Вера Ганчева

Between 1871 and 1887 Georg Brandes delivered his lectures on "The Main Movements in 19th Century European Literature", where he not only launched the notion "the break of modernity" as the primary task of Scandinavian men of letters, but also stirred the cultures of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, pushing them towards a greater polemicity, topical problems, an increasingly categorical departure from the Romantic legacy and a greater proximity to the spiritual and aesthetic movements in Europe, for the overcoming of the provincial reticence and isolation. The Scandinavian literatures were permeated by new European tendencies, while the notion of loneliness broadened its meaning and became a key concept for the spirit of the time. The study analyses the basic types of loneliness principally distinguished by the researchers and their specific projection in the Scandinavian North, the changes induced by the various epochs. A special emphasis is laid on the attitude to loneliness - conceived not merely as an emotional state as an idea, an outlook to people and the world, - in the greatest representatives of the "break of modernity" in the region such as Ibsen, Bjornson, Schilan, Lie, Garborg in Norway, Strindberg, Jejerstam, Benediktson-Algren, Hanson - in Sweden, Jakobsen, Bang, Jelerup, Pontopidan in Denmark, almost without exception felt the strong influence of philosopher Kirkegaard, the "spiritual father" of that dynamic literary movement. The pattern from Romanticism through Naturalism to New Romanticism, applied to the personal and artistic development of its exponent, eloquently outlines its basic trends until the early 90s of the 19th century, when Knut Hamsun entered literature to take up in his turn the subject of loneliness, transforming it into a dimension of the increasingly important problem of the interrelation between Man and Nature, of the need for a balance between the biological and the spiritual. With his novels a new type of loner entered 20th century.

The Swedish scientist, philosopher and writer Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) is one of the most internationally famous representatives of his native country and of European Enlightenment with a strong influence on many bright minds in the world even to this day. Influenced by Descartes, but also by Locke and Leibnitz, Swedenborg saw the world as subject to mechanical laws and already in his first works of a progressively philosophical and psychological nature he investigated the question of the relationship between mind and matter, body and spirit, coming to the conclusion that soul is material. Like almost all scientists of those days, Swedenborg's starting point lay in Christianity. For him there was a natural link between the function of the soul and the problem of good and evil; also with the epistemological question of the nature of human knowledge. Knowledge, he thought, partly springs from experience, partly - from intuition which is divine clarity, light. During his Journal of Dreams period (approx. 1743-1745) Swedenborg went through an existential and religious crisis and became a mystic. He decided to discover and explain the complex structure of the universe with the help of the scientific rationalism, characteristic of his time. The essence of Swedenborg's message is theosophy, knowledge of God and its best known aspect is the correspondence doctrine, a dynamic context in which the natural, spiritual and divine things are connected in a whole with universal importance and validity. The idea of this concordance has served as a special approach to creation in literature and arts but also as their general principle to many thinkers, writers, musicians, artists in different countries and epochs like the European Romanticists, Emerson, Balzac, Baudelaire, Strindberg, Pound, Borges, Milosz, Brodsky and probably above all - Dostoyevsky.