Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen
often referred to in Scandinavia as H.
C. Andersen was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays,
travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy
tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his
stories, called eventyr
in Danish, or "fairy-tales" in English, express themes that transcend
age and nationality.
Hans Christian Andersen was born in the town
of Odense, Denmark, on Tuesday, April 2, 1805. He was an only child. Andersen's father, also
Hans, considered himself related to nobility. His paternal grandmother had told
his father that their family had in the past belonged to a higher social class,
but investigations prove these stories unfounded. Theories that Andersen may
have been an illegitimate son of King
Christian VII persist.
Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into
more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's
collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting
lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as
well. Some of his most famous fairy tales include "The Little Mermaid", "The
Snow Queen", "The
Ugly Duckling", "The Nightingale",
"The Emperor's New Clothes"
and many more. His stories have inspired plays, ballets, and both live-action
and animated films.
All in all, he wrote about a hundred and fifty of them,
and while all are not equally good – and many are really not meant
for children – all of them are told in Andersen's special
satirical, comical, and sympathetic voice. And all of them are in some way
about Andersen himself, whose own story is at least as strange as his tales. He
called his autobiography "The
Fairytale of My Life," and the title is apt.
He was a solitary boy who amused himself by playing with
puppets and trying to write plays. He grew up in extreme poverty and was
obsessed with a desire to become famous, even if he wasn't quite sure of the
path to fame. He left home at the age of fourteen, setting off for Copenhagen,
the Danish capital, and he never looked back. He had the enormous good fortune
to be noticed by a prosperous and socially prominent family, the Collins, who
helped get him an education. Andersen considered them his family – his own
father had died when Andersen was eleven, his mother was a drunk – and although
he tried the Collins' patience, they stood by him, never imagining that this
strange, overly sensitive and strikingly ugly young man would become world
famous.
Andersen's father, who had received an
elementary education, introduced Andersen to literature, reading him Arabian
Nights. Andersen's mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter,
was uneducated and worked as a washerwoman following his father's death in
1816, remarrying in 1818. Andersen was sent to a local school for poor children
where he received a basic education and was forced to support himself, working
as a weaver's apprentice and, later, for a tailor. At 14, he moved to Copenhagen to seek employment as an actor. Having an excellent soprano voice, he
was accepted into the Royal
Danish Theatre, but his voice soon changed. A colleague at
the theatre told him that he considered Andersen a poet. Taking the suggestion
seriously, Andersen began to focus on writing.
Andersen's childhood home in Odense
Jonas Collin, director of the Royal Danish
Theatre, felt a great affection for him, and sent him to a grammar school in Slagelse, persuading King
Frederick VI to pay part of his education. Andersen had
already published his first story, The
Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave, in 1822. Though not a keen student, he also
attended school at Elsinore until 1827.
He later said his years in school were the
darkest and most bitter of his life. At one school, he lived at his
schoolmaster's home. There he was abused in order "to improve his
character," he was told. He later said the faculty had discouraged him from
writing in general, causing him to enter a state of depression.
A very early fairy tale by Andersen called The Tallow Candle (Danish:
Tællelyset)
was discovered in a Danish archive in October 2012. The story, written in the
1820s, was about a candle who did not feel appreciated. It was written while he
was still in school and dedicated to a benefactor, in whose family's possession
it remained until it turned up among other family papers in a suitcase in a
local archive.
In 1829, Andersen enjoyed considerable success with a
short story titled A Journey on Foot
from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager. In the book, the
protagonist meets characters ranging from Saint Peter to a talking cat. He
followed this success with a theatrical piece, Love on St. Nicholas Church Tower and a short volume of poems.
Though he made little progress writing and publishing immediately thereafter,
in 1833 he received a small traveling grant from the King, enabling him to set
out on the first of many journeys through Europe. At Jura,
near Le
Locle, Switzerland, he wrote the story, Agnete and the Merman. He spent an
evening in the Italian seaside village of Sestri Levante the same year,
inspiring the name, The Bay of Fables. In October 1834, he arrived in Rome.
Andersen's travels in Italy would be reflected in his first novel; an
autobiography titled The Improvisatore (Improvisatoren)
which was published in 1835, receiving instant acclaim.
