Transforming Author Museums: From Sites of Pilgrimage to Cultural Hubs 9781800732445

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Expanded Spaces and Changing Contexts of Author Museums
Part I Expansion
Chapter 1 New Architecture in Author Museums and Centres
Chapter 2 A Displaced Apartment of a Poet in a Museum: Staging and Reception of Franz Grillparzer in the Wien Museum
Chapter 3 From Cobwebs to a Web-Based Reality: Drawing Young Adults into a Memorial House
Chapter 4 Ghostly Voices in the Author Museum
Chapter 5 Unpacking the Book Collection: Following a Guide, a Curator and a Librarian in an Author Museum
Chapter 6 The Gunnar Ekelöf Room and the Poet’s Widow as Archivist and Author
Chapter 7 This Is Not a Set of Guidelines – or How (Not) to Exhibit Literature
Part II Politics
Chapter 8 New Sites of Worship: Sovietization and Literary Museums in Western Borderlands, 1940–1979
Chapter 9 Exposing the Obscurity of the Chinese Literary Establishment: The Destabilizing Power of Author Museums
Chapter 10 South African Literature, Author Museums and Narrative Expansion: The Olive Schreiner House
Chapter 11 Troublesome Heritage in the Home of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
Chapter 12 Housing World Literature: The Norwegian Ibsen Museums
Epilogue: Author Museums and Democratization
Index

Citation preview

Transforming Author Museums

Museums and Collections Editors Mary Bouquet, University College Utrecht, and  Howard Morphy, The Australian National University, Canberra As houses of memory and sources of information about the world, museums function as a dynamic interface between past, present and future. Museum collections are increasingly being recognized as material archives of human creativity and as invaluable resources for interdisciplinary research. Museums provide powerful forums for the expression of ideas, and are central to the production of public culture: they may inspire the imagination, generate heated emotions and express conflicting values in their material form and histories. This series explores the potential of museum collections to transform our knowledge of the world, and for exhibitions to influence the way in which we view and inhabit that world. It offers essential reading for those involved in all aspects of the museum sphere: curators, researchers, collectors, students and the visiting public.

Recent volumes: Volume 13.  Transforming Author Museums: From Sites of Pilgrimage to Cultural Hubs Edited by Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke Volume 12.  Exchanging Objects: Nineteenth-Century Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution Catherine A. Nichols Volume 11.  Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian’s Fossil Halls Diana E. Marsh Volume 10.  The Witness as Object: Video Testimony in Memorial Museums Steffi de Jong Volume 9.  Visitors to the House of Memory: Identity and Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin Victoria Bishop-Kendzia

Volume 8.  Museum Websites and Social Media: Issues of Participation, Sustainability, Trust and Diversity Ana Luisa Sánchez Laws Volume 7.  The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums Zuzanna Bogumił, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Tim Buchen, Christian Ganzer and Maria Senina Volume 6.  Exhibiting Europe in Museums: Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives and Representations Wolfram Kaiser, Stefan Krankenhagen and Kerstin Poehls Volume 5.  Borders of Belonging: Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site Mads Daugbjerg Volume 4.  Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Claire Wintle

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://berghahnbooks.com/series/museums-and-collections

Transforming Author Museums From Sites of Pilgrimage to Cultural Hubs

Edited by Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Spring, Ulrike, editor. | Schimanski, Johan, editor. | Aarbakke, Thea, editor. Title: Transforming author museums : from sites of pilgrimage to cultural hubs / edited by Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2022. | Series: Museums and collections ; volume 13 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021017498 (print) | LCCN 2021017499 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800732438 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800732445 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Literary museums--History. Classification: LCC PN34 .T73 2022 (print) | LCC PN34 (ebook) | DDC 807.5--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017498 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017499 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-243-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-244-5 ebook

Contents List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgements x Introduction. The Expanded Spaces and Changing Contexts of Author Museums Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke

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Part I. Expansion Chapter 1. New Architecture in Author Museums and Centres Elin Haugdal

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Chapter 2. A Displaced Apartment of a Poet in a Museum: Staging and Reception of Franz Grillparzer in the Wien Museum 68 Eva-Maria Orosz Chapter 3. From Cobwebs to a Web-Based Reality: Drawing Young Adults into a Memorial House Anna Benedek Chapter 4. Ghostly Voices in the Author Museum Ulrike Spring and Johan Schimanski

