Dostoevsky on Meth

As a bear grows older, it tends to revisit old haunts and reinterpret them in the light of new experiences.  This bear has recently done that with the works of Knut Hamsun (Hunger, Mysteries, Pan, Victoria, etc.).  When Hamsun was first encountered in the wild, his energetic and elevated descriptions of emotional states were just what a young bear would like, especially a bear without a great store of literary archetypes or well-formed aesthetic ideals.

But now Hamsun seems to have worn out his welcome.  Dostoevsky is also an emotionally overwrought writer, but his emotion comes from some deeply authentic place in the psyche, and suggests that his way is the truth, even if "you can't handle the truth".  Dostoevsky's stories are too rich and significant to cast aside in any case.

Hamsun, on the other hand, veers from overwrought to insanity. The antics of his characters now seem immature and misguided, and the Hamsunesque hero is always trying to contort himself into a position that allows him to appear to himself as selfless, heroic, and authentic, all while admiring himself in the looking glass.  But viewed from the outside, these actions are drunken, insane, and threatening.  His writing likewise is neither raw enough to be fully opened up, like a Kerouac or Dostoevsky, nor is it polished to highlight its unique qualities (e.g., Alexander Grin).  Dostoevsky seemed to handle the emotional swings of white nights and dark winters better, it seems.

Among his works, Victoria is the one with the least histrionics, and it benefits from some effort to bound itself by its focus on the nature of love, albeit with a particuliarly Hamsunian flavor of unreal self-sacrifice.

Asked what love is, some reply: It is only a wind whispering among the roses and dying away. But often it is an inviolable seal that endures for life, endures till death.  God has fashioned it of many kinds and seen it endure or perish. [from Victoria]

Ultimately, the Norwegian village setting provides a limited canvas for the characters to play on, with much action constrained by poverty, hunger, and rigid class roles.  Hamsun is rightly celebrated for smashing away at those constraints, and he certainly is unique and worthwhile as an artist, but this bear is now seeking guidance from other sources than an unstable and addled Scandinavian who, if not hopped up on meth, was certainly on something that took him to places that an older, more reflective bear is not seeking to go.