GARBORG, ARNE EVENSEN

born Jan. 25, 1851, Time, Nor. died Jan. 14, 1924, Asker Arne also spelled Adne novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist, one of the first great writers to show the literary possibilities of Nynorsk, which many writers wished to establish in place of the standard Dano-Norwegian literary medium. The demand for social reform was central to Garborg's life and work. Garborg was the son of a farmer, and his father's suicide, the result of an overstrained religious conscience, made him a permanent enemy of orthodox religion, especially his narrow Pietist heritage. Like Tolstoy, he understood Christianity to mean a social and spiritual revolution. Later he moved ever further to the left and became interested in socialism, anarchism, and free love, though he attacked each when it threatened to become dogmatic. Educated at a teachers' seminary, he taught school and edited newspapers before studying at King Frederick's University. An unusually versatile and prolific writer, Garborg established himself as one of the great writers of his time with his second novel, Bondestudentar (1883; Peasant Students), a depiction of the cultural clash between country and city life as embodied in the struggles of a peasant student living in the capital. The naturalistic approach of this novel was developed in Hjaa ho mor (1890; At Mother's), winner of a German literary prize, and several further works. Garborg's masterpiece is a poetic cycle in Nynorsk, Haugtussa (1895; Woman of the Underground People), which describes a young girl's belief in the supernatural and was set to music by Edvard Grieg. Other works include translations of the Odyssey (1918) and of a section of the Mahabharata (1921), and, for presentation in the Nynorsk theatre that he and his wife had founded, Baron Ludvig Holberg's classical comedy Jeppe p bjerget (1921).