83 105

Chapter 5. Unpacking the Book Collection: Following a Guide, a Curator and a Librarian in an Author Museum Thea Aarbakke

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Chapter 6. The Gunnar Ekelöf Room and the Poet’s Widow as Archivist and Author Helena Bodin

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Chapter 7. This Is Not a Set of Guidelines – or How (Not) to Exhibit Literature Vanessa Zeissig

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Contents

Part II. Politics Chapter 8. New Sites of Worship: Sovietization and Literary Museums in Western Borderlands, 1940–1979 Anastasia Felcher

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Chapter 9. Exposing the Obscurity of the Chinese Literary Establishment: The Destabilizing Power of Author Museums Emily Graf

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Chapter 10. South African Literature, Author Museums and Narrative Expansion: The Olive Schreiner House Dana Ryan Lande

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Chapter 11. Troublesome Heritage in the Home of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 277 Marianne Egeland Chapter 12. Housing World Literature: The Norwegian Ibsen Museums 295 Narve Fulsås Epilogue. Author Museums and Democratization Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke

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Index 327

Illustrations Figure 1.1. Recently built author museums in Norway: a. The Hamsun Centre in Hamarøy (2009); b. The Petter Dass Museum at Alstahaug (2007); c. The Ivar Aasen Centre in Ørsta (2000); d. The Aukrust Centre in Alvdal (1996); e. The Visitor Centre Bjerkebæk in Lillehammer (2007); f. The Garborg Centre in Bryne (2012); and g. The Prøysen House in Ringsaker (2014). Photographs a, c, d, e and g by Elin Haugdal, 2017. Photograph b by Ingebjørg Hage, Arkitekturguide for Nord-Norge og Svalbard, CC BY-SA 4.0, 2010. Photograph f by Asle Haukland, Jærmuseet, 2012. 36–37 Figure 1.2. The entrance to the Petter Dass Museum facing the old church and yard, Alstahaug. The exhibition area is in the upper front. Photograph by Elin Haugdal, 2017.

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Figure 1.3. The exhibition area in the Ivar Aasen Centre. The axial plan is divided into spatial sequences, Ørsta. Photograph by Elin Haugdal, 2017.

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Figure 1.4. The property of Bjerkebæk seen from the visitor centre’s southern pavilion towards Undset’s home, Lillehammer, and the architect Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk’s site plan. Photograph by Elin Haugdal, 2017. Drawing: www.holmebakk.no/bjerkebaek/drawings.html. 55 Figure 2.1. Grillparzer’s Library at the City Hall, in 1891.  Photograph by R. Lechner. Vienna, Wien Museum, inv. No. 1667/2. © Wien Museum / Foto Birgit und Peter Kainz, used with permission.

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Figure 2.2. The living room of the Grillparzer apartment in Vienna City Hall, in 1941. Vienna, Wien Museum, inv. No. 226.496/1. © Wien Museum used with permission.

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Illustrations

Figure 2.3. The living room of the Grillparzer apartment in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna, in 2009. Photograph by Enver Hirsch. Vienna, Wien Museum. © Wien Museum / Foto Enver Hirsch, used with permission.

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Figure 4.1. The main building at Selma Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka. Photo: © KM IDÉ, number KM_15189.

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Figure 4.2. The entrance to the W.H. Auden-Gedenkstätte in Kirchstetten, Lower Austria, with a photograph of Auden placed so that he seems to be standing in the place he stood when the photo was taken. Photograph by Carmen Osowski © Landessammlungen Niederösterreich.

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Figure 5.1. Bjerkebæk, Sigrid Undset’s home. Lillehammer, in 2018. Photograph by Thea Aarbakke.

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Figure 5.2. Bookshelves protected by ropes. Bjerkebæk, Sigrid Undset’s home. Lillehammer, in 2018. Photograph by Thea Aarbakke.

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Figure. 5.3. A single volume from Undset’s book collection, returned to Bjerkebæk, Sigrid Undset’s home, by the curator. Lillehammer, in 2018. Photograph by Thea Aarbakke.

