Carl Jonas Love Almqvist

• Born: November 28, 1793
• Birthplace: Stockholm, Sweden
• Died: September 26, 1866
• Place of death: Bremen, Germany

Other Literary Forms

Carl Jonas Love Almqvist is known primarily for his fiction and nonfiction. His major works, including his plays, were organized within a frame narrative called Törnrosens bok (the book of the friar rose), which he published in two editions: The fourteen volumes of the duodecimo edition appeared between 1832 and 1851 and the imperial octave edition’s three volumes between 1839 and 1850. Inspired by a characteristically romantic aspiration toward an organic unity among the genres and probably also by frame narratives such as Alf layla wa-layla (15 c.e.; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1706-1708), Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron: O, Prencipe Galetto (1349-1351; The Decameron, 1620), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (1795; Conversations of German Emigrants, 1854), Almqvist combined stories and fairy tales, novels and novellas, dramatic and lyric pieces, treatises and lectures, tracts and speeches, and essays on a wide range of sociopolitical, economic, and religious topics in his Törnrosens bok. These works are not connected thematically and bridge two movements in Swedish literature, Romanticism and realism. However, Almqvist succeeds in creating an organic whole, which has unity despite its heterogeneity, and ambivalence. A firm supporter of liberalism in Swedish society and in education, Almqvist also published a series of influential textbooks in science and grammar books in Swedish, Greek, and French.

Achievements

Because of his legal problems and flight from Sweden, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist failed to receive formal recognition of his innovative work and daring ideas during his lifetime from either the Swedish public or the literary establishment, both of which failed to draw a distinction between Almqvist the man and the writer. It was not until 1894 when Ellen Key published her influential article calling Almqvist Sweden’s most modern poet that Almqvist’s literary and nonliterary production enjoyed popularity and acclaim. He has come to be regarded as one of the most talented and intrepid Romantic writers in Swedish literature. Though he was one of the founders of the Stockholm center of Romanticism, he was a keen cultural reformer and liberal who never joined the Swedish Academy, the most prestigious literary establishment at the time.

In the 1830’s, Almqvist introduced folklivsskildring, stories that featured realistic representations of life in rural Sweden, into Swedish literature. In the 1880’s, this art form would come back in vogue and shape the poetry and prose of a whole generation of Swedish writers. In the 1890’s, the influence of Almqvist’s peasant stories could be clearly seen in the tales of Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize, and in the works of many other writers.

Almqvist’s masterpiece, Det går an (1839; Sara Videbeck, 1919; also as Why Not! A Picture Out of Life, 1994), a didactic and radical yet lively and enjoyable novel, was his response to the debates on the function of weddings; the rights of unmarried women, especially their right to work; and the Lutheran doctrine of marriage. His rather daring ideas of “free marriage” made the novel one of the first significant feminist texts in Swedish literature. It anticipated the arrival forty years later of the strong feminist voices of Det Unga Sverige, a group that opposed traditional social and religious conventions in the so-called Great Scandinavian Morality Debate.

Biography

Carl Jonas Love Almqvist was born in Stockholm in 1793 to Carl Gustaf Almqvist, an army paymaster, and Brigitta Lovisa Gjörwell, daughter of a famous publicist. Almqvist’s ancestors included a theology professor and a dean on his father’s side, and his mother came from a famous middle-class Stockholm family. He attended Uppsala University, where he studied history and philosophy. It was there that he became familiar with German Romanticism and with the works of the Uppsala center of Romanticism.

Having earned his master of arts degree from Uppsala in 1815, Almqvist embarked on a career as a civil servant, which he grew to dislike and abandoned in 1823. In the meantime, however, he started publishing theological and philosophical tracts, one of which, Vad är kärlek? (1816; what is love?), provided a theme for his future writing. In 1817, he helped found Manna Samfundet, a Romantic circle dominated by the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish Enlightenment thinker, noteworthy scientist, and theological writer. Almqvist’s Romantic ideas and social criticism were manifested in 1822 in the novel Amorina (1822, 1839). However, Almqvist’s uncle, who was a bishop, had the book destroyed, fearing the ideas expressed within it would have negative consequences for his nephew.

