Krzysztof Bak

This article presents the research project “Searching for a New National Identity: The Construction of Swedish Cultural Memory in Carl Snoilsky’s Poems Svenska bilder”, and functions as an introduction to the four subsequent articles in this issue of Studia Litteraria, which are the result of the project. The principal aim of the project was a comprehensive analysis of the construction of cultural memory in Carl Snoilsky’s cycle of poems Svenska bilder (Swedish Pictures) for many decades being part of the core canon of Swedish literature, but which remains largely forgotten today. In part one, the article outlines the complex process of the creation and publication of Svenska bilder. It also reviews the state of research on Snoilsky’s cycle, justifying the need for new theoretical perspectives. In part two, the article analyses ways in which national memory is portrayed in Svenska bilder at different intra- and extranarrative levels, arguing that cultural memory and its preservation are among the central themes of the cycle. In part three, the article illuminates the construction of cultural memory in Svenska bilder as an example of nineteenth-century European cultural memory. The article considers three features, typical of nineteenth-century collective memory culture, to be particularly important for Snoilsky’s poems: subjectivisation, historicisation, and nationalisation. In part four, the article discusses Svenska bilder as an attempt to democratise the model of Swedish national memory created by the Romantics. The article argues that the cultural memory in Svenska bilder in many ways reflects the liberal ideas of the second half of the nineteenth century advocated by Snoilsky. In part five, the article examines the place of Polishness in the construction of Swedish cultural memory in Svenska bilder. Although Snoilsky considered himself a friend of Poland and an advocate for the Polish independence movements, in his cycle he assigns Polishness the role of the negative Other that serves to consolidate a positively characterised Swedish national identity. The article concludes with a short presentation of the four articles that are the fruits of the presented project.

The article analyses the relationship between cultural memory and myth in Carl Snoilsky’s poetic cycle Svenska bilder (Swedish Pictures). According to theoreticians, one of the primary goals of the 19th-century cultural memory is to consolidate the nation-state. Politically conservative Swedish Romanticism achieves this goal by turning Swedish cultural memory into a kind of national mythology, combining mythical and historical elements. In his cycle, Snoilsky, a democrat and a liberal, revises the Romantic construction of Swedish national memory by demythicising it. However, the author’s patriotic intentions often lead to the remythicisation of the democratically calibrated events and figures featuring in the cycle. The article analyses this dialectic, drawing on the theories of myth by Roland Barthes, Northrop Frye, Carl Gustav Jung, Ernst Casssirer, Mircea Eliade, Max Weber, et al., and supporting them with the intertextual apparatus of Gérard Genette. Among the most important demythicising strategies in Svenska bilder are mimetic devaluation, archetypal deheroisation, semiotic denaturalisation, and secularisation. Remythicisation in Snoilsky’s cycle is realised either by taking over selected elements of Romantic cultural memory, or by subjecting liberal cultural memory to mythicising strategies. The most important of these include mimetic valuation, archetypal heroisation, semiotic naturalisation, and sacralisation, i.e. strategies that are in dialectical opposition to the distinguished strategies of demythicisation.

The paper examines Thorsten Jonsson’s Fly till vatten och morgon (Flee to water and morning, 1941), a short story collection based on material from real criminal cases, reported in newspaper articles and investigation records. Special attention is given to the connections between Jonsson’s short stories and the criminal psychology of Andreas Bjerre, an intertextual relation highly neglected by earlier scholars. Jonsson studied Bjerre’s psychological theories while working on a monograph on the prose writer Martin Koch. The discussion of the paper focuses on fi ve intertextual areas. Firstly, it is argued that the characters in Jonsson’s short stories in their construction are founded on Bjerre’s psychological classifi cation of criminals. Secondly, it is demonstrated that Bjerre’s conception of the paradigmatic criminal had an analogous infl uence on Jonsson’s characterization. Thirdly, drawing on Bjerre’s ethics, the paper analyzes the collection’s moral approach to criminality. Fourthly, some intertextual correspondences are shown between Jonsson’s social discourse and Bjerre’s criticism of the European judicial and penal apparatus. Fifthly and fi nally, the paper points out that some of the collection’s most effective narrative devices are inspired by Bjerre’s interview method, invented by him for the purpose of revealing self-deception of criminals.