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Figure 6.1. At work in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room, reading the correspondence between Ingrid Ekelöf and Brita Wigforss, stored in a blue cardboard suitcase box. Sigtuna Foundation, in 2015. Photograph by Helena Bodin.

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Figure 6.2. Ingrid Ekelöf ’s copy of the actual appearance of one of Gunnar Ekelöf ’s notebooks, with her comments and cross-references in square brackets in the margins. Photograph by Helena Bodin.

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Figure 6.3. Ingrid Ekelöf ’s notebook, labelled ‘Where everything is’, serving as a guide to the Home Archive’s associative system, initiated by the poet. Photograph by Helena Bodin.

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Figure 6.4. On the top of this page, Ingrid Ekelöf has imitated her husband’s handwriting as a schoolboy: ‘Write / I am a poet’ (in old-fashioned Swedish spelling: ‘Schrifw / jag är poet’). Photograph by Helena Bodin.

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Illustrationsix

Figure 8.1. Soviet military unit passes under the arch erected by the Red Army on formerly Nazi-occupied territory near Pushkin Hills in the Pskov region of Russia (RSFSR), 1944. The slogan on the banner states ‘Let us avenge Germans for our Pushkin!’ © Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive in Moscow (RGAKFD).

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Figure 8.2. The Markučiai estate in Vilnius, formerly owned by Varvara and Grigory Pushkin; the view of the house prior to the opening of the Alexander Pushkin Museum, 1946. © Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive in Moscow (RGAKFD).

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Figure 8.3. A room at the Markučiai estate of Alexander Pushkin’s son Grigory, in Vilnius, 1940. The coffee table, armchairs and self-woven curtains at the doors are the poet’s room furnishings, brought to Vilnius by Grigory Pushkin from Mikhailovskoye in 1899. © Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive in Moscow (RGAKFD).

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Figure 9.1. The Mao Dun Literature Prize on display, Gaomi, in 2014. Photograph by Emily Graf. Courtesy of the Mo Yan Literature Museum.

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Figure 9.2. Lu Xun bust on display, Xiamen, in 2014. Photograph by Emily Graf. Courtesy of the Xiamen Lu Xun Museum.

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Figure 9.3. Signatures on Lin Yutang’s collected books, Taibei, in 2015. Photograph by Emily Graf. Courtesy of the Lin Yutang Former Residence.

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Figure 10.1. Street view of the Olive Schreiner House, Cradock, in 2017. Photograph by Dana Ryan Lande.

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Figure 10.2. Ikhamanga Hall and the central courtyard with water pump, Cradock, in 2017. Photograph by Dana Ryan Lande.

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Acknowledgements We would like to thank our authors, reviewers, editors, production staff and indexer who have been involved in creating this book. We would also like to thank the institutions that have provided support for our contributors during their research and writing processes. This volume is a result of the TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums research project, originally at the University College of Sogn og Fjordane, in collaboration with the University of Oslo. During the project period of 2016–19, the University College of Sogn og Fjordane underwent a fusion with other institutions, with the project subsequently being owned by the newly established Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. The project was financed by the Research Council of Norway (251225). The project coordinators Ulrike Spring and Johan Schimanski would like to thank the project’s former doctoral fellow Thea Aarbakke for being willing to join them in the editing of this book and contributing so much to its final form. The project acronym TRAUM means ‘dream’ in German, which is the way the project was originally envisaged. We would like to thank all who have contributed to this dream, which has reached a provisional conclusion with this book. Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke

Introduction The Expanded Spaces and Changing Contexts of Author Museums Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke

What transformations have author museums undergone since the nineteenth century, when they became part of the heritage landscape? What challenges do they face today in an increasingly diversified world, and how might we imagine them in the future? What new strategies do today’s author museums use to interlink real and literary spaces, texts, objects, new media, authors, readers and visitors? These are some of the questions we give provisional answers to in this volume. Since their establishment as public institutions from the eighteenth century onwards, museums as keepers and communicators of collections have had a transformative potential. By narrating the world through specific collection strategies and exhibition designs they have offered new interpretations of history and contemporary society. Museums influence future interpretations of the past, through their roles as not only ‘conserving/depositing’ but also ‘interpreting/exposing’ institutions (see e.g. Korff 2002). They both respond to and shape cultural, political and social changes in society. In 2019 the International Council of Museums (ICOM) proposed (but did not agree upon) a new definition of museums, emphasizing their active role in society and showcasing the increasing relevance of museums as communicators within a global and diverse society (ICOM 2020). A stronger focus on the societal role of museums today is also an attempt to make them more relevant to their visitors, by connecting the past to present events and conditions that people can relate to through their own experiences. Author museums – that is, museums in former homes of literary writers or dedicated to specific writers – have been part of these changes in the museum landscape, and here too we can see increasing efforts to

