On Lagerkvist's 'Evening Land'
One of Lagerkvist's earlier books was called Angest, (Anguish) and it might be thought from this that he was influenced by Kierkegaard. On the contrary, his dominant influence was Left Socialism….
Anguish was published in 1916 and its emotional and moral subject is the profound anguish that overwhelmed the revolutionary Socialist movement with the betrayal of the Second International and the participation of the Socialist Partys in the capitalist war they had unanimously vowed to prevent. It wasn't just political disillusionment, as with Lenin, but an awakening to the duplicity in the heart of man. The War taught Lagerkvist the truth of the "Socratic Dilemma"—when faced with a choice between a greater ultimate good and a lesser immediate good almost all men will choose the latter, and furthermore, in the face of reason many men will choose positive evil. It took Hitler to teach these self evident truths to the liberal and radical intellectuals of the world, who then, once the smoke of the gas ovens had blown away, almost immediately forgot.
The irrational corruption of mankind can be made much easier to bear if one believes in God and Original Sin. Lagerkvist believed in neither. Early on he referred to himself as a deeply religious atheist. Now the only large number of deeply religious atheists in the world are Buddhists, so it is not surprising that Lagerkvist's poetry and most especially the poems in Evening Land resemble certain of the most highly developed speculations of Mahayana Buddhism, just as the poems of Gunnar Ekelof owe so much to the great mystical poets of Persian Sufism. Ekelof consciously modeled himself on poets like Hafidh, and many of his poems read like translations. It is hard to tell just how much Lagerkvist was actually influenced by reading Mahayana Buddhist texts…. [There] is not the slightest echo of such terminology, not the slightest hint of exoticism. His "Doctrine of the Void" is not a doctrine at all, and the Void is there in Sweden, not in Kyoto. The transcendental Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the immense pantheon of Buddhism are admittedly "conceptual entities," that is imaginary, part of the unreality of universal illusion behind them lies the Void known to Mind Only. In Evening Land Lagerkvist is continuously seeking identification with the Void behind an imaginary diety.
Surrounded by a void
as a constellation is by space
with infinite distance between its luminous points,
its timeless manifestations of itself.
So in complete calm,
in dead perfection,
lives the Truth about the great Nothing.
The soul of the void.
Like a constellation
named after an utterly forgotten divinity….
The religious experience itself is all the Reality there is, an idea not just theologically but emotionally unacceptable to Jews, Christians, and Muslims….
All the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, like the deities of later Hinduism, have both beneficent and wrathful aspects—and yet they are "conceptual entities". So too is the divinity of Lagerkvist, even, or even more so, as revealed to the mind in his wrathful aspect.
All through the poems the narrator appears as "the Wanderer". The empiric ego, in the flux of time and space, in the crystal Swedish winter night under the immense geometrical winter constellations as fluxtuant as the Wanderer himself. "Shadows glide through my lands, quenched shapes of light … the mountains raise their desolate summits". "The combinations of the world are unstable by nature strive without ceasing." Nirvana.
It is extraordinary that a view of existence just now so extremely fashionable could be presented totally as the experience of one man in one place dealing only with the most objective poetic materials…. Lagerkvist's voice is a voice out of the far Northern forests like the Kalevala of Finland or like the darker and more cryptic poems of the Poetic Edda. He is one of the most sombre writers in modern literature. I am not particularly an admirer of Sibelius, but it is this quality that he sought in his music, the sound of a far away long wooden horn coming through the snow bound, low, sub-arctic forests, the cry of an unknown bird from the middle of a lake, white in the white night. Ibsen and Strindberg achieved moments of this. Lagerkvist didn't need to achieve it; it was there all the time, a habitude of soul.
Kenneth Rexroth, "On Lagerkvist's 'Evening Land'," in The American Poetry Review (copyright © 1978 by World Poetry, Inc.; reprinted by permission of Kenneth Rexroth), January//February, 1978, p. 46.
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