Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen (Odense, April 2, 1805 - Copenhagen, August 4, 1875) was a Danish writer and poet famous for his children's stories, including The Duckling Ugly, The Little Mermaid, The Emperor's New Clothes and The Snow Queen.

The son of a humble shoemaker, he soon learned various trades, but did not finish any. At the age of fourteen, he fled to Copenhagen with little money, ready to make his fortune as an actor and singer; he wrote some works and after privations and disappointments, he managed to arouse the interest of personalities from the country who dealt with his formation. Andersen always felt that his humble origins were a liability and fantasized that he was the illegitimate son of a great lord.

In addition to novels, poetry and theater, he wrote an autobiography (The adventure of my life, 1855) and published valuable travel books resulting from his experiences, since he spent approximately ten years of his traveling life; the author visited Germany, Great Britain, Turkey and Spain among many other countries. He always traveled with a rope in his suitcase, in case he had to escape through the window because of a fire. The fruit of his longest journey is the book A poet's bazaar (1848). In 1851 he published his experiences in Sweden ( In Sweden ) and in 1862 what he experienced during his stay in Spain ( In Spain ).

However, Hans Christian Andersen is known above all for his children's stories, some inspired by Nordic tales and legends, but most of them invented by him and characterized by great imagination, humor and sensitivity. Some critics suggest that these stories were not so innocent, being censored when they were published, and that, in any case, they reflect part of the internal conflicts of the writer. Much has been said, among others, about the parallelism between The Ugly Duckling and the life of its author.

In any case, these more than two hundred stories, some translated into many languages, have been republished and thanks to them he had the privilege of being recognized while alive as an author, becoming one of the classics of children's literature. According to the Index Translationum, he is one of the most translated authors.His work has inspired films –especially animated ones–, plays and ballets.

In Odense, his hometown, is his house-museum, with photographs, drawings and memorabilia of Andersen, and it has become a center that organizes activities aimed primarily at children.

Biography

Hans Christian Andersen's house in Odense.

He was born on April 2, 1805 in Odense, Denmark. His family was so poor that he sometimes had to sleep under a bridge and beg. He was the son of a twenty-two-year-old shoemaker, educated but infirm, and a Protestant laundress. Andersen dedicated the story The Little Match Girl to his mother, because of her extreme poverty, as well as It's useless , because of his alcoholism.

From an early age, Hans Christian displayed a great imagination that was encouraged by the indulgence of his parents. In 1816 his father died and Andersen stopped attending school; he devoted himself to reading all the works he could get his hands on, including those by Ludwig Holberg and William Shakespeare.

Artistic Beginnings

Andersen decided to become an opera singer and moved to Copenhagen in September 1819. Once there he was taken for a lunatic, shunned, and left with virtually nothing; but he made friends with the musicians Christoph Weyse, Giuseppe Siboni (founder and director of the Royal Danish Academy of Music) and later with the poet Frederik Høegh-Guldberg.

Siboni, after listening to him, decided to sponsor his studies, but the poor conditions of his room during the winter made him lose his voice. However, the tragedy of his & # 34; Alfsol & # 34; he attracted the attention of Jonas Collin, the director of the Royal Theater in Copenhagen (as well as being a councilor of state, which meant he had close ties to the king), who would be his patron as well as his lifelong friend.

King Frederick VI took an interest in the strange boy and sent him to the school at Slagelse for a few years. Given his little previous education, he was sent with the youngest students, which, added to the director's antipathy, meant that, as he later recognized, these years were the darkest and bitterest of his life. Nevertheless, the grateful Andersen persevered in his studies, retaining grades to the satisfaction of the counselor, and remained at Slagelse and the Elsinore School (Danish Helsingør) until 1827. Collin finally considered his studies finished and Andersen returned to Copenhagen.

Career

Hans Christian Andersen, 1835.

Portrait of 1836, painted by Christian Albrecht Jensen.

Hans Christian Andersen, self-portrait of 1830.

In the same year, 1827, Hans Christian managed to get his poem «The Dying Child» published in the literary magazine Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post, the most prestigious of the moment; it appeared in the Danish and German versions of the magazine.

Andersen was an inveterate traveler (“to travel is to live”, he said). After his travels, he wrote his impressions in the newspapers. From his ideas and comings he also drew themes for his writings.

His first play, Love in the Tower of Saint Nicholas, published in 1839, was also successful.

By 1831 he had published the collection of poems Fantasías y esbozos and made a trip to Berlin, the chronicle of which appeared under the title Silhouettes. In 1833 he received a small traveling grant from the king and made the first of his long journeys through Europe.

In 1834 he arrived in Rome. It was Italy that inspired his first novel, The Improviser , published in 1835, with great success. In the same year the first two editions of Adventure Stories for Children also appeared, followed by several short story novels. He had previously published a libretto for an opera, The Bride of Lammermoor , and a book of poems entitled The Twelve Months of the Year .

The value of these works was initially not highly appreciated; consequently, they had little sales success. However, by 1838 Hans Christian Andersen was already an established writer. The fame of his fairy tales grew. He began writing a second series in 1838 and a third in 1843, published under the title New Stories. Among his most famous stories are "The Ugly Duckling", "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Snow Queen", "The Red Shoes", "The Tin Soldier", "The Nightingale", "The Little Mermaid", », «Thumbelina», «The little match girl», «The buckwheat», «The flying chest», «The tinderbox», «The Phoenix bird», «The shadow», «The princess and the pea» among others. They have been translated into more than eighty languages and adapted into plays, ballets, movies, cartoons, CD games, and works of sculpture and painting.

The longest of Andersen's journeys, between 1840 and 1841, was through Germany (where he made his first journey by train), Italy, Malta and Greece to Constantinople. The return journey took him to the Black Sea and the Danube. The book A poet's bazaar (1842), where he narrated his experience, is considered by many to be his best travel book.

Andersen became a household name in much of Europe, despite the fact that Denmark was not fully recognized as a writer. His works, by that time, had already been translated into French, English and German. In June 1847, he visited England for the first time, a trip that was a complete success. Charles Dickens accompanied him on his departure.

After this, Andersen continued his publishing, aspiring to become a novelist and playwright, which he failed to achieve. In fact, Andersen didn't have much interest in his fairy tales, despite the fact that it is precisely for them that he is valued today. Even so, he continued to write them, and in 1847 and 1848 two new volumes appeared. After a long silence, Andersen published another novel in 1857, To be or not to be. In 1863, after another trip, he published a new travel book, in Spain, a country where he was especially impressed by the cities of Malaga (where he has a statue erected in his honor), Granada, Alicante and Toledo.

A custom that Andersen maintained for many years, starting in 1858, was to narrate in his own voice the stories that made him famous.

Love life and sexuality

Andersen often fell in love with women who were inaccessible to him, and many of his stories are interpreted as allusions to his romantic failures. The most famous of these was soprano Jenny Lind. Her passion inspired the story "The Nightingale" and contributed to her being nicknamed the "Swedish Nightingale." Andersen was often shy around women and had a hard time proposing to Lind. He did it by letter when Lind was taking a train to perform a concert. Her feelings were unrequited, as she saw him as a brother, as she expressed in a letter from 1844: "Farewell... may God protect my brother is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister, Jenny." Another unrequited love Andersen's youth was a girl named Riborg Voigt. A small bag containing a long letter from Riborg was found next to Andersen's chest when she died. In her diary he wrote this plea: “Almighty God, you are all I have, you who rule my fate, I must surrender to you! Give me a way of life! Give me a girlfriend! My blood wants love, as my heart wants it!» Other love disappointments were Sophie Ørsted, the daughter of the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, and Louise Collin, the youngest daughter of his benefactor Jonas Collin.

Just as he had little success with women, Andersen also found himself unrequitedly attracted to various men. For example, he wrote to Edvard Collin: 'I languish for you as for a Calabrian girl... my feelings for you are like those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain secret." Collin, for his part, wrote in his memoir: "I did not find myself capable of responding to his love, and that caused the writer much suffering." Nor did Andersen's passions for Charles Alexander, the young heir to the duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and the dancer Harald Scharff develop into lasting relationships.Modern literary studies suggest that in some of Andersen's works there is a camouflaged homoeroticism, the result of his repressed homosexuality. This repression is already seen in Andersen's youth diaries in which he records his intention not to have sexual relations.

Andersen and Harald Scharff

Portrait of Hans Cristian Andersen of July 1860.

Andersen met Harald Scharff, a handsome young Danish dancer with the Royal Copenhagen Theater company, in 1857 in Paris. Andersen was stopping over in Paris on his way to Denmark from England on a visit to Charles Dickens, and Scharff was on holiday with his housemate, actor Lauritz Eckardt. Andersen and Scharff then visited Notre Dame together. Three years would pass before Andersen met the couple again by chance in Bavaria in July 1860. The three men enjoyed a week together in and around Munich. It is likely that Andersen fell in love with Scharff during this period.According to his diary, Andersen "did not feel quite well" when the two young men left Munich on 9 July 1860 for Salzburg.