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allow new stories into hegemonial museum narratives and to open themselves up to new groups of visitors. However, because of their history as sites of apotheosis and pilgrimage, and their inherent hagiographic tendency, many author museums – and personality museums in general – at the same time seem to lag behind wider changes in the museum landscape. The challenges they face are not always similar to those faced by the grand national history, art or ethnographic museum. This book focuses on the role of author museums since the nineteenth century, when they became public institutions. It discusses their various functions, and investigates some of the challenges and transformative potentials author museums have had in society up until today, encompassing a wide geographical scope. While the phenomenon of author museums stems from a Western tradition, it is today a global phenomenon. This book includes discussion of author museums in China, South Africa and the former Soviet Union, in addition to several case studies from European and particularly Nordic countries. Previous English-language literature on authors’ home museums has focused primarily on such houses in Britain, the United States, France and Italy. This book seeks to redress this imbalance by including lesser-known cases, often coming out of rich traditions of musealizing authors. Scholars of museology or museum studies have for some time argued for the importance of studying museums and cultural heritage in different regions of the world, acknowledging that museums have different meanings, tasks, statuses and societal roles within the places they are situated (Macdonald 2006; Brenna 2009; Soares 2019). Museum professionals also recognize this diversity (Sandahl 2019), and the present volume emphasizes the relevance of studying museums within a broad spectrum of regions with different political systems and cultural traditions. In widening the field, our volume complements previous work on, for example, literary museums in Japan (Meyer 2015), and acknowledges author museums as a global phenomenon, while at the same time being alert to their variations, which are often a result of different traditions, influences and contexts. Moreover, it expands upon the existing research on author museums in the English language, by integrating research in other languages. It is, for example, striking that the extensive and rich scholarly literature on literary museums in German has hardly been adopted into English-language scholarship. By approaching author museums from a wider range of perspectives, the volume follows Sharon Macdonald’s suggestion that the multiplicity and complexity of museums ‘call[s] for a correspondingly rich and multi-faceted range of perspectives and approaches to comprehend and provoke museums themselves’ (Macdonald 2006: 2).

Introduction3

While this volume can primarily be seen as a contribution to what might be called the ‘interdisciplinary discipline’ of museum studies or museology, it involves the disciplinary perspectives of cultural studies, literary studies, history, architectural history, media studies and biography studies, and can be expected to speak also to related and overlapping fields such as heritage studies, memory studies, material culture studies and tourism studies. By including a wide range of non-English-language references that have previously not been made available in English-language research, and by addressing their theoretical perspectives, the volume aims to open the field to a broad audience of museum professionals and scholars around the world. The academic literature on author museums in English is not extensive, in spite of some major contributions, in particular by Nicola J. Watson (2006, 2009, 2020), Harald Hendrix (2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2009, 2010, 2014, 2020), Andrea Zemgulys (2008), and Alison Booth (2009, 2016). This research has first and foremost focused on authors’ (or, more widely, writers’) home museums – the dominating tradition in the English-speaking countries – often seen through the field of literary tourism. The extensive German-language research on literary exhibitions and author museums bridges across a wide variety of disciplines: mostly literary studies (particularly the discipline of German literature), but also museology, museum pedagogy, cultural theory, history and art history, reaching at least back to 1971, when historian and museum professional Franz Rudolf Zankl (1971) published a book on the personality museum as a specific museum type, including a chapter on writers and poets. Conspicuously, the primary focus of this extensive research is on German authors. An investigation of author museums and their transformative potential must however go further than a discussion from a purely academic perspective. It requires also the analytical and experience-based insight of museum professionals. The present volume therefore includes contributions by both academics and museum professionals. It offers theoretical reflections and hands-on research, integrating scholarly and curatorial knowledge on diverse communication processes, and manifold encounters with visitor groups, objects and narratives. Literary scholars have previously by far taken the lead in the research on author museums, with other disciplines such as history or museology (at least English-language museology) paying little attention to author museums specifically, or even to personality museums in general. The cultural theorist Hans Dam Christensen has argued (2001: 204) that the reason for this lack of interest among museum studies scholars is that

