The Nobel Prize in Literature 1951-1960

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1951

Pär Fabian Lagerkvist “for the artistic vigour and true independence of mind with which he endeavours in his poetry to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1952

François Mauriac “for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954

Ernest Miller Hemingway “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated inThe Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1955

Halldór Kiljan Laxness “for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1956

Juan Ramón Jiménez “for his lyrical poetry, which in Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistical purity”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1957

Albert Camus “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times”.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a representative of non-metropolitan French literature. His origin in Algeria and his experiences there in the thirties were dominating influences in his thought and work. Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest in philosophy (only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field), he came to France at the age of twenty-five. The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation was a columnist for the newspaper Combat. But his journalistic activities had been chiefly a response to the demands of the time; in 1947 Camus retired from political journalism and, besides writing his fiction and essays, was very active in the theatre as producer and playwright (e.g., Caligula, 1944). He also adapted plays by Calderon, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Faulkner’sRequiem for a Nun. His love for the theatre may be traced back to his membership in L’Equipe, an Algerian theatre group, whose “collective creation” Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons.

The essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), 1942, expounds Camus’s notion of the absurd and of its acceptance with “the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement – and a conscious dissatisfaction”. Meursault, central character of L’Étranger (The Stranger), 1942, illustrates much of this essay: man as the nauseated victim of the absurd orthodoxy of habit, later – when the young killer faces execution – tempted by despair, hope, and salvation. Dr. Rieux of La Peste (The Plague), 1947, who tirelessly attends the plague-stricken citizens of Oran, enacts the revolt against a world of the absurd and of injustice, and confirms Camus’s words: “We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them”. Other well-known works of Camus are La Chute (The Fall), 1956, and L’Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom), 1957. His austere search for moral order found its aesthetic correlative in the classicism of his art. He was a stylist of great purity and intense concentration and rationality.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1958

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak “for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition”.

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960), born in Moscow, was the son of talented artists: his father a painter and illustrator of Tolstoy’s works, his mother a well-known concert pianist. Pasternak’s education began in a German Gymnasium in Moscow and was continued at the University of Moscow. Under the influence of the composer Scriabin, Pasternak took up the study of musical composition for six years from 1904 to 1910. By 1912 he had renounced music as his calling in life and went to the University of Marburg, Germany, to study philosophy. After four months there and a trip to Italy, he returned to Russia and decided to dedicate himself to literature.

Pasternak’s first books of verse went unnoticed. With Sestra moya zhizn (My Sister Life), 1922, andTemy i variatsii (Themes and Variations), 1923, the latter marked by an extreme, though sober style, Pasternak first gained a place as a leading poet among his Russian contemporaries. In 1924 he published Vysokaya bolezn (Sublime Malady), which portrayed the 1905 revolt as he saw it, andDetstvo Lyuvers (The Childhood of Luvers), a lyrical and psychological depiction of a young girl on the threshold of womanhood. A collection of four short stories was published the following year under the title Vozdushnye puti (Aerial Ways). In 1927 Pasternak again returned to the revolution of 1905 as a subject for two long works: Leytenant Shmidt, a poem expressing threnodic sorrow for the fate of Lieutenant Schmidt, the leader of the mutiny at Sevastopol, and Devyatsot pyaty god(The Year 1905), a powerful but diffuse poem which concentrates on the events related to the revolution of 1905. Pasternak’s reticent autobiography, Okhrannaya gramota (Safe Conduct), appeared in 1931, and was followed the next year by a collection of lyrics, Vtoroye rozhdenie(Second Birth), 1932. In 1935 he published translations of some Georgian poets and subsequently translated the major dramas of Shakespeare, several of the works of Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, and Ben Jonson, and poems by Petöfi, Verlaine, Swinburne, Shelley, and others. Na rannikh poyezdakh(In Early Trains), a collection of poems written since 1936, was published in 1943 and enlarged and reissued in 1945 as Zemnye prostory (Wide Spaces of the Earth). In 1957 Doktor Zhivago, Pasternak’s only novel – except for the earlier “novel in verse”, Spektorsky (1926) – first appeared in an Italian translation and has been acclaimed by some critics as a successful attempt at combining lyrical-descriptive and epic-dramatic styles. An autobiographical sketch, Biografichesky ocherk (An Essay in Autobiography), was published in 1959, first in Italian, and subsequently in English. Pasternak lived in Peredelkino, near Moscow, until his death in 1960.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1959

Salvatore Quasimodo “for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times”.

