Johannes Vilhelm Jensen Biography

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

(Farso, 1873-Copenhagen, 1950) Danish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1944 and was a prominent promoter of modernism in his country.

Son of a veterinarian, in 1893 he left his native country and went to Copenhagen to study Medicine; but in 1895 he interrupted such studies and devoted himself to literary and journalistic activity, although without giving up his scientific-biological vocation.Only the two novels Danish (1896) and Einar Elkjaer (1897), inspired by a decadence that later the author, deserve to be cited from his extensive and hasty production of the early years.abandonment.

From 1898 Jensen was a correspondent for several newspapers in Spain, France, England and Norway; This was followed by trips to India, China, and America, the latter singularly important to his future position as an unreserved admirer of the Germanic race and of modern technique.His success as a writer was sanctioned in 1929 with the appointment of doctor "honoris causa" from the University of Lund, and, in 1944, by the award of the Nobel Prize.

In his accounts of Himmerlandshistorier (1898-1910), evokes the landscape and archaic lifestyle of his native region, without regretting the social and technical development, which he considered not only inevitable but also necessary.The stories are interrelated, so that a secondary character of one of them turns out to be the protagonist of another.In Danskere (1896) and Einar Elkær (1898) there is a criticism of the overly reflective attitude of his compatriots, which he considered was detrimental to a more active life.

But, unlike many of his contemporaries, Jensen was neither fatalistic nor pessimistic.In The fall of the king (1901), a historical novel whose protagonist is Christian II, who reigned in Denmark in the 16th century, a similar theme appears.But there is another message on its pages, of a more nihilistic nature: all human endeavors are doomed to failure.

On his trips to the United States, Jensen was filled with admiration for the young nation, so much more vital than the Europe of the time. Den lange Rejse (1908-1922), in six volumes, is a series of mythical tales of Darwinian inspiration, which make up a scientifically doubtful anthropological theory but of great poetic seduction.Although his dramatic attempts failed and his scientific ambitions were inordinate, Jensen was an innovative spirit in Danish culture and, as an inspirer of literary modernism, he was of great importance to many writers of later generations.