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much museological research has been published by American scholars studying the United States museum landscape, where there are few single-artist museums. Another reason may be that in recent years museologists have studied museums primarily from a perspective that is part of a broader development within cultural and social disciplines, known as ‘representational critique’ (Vergo 1989; Macdonald 2006; Soares 2019). This approach owes a lot to postcolonial and feminist theory, which have both contributed important knowledge on how museums have a legacy as patriarchal institutions, and have been used as political tools for nation-building (e.g. Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Bennett 1995; Duncan 1995). In these studies on museums’ power structures and colonial heritage, smaller biographical museums dedicated to authors or other single artists have not attracted the same attention as the larger, national art museums, ethnographic collections or museums of natural history. These two factors may explain why author museums have not been the focus of attention for museological researchers writing within what is known as the New Museology, and later Critical Museology. There is, however, an obvious critique of patriarchalism in author museums to be made because of the dominance of personality museums dedicated to white, Western men (e.g. Bohman 2010: 31). At the same time, author museums differ from cultural history museums in how they became public institutions, in their actual size and in their collection history and strategy. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, an example of a major museum, is based on a donation to the University of Oxford from Lieutenant-General Pitt Rivers in 1884. Some twenty thousand ethnographic and archaeological objects from his collections were donated to the university, and became an important part of how anthropology was taught and researched there in the early twentieth century (Gosden and Larson 2011). Author museums are to a lesser degree interwoven with questions of scientific legitimacy and representation, partly because they have often come into being on the initiative of literary fans, local actors, family members of the late author, or even by the author her- or himself. In addition, they are usually much smaller and less noticeable than many other museums, being placed within the authors’ former homes and often outside the larger cities. Since the 1990s, museology has grown and expanded as a research field. In addition to enquiries related to representational critique informed by postcolonial, feminist, structuralist and poststructuralist theory, museologists and museum professionals have become interested in questions related to materiality and the senses. These can in new ways make literary museums and authors’ homes interesting research objects

Introduction5

for museological research. Edited volumes such as Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations (Dudley 2010) and Museum Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things (Dudley 2012) have introduced a focus on the sensory and aesthetic aspects of museums. Here the focus lies on other aspects of the museum institution than those addressed in the aforementioned works by Hooper-Greenhill, Bennett and Duncan, such as the sensory and emotional as vital parts of the museum experience and our understanding of the museum. Watson has addressed the embarrassment of literary tourism as an explanation of why there has been so little research on writers’ homes: ‘As a practice that tries to make the emotional and virtual realities of reading accountable to the literal, material realities of destination, it is bound to make literary specialists uneasy’ (Watson 2009a: 5). Contributions such as Dudley’s can encourage questions of materiality and emotions to author museums, and give them a terminology with which to investigate these questions. This volume acknowledges the various possible functions of author museums: they can be monuments, tourist attractions, places of pilgrimage or recreation, historical sites, artistic or architectural expressions, loci for extended forms of reading, pedagogical resources or cultural hubs. They can be symbols confirming local, regional, national or global identities, or a critical, destabilizing force, challenging the establishment. In most cases, a museum has more than one of these functions. Analysing these manifold functions can help us to discern specific areas where the transformative potential of author museums became particularly conspicuous, or where this potential was halted – and in both cases, to explain why. Our underlying conception for this volume is to study ongoing transformations in author museums from two entangled perspectives: one expansion, going from the inside of museums and out (transforming genres, spaces, themes and techniques); and the other politics, going from the outside of museums and in (transforming contexts and functions). While these two themes run through the whole volume to a greater or lesser extent, we have divided the book into two corresponding parts that each showcase the transformations going on in author museums, along with their transformative potentials, with a primary focus on one of the themes. In the following we present each perspective with reference to the contributions and to previous research, while in the volume’s epilogue we sum up the book as a whole and focus on a form of transformation that both perspectives contribute to, namely democratization.