In June 1847, Andersen paid his first visit to England
and enjoyed a triumphal social success during the summer. The Countess of Blessington
invited him to her parties where intellectual people could meet, and it was at
one party that he met Charles
Dickens for the first time. They shook hands and walked to the
veranda which was of much joy to Andersen. He wrote in his diary, "We had
come to the veranda, I was so happy to see and speak to England's now living
writer, whom I love the most."
The two authors respected each other's work and had
something important in common as writers: Depictions of the poor and the
underclass, who often had difficult lives affected both by the Industrial Revolution and by
abject poverty. In the Victorian era there was a growing sympathy for children
and an idealization of the innocence of childhood.
Ten years later, Andersen visited England again,
primarily to visit Dickens. He extended a brief visit to Dickens' home at Gads
Hill Place into a five-week stay, to the distress of Dickens'
family. After Anderson was told to leave, Dickens stopped all correspondence
between them, much to the great disappointment and confusion of Andersen, who
had quite enjoyed the visit and never understood why his letters went
unanswered.
Andersen's poem 'The Dying Child,' was published in a
Copenhagen journal and the Royal Theatre produced in 1829 his musical drama. Phantasier og Skizzer, a
collection of poems, was born when Andersen fell in love with Riborg Voigt, who
was secretly engaged to the local chemist's son. "She has a lovely, pious
face, quite child-like, but her eyes looker clever and thoughtful, they were
brown and very vivid," Andersen remembered in The Book of My Life.
Riborg married the chemists's son, Poul Bøving, in 1831. A leather pouch
containing a letter from Riborg was found round Andersen's neck when he died.
Also Edvard, Jonas Collin's son, and Henrik Stempe in the 1840s were for
Andersen other objects of unfulfilled dreams.
"I do wish that I were dead," Andersen said to
one of his friends in 1831, expressing not his feelings about his failed love
for Riborg but also echoing the melancholy of Goethe's Werther from The
Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Andersen never met Goethe, who was still
alive when Andersen made his first journey to Germany. The visit inspired the
first of his many travel sketches.
From 1831 onwards Andersen travelled widely in Europe, and
remained a passionate traveller all his life.He wrote sketches about Sweden,
Spain, Italy, Portugal, and the Middle East. During his journeys Andersen met
in Paris among others Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine, Balzac, and Alexandre Dumas.
A Poet's Day Dreams (1853) Andersen dedicated to Charles Dickens, whom
he met in the summer of 1857. And in Rome he met the young Norwegian writer
Björnson. Andersen lacked sufficient command of English and after staying with
Dickens at Gad's Hill, his host stuck a brief note in the guest room saying:
"Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks which seemed to the
family AGES!"
Love life
Andersen often fell in love with unattainable women and
many of his stories are interpreted as references. At one point, he wrote in
his diary: "Almighty God, thee only have I; thou steerest my fate, I must
give myself up to thee! Give me a livelihood! Give me a bride! My blood wants
love, as my heart does!" A girl named Riborg Voigt was the unrequited
love of Andersen's youth. A small pouch containing a long
letter from Riborg was found on Andersen's chest when he died, several decades
after he first fell in love with her, and after he supposedly fell in love with
others. Other disappointments in love included Sophie Ørsted, the daughter of
the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, and Louise
Collin, the youngest daughter of his benefactor Jonas Collin. One of his
stories, The
Nightingale, was a written expression of his passion for Jenny
Lind, and became the inspiration for her nickname, the
"Swedish Nightingale". Andersen was often shy around women and had
extreme difficulty in proposing to Lind. When Lind was boarding a train to take
her to an opera concert, Andersen gave Lind a letter of proposal. Her feelings
towards him were not the same; she saw him as a brother, writing to him in 1844
"farewell... God bless and protect my brother is the sincere wish of his
affectionate sister, Jenny."
Andersen wrote to Edvard Collin: "I languish for you
as for a pretty Calabrian wench... my sentiments for you
are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must
remain a mystery." Collin, who preferred women, wrote in his own memoir:
"I found myself unable to respond to this love, and this caused the author
much suffering." Likewise, the infatuations of the author for the Danish
dancer Harald Scharff and Carl
Alexander, the young hereditary duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, did not result
in any relationships.
Thanks for reading my article =) please fill our questionnaire too : https://docs.google.com/forms/
♥THANK YOU VERY MUCH♥
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar