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The Nobel Prize in Literature 1921-1930

1921

Anatole France

Literature 1921 was awarded to Anatole France “in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament”.

Anatole France, pseudonym for Jacques Anatole Thibault (1844-1924), was the son of a Paris book dealer. He received a thorough classical education at the Collège Stanislas, a boys’ school in Paris, and for a while he studied at the École des Chartes. For about twenty years he held diverse positions, but he always had enough time for his own writings, especially during his period as assistant librarian at the Senate from 1876 to 1890. His literary output is vast, and though he is chiefly known as a novelist and storyteller, there is hardly a literary genre that he did not touch upon at one time or another. France is a writer in the mainstream of French classicism. His style, modelled on Voltaire and Fénélon, as well as his urbane scepticism and enlightened hedonism, continue the tradition of the French eighteenth century. This outlook on life, which appears in all his works, is explicitly expressed in collection of aphorisms, Le Jardin d’Épicure (1895) [The Garden of Epicurus].

France had written several stories and novels before he achieved his first great success with Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881). The novel received a prize from the Académie Française, of which France became a member in 1896.

In 1885 he published Le Livre de mon ami [My Friend’s Book], a kind of autobiographical novel, which he continued with Pierre Nozière (1899), Le Petit Pierre (1918), and La Vie au fleur (1922) [The Bloom of Life]. From 1888 to 1892 France was the literary critic of the newspaper Le Temps. His reviews, inspired by the scepticism of Renan, but highly subjective, were collected in four volumes under the title La Vie littéraire (1888-92) [On Life and Letters]. About this time France turned sharply against the naturalism of Zola. His own work of this period consists of historical fiction that evokes past civilizations with great charm and deep insight. The period of transition from paganism to Christianity was one of his favourites. In 1889 appeared Balthazar, a fanciful version of the story of one of the Magi, and in 1890 Thaïs, the story of the conversion of an Alexandrian courtesan during the Christian era. L’Étui de nacre (1892) [Mother of Pearl] is the story of a hermit and a faun, an ironic conjunction typical of France’s art.

In 1893 France published his most celebrated novel, La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque [At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque], a vast tableau of life in eighteenth century France. The central figure of the novel, the Abbé Coignard, a complex, ironical, and lovable character, reappears in Les Opinions de Jérôme Coignard (1893) and the collection of stories Le Puits de Sainte Claire (1895) [The Well of Saint Claire]. With the tragic love story, Le Lys rouge (1894) [The Red Lily], France returned to a contemporary subject and in the following years wrote Histoire contemporaine (1896-1901), a group of prose works, not really novels, that have their unity in the character of Professor Bergeret, one of France’s most famous creations.

In his later years France became increasingly interested in social questions. He protested the verdict in the Dreyfus case and developed some sympathies for socialism. Among his last important works were a biography of Joan of Arc (1908), Les Dieux ont soif (1912) [The Gods are Athirst], and La Révolte des anges (1914) [The Revolt of the Angels]. The collected works of Anatole France were published in twenty-five volumes between 1925 and 1935.

1922

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1922 was awarded to Jacinto Benavente “for the happy manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama”.

 

1923

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1923 was awarded to William Butler Yeats “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”.

1924

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1924 was awarded to Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont “for his great national epic, The Peasants“.

1925

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1925 was awarded to George Bernard Shaw “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty”.

George Bernard Shaw received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1926. During the selection process in 1925, the Nobel Committee for Literature decided that none of the year’s nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. According to the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year, and this statute was then applied. George Bernard Shaw therefore received his Nobel Prize for 1925 one year later, in 1926.

Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant. His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. After working in an estate agent’s office for a while he moved to London as a young man (1876), where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. He began his literary career as a novelist; as a fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he decided to write plays in order to illustrate his criticism of the English stage. His earliest dramas were called appropriately Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Among these, Widower’s Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession savagely attack social hypocrisy, while in plays such as Arms and the Man andThe Man of Destiny the criticism is less fierce. Shaw’s radical rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum of ideas, and nowhere more openly than in the famous discourses on the Life Force, «Don Juan in Hell», the third act of the dramatization of woman’s love chase of man, Man and Superman (1903).