The article investigates some main tendencies in the translations of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry into Swedish. According to scholars of Polish literature, the poetical work of Szymborska can be placed within two literary traditions: on the one hand modernism, on the other hand premodern literature with a heavy accent on baroque aesthetics. The leading thesis of this article is that Swedish translators strengthen the modernistic character of the poems while weakening their baroque features. The line of argument comprises four stages. In the first stage, the history of Swedish translations of Szymborska’s poetry is summarized. In the second stage, it is demonstrated that Swedish translators successfully reproduce the majority of Szymborska’s modernistic devices (metaphor, free verse, depersonalization, polyphony, colloquialism etc.). In the third stage, it is analogously shown that Szymborska’s baroque devices (conceit, pun, play with rhetorical figures and intertextual artefacts etc.) tend to abate or simply disappear in Swedish translations. In the fourth stage finally, the translatory practice of substituting Szymborska’s baroque components is examined. Whether the translators try to find literal equivalents to her conceits or turn them into colloquial Swedish idiom, the article argues, the result of both strategies is an intensification of the poems’ modernistic style.

The paper examines genre strategies in a number of children’s books by the well-known Swedish author, Astrid Lindgren. Drawing on the reception theories of Hans Robert Jauss, Aidan Chambers and Reinbert Tabbert, the paper demonstrates that the stormy reception of Pippi Longstocking (1945), prompted by a review by Professor John Landquist, had principally genre-related grounds. The book made readers feel a sense of provocation because it challenged their archetextual horizon of expectations by evoking certain traditional genres and simultaneously twisting them in almost anarchic ways. In later books Astrid Lindgren makes a more elaborate use of classic genre structures. She generally chooses one well-known archetext as the generic dominant and allows it to interact with a set of other genres, thus calling forth the main aesthetic effect of the book from the archetextual dialogue between the dominant and the accompanying genres. The paper specifically investigates this polyphonic method in three of Lindgren’s most popular books. In All about the Bullerby children (1947–52) the generic dominant is idyll and the subordinated archetexts satire, parody, burlesque, farce, fairy tale and ballad. Mio, my son (1954) can be considered as an artistic fairy tale (Kunstmärchen), this dominant genre correlating with some other interwoven archetexts: apocryphal gospel, myth, legend, heroic tale and idyll. Finally, the generic dominant of Ronia, the robber’s daughter (1981) – a novel about the adventures of a band of robbers (Räuberroman) – finds its archetextual counterparts in folktale, popular legend, myth, burlesque, fantasy and Bildungsroman, among others.

The Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig (1928–2011) defines her own process of literary creation in interart terms as a translation of pictures into verbal signs. She often comments on the intersemiotic difficulties involved in this transformation by referring to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy. Using Trotzig’s notion of the iconoclastic controversy as a starting point, the present article investigates her understanding of the picture-word-transformation problems. The line of argument comprises five stages. In the first stage, the main issue of the article is presented and specified. In the second stage, it is argued that previous critical approaches to Trotzig’s Byzantinism in most cases have been based on misleadingly anachronistic and mainly Occidental categories. In the third stage, the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy is related to the distinctive character of the theological thought of the Eastern Church. In the fourth stage, the Byzantine iconophile and iconoclast theories are applied to Trotzig’s literary works. A close reading of a representative prose poem of hers, “Teologiska variationer” (“Theological vari­ations”), demonstrates that her works unequivocally support the icon theology of the iconodules. In the closing fifth stage, Trotzig’s notion of the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy is reconstructed on the basis of her essays and interviews in which she explains her own as well as other authors’ intersemiotic difficulties. In conclusion, these difficulties are related to general aesthetic, political, ideological and philophical conflicts, all of which are – paradoxically – diagnosed by Trotzig herself in typical categories of Western theology.