Knut Hamsun in Siberia

Abstract

The article is devoted to various forms of Hamsun’s influence on Siberian writers of the 1910–1930s. On the pages of Siberian periodicals, the Norwegian writer was often mentioned in theatrical chronicle, in the lists of European book novelties, in poetic texts, but he influenced most clearly the general northern flavour of the Siberian prose. Fifteen stories and short novellas of famous Siberian writers (Georgy Grebenshchikov, Isaak Goldberg, Anton Sorokin, Georgy Vyatkin) and almost forgotten writers (Stepan Isakov, Arseny Zhilyakov, Maximilian Kravkov) form the “Siberian Hamsuniana”, the distinctive features of which are “anti-urbanism”, “ethnography”, folklorism, northern landscapes and scenes of folk life. When studying the texts that became the subject of description in this article, the materials from an archive of the Siberian literature historian and critic N. N. Yanovsky were used, who collected and printed a book of short stories by S. Isakov and A. Zhilyakov in the mid-1980s with an introductory article, which sets out biographies of forgotten writers. In the introductory article to this book, it is mentioned that literary comrades called Stepan Isakov half-jokingly to be the “Siberian Hamsun”. When analyzing the Siberian prose on Hamsun themes, special attention was paid to the stylization elements of northern mythology, shamanistic predictions, various legends, which creates an image of Siberia similar to the image of northern Europe by Hamsun.