a blog by Peter Leonard
Johan Svedjedal, from Uppsala's Department of Literature Sociology (and editor of the volume we're presently reading) gave a 2-hour lecture on Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (1793-1866) on Thursday. The first factoid I picked up was a long-aftersought explanation for one of his middle names: "Love" turns out to be a diminutive of Ludvig. Svedjedal then took us on a trip through Almqvist's childhood and youth, starting the traumatic death of his mother in 1806, which initiated a period of personal crisis and religious doubt in the upper-class youth. Following the standard practice for talented rich youth, Almqvist gained admittance to Uppsala University at age 15 following a kind of oral entrance exam.
Though the university was buzzing with brand-name Romanticists at this time (Gejer and Atterbom!), Almqvist had little-to-no interaction with these intellectual and artistic circles. While Gothicism was inspiring other young Swedes to re-imagine their country's past in glorious Viking cloth, and the Phosphoritarna movement swirled around the journal Phosphoros , Almqvist seems to have adhered to the outmoded "Gustavian Wit" literary tradition, outside the heady excitement of a Romantic movement which was rapidly taking its place as Sweden's æsthetic avant-garde.
In 1814, Almqvist's father's farm entered a period of economic crisis, kicking the financial support out from under him. Forced to drop out of Uppsala, Almqvist moved to Stockholm and worked in a clerical role for a wealthy Finland-Swedish family who lived in the capital half of the year. During this period, he continued to write in the antiquated Gustavian fashion. Only in 1815 did he shift towards Romanticism, finding an outlet for his deep-felt emotion (including significant anger) in Romanticism's use of allegory.
Svedjedal points out the curiosity of this "pillar of society" becoming interested in what was, essentially, a counter-culture: Romanticism as kind of the Hippie movement of the early 1800s. What we believe may have motivated Almqvist to write in this tradition was twofold: first, his profound sense of loss and disappointment stemming from both his mother's early death and his father's economic disasters. Within a short period of time, both his emotional world and his social standing had been turned upside down. Additionally, Romanticism provided an outlet for some of the profoundly religious feelings Almqvist had experienced ever since childhood: a sense of being one with the world-spirit.
By 1816 Almqvist had joined a kind of "Gothicist Boy Scout Troop," and attempted to steer the philosophical discussion group more in the direction of his specific Romantic interests. Failing in that effort, as well as with another preëxisting group, Almqvist finally founded the Mannasamfund as an expression of his own personal interests. Working as a volunteer copyist during the day in a government bureaucracy (alongside, incredibly, Stagnelius), Almqvist continued to develop his Romantic ideas and, by the end of the 1810s, had gained renown for his writing and thinking.
No small part of the respect he was given was probably due to his amazing capabilities as a public speaker: we have ample testimony of his charismatic effect on audiences. With the oral power of a tent-revival preacher and a series of publications towards the end of the 1910s , he presented his Swedenborg-influenced ideas of heaven, hell and the lives of humans caught between the two.
Murnis (1819) contained depictions of physical love nearly unthinkable for its time: it was considered unprintable because of how it challenged conventional morality. But in Almqvist held that love between two "souls" was honorable and clean even in its corporeal manifestations. In the purity of its convictions, Svedjedal points out, Almqvist's moral rhetoric reminds us of nothing so much as the rhetoric of the Moral Majority, or the suicide bomber: a guaranteed heaven awaits as a reward for committing oneself to virtue, regardless of (and in fact often in contradiction to) mainstream society.
By 1820 Almqvist had finally made connections with the important circle of Romanticists in both Stockholm and Uppsala, despite occasional setbacks. His first attempt at a gesamtkunstverk, Amorina, was tragically destroyed when the printer's presses burned down in a freak accident.
1823 saw Almqvist's psuedo-Trancendentalist notions of a return to nature were taking concrete form. He planned to retreat to the Värmlandic countryside as a gentleman farmer, but nearly as shocking was his choice of wife: a rustic commoner who was semi-literate. Almqvist's efforts here really amount to founding a commune, were we to transplant ourselves forward in history 150 years.
Though the Amqvistian commune -- which included the author, his peasant wife, and several friends -- met with predictably disastrous logistical and economic results, the writer considered the project an intellectual and spiritual success. He was inspired to write Tunnrosens bok, upon which he commenced work after the project's dissolution in 1825. In the time before that volume's completion in 1833, he kept himself occupied as a teacher and rector at a school in Stockholm. Though his songs and poems were sung and recited in drinking halls and private societies, nothing found its way into print.
By 1839, on the heels of his recent critical successes, his earliest Romantic writings
were finally published, decades after their their creation. Almqvist is, of course, known to us chiefly for his pioneering feminist work Det går an, about which another post will have to be made sometime in the future.