Maria Kłańska

The paper deals with the figures of Albert Langen, the German publisher and editor of the Simplicissimus magazine, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the Norwegian classic: poet, dramatist and novelist, as seen through the eyes of Bjørnstjerne Albert Bjørnson-Langen, an architect, who was a son of the former and grandson of the latter. He was born in 1898 in Munich and published his recollections under the title Aulestad tur-retur in 1981. He reminisces the fine Norwegian cosmopolitan society from before the First World War and especially his father, he did know not very well because of the separation of his parents, and his famous grandfather, who possessed the farm Aulestad where the author and his brother spent the happiest days of their childhood. The book straddles autobiography, memoirs and a family chronicle, offering a subjective but very rich picture of the “world of yesterday”. My article concentrates on the image of the two famous ancestors of B. A. Bjørnson-Langen and of his relations with them.

The phenomenon of intertextuality is so old as the literature, but the term was coined by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s. Vincent Leitsch expressed it 1983 in a such way: “The text is not an autonomous object, but a set of relations with other texts”. The purpose of my paper was to comparise Thomas Mann’s brillant debut as a novelist, Buddenbroks (1901), with the stream of realistic Norwegian novels of the 1880s. Especially there is a great influence of two fiction writers of the Golden Age of Norwegian literature in the second part of XIXth century, Alexander Kielland and Jonas Lie, on this novel. At the beginning of my paper were quoted the statements on this subject by Thomas Mann himself. Than the essay takes up the problem of intertextual links between theBuddenbrooks and some novels by Kielland and Lie on the level oft the plot, characters, names and lingual pronouncements in the texts. At last I researched the differences in the function of the common elements by the Norwegian writers and the German novelist.