a certain way based on psychical and sentimental aspects- to reconstruct a modernist mythology for the institutions. His main endeavour was to rid people's conscience from unjustifiable remorse and to complement natural elements through ethical powers, to achieve the highest possible transparency in expression and finally, to succeed in approaching the mystery of light, the metaphysics of the sun of which he was a worshipper -idolater by his own definition.

A parallel manner concerning technique resulted in introducing the inner architecture, which is evident in a great many poems of his; mainly in the phenomenal landmark work It Is Truly Meet (Το Άξιον Εστί). This work, due to its setting to music by Mikis Theodorakis as an oratorio, is a revered anthem whose verse is sung by all Greeks for all injustice, resistance and for its sheer beauty and musicality of form.

Elytis' theoretical and philosophical ideas have been expressed in a series of essays under the title The Open Papers (Ανοιχτά Χαρτιά). Besides creating poetry, he applied himself to translating poetry and theatre, as well as a series of collage pictures. Translations of his poetry have been published as autonomous books, in anthologies or in periodicals in eleven languages.

More information: The Culture Trip

If you deconstruct Greece,
you will in the end see an olive tree,
a grapevine, and a boat remain.
That is, with as much, you reconstruct her.

Odysseas Elytis

J. E. FREDERIC MISTRAL, ''LOU TRESOR DÓU FELIBRIGE'

Frederic Mistral

Today, The Grandma has received the visit of one of her closest friends, Jordi Santanyí. Jordi is a writer and he loves Literature. He spends lots of hours talking with The Grandma about authors and their works. They have been talking about Frederic Mistral, the Occitan writer and lexicographer.

The Grandma loves Occitan culture and it is a great pleasure and honour to talk about Frederic Mistral, one of her favourite writers who received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature and who was born on a day like today in 1830. Jordi and The Grandma think that the best way to pay homage to Frederic Mistral is talking about his life and his excellent works, especially his poems.

Frederic Mistral, in Occitan Josèp Estève Frederic Mistral (8 September 1830-25 March 1914) was an Occitan writer and lexicographer of the Provençal form of the language.

Mistral received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of the fresh originality and true inspiration of his poetic production, which faithfully reflects the natural scenery and native spirit of his people, and, in addition, his significant work as a Provençal philologist. He was a founding member of the Félibrige and a member of l'Académie de Marseille.

His name in his native language was Frederi Mistral (Mistrau) according to the Mistralian orthography or Frederic Mistral or Mistrau according to the classical orthography.

More information: Gutenberg

Mistral's fame was owing in part to Alphonse de Lamartine who sang his praises in the 40th edition of his periodical Cours familier de littérature, following the publication of Mistral's long poem Mirèio. Alphonse Daudet, with whom he maintained a long friendship, eulogized him in Poet Mistral, one of the stories in his collection Lettres de mon moulin.

Mistral was born in Maillane in the Bouches-du-Rhône département. His parents were wealthy landed farmers. His father, François Mistral, was from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. His mother was Adelaide Poulinet. As early as 1471, his paternal ancestor, Mermet Mistral, lived in Maillane. By 1588, the Mistral family lived in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Mistral was given the name Frederi in memory of a poor small fellow who, at the time when my parents were courting, sweetly ran their errands of love, and who died shortly afterward of sunstroke.

Frederic Mistral

Mistral did not begin school until he was about nine years, and quickly began to play truant, leading his parents to send him to a boarding school in Saint-Michel-de-Frigolet, run by a Monsieur Donnat.

After receiving his bachelor's degree in Nîmes, Mistral studied law in Aix-en-Provence from 1848 to 1851. He became a champion for the independence of Provence, and in particular for restoring the first literary language of civilized Europe, Provençal. He had studied the history of Provence during his time in Aix-en-Provence.

Emancipated by his father, Mistral resolved: to raise, revive in Provence the feeling of race...; to move this rebirth by the restoration of the natural and historical language of the country...; to restore the fashion to Provence by the breath and flame of divine poetry. For Mistral, the word race designates people linked by language, rooted in a country and in a story.

For his lifelong efforts in restoring the language of Provence, Frederic Mistral was one of the recipients of the 1904 Nobel Prize for Literature after having been nominated by two professors from the Swedish Uppsala University. The other winner that year, José Echegaray, was honored for his Spanish dramas. They shared the prize money equally.

Mistral devoted his half to the creation of the Museum at Arles, known locally as Museon Arlaten. The museum is considered to be the most important collection of Provençal folk art, displaying furniture, costumes, ceramics, tools and farming implements. In addition, Mistral was awarded the Légion d'honneur. This was a most unusual occurrence since it is usually only awarded for notable achievement on a national level whereas Mistral was uniquely Provençal in his work and achievement.

More information: Languedoc, France

In 1876, Mistral married a Burgundian woman, Marie-Louise Rivière (1857-1943) in Dijon Cathedral. They had no children. The poet died on 25 March 1914 in Maillane, the same village where he was born.

Mistral joined forces with one of his teachers, Joseph Roumanille, and five other Provençal poets and on 21 May 1854, they founded Félibrige, a literary and cultural association, which made it possible to promote the Occitan language. Placed under the patronage of Saint Estelle, the movement also welcomed Catalan poets, driven out by Isabelle II.

The seven founders of the organization were to use their Provençal names: Jóusè Roumaniho, Frederi Mistral, Teodor Aubanel, Ansèume Matiéu, Jan Brunet, Anfos Tavan and Paul Giera. Félibrige exists to this day, one of the few remaining cultural organizations in 32 departments of the Langue d'Oc.

Frederic Mistral

Mistral strove to rehabilitate the language of Provence, while carrying it to the highest summits of epic poetry.

He redefined the language in its purest form by creating a dictionary and transcribing the songs of the troubadours, who spoke the language in its original form.

Mistral is the author of Lou Tresor dóu Félibrige (1878–1886), which to date remains the most comprehensive dictionary of the Occitan language, and one of the most reliable, thanks to the precision of its definitions.

It is a bilingual dictionary, Occitan-French, in two large volumes, with all of the dialects of oc, including Provençal. Mistral owes to François Vidal the work of typesetting and revising that dictionary.

Mistral's most important work is Mirèio (Mireille), published in 1859, after eight years of effort. Mirèio, a long poem in Provençal consisting of twelve songs, tells of the thwarted love of Vincent and Mireille, two young Provençal people of different social backgrounds. The name Mireille (Mirèio in Provence) is a doublet of the word meraviho which means wonder.

Mistral used the occasion not only to promote his language but also to share the culture of an area. He tells among other tales, of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where according to legend the dragon, Tarasque, was driven out, and of the famous and ancient Venus of Arles. He prefaced the poem with a short notice about Provençal pronunciation.

The poem tells how Mireille's parents wish her to marry a Provençal landowner, but she falls in love with a poor basket maker named Vincent, who loves her as well. After rejecting three rich suitors, a desperate Mireille, driven by the refusal of her parents to let her marry Vincent, runs off to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to pray to the patrons of Provence to change her parents' minds. Having forgotten to bring a hat, she falls victim to the heat, dying in Vincent's arms under the gaze of her parents.

Mirèio was translated into some fifteen European languages, including into French by Mistral himself. In 1863, Charles Gounod made it into an opera, Mireille.

More information: JFBrun

Aioli epitomizes the heat, the power,

and the joy of the Provencal sun,

but it has another virtue -it drives away flies.

Frederic Mistral

'THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA' BY ERNEST M. HEMINGWAY

The Old Man and The Sea

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of one of her closest friends, Jordi Santanyí. Jordi is a great writer, he loves Literature and he likes talking about it with The Grandma. They have talked about the American journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman Ernest Hemingway and his work The Old Man and the Sea, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that was first published on a day like today in 1952.

The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952.

It was the last major work of fiction written by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba.

In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.

The Old Man and the Sea tells the story of a battle between an aging, experienced fisherman, Santiago, and a large marlin.

The story opens with Santiago having gone 84 days without catching a fish, and now being seen as salao, the worst form of unluckiness. He is so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail with him and has been told instead to fish with successful fishermen.

The boy visits Santiago's shack each night, hauling his fishing gear, preparing food, talking about American baseball and his favorite player, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture far out into the Gulf Stream, north of Cuba in the Straits of Florida to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end.

More iformation: Friends of Words

On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago takes his skiff into the Gulf Stream, sets his lines and by noon, has his bait taken by a big fish that he is sure is a marlin. Unable to haul in the great marlin, Santiago is instead pulled by the marlin, and two days and nights pass with Santiago holding onto the line.

Though wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a compassionate appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a brother. He also determines that, because of the fish's great dignity, no one shall deserve to eat the marlin.

On the third day, the fish begins to circle the skiff. Santiago, worn out and almost delirious, uses all his remaining strength to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon. Santiago straps the marlin to the side of his skiff and heads home, thinking about the high price the fish will bring him at the market and how many people he will feed.

On his way in to shore, sharks are attracted to the marlin's blood. Santiago kills a great mako shark with his harpoon, but he loses the weapon. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; five sharks are slain and many others are driven away. But the sharks keep coming, and by nightfall the sharks have almost devoured the marlin's entire carcass, leaving a skeleton consisting mostly of its backbone, its tail, and its head.

Ernest Hemingway

Santiago knows that he is destroyed and tells the sharks of how they have killed his dreams. Upon reaching the shore before dawn on the next day, Santiago struggles to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder, leaving the fish head and the bones on the shore. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and falls into a deep sleep.

A group of fishermen gather the next day around the boat where the fish's skeleton is still attached. One of the fishermen measures it to be 5.5 m from nose to tail. Pedrico is given the head of the fish, and the other fishermen tell Manolin to tell the old man how sorry they are. Tourists at the nearby café mistakenly take it for a shark. The boy, worried about the old man, cries upon finding him safe asleep and at his injured hands.

Manolin brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man wakes, they promise to fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of his youth- of lions on an African beach.

Written in 1951, The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's final full-length work published during his lifetime. The book, dedicated to Charlie Scribner and to Hemingway's literary editor Max Perkins, was simultaneously published in book form -featuring black and white illustrations by Charles Tunnicliffe and Raymond Sheppard- and featured in Life magazine on September 1, 1952. The first edition print run of the book was 50,000 copies and five million copies of the magazine were sold in two days.

The Old Man and the Sea became a Book of the Month Club selection, and made Hemingway a celebrity.

In May 1953, the novel received the Pulitzer Prize and was specifically cited when in 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature which he dedicated to the Cuban people.

The success of The Old Man and the Sea made Hemingway an international celebrity. The Old Man and the Sea is taught at schools around the world and continues to earn foreign royalties.

More information: Cliffs Notes

The Old Man and the Sea served to reinvigorate Hemingway's literary reputation and prompted a reexamination of his entire body of work. The novel was initially received with much popularity; it restored many readers' confidence in Hemingway's capability as an author.

Its publisher, Scribner's, on an early dust jacket, called the novel a new classic, and many critics favorably compared it with such works as William Faulkner's short story The Bear and Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick.

Several critics note that Santiago hails from the Canary Islands, and that his Spanish origins have an influence in the novella. After immigrating to Cuba in his 20s, later in life Santiago dreams about the Canary Islands and mixes Cuban and Peninsular Spanish vocabulary. His biography has many similarities to that of Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway’s first mate.

Joe Russell & Ernest-Hemingway, Havana, 1932

Gregorio Fuentes, who many critics believe was an inspiration for Santiago, was a blue-eyed man born on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. 

After going to sea at age ten on ships that called in African ports, he migrated permanently to Cuba when he was 22. After 82 years in Cuba, Fuentes attempted to reclaim his Spanish citizenship in 2001.

Critics have noted that Santiago was also at least 22 when he immigrated from Spain to Cuba, and thus old enough to be considered an immigrant -and a foreigner- in Cuba.

Hemingway at first planned to use Santiago's story, which became The Old Man and the Sea, as part of an intimacy between mother and son. Relationships in the book relate to the Bible, which he referred to as The Sea Book. Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream.

Hemingway mentions the real life experience of an old fisherman almost identical to that of Santiago and his marlin in On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter (Esquire, April 1936).

Joseph Waldmeir's essay Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway's Religion of Man is a favorable critical reading of the novel -and one which has defined analytical considerations since. Perhaps the most memorable claim is Waldmeir's answer to the question-  What is the book's message?

More information: A Research Guides for Students

In 1954, Hemingway wanted to donate his Nobel Prize in Literature gold medal to the Cuban people. To avoid giving it to the Batista government, he donated it to the Catholic Church for display at the sanctuary at El Cobre, a small town outside Santiago de Cuba where the Marian image of Our Lady of Charity is located. The Swedish medal was stolen in the mid 1980s, but the police recovered it within a few days.

The Old Man and the Sea has been adapted for the screen three times: a 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy, a 1990 miniseries starring Anthony Quinn, and a 1999 animated short film.

It also inspired the 2012 Kazakhstani movie The Old Man, which replaces the fisherman with a shepherd struggling to protect his flock from wolves. It is often taught in high schools as a part of the American literature curriculum.

In 2003, the book was listed at number 173 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's 200 best-loved novels.

More information: The Guardian

Download The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway

All modern American literature comes

from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Ernest Hemingway