‘Den mest danske nordmand’? Breve til og fra Sigurd Hoel

Resumé

NB: Artiklen er på dansk, kun resuméet er på engelsk. In the shape of a posthumous letter addressed to the Norwegian novelist, critic and editor Sigurd Hoel (1890-1960), the author’s personal mentor in his youth, this essay polemicizes against reductionist views of Hoel as a kind of neurotic reactionary. His achievement and his intellectual anabolism with Danish cultural life from the 1920s to the 1960s are reconstructed via newly found letters to three Danish correspondents: the artist Anton Hansen (1891-1960) and the writers Johannes V. Jensen (1873-1950) and Tom Kristensen (1893-1974), the first critic to fully appreciate Hoel’s art (in the daily Politiken). Sketching the Danish reception of Hoel, the essay aspires to a more just evaluation of him as a libertarian, anti-totalitarian cultural critic. An epilogue discusses the use of letters as a historical source and as a key to understanding how – in the words of the French critic Tzvetan Todorov – ”context becomes text”.