The classic study of the history of passion love is L’Amour et l’Occident (1939; Love in the Western World, 1957).

28 Hamsun had close contacts with the circle associated with the Copenhagen journal Ny Jord, which published the fragment of Hunger in 1888. Its first three volumes, 1888-1889, featured selections from Schopenhauer’s most popular book, Parerga and Paralipomena, as well as critical discussion of his philosophy, and from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Georg Brandes’ study of Nietzsche appeared in another Danish journal during the same period: “Aristokratisk Radikalisme: En Afhandling om Friedrich Nietzsche,” Tilskueren 6 (1889), 565-613; Friedrich Nietzsche: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism, trans. A. G. Chater (New York, n.d.). In an 1889 article on Strindberg, from whom, according to Harald Næss, Hamsun may have acquired what Georg Brandes called his “touching blind faith in Eduard von Hartmann’s profundity” (Brev, I: 135; 136, note 1), Hamsun describes Hartmann as a “subtle, aristocratic author whose ... refined thoughts delight in ... losing themselves in a drunken orgy of suffering” (Hamsun, Artikler, 41).

29 “On the Sufferings of the World,” in Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. T. Bailey Saunders, in K. Francke & W. G. Howard, eds., The German Classics, XV (New York, 1914): 84.

30 Op. cit., 229-30.

31 See E. C. Barksdale & Daniel Popp, “Hamsun and Pasternak: The Development of Dionysian Tragedy,” Edda 76 (1976): 343.

32 Brandes’ review of Mysteries appeared in Politiken, September 21, 1892.

33 Brev, I: 280. A story published in August 1890, “Small Town Life” (Samlede verker [Oslo, 1992], IV: 96-109), has a similar social setting to that in Mysteries. Based in all likelihood on Hamsun’s stay in Lillesand during the summer of that year, it contains a trenchant expose of small-town life. Tønnes Olai, a rather mysterious figure in the story, recalls Miniman by assuming the paternity of an illegitimate child, a proposition that the latter turned down.

34 Brev, I: 280.

35 Brev, I: 284; Letters, I: 164.

36 Matthew 4:19.

37 Letter to the Larsens of May 13, 1892, Brev, I: 250; Letters, I: 150.

38 Review of Mysteries (trans. Gerry Bothmer) in the New York Times Book Review, August 22, 1971, 1, 30.

39 Entstehung und Krise des modernen Romans, 4th ed. (Stuttgart, 1963), 35.

40 The most extensive treatment of Mysteries in relation to modernism is a section entitled “The Modernist Perspectivization of Narrative in Mysteries” in Martin Humpál’s narratological study of Hamsun’s early novels, The Roots of Modernist Narrative (Oslo, 1998), 89-104.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Buttry, Dolores. “Music and the Musician in the Works of Knut Hamsun,” Scandinavian Studies 53, no. 2 (1981): 171-82.

Downs, Brian. Modern Norwegian Literature 1860-1918. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Pp. 174- 88.

Ferguson, Robert. Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987.

Humpál, Martin. The Roots of Modernist Narrative: Knut Hamsun’s Novels ‘Hunger,’ ‘Mysteries,’ and ‘Pan.’ Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1998.

Larsen, Hanna Astrup. Knut Hamsun. New York: Knopf, 1922.

McFarlane, James W. “Knut Hamsun,” in Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian Literature. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Pp.