Tag: Growth of the Soil

You can buy the Imperium Press edition of Knut Hamsun’s novel Growth of the Soil here.

2,229 words

If there is a novelist whose work needs a revival, it’s Norwegian author Knut Hamsun. And if there is any novel of his which deserves being revived, it’s Hamsun’s 1917 classic Growth of the Soil.

Since the Second World War, culture leaders in the West have deliberately neglected works of literature deemed politically inconvenient while promoting those that accord more or less with their globalist, Left-wing agenda. This is why stateless iconoclasts such as Franz Kafka are so celebrated these days while reactionary nationalists such as Hamsun are largely forgotten. (more…)

N. C. Wyeth, The Storybook

874 words

There is a natural tendency on the Right to view the act of reading as a purely utilitarian endeavor. In the hierarchy of human activities, reading is accorded greater status because reading was traditionally the hegemonic mode of transmitting scientific discoveries, lofty philosophical ideas, and arcane theological refinements. This purely mechanistic view of treating the written word as solely a vehicle for informational exchange overlooks its transcendental and transformative power. We read not only to learn, but to stoke our imagination. (more…)

Knut Hamsun, circa 1890

1,910 words

Knut Hamsun’s 1917 classic Growth of the Soil seems to defy the fundamental conflicts found in most fiction. It is a mystifying novel. One can pigeonhole it as modern with its use of stream of consciousness, flashbacks, and other literary techniques. It’s also considered part of a literary movement called Norwegian New Realism, which was highly influential beyond Norway in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Most interesting for dissidents, the novel reflects the near mystical connection Man has with the soil, consecrated through hard work and family. (more…)

Ludwig Fahrenkrog, “The Holy Fire”

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Part 2 of 2

Translated by Greg Johnson

The Paganism of Hamsun and Lawrence

If Hamsun and Lawrence carry out their desire to return to a natural ontology by rejecting rationalist intellectualism, this also implies an in-depth contestation of the Christian message. (more…)

Knut Hamsun

2,378 words

Part 1 of 2

Translated by Greg Johnson

The Hungarian philologist Akos Doma, educated in Germany and the United States, has published a work of literary interpretation comparing the works of Knut Hamsun and D. H. Lawrence: (more…)

367 words

In 1916 Hamsun began work on what became his greatest and most idealistic novel, Growth of the Soil, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. It painted Hamsun’s ideal of a solid, farm-based culture, where human values, instead of being fixed upon transitory artificialities which modern society had deemed fashionable, would be based upon the fixed wheel of the seasons in the safekeeping of an inviolable eternity where man and Nature existed in harmony: (more…)