In the plays of his later period discussion sometimes drowns the drama, in Back to Methuselah(1921), although in the same period he worked on his masterpiece Saint Joan (1923), in which he rewrites the well-known story of the French maiden and extends it from the Middle Ages to the present.

Other important plays by Shaw are Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), a historical play filled with allusions to modern times, and Androcles and the Lion (1912), in which he exercised a kind of retrospective history and from modern movements drew deductions for the Christian era. InMajor Barbara (1905), one of Shaw’s most successful «discussion» plays, the audience’s attention is held by the power of the witty argumentation that man can achieve aesthetic salvation only through political activity, not as an individual. The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), facetiously classified as a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy the humour of which is directed at the medical profession.Candida (1898), with social attitudes toward sex relations as objects of his satire, and Pygmalion(1912), a witty study of phonetics as well as a clever treatment of middle-class morality and class distinction, proved some of Shaw’s greatest successes on the stage. It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social corrective that gives Shaw’s comedies their special flavour.

Shaw’s complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950, the year of his death.

 

1926

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1926 was awarded to Grazia Deledda “for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general”.

Grazia Deledda received her Nobel Prize one year later, in 1927. During the selection process in 1926, the Nobel Committee for Literature decided that none of the year’s nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. According to the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year, and this statute was then applied. Grazia Deledda therefore received her Nobel Prize for 1926 one year later, in 1927.

 

1927

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1927 was awarded to Henri Bergson “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented”.

Henri Bergson received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1928. During the selection process in 1927, the Nobel Committee for Literature decided that none of the year’s nominations met the criteria as outlined in the will of Alfred Nobel. According to the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, the Nobel Prize can in such a case be reserved until the following year, and this statute was then applied. Henri Bergson therefore received his Nobel Prize for 1927 one year later, in 1928.

1928

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1928 was awarded to Sigrid Undset “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”.

 

1929

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1929 was awarded to Thomas Mann “principally for his great novel,Buddenbrooks, which has won steadily increased recognition as one of the classic works of contemporary literature”.

Iwas born in Lübeck on June 6, 1875, the second son of a merchant and senator of the Free City, Johann Heinrich Mann, and his wife Julia da Silva Bruhns. My father was the grandson and great-grandson of Lübeck citizens, but my mother first saw the light of day in Rio de Janeiro as the daughter of a German plantation owner and a Portuguese-Creole Brazilian. She was taken to Germany at the age of seven.

I was designated to take over my father’s grain firm, which commemorated its centenary during my boyhood, and I attended the science division of the «Katharineum» at Lübeck. I loathed school and up to the very end failed to meet its requirements, owing to an innate and paralyzing resistance to any external demands, which I later learned to correct only with great difficulty. Whatever education I possess I acquired in a free and autodidactic manner. Official instruction failed to instill in me any but the most rudimentary knowledge.

When I was fifteen, my father died, a comparatively young man. The firm was liquidated. A little later my mother left the town with the younger children in order to settle in the south of Germany, in Munich.

After finishing school rather ingloriously, I followed her and for the time being became a clerk in the office of a Munich insurance company whose director had been a friend of my father’s. Later, by way of preparing for a career in journalism, I attended lectures in history, economics, art history, and literature at the university and the polytechnic. In between I spent a year in Italy with my brother Heinrich, my elder by four years. During this time my first collection of short stories, Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898) [Little Herr Friedemann], was published. In Rome, I also began to write the novel Buddenbrooks, which appeared in 1901 and which since then has been such a favourite with the German public that today over a million copies of it are in circulation.

There followed shorter stories, collected in the volume Tristan (1903), of which the North-South artist’s novella Tonio Kroger is usually considered the most characteristic, and also the Renaissance dialogues Fiorenza (1906), a closet drama which, however, has occasionally been staged.

In 1905 I married the daughter of Alfred Pringsheim, who had the chair of mathematics at the University of Munich. On her mother’s side my wife is the granddaughter of Ernst and Hedwig Dohm, the well-known Berlin journalist and his wife, who played a leading role in the German movement for women’s emancipation. From our marriage have come six children: three girls, of whom the eldest has gone into the theatre, and three boys, of whom the eldest has also devoted himself to literature.

