Emigrants

Introduction to the Emigrant Novels

Introduction to the Emigrant Novels Vilhelm Moberg: The Early Years "HOT-TEMPERED, easily moved, and changeable" was how the Swedish novelist Vilhelm Moberg once described himself.l He might have added that in the first half of the twentieth century he was both the most widely admired and the most deeply distrusted of all Swedish authors. A man of humble origins but immense ambition and srrong opinions, Moberg spent his entire literary life championing the rights of the common people. This tendency, combined with his volatile temperament, earned Moberg a deep, abiding respect from the general reading public while it created barriers for him among conservative critics, politicians, and religious leaders. Moberg's biography has many elements ofa rags-to-riches tale. He was born on August 28, 1898, in a small family cabin in southern SmaIand, historically one of the most impoverished areas of Sweden. The region had long been known as "darkest Smaland" because of the people's conservative Lutheranism and reluctance to accept other religious views. During Moberg's childhood years, only one railroad station existed in the vicinity of his family home, and the horse was still the most common mode of transportation. Clothes were made locally and often paid for by barter. Moberg's father was a career soldier who farmed a small plot offorest land. His mother, who lived into her nineties, cared for the family. Although Moberg in his later nonfictional works remembered this rustic setting as the spot "where I ran barefoot," his boyhood was one of hardship.2 He received just five years of formal schooling and was the only boy in his family who survived to adulthood. Even in his fifties, Moberg recalled the frustration of trying to satisfY his hunger for learning in an environment where the teaching was poor and books scarce. In his teens and early twenties, Moberg worked as a manual laborer, chiefly 1. Magnus von Platen, Den unge Vilhelm Moberg. En levnadsteckning (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1978),310. 2. Vilhelm Moberg, "Dar jag sprang barfota," Beriittelser ur min levnad (Stockholm: Bonniers , 1968), 29-46. IX x INTRODUCTION TO THE EMIGRANT NOVELS among the lumberjacks and farm hands ofSmaland, and with great reluctance did his compulsory military service. His firsthand experiences from these years were later to serve as important motifs in his writings. Moberg left his parents' home in 1916 to attend adult continuing education school lfolkhogskola) in Grimslov. A nearly fatal bout of influenza brought his final attempt at formal schooling to an abrupt halt. The enduring pattern of the aspiring writer's life emerged in the decade of the 1920S. He worked as a journalist for small-town newspapers in southern Sweden, met his future wife, and got his start as a novelist. This period began what his biographer Magnus von Platen has called "the gigantic day ofwork at the writing desk, which his life came to be."3 Moberg was nothing if not indefatigable . In addition to the daily routine ofwriting news stories, setting type, and selling advertising space, he wrote several novels before having one accepted for publication.4 His literary breakthrough came in 1927 with Raskens: en soldatfami/js historia (Raskens: the story of a soldier's family). This novel, set in rural Smaland, established Moberg as a writer for and ofthe common people and solidified his place among the ranks of the renowned Swedish working-class novelists (proletiirfiirfattare ) of the 1920S and 1930S. These authors, including Jan Fridegard, Ivar Lo-Johansson, and Moa Martinsson, were the first in Swedish literature to describe the lives of the lower classes from the perspective of men and women who themselves had grown up among the working poor. Moberg's depictions of the customs and way oflife in SmaIand constituted his major contribution to this group ofwriters. The local realism in his early fiction was the foundation on which his popularity in Sweden was built. It was not until the publication of his four great novels about Swedish emigration to Minnesota that his fame spread to other countries in Europe and across the Atlantic. In 1929 Moberg moved north to Stockholm with his wife and family. Despite his restless spirit, he kept a permanent residence near that city until his death on August 8, 1973. Moberg andEmigration Since his childhood, America had been an ever-present reality for Moberg. Historically, this is not surprising. Of the 1.2 million emigrants who left Sweden for America between 1845 and 1930, more than three hundred thousand 3...