Eyvind Johnson Biography and List of Works

Swedish working class writer - on his own from the age of 13 - who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature with Harry Martinson in 1974. Johnson's early works dealt with his impoverished upbringing and social or political problems. In many of his later novels Johnson tested and questioned the many roles of the storyteller and experimented with time, reflecting the interaction of the historian and the narrator.

"Utan tidningar och radio skulle säkert stora delar av mänskligheten tro att allt är så bra som man kan gebärä - också på alla andra ställen på Jordklotet. Ja inbilla sej - kanske - att just de själva borde ha anledning till att vara, att de var lykliga. I brist på telegram och radionyheter och andra raporter skulle de kanhända vara fyllda av största lugn i själen. Människan är i hög grad outforskad. I brist på fantasi eller brist på kunskanp om de andra, skulle människor som har bara fem minuters promenadväg till Helvetet inte ha en aning om att Helvetet fanns så närä deras egen trygghet."
(from Några steg mot tystnaden, 1963)

Eyvind Johnson was born at Saltsjobaden in Norrbotten, in northern Sweden. When his father, laborer on the Lapland iron ore railroad, suffered from mental breakdown, his mother entrusted his upbringing to relatives. Johnson left school at the age of thirteen and worked in odd jobs, mainly as a lumberjack, and educated himself by reading. In 1919 he settled in Stockholm. Johnson wrote for the magazine Brand and participated actively in politics and trade unionism.

Most of the 1920s Johnnson spent in Berlin and Paris, working at various jobs. He moved in 1921 to Berlin where he lived for two years. In Paris (1925-30) he wrote for Swedish newspapers. During these years, Johnson read the works of John Dos Passos, Alfred Döblin, Marcel Proust, André Gide, and James Joyce, as well as Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud. On his return visits to Sweden Johnson was distressed by its sense of isolation from the rest of Europe.

Johnson's first books appeared in the 1920s, among them TIMANS OCH RÄTTFÄRDIGHETEN (1925), STAD I MÖRKER (1927) and STAD I LJUS (1928). In 1927 he married Aase Christiansen and returned to Sweden in 1930 as an established writer and the most important representative of the experimental novel of his generation. AVSKED TILL HAMLET (1930) began the series of five books about Mårten Torpare, a character with a background like the author's own, who learns to reject his ambivalence toward his simple past. REGN I GRYNINGEN (1933, Rain at Daybreak) was concerned with the damaging effects on people on boring office jobs.

Between the years 1934 and 1937 he wrote ROMANEN OM OLOF. The four-volume epic was based on Johnson's experiences as a logger and became a classic of Swedish literature. The tetralogy - NU VAR DET 1914 (1934), HÄR HAR DU DITT LIV! (1935), SE DIG INTE OM! (1936), and SLUTSPEL I UNGDOMEN (1937) - tells of the story of a young Swedish boy growing up in the sub-Arctic during World War I. During the 1930s Johnson worked actively against the onslaught of Nazism and helped establish a link between Resistance in Norway and Sweden.

After his first wife died in 1938, Johnson married Cilla Frankenhauser, and collaborated with her in translations of such writers as Albert Camus, Anatole France, Jean-Paul Sartre and Eugène Ionesco. During World War II Johnson credited with Willy Bradt the newspaper Et Handslåg for the Norwegian resistance and wrote the trilogy KRILON (published 1941, 1943, and 1945). The work, which weaves together fictional, allegorical and symbolic levels, condemns Nazi oppression and explores the controversial policy of Swedish neutrality during the war. In the story Krilon establishes a discussion group with his friends and tries to keep it together as a counterforce against totalitarian and corporative pressures. Johnson also condemned Bolshevism in a radio speech in 1947, when the Soviet Union celebrated the October Revolution: "Similarities between a Communist state and a Nationalist or Fascist state are greater than differences. The both rule by clichés and blood."

In Johnson's early novels can be seen the influence of Marcel Proust, André Gide and James Joyce. Among his best-known novels is perhaps HANS NÅDENS TID, which have been translated into several languages. It is an analysis of the totalitarian ethos, seen through the eyes of the inhabitants of a nation conquered by Charlemagne. Internationally famous is also STRANDERNAS SVALL (1946), translated as Return to Ithaca: The Odyssey Retold as a Modern Novel, which began a series of novels emphasizing the repetition of history, the illusion of chronological time and the similarity of man's condition under varying circumstances.

Following WW II Johnson travelled extensively in Switzerland. Its culture and landscape provided the setting for several of his novels. At age 46 Johnson began to write historical novels. Among the author's later books is DRÖMMAR OM ROSOR OCH ELD (1949), which looks at political trials and executions through the witchcraft trial of the 17th-century French Priest Urbain Grainier. MOLNEN ÖVER METAPONTION (1957) combined Xenophon's Anabasis with the fate of a Swedish survivor of a German concentration camp. LIVSDAGEN LÅNG (1964) was an eight-episode chronicle spanning the 9th to 16th cunturies. Johnson was elected a member of the Swedish Academy in 1957. He died in Stockholm on August 25, 1976.

"Man kan säga vad som helst on Amerika tämligen ostraffat, men till sist kommer man fram till att USA:s styrka är den för närvarande enda fullviktiga garanten för vår egen trygghet. Om Amerika är starkt - och med det västerlandet - betyder det för oss att vi ännu har möjligheten till vår folkliga självbestämmanderätt kvar. Ifall den styrkan mattas eller drar sig tillbaka i isolationism, återtsår oss det andra: att omfattas av, pressas in i en östlig världs intressen, att bli provinsen eller guvernementet Sverige i protektoratet Europa. Förebilden är de so kallade folkdemokratierna med så kallade folkdomstolar inför vilka själva tanken på västerländsk demokrati betraktas som ett grov brott, som lands- och statsfientlig verksamhet, värd dödsstraff."
(first published in Stockholms-Tidningen, on March 13, 1951)

For further reading: Eyvind Johnson by Jørgen Claudi (1947); Eyvind Johnson by G.K. Orton (1972); The Ulysses Theme by W.B. Stanford (1963); Romantikern Eyvind Johnson by Thure Stenström (1978); Hamlet i klasskampen by Nils Schwartz (1979); Eyvind Johnson och Djävulen by Mona Kårsnäs (1984); Norrbottningen som blev europé by Örjan Lindberger (1986); Människan i tiden by Örjan Lindberger (1990); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 2)

DE FYRA FRÄMLINGARNA, (1924)
HANS NÅDENS TID, (1960)
SPÅR FÖRBI KOLONOS, (1961)
NÅGRA STEG MOT TYSTNADEN, (1963)
LIVSDAGEN LÅNG, (1964)
STUNDER VÅGOR, (1965)
FAVEL ENSAM, (1968)
NÅGRA STEG FÖR TYSTNADEN, (1973)