C.G. Heidenstam (1859-1940)

Heidenstam represented literary reaction to naturalism, scientific world view, bourgeois culture, and technology. He often chose national themes for his novels; his great neoromantic rival was Selma Lagerlof, the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1909. Much of his life Heidenstam spent restlessly traveling. However, his works do not show that he was especially interested in new literary currents.

Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam was born at Olshammar, his grandmother's estate on the shores of Lake Vättern, into an aristocratic and wealthy family. In his childhood Heidenstam got used to being center of attention and self-assertion became part of his perrsonality. When he dressed as a king, his grandmother told household servants to play his underlings. At school Heidenstam was lazy, and his educations was superficial – he had troubles in grammatical correctness, he was mostly alone or spent time with female relatives or friends who let him dominate the scene. At the age of sixteen his parents sent him on a journey to Middle East, Greece, and Italy with his cousin Ernst von Heidenstam. On the second journey his companion was Carlo Landberg, a linguistic. The travels in the Mediterranean influenced Heidenstam's first poems, which formed a colorful contrast to the prevailing gloomy mood in literature.

Colonel Gustaf von Heidenstam had tried in vain to change his son's aimless life style, and eventually sent him to Paris to study art under Jean Leon Gerome at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. There Heidenstam boasted with his great plans, emphasized his aristocratic background, but actually did not show any ambitions to become an artists. After returning to Sweden in 1880 he married Emilia Uggla, a Swiss woman, against his father's wishes. His early poems Heidenstam sent to the Finnish writer Zachris Topelius, who encouraged him to continue. During the following years Heidenstam lived with his wife in Italy, France, and Norway.

In 1886 the Heidenstams leased a medieval castle in northern Switzerland. The regular visitors there included the writer August Strindberg, with whom Heidenstam later disputed. In 1887 Heidenstam returned to Sweden and settled on the family estate. His relationship with his father had improved, but facing an incurable illness Gustaf von Heidenstam committed suicide. He never witnessed the appearance of his son's first collection of poems, Pilgrimage and Wander Years, (1888), which became an immediate success, but nowadays its vision of Middle East as a place of exotic pleasures is considered bizarre.

During the next decade Heidenstam's output was prolific. Endymion (1889), his novel set in Damascus, expressed the author's fear of the decline of Orient culture due to European influences. It was followed by a pamphlet, Renassans (1890), the prose-and-verse novel Hans Alienius (1892), in which the protagonist, a wanderer, depicts his problematic relationship with his father, and Dikter (1895), in which the declamatory and recitative tone do not hide Heidenstam's hopes to gain the status of a national poet.

"Oh Sweden, Sweden, native land, 
Our earthly home, the haven of our longing!"

The 1890s saw an upsurge in neoromantic historical fiction in response to a growing nationalism. In his essays, of which Renaissance is perhaps the most famous, Heidenstam called for a rejection of the treatment of social problems – or "shoemaker's realism" – and advocated a return to imagination, sense of beauty, and wit. In Hans Alienus (1892) he exploited the exoticism of the Near-East, like in the short story 'The Lion's Cage', a mixture of historical fantasy and philosophizing in the style of The Thousand and One Nights. In the story the Sultan wants to wipe out the Brotherhood of the Truthtellers. Num Eddaula, their leader, decides to sacrifice himself in order to save the other truthtellers. He goes to the camp of the Sultan, where he meets the King of Sweden, who is half prisoner and half guest of honour. The King has lost his visions after his defeat in a battle. Num Eddaula tells him to complete his work as a hero: "Thou has command over they features; have command also over thyself. Thou art capable of better things than those thou hast accomplished, and God never forgives a hero for acting thus." Num Eddaula is executed on the following morning, but the King in the story is without doubts Charles XII (1682-1718), Heidenstam's hero, who was defeated at Poltava in the Ukraine, and forced to take refuge in the Turkey until 1714. Four years later he was killed while besieging Fredrikshall, Norway.

Heidenstam interest in Swedish history gave inspiration to his most popular novel Karolinerna (The Charles Men 1897-1898). It is a series of stories connected by the life of Charles XII and his troops. Heidenstam's common soldiers occasionally express their belief in patriotic ideals, but the thoughts of officers are psychologically more complex. The author also visited in the mid-1890s the battle grounds in Poltava, where he picked deeply moved flowers and sent them to the Swedish poet and diplomat Carl Snoilsky. Heidenstam saw in The Charles Men the King as a tragic character and when his sarcophagi was opened in 1917, Heidenstam was present.

After the death of his first wife in 1893, whom he had treated coldly, Heidenstam married Olga Wiberg, but the marriage soon ended to divorce. However, their weddings was a colorful event: the guests were dressed in Roman togas, and the artists Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn had designed a special journal, Evoi, for the occasion.

In 1900 Heidenstam married Greta Sjoberg, who was nearly twenty years his junior – the marriage was also short-lived. Heidenstam's interest in the Swedish past continued in Heliga Birgittas Pilgrimsfarjd (1901), Folkunga Tradet (2 vols., 1905-1907), describing the foundation of the kingdom of Sweden, and Svenskarna Och Deras Hovdingar (1908-1910). In the 1910s, when Heidenstam had abandoned his radical ideals and defended strongly the aristocracy, he was labelled as "the Junkers poet" according to the conservative, militaristic landowners of Prussia.

Heidenstam's later works include a collection of poems, Nya Dikter (1915), and an idealized childhood memoir, Nar Kastanjerna Blommade, in which he again wrote admiringly about his father. The book appeared posthumously in 1941. In the 1920s Heidenstam had designed and constructed a home at Ovralid, near Lake Vattern, where he lived quietly. "O Man, you will become wise only when you reach the summit of the evening-cool heights where all the earth is beheld." Heidenstam did not publish further works, and his physical and mental health gradually deteriorated. During this period his companion was Kate Bang, whose two children became close to him. Heidenstam died on May 20, 1940. Heidenstam's reputation declined in the Swedish Social Democratic society to the point of eclipse. Strindberg, his adversary who also was an individualist, is considered a major writer. Later, after their break, Strindberg called Heidenstam "Sweden's most unintelligent man".