Knut Hamsun. Malinconie vichinghe di un maldestro cacciatore di estasi

[Autom. eng. transl.] 1888 is a turning point in Scandinavian literature. As it happens, in the spring of the same year in Copenhagen the literary and philosopher critic Georg Brandes lectures on Nietzsche's thought, hoping for a radical renewal in Scandinavian literature. His essay on the German philosopher, Aristokratisk Radikalisme (Aristocratic Radicalism) released in 1889 in the Danish magazine Tilskueren triggers a heated controversy in the three Scandinavian countries, which will however result in the dissemination of Nietzschean ideas, a thought "for rock climbers of the spirit", not accessible in translation until the second half of the nineties. «The clear sky on the open sea at the foot of the mountains and above all a sky of light, an abyss of light, a blue bell, a muffled silence on the pouring waters and the mighty mountain chains. On the top Zarathustra is alone with himself, breathing deeply in the pure air, only with the sun at its rising, only with the heat of midday that does not mitigate the coolness, only with the voices of the shining stars in the night, "wrote Brandes. It seems a hymn to the hamsunian protagonists of works such as Mysteries, Pan, Victoria ... Yet in Hamsun there is something that is literally even more meaningful, perturbing, since the protagonist of Mysteries is not a superman, or rather he is a clumsy, contradictory superman, a superman too human. Johan Nagel of Misteri is "the contradiction made person" whose components are not resolved in unity, and not only from the narrative point of view. Not only is Nagel not a romantic hero, he does not wander free and carefree to the adventure as the vagabond of Goethe's youthful poems, such as Eichendorff's Taugenichts, or the Lard celebrated by Thomas Mann in which Benjamin (Claudio Magris rightly remembers him in the afterword) to the translation of Misteri, also re-proposed by Iperborea) he saw the literary progenitor of the protagonists of Hamsun.