Martin Andersen Nexø
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Martin Andersen Nexø (June 26, 1869 - June 1, 1954) was a Danish writer. He was the first significant Danish author to depict the working class, and the first great Danish communist writer.
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[edit] Biography
Martin Anderson Nexø was born to a large family (the fourth of eleven children) in an impoverished district of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1877, his family moved to Nexø, Denmark. Martin later adopted the name of this town as his last name. Having been an industrial worker, he attended a folk high school and later worked as a journalist. He spent the mid-1890s travelling in Southern Europe, and his book Soldage (1903) (Days in the Sun) is largely based on those travels. Like many of his literary contemporaries, including Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Nexø was at first much influenced by fin-de-siécle pessimism, but gradually turned to a more extroverted view, joining the Social Democratic movement and later the Communist Party of Denmark. His later books reflected his political support of the Soviet Union. Pelle Erobreren (Pelle the Conqueror), the last volume of which was completed in 1910, is his best-known work and the one most translated, its first section becoming the subject of the movie Pelle Erobreren from 1987. Ditte Menneskebarn (1917-21) (Ditte, Child of Man), praises the working woman for her self-sacrifice. A Danish film version of the first part of this book was released in 1946. The much debated Midt i en Jærntid from 1929, (i. e. "In an Iron Age", English translation In God's Land) satirises the Danish farmers of World War I. During his last years, from 1944 to 1956, he wrote a (never fulfilled) trilogy, consisting of the books Morten hin Røde (Morten the Red), Den fortabte generation (The Lost Generation), and Jeanette. This was ostensibly a continuation of Pelle the Conqueror, but also a masked autobiography.
Danish police arrested him in 1941 during Denmark's occupation by the Nazis for his communist affiliation. Upon his release, he went to neutral Sweden and then traveled to the Soviet Union where he made broadcasts to Nazi-occupied Denmark and Norway. After World War II, Nexø moved to Dresden in East Germany, where he was made an honorary citizen. Characteristically, the Martin-Andersen-Nexø-Gymnasium high school in Dresden was named after him. His international reputation as one the greatest European social writers grew, especially, but not exclusively, in socialist countries.[citation needed]
Nexø died in Dresden in 1954 and was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro neighbourhood of Copenhagen.
A minor planet 3535 Ditte, discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh in 1979 is named after the main character in his novel Ditte, Child of Man. [1]
[edit] Nexø Works in English
- Martin Andersen Nexø: Days in the Sun. Transl. by Jacob Wittmer Hartmann. 1929. (travel book)
- Martin Andersen Nexø: In God’s Land. Transl. by Thomas Seltzer. 1933.
- Martin Andersen Nexø: Under the Open Sky. My early Years. Transl. by J. B. C. Watkins. 1938. (part of autobiography)
- Martin Andersen Nexø: Pelle the Conqueror 1-2. Transl. by Jesse Muir and Bernard Miall. Gloucester, Mass. 1963. – New ed. by Fjord Press 1989-.
- Martin Andersen Nexø: Ditte. Gloucester, Mass. 1963.
[edit] Literature
- Henrik Faith Ingwersen and Niels Ingwersen: Quests for a Promised Land. The Works of Martin Andersen Nexø. 1984.
- Henrik Yde: Martin Andersen Nexø. An Introduction. (in: Nordica, vol. 11. 1994).
[edit] References
- ^ Schmadel, Lutz D. (2003). Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, 5th, New York: Springer Verlag, p. 297. ISBN 3540002383.