In 1824, Almqvist started another romantic experiment: Drawn by the Romantic dream of living the idyllic life of a peasant, he became a farmer in Värmland. He married a peasant girl and devoted his time equally to writing and farming. However, his enthusiasm for the rural life did not last long, and in August, 1825, he returned to Stockholm and started a new career, becoming a teacher. Financial difficulties dominated the next few years, until in 1828 when he became the principal of a famous experimental school in Stockholm. Between 1829 and 1841, in addition to his philosophic, religious, and literary works, he wrote textbooks in a wide range of subjects and introduced a number of educational reforms. In 1832, Almqvist began his lifelong literary project, Törnrosens bok. Well received by the public, the first volumes were quickly followed in 1834 by another success, the novel Drottningens juvelsmycke: Eller Azouras Lazuli Tintomara (1834; The Queen’s Diadem, 1992).

Toward the end of the 1830’s, however, Almqvist’s views on art, religion, society, and politics turned away from Romanticism and toward realism. A Neoplatonic Romantic and an ordained minister, Almqvist was disappointed by his unsuccessful application for the chair of aesthetics and modern languages at Lund University in 1838. A year later, the publication of his realistic novel Sara Videbeck caused a big stir among his contemporaries as they found Almqvist’s liberal treatment of the marriage controversy too radical and morally damaging. He was questioned by the Cathedral Chapter of Uppsala because of both the novel and the theological drama Marjam and was soon dismissed from his position as a principal. In 1846, he joined the staff of Aftonbladet, Sweden’s liberal newspaper, to which he had been contributing since 1839.

Almqvist’s financial difficulties persisted despite his position at the newspaper. In 1851, he was accused of having attempted to poison a creditor and of having forged and stolen promissory notes. Although these crimes were never proved or disproved, they resulted in Almqvist’s exile from Sweden in August, 1851. The next fourteen years Almqvist spent in the United States, where, after extensive travels, he settled in Philadelphia and married a second time under a false name. In 1865, the seventy-two-year-old Almqvist left the United States for Bremen, Germany, under the name Professor Carl Westermann. He never saw his native country again, dying in Bremen on September 26, 1866.

Analysis

Carl Jonas Love Almqvist’s work, both Romantic and realistic, is dominated by the conflict between the individual and society, specifically the conflict between an enlightened intellectual with liberal and radical views and the society of early nineteenth century Sweden, with its traditional, conservative social and religious beliefs. In artistic terms, this is expressed in Almqvist’s Romantic aesthetic of the poetic fugue, a combination of drama and epic with dance and music. Two of his early works, Amorina and The Queen’s Diadem, are novels in dramatic form: Dramatic monologues or dialogues, accompanied by dance and music pieces, make up about 90 percent of the former and 60 percent of the latter. A contemporary reader may see in this an anticipation of modernism; however, Almqvist’s works use older narrative techniques that would later be replaced by the use of an omniscient third-person narrative and interior monologue. Still, the pronounced dramatic aspects of both works attracted the attention of Alf Sjöberg, a gifted Swedish director, who successfully produced dramatic adaptations of Amorina and The Queen’s Diadem at the Royal Dramatic Theater in 1951 and 1957, respectively. Almqvist’s Romantic aesthetic could also be seen in his creation of a new genre, his songes, short poems that aimed at an organic unity between poetry, drama, and music. These songes were presented as short stage plays, or living pictures, in famous literary salons as well as in the theater during the 1820’s and gained enormous popularity.

Almqvist experimented with a variety of dramatic forms: verse and prose drama, comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, melodrama, classical and theological drama, and pieces in which he discussed aesthetic and philosophical principles. At the beginning of his literary career Almqvist tried to escape from the immediate present by exploring different time periods and geographical locations, including the Celtic and Nordic past, the early Christian period and the Middle Ages, and the Mediterranean and other exotic locales; however, in his treatment of both subject matter and characters, it is possible to discern a subtext that reveals his awareness of contemporary political, economic, social, and aesthetic problems. Therefore, some of Almqvist’s major themes and motifs center on the interactions between demonic and heavenly forces, saints and sinners, lovers and criminals, and spiritual and earthly principles.