After Scharff and Eckardt left for Salzburg, Andersen traveled to Switzerland, but there he felt despondent and depressed. In November he returned to Copenhagen and went to spend Christmas at Basnæs, the estate of an aristocratic friend of his on the coast of Zealand. The Christmas holidays lifted his spirits and he wrote "The Snowman" on New Year's Eve 1860. It was published with other new stories by Andersen two months later, on March 2, 1861 in the volume New Stories from fairies and stories Second series. First collection of the Copenhagen publisher C. A. Reitzel.

Harald Scharff characterized for a ballet performance Naples1860.

Andersen and Scharff's friendship continued, and early in 1862 they began a relationship that brought Andersen "joy, some sexual fulfillment, and its eventual end led to loneliness". Andersen refers to this period of his life as the "erotic period", in a diary entry from March 1862. He was not discreet in his public behaviors around Scharff and was open about his feelings even to a great extent. Some witnesses called the relationship "improper and ridiculous".

Their relationship ended in late 1863 when Scharff gradually left him as his relationship with Eckardt intensified. Andersen noted in his diary on 27 August 1863 that Scharff's passion for him had cooled. And on November 13, 1863, he noted: "Scharff has not visited me in eight days, everything has finished him." In December he read stories at the Eckhardt home, where Scharff and a dancer, Camilla Petersen, to whom he would be engaged but never marry, were present. Andersen took the end of the relationship in stride and the two former lovers continued to meet later in their social circle without reproach. Andersen tried several times, without success, to resume the intimate relationship with Scharff.

When the relationship faded, Andersen felt old. He speculated that he would never have another relationship. In September 1863 he wrote: "I cannot live in my solitude, I am tired of life." In October he noted: "I feel old and downhill." In 1864, after a twelve-year hiatus from the theatre, Andersen composed three new plays for the Copenhagen theaters, examining brotherly love and the deep feelings between men. One of the reasons why the writer was able to make another attempt in a field in which he had already experienced failure in the past would be the possibility of staying close to Scharff at the Royal Theater. He updated his 1832 opera The Raven, which was staged in Copenhagen on April 23, 1865 where Scharff played a vampire who sucked the blood of a young man on his wedding night. In 1871, Bournonville composed a ballet based on Andersen's short story "The Tin Soldier", whose title role was played by Scharff. But the dancer broke his knee during a rehearsal of The Troubadour in November 1871, forcing him to give up his ballet career. He tried to become an actor without much success, and ended up marrying the dancer Elvida Møller in 1874.

Last days and death

Hans Christian Andersen Sculpture at the Rosenborg Garden in Copenhagen.

Her children's stories continued to appear until 1872, when the last stories were published at Christmas. During the spring of that year, Andersen suffered a fall from his own bed, which caused him serious injuries. He never fully recovered, and on August 4, 1875 he died in the house called Rolighed , near Copenhagen, where he is buried.

Acknowledgments

Hans Christian Andersen received many honors during his lifetime. In 1866 the King of Denmark granted him the honorary title of State Councilor and in 1867 he was declared an illustrious citizen of his hometown.

In his honor, the Hans Christian Andersen Prize for children's literature has been awarded every two years since 1956 and, since 1966, also for illustration. On April 2, the date of his birth, International Children's Book Day is celebrated. In 2006, the bicentenary year of the author's birth, it was celebrated all over the world in memory of his life and work.

In 1976, astronomer Nikolai Chernykh named the asteroid 2476 in honor of this writer.

In the special collections section of the United States Library of Congress is a unique collection of Andersen materials, bequeathed by actor Jean Hersholt. Of particular interest in this collection is an original Andersen scrapbook prepared by the young Jonas Drewsen.

Statues and monuments

In the port of Copenhagen there is a statue of the Little Mermaid, reminiscent of Andersen's character.

Statue with the ugly duck at Central Park in New York.

In the United States there are some statues of Hans Christian Andersen: in Central Park in New York, in Lincoln Park in Chicago, and in Solvang, California.

There is a statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Bratislava (Slovakia), in memory of his visit in 1841. There is also a statue of the writer in Málaga (Spain), in memory of his visit to this city in October 1862, as well as a commemorative plaque of the respective one in the city of Bailén.

In the Japanese city of Funabashi there is a children's theme park named after Hans Christian Andersen. In the Polish city of Lublin there is a puppet theater and actors with the same name. In the Chinese city of Shanghai it was inaugurated in 2006 a theme park based on Andersen's tales.

Hans Christian Andersen's tomb.

Arts, entertainment and media

• Hans Christian Andersen (1952), an American musical film starring Danny Kaye, which is inspired by the life and legacy of Andersen, was meant not to be historically or geographically accurate; that begins by saying, "This is not the story of his life, but a fairy tale about this great storyteller."^{[chuckles]required]}

Works

Andersen wrote approximately 168 short stories; some are as follows: