Serving two masters
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| Verner von Heidenstam |
Swedish author Verner von Heidenstam was the winner of the 1916 Nobel Prize in Literature. His play The Soothsayer is one of only a handful of his works available in English translation. This quickie drama would have only lasted about ten minutes on the stage, but it was nevertheless published as a stand-alone book in 1919.
The Soothsayer is similar in style, substance, and duration to another of von Heidenstam’s plays, The Birth of God, which is also available in English. Von Heidenstam was a diehard romanticist, and he uses gods and characters from classical antiquity to convey a moral lesson. The play takes place in ancient Greece in the 5th century BC, around the time of the Persian invasion. The curtain rises on a man named Eyrytus, along with his wife, mother, and faithful old servant, worshipping at an altar to Eros, the god of love. His wife and family are the greatest joys of Eyrytus’s life, and he celebrates that fact by making offerings to Eros. However, Eyrytus was born with the prescient power of a soothsayer, and his destiny therefore falls under the jurisdiction of Apollo, among whose many titles is the god of prophecy. Apollo becomes irate when he sees Eyrytus devoting himself to Eros, and he demands that the young soothsayer make a choice between which of the two gods he is going to follow.
From there, the play essentially becomes a brief enactment of the proverb “you can’t serve two masters.” At only 48 pages long, there isn’t really room for a whole lot to develop out of that basic premise. Though it may be hard to get excited about a ten-minute play, this is still better than The Birth of God. At least The Soothsayer has one meaty scene for the actor who plays Eyrytus, and despite its brevity it does manage to get its point across with affecting poignancy. Von Heidenstam likely has more substantial works in his oeuvre, but if you want to sample the work of this Nobel laureate The Soothsayer is a quick and easy way to do so.
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Romantic longing for classical antiquity
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| Verner von Heidenstam |
Swedish author Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1916. Though primarily known as a poet and novelist, he was also a playwright. His drama The Birth of God is a one-act play that would likely take up less than 15 minutes of running time on the stage. Nevertheless, it was translated into English and published in 1920 as a stand-alone book of 32 pages. This English translation is now in the public domain and available for free at HathiTrust.
A modern man, known only as Stranger, travels to Egypt. There, among the ruins of Karnak, he meets a seemingly ancient, possibly immortal man named Dyskolus, with whom he engages in conversation. In the background, idols of ancient Egyptian gods, with their animal heads, dance and occasionally speak. The Stranger tells Dyskolus that he has travelled the world looking for a god. He feels trapped by the “daily sham” of modern life and seeks true meaning and purpose. Dyskolus acts as an intermediary for the old pagan gods, who, now long forgotten, yearn for new worshippers to restore them to their ancient glory.
As you can tell from the plot description, with its heavy-handed symbolism and reverence for ancient Egypt, The Birth of God is about as romantic as romanticism gets. Because Heidenstam’s career crept into the age of modernism, his writing style is late enough in history to be called neo-romanticism. The Birth of God paints modern life, represented by the Stranger, as empty and meaningless, while classicism is held to be pure and profound. Modern man longs for a new deity to rescue him from his vapid life of industry and commerce. Heidenstam doesn’t really seem to be advocating that man should believe in these pagan gods; rather, he expresses an envy towards the ancients’ lives of superstition and worshipful purpose. There is veneration in this view, but also a hint of condescension: If only I could be as ignorant as these primitives, my existence would at least seem meaningful! The dialogue includes a brief mention of Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar who was executed for heresy, perhaps suggesting that pantheism may be the answer to modern man’s spiritual crisis, but this thread is never followed up and the play just proceeds to an ending that’s not only rather simplistic and silly but also describes imagery that would have been difficult to pull off with the special effects of 1920. If a pantheism worthy of Bruno were established in modern times, it would have to be a pantheism that embraces science, yet Heidenstam seems to reject science along with the rest of modernity in favor of a nostalgia for more primitive superstitions.
If you are looking to sample Nobel Prize winners of the past, reading The Birth of God is probably the quickest way to get an idea of Heidenstam’s writing, since only a few of his works have been translated into English. Another brief play from 1919, The Soothsayer, is also available in the public domain. I’m sure there’s more to Heidenstam than what’s indicated by these 32 pages, but reading this play doesn’t really make the reader eager to invest a lot of time and energy into one of his longer novels.
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