Ramido Marinesco

This short verse drama contains seven scenes and a tight plot line, a rather original rendering of Don Juan’s story in which his son, Don Ramido, pays with his life for the sins of his father. It also introduces some of Almqvist’s favorite motifs: the rather unpredictable relationships between parents and children (Don Ramido’s teacher, the monk Anselmo, turns out to be his father, Don Juan), the threat of incest (four times Don Ramido falls in love with a different half-sister), and the nature of love and the tragedy of beauty.

The work also serves as an illustration of Almqvist’s aesthetic principle of the collaborative relationship between a piece of art and its audience. Although he was praised by contemporary reviewers for the rich poetic sound of his verse and his masterful female characterizations, he was criticized for the rather ambiguous and open ending of his play, in which Don Ramido becomes a victim of demonic art. The young man dies at the very climax of experiencing love and beauty as he kisses the poisonous portrait of his beloved, painted by his own father. Almqvist defended his artistic method in a work titled Om sättet att sluta stycken (1835; dialogue on how to finish pieces), in which he presented his Romantic theory of the participatory reader. By not saying everything and by refusing to provide a clear ending to his drama, the author encourages the reader to enter the world of the play, to participate in its life by looking for aesthetic patterns. Although it was widely read, Ramido Marinesco was never staged during Almqvist’s lifetime.

Marjam

Like Almqvist’s earlier work Ferrando Bruno, which presents a quest for truth and one’s (Christian) self, the theological play Marjam explores themes and motifs from the times of early Christianity. The play’s rather unorthodox message that Christianity has lost its original purity and close connections with nature, which have been replaced by rigid Christian dogma, is in accord with both Almqvist’s journalistic and literary work in the late 1830’s and early 1840’s. The playwright’s nostalgia for the richness and simplicity of the Christian past is presented through his portrait of the opposition between a nameless stranger, easily identifiable as Saint Paul, and Saint John. Saint Paul’s preaching sounds affected and hollow in comparison with the ease and straightforwardness of Saint John’s address because Saint John stands much closer to Christ’s legacy. The Lutheran Church found Almqvist’s ideas extremely disturbing and morally denigrating, and Marjam, together with the novel Sara Videbeck, contributed significantly to Almqvist’s being perceived as a corruptor of morals. This would eventually cost him his position as a principal and result in a rather strained relationship with his contemporaries.

Purpurgrefven

Like Silkesharen på Hagalund (the silk hare of Hagalund), Purpurgrefven (the purple count) is a comedy in prose and one of Almqvist’s last plays. Almqvist called them “dramatic stories” and used them to introduce utopian solutions to current socioeconomic problems. In Purpurgrefven, the playwright envisions the construction of an enormous hotel, which brings together all families and households in a collective whole. The enterprise’s leaders are young and noble, intelligent and enlightened people, who, entangled in comic love affairs, come to share even love. The play was staged successfully in the 1950’s. It was also a popular radio play.

Bibliography

Blackwell, Marilyn. C. J. L. Almqvist and Romantic Irony: The Aesthetics of Self-Consciousness. Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1983. Examines Almqvist’s Romantic production with special emphasis on his dramatic novels and early fiction and nonfiction.

Blackwell, Marilyn. “Friedrich Schlegel and C. J. L. Almqvist: Romantic Irony and Textual Artifice.” Scandinavian Studies 52, no. 2 (1980). Places Almqvist within the context of German Romanticism. Sees a common Romantic search for a higher unity of genres (drama, epic, and lyric poetry) and emphasizes the importance of the Romantic fragment.

Nolin, Bertil. “The Romantic Period.” In A History of Swedish Literature, edited by Lars G. Warme. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. A chapter on Almqvist presents a brief biographical introduction, followed by an overview of his major works. A chapter on Romantic plays situates Almqvist within the context of nineteenth century Swedish drama, highlighting his influences.

Romberg, Bertil. Carl Jonas Love Almqvist. Boston: Twayne, 1977. A detailed and laudatory study of Almqvist’s life and work. Contains close readings of major works and useful summaries of the rest, all of which are accompanied by generous examples from Almqvist’s correspondence and nonliterary writing.