When the first part of “Pelle Erobreren” (Pelle the Conqueror) appeared
in 1906, its author, Martin Andersen Nexö, was practically unknown even
in his native country, save to a few literary people who knew that he
had written some volumes of stories and a book full of sunshiny
reminiscences from Spain. And even now, after his great success with
“Pelle,” very little is known about the writer. He was born in 1869 in
one of the poorest quarters of Copenhagen, but spent his boyhood in his
beloved island Bornholm, in the Baltic, in or near the town, Nexö, from
which his final name is derived. There, too, he was a shoemaker’s
apprentice, like Pelle in the second part of the book, which resembles
many great novels in being largely autobiographical. Later, he gained
his livelihood as a bricklayer, until he somehow managed to get to one
of the most renowned of our “people’s high-schools,” where he studied
so effectually that he was enabled to become a teacher, first at a
provincial school, and later in Copenhagen.
“Pelle” consists of four parts, each, except perhaps the last, a
complete story in itself. First we have the open-air life of the boy in
country surroundings in Bornholm; then the lad’s apprenticeship in a
small provincial town not yet invaded by modern industrialism and still
innocent of socialism; next the youth’s struggles in Copenhagen against
employers and authorities; and last the man’s final victory in laying
the foundation of a garden-city for the benefit of his fellow-workers.
The background everywhere is the rapid growth of the labor movement;
but social problems are never obtruded, except, again, in the last
part, and the purely human interest is always kept well before the
reader’s eye through variety of situation and vividness of
characterization. The great charm of the book seems to me to lie in the
fact that the writer knows the poor from within; he has not studied
them as an outsider may, but has lived with them and felt with them, at
once a participant and a keen-eyed spectator. He is no sentimentalist,
and so rich is his imagination that he passes on rapidly from one scene
to the next, sketching often in a few pages what another novelist would
be content to work out into long chapters or whole volumes. His
sympathy is of the widest, and he makes us see tragedies behind the
little comedies, and comedies behind the little tragedies, of the
seemingly sordid lives of the working people whom he loves. “Pelle” has
conquered the hearts of the reading public of Denmark; there is that in
the book which should conquer also the hearts of a wider public than
that of the little country in which its author was born.
OTTO JESPERSEN,
Professor of English in the University of Copenhagen.
GENTOFTE, COPENHAGEN.
April, 1913.