Hamsuns I Æventyrland sett i et «grenselandsperspektiv»

Abstract

It is common knowledge that Hamsun is concerned with border themes. He crosses, breaks, dissolves or draws new boundaries, both geographically, genre-wise and biographically. Hamsun’s In Wonderland. Experienced and dreamt in the Caucasus (1903) is characteristic in this respect. The work describes the journey through Russia and Caucasus, but at the same time we follow a journey into the narrator’s inner nature too. There is no real boundary between reality and fantasy in the book. Everything is mixed with Hamsunic aesthetic ingenuity. The border perspective manifests itself in the book on a number of levels. Geographically, since he crosses the Great Caucasus, then his blurring of the boundary between dream and reality in the portrayal of himself as the book’s first-person, etc.

In Hamsun’s time the South Caucasus was part of the Russian Empire and divided into governorates. Tbilisi was the administrative centre of the entire Caucasus and the seat of the tsar’s governor. The governorate boundaries do not exist for Hamsun. He draws his own boundaries between what he experiences as Oriental and what he experiences as Western, both topographically, religiously and culturally. He shows an obvious love for everything non-Western and non-Christian. This is the way he creates so to speak his own “Orientalism" in the book.