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according to Harald Næss, Hamsun may have acquired what Georg Brandes called his “touching blind faith in Eduard von Hartmann’s profundity” (Brev, I: 135; 136, note 1), Hamsun describes Hartmann as a “subtle, aristocratic author whose ... refined thoughts delight in ... losing themselves in a drunken orgy of suffering” (Hamsun, Artikler, 41).

29 “On the Sufferings of the World,” in Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. T. Bailey Saunders, in K. Francke & W. G. Howard, eds., The German Classics, XV (New York, 1914): 84.

30 Op. cit., 229-30.

31 See E. C. Barksdale & Daniel Popp, “Hamsun and Pasternak: The Development of Dionysian Tragedy,” Edda 76 (1976): 343.

32 Brandes’ review of Mysteries appeared in Politiken, September 21, 1892.

33 Brev, I: 280. A story published in August 1890, “Small Town Life” (Samlede verker [Oslo, 1992], IV: 96-109), has a similar social setting to that in Mysteries. Based in all likelihood on Hamsun’s stay in Lillesand during the summer of that year, it contains a trenchant expose of small-town life. Tønnes Olai, a rather mysterious figure in the story, recalls Miniman by assuming the paternity of an illegitimate child, a proposition that the latter turned down.

34 Brev, I: 280.

35 Brev, I: 284; Letters, I: 164.

36 Matthew 4:19.

37 Letter to the Larsens of May 13, 1892, Brev, I: 250; Letters, I: 150.

38 Review of Mysteries (trans. Gerry Bothmer) in the New York Times Book Review, August 22, 1971, 1, 30.

39 Entstehung und Krise des modernen Romans, 4th ed. (Stuttgart, 1963), 35.

40 The most extensive treatment of Mysteries in relation to modernism is a section entitled “The Modernist Perspectivization of Narrative in Mysteries” in Martin Humpál’s narratological study of Hamsun’s early novels, The Roots of Modernist Narrative (Oslo, 1998), 89-104.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Buttry, Dolores. “Music and the Musician in the Works of Knut Hamsun,” Scandinavian Studies 53, no. 2 (1981): 171-82.

Downs, Brian. Modern Norwegian Literature 1860-1918. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Pp. 174- 88.

Ferguson, Robert. Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987.

Humpál, Martin. The Roots of Modernist Narrative: Knut Hamsun’s Novels ‘Hunger,’ ‘Mysteries,’ and ‘Pan.’ Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1998.

Larsen, Hanna Astrup. Knut Hamsun. New York: Knopf, 1922.

McFarlane, James W. “Knut Hamsun,” in Ibsen and the Temper of Norwegian Literature. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Pp. 114-57.

—“The Whisper of the Blood: A Study of Knut Hamsun’s Early Novels,” PMLA 71 (1956): 563-94.

Næss, Harald. Knut Hamsun. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

—“Knut Hamsun and America,” Scandinavian Studies 39 (1967): 305-28.

—“A Strange Meeting and Hamsun’s Mysteries,” Scandinavian Studies 36 (1964): 48-58.

—“Strindberg and Hamsun,” in Structures of Influence: A Comparative Approach to August Strindberg. University of North Carolina Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, vol. 98, ed. Marilyn Johns Blackwell. Chapel Hill, 1981. Pp. 121-36.

—“Who Was Hamsun’s Hero?” in The Hero in Scandinavian Literature, ed. John M. Weinstock & Robert T. Rovinsky. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975. Pp. 63-86.

Popperwell, Ronald G. “Interrelatedness in Hamsun’s Mysterier,” Scandinavian Studies 38 (1966): 295-301.

Riechel, Donald C. “Knut Hamsun’s ‘Imp of the Perverse’: Calculation and Contradiction in Sult and Mysterier,” Scandinavica 28 (1989): 29-53.

Wood, James. “Knut Hamsun’s Christian Perversions,” in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. New York: Random House, 1999. Pp. 75-88.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

This is the first complete translation of Knut Hamsun’s second novel, Mysteries. Arthur G. Chater’s rendition of 1927 was bowdlerized, presumably because the deleted pages (an episode in chapter 10) were considered too robust fare for English and American readers of the 1920s. Gerry Bothmer’s version of 1971 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is less a translation than a free adaptation of Hamsun’s original. The text is not only drastically reduced