The first literary fruit of my new status was the novel Königliche Hoheit (1909) [Royal Highness], a court story that provides the frame for a psychology of the formal-representative life and for moral questions such as the reconciliation of an aristocratic, melancholic consciousness with the demands of the community. Another novelistic project followed, the Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1922) [Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man]. It is based on an idea of parody, that of taking an element of venerable tradition, of the Goethean, self-stylizing, autobiographic, and aristocratic confession, and translating it into the sphere of the humorous and the criminal. The novel has remained a fragment, but there are connoisseurs who consider its published sections my best and most felicitous achievement. Perhaps it is the most personal thing I have written, for it represents my attitude toward tradition, which is simultaneously loving and destructive and has dominated me as a writer.

In 1913 the novella Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] was published, which beside Tonio Kroger is considered my most valid achievement in that genre. While I was writing its final sections I conceived the idea of the «Bildungsroman» Der Zauberberg (1924) [The Magic Mountain], but work on it was interrupted in the very beginning by the war.

Although the war did not make any immediate demands on me physically, while it lasted it put a complete stop to my artistic activity because it forced me into an agonizing reappraisal of my fundamental assumptions, a human and intellectual self-inquiry that found its condensation inBetrachtungen eines Unpolitischen [Reflections of an Unpolitical Man], published in 1918. Its subject is the personally accented problem of being German, the political problem, treated in the spirit of a polemical conservatism that underwent many revisions as life went on. An account of the development of my socio-moral ideas is found in the volumes of essays Rede und Antwort (1922) [Question and Answer], Bemühungen (1925) [Efforts], and Die Forderung des Tages (1930) [Order of fhe Day].

Lecture tours abroad began immediately after the borders of countries neutral or hostile during the war had been re-opened. They led me first to Holland, Switzerland, and Denmark. The spring of 1923 saw a journey to Spain. In the following year I was guest of honour of the newly established PEN Club in London; two years later I accepted an invitation of the French branch of the Carnegie Foundation, and I visited Warsaw in 1927.

Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1924, after many prolonged delays the two volumes of Der Zauberberg were published. The interest of the public, as revealed by the hundred printings the book ran into within a few years, proved that I had chosen the most favourable moment to come to the fore with this composition of ideas epically conceived. The problems of the novel did not essentially appeal to the masses, but they were of consuming interest to the educated, and the distress of the times had increased the receptivity of the public to a degree that favoured my product, which so wilfully played fast and loose with the form of the novel.

Soon after the completion of the Betrachtungen I added to my longer narratives a prose idyll, the animal story Herr und Hund (1919) [Bashan and I]. Der Zauberberg was followed by a bourgeois novella from the period of revolution and inflation, Unordnung und frühes Leid (1926) [Disorder and Early Sorrow]; Mario und der Zauberer [Mario and the Magician], written in 1929, is for the time being my last attempt at compositions of this size. It was written during my work on a new novel which in subject matter and intention is far different from all earlier works, for it leaves behind the bourgeois individual sphere and enters into that of the past and myth. The Biblical story for which the title Joseph und seine Brüder is planned, and of which individual sections have been made known through public readings and publications in journals, seems about half completed. A study trip connected with it led me to Egypt and Palestine in February-March-April, 1930.

Ever since his early days the author of this biographical sketch has been encouraged in his endeavours by the kind interest of his fellow men as well as by official honours. An example is the conferment of an honorary doctor’s degree by the University of Bonn in 1919; and, to satisfy the German delight in title, the Senate of Lübeck, my home town, added the title of professor on the occasion of a city anniversary. I am one of the first members, nominated by the state itself, of the new literary division of the Prussian Academy of Arts; my fiftieth birthday was accompanied by expressions of public affection that I can remember only with emotion, and the summit of all these distinctions has been the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy last year. But I may say that no turmoil of success has ever dimmed the clear apprehension of the relativity of my deserts or even for a moment dulled the edge of my self-criticism. The value and significance of my work for posterity may safely be left to the future; for me they are nothing but the personal traces of a life led consciously, that is, conscientiously.

1930

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1930 was awarded to Sinclair Lewis “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters”.

 

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