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) was born of Sicilian parents in Modica, near Syracuse. Desiring to become an engineer, he attended technical schools in Palermo and later enrolled at the Politecnico in Rome. In addition, he studied Latin and Greek at the University there. However, for economic reasons he was unable to complete his studies. He obtained a position with the Italian government’s civil engineering corps and was sent to various parts of Italy. In 1930 he had three poems published in the avant-garde review, Solaria, and later that same year appeared his first book of verse, Acque e terre (Waters and Lands). Two years later he published Òboe sommerso(Sunken Oboe), in which he proves a more mature poet. The “poetica della parole”, the poetics of the word, which is, for Quasimodo, the fundamental and virtually limitless connotative unit, pervades his first book. While this concept still serves as the basis for Òboe sommerso, the main interest of this collection lies in the rhythmical arrangement of words around a lyrical nucleus. In both these and his later works Sicily is the constant, ever-present factor.

Between 1930 and 1938, the year he left his government position, he made the acquaintance of many prominent Italian authors and painters. In 1938 he became editor of the weekly magazine,Tempo, and three years later was appointed to the chair of Italian Literature at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan.

During the 1930’s Quasimodo was a leader of the “Hermetic” school of poetry; however, with the appearance of his translations Lirici Greci (Greek Lyrics), 1940, it was obvious that his direction was no longer entirely along the lines of that group. In Nuove Poesie (New Poems), 1942, Quasimodo reveals both the influence of classical stylistics and a greater understanding of life in general. His subsequent translations, which range from the Greek and Latin poets (Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Ovid, Vergil, etc.) to Shakespeare and Molière and twentieth-century writers (Neruda, e.e. cummings, Aiken, etc.), reflect his full appreciation of the original works as well as his modern taste and sensibility.

During the Second World War Quasimodo experienced the need of the poet to feel one with the people and to declare himself as such in his poems. To him the role of the poet in society is a neccessarily active one; he should commit himself and his talents to contemporary struggles. Such views were first expressed in Giorno dopogiorno (Day after Day), 1946, and La vita non è sogno (Life Is Not a Dream), 1949.

Quasimodo’s later works show this change from individualism toward sociality, and moreover affirm the positive characteristics of life even in a world where death is an omnipresent fear. In La terra impareggiabile (The Incomparable Earth), 1958, Quasimodo has eloquently attempted to fuse life andliterature; he has developed a new language which coincides with man’s new activities and ever-expanding investigations. Some of his poetry and two of his critical essays have appeared in English translation in The SelectedWritings of Salvatore Quasimodo (1960); his Selected Poemswere published in 1965.

The recipient of many literary prizes – in 1953, for instance, together with Dylan Thomas, he was awarded the Etna-Taormina International Prize in Poetry -, Quasimodo died in Naples on June I4, 1968.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1960

Saint-John Perse “for the soaring flight and the evocative imagery of his poetry which in a visionary fashion reflects the conditions of our time”.

Saint-John Perse, born in 1887, pseudonym for Alexis Saint-Léger Léger, came from an old Bourguignon family which settled in the French Antilles in the seventeenth century and returned to France at the end of the nineteenth century. Perse studied law at Bordeaux and, after private studies in political science, went into the diplomatic service in 1914. There he had a brilliant career. He served first in the Peking embassy, and later in the Foreign Office where he held top positions under Aristide Briand and became its administrative head.

He left France for the United States in 1940 and was deprived of his citizenship and possessions by the Vichy regime. From 1941 to 1945, he was literary adviser to the Library of Congress. After the war he did not resume his diplomatic career and, in 1950, retired officially with the title of Ambassadeur de France. He has made the United States his permanent residence.

His literary work was published partly under his own name, but chiefly under the pseudonyms St. J. Perse and Saint-John Perse. After various poems that reflect the impressions of his childhood, he wrote Anabase (Anabasis), 1924, while in China. It is an epic poem which puzzled many critics and gave rise to the suggestion that it could be understood better by an Asian than by a Westerner. Much of his work was written after he settled in the United States: Exil (Exile), 1942, in which man and poet merge and imagery and diction are fully mastered; Poème l’Etrangère (Poem to a Foreign Lady), 1943; Pluies (Rains), 1943; Neiges (Snows), 1944; Vents (Winds), 1946, which are the winds of war and peace that blow within as well as outside of man; Amers (Seamarks), 1957, wherein the sea redounds as an image of the timelessness of man; and his abstract epic, Chronique (Chronicle), 1960.