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Expansion In the first part of our volume, we focus on expansion, specifically when it comes to the extension of author museums into related museum genres, their physical or virtual extensions into architecture and the urban, rural and digital landscapes that surround them, their inclusion of new themes beyond that of the biographical literary works they focus upon, and their utilization of increasingly multidimensional exhibition strategies and techniques. Indeed, we see the expansion of genres as related to the extension of space, theme and technique in contemporary author museums. The change of genre, which takes place when author museums are supplemented by multi-author museums, literature museums, author centres or theme parks, also opens up author museums to potential new visitor groups. Today, it is not only literary fans, authors and scholars who visit these museums (or institutions with strong museal aspects). Literary museums have developed sophisticated outreach programmes and align tourist landscapes to their needs. With star architects having begun to build such museums, people interested in or attracted by their architecture also visit them. Contributors to the present volume show how the museum genre has opened up to new visitor groups such as schoolchildren (Benedek), tourists in general, or in some cases architecture fans (Haugdal). Changes in genre and space have influenced the exhibition strategies and aesthetical choices when authors and their authorships are put on display, be it in their homes themselves, in refunctioned outhouses, in added exhibition annexes, or on marked pathways and itineraries.

How Did the Author Museum Come into Being? To be able to say something about the extension and expansion of author museums, it is first necessary, however, to look at them from a historical perspective, taking into account their geographical spread and variation throughout the world. While most work in English-language research on literary tourism and author museums has been by literary scholars, the perspective has been strongly historical, tracing the origins of the writer’s home museum back to the Early Modern period in Italy and France (Hendrix 2008a, 2009) and literary pilgrimage practices through the Romantic period and onwards (Watson 2006, 2009b). These pioneering works placed the author’s home museum in a continuity beginning with the authors’ attitudes to their own homes as places worth exhibiting, followed by the subsequent life of these homes as museums, and culminating in the

Introduction7

practices of literary tourists as visitors or of museums as negotiators of cultural memory and identity. This focus on different stages of the musealization process – production, institutionalization, reception – where authors’ homes are concerned, is a product not only of the approach through literary tourism (Watson 2006, 2009b; Booth 2016), but also of perspectives from performance and memory studies, as indicated in the title of the introduction of one of the very few previous English-language edited volumes with a focus on literary museums, ‘Writers’ Houses as Media of Expression and Remembrance: From Self-Fashioning to Cultural Memory’ (Hendrix 2008d). Literary tourism existed before literary museums, with a focus on poets’ graves stretching back over two millennia (Watson 2006: 32). Hendrix (2008a) examines the first pilgrimages to the homes of Petrarch (1304–74) from the 1530s onwards, and their transformations into museums, and traces the spread of cultures of literary tourism from Italy to France and then to Britain (Hendrix 2009). These homes and others like them often developed from being places to visit (sometimes already in their authors’ lifetimes, and often unwished for – cf. North 2009; Roberts 2009: 204; Booth 2016: 13) into museums – often slowly, and maybe over decades. Watson (2006: 13–14; 2009a: 3; 2020: 8–9) and Hendrix (2009: 13) point to how in the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain, literary tourism was a product of the combined forces of a romantic resistance to the ‘massification’ of tourism and printed literature, the invention of book genres such as the ‘Homes and Haunts’ genre, the influence of a realist aesthetic on the desire to see the real and authentic, a boom in bourgeois memorial culture and cultural nationalism, and also specifically in the musealization of authors’ homes. Julian North (2009) points to how a new focus in literary biographies, on the inner lives of authors, also helped to create an interest in their homes. Nineteenth-century realism and memorial culture are both aspects of a shift to a modern and historicist view of time, setting the stage for a dialectic of, on the one hand, the privileged authenticity of past times and new practices of documentation and restoration, and on the other of myth-making and monumentalization, all principles of concern in research on author museums (Alexander 2008; Colaiacomo 2008; Thomas 2009). These concerns frame the expansion in the number of author museums; in Britain for example, authors’ home museums were being founded in ‘significant’ numbers from the 1890s onwards (Booth 2016: 13). Further work on the history and phenomenology of literary tourism, such as Watson’s previous monograph The Literary Tourist (2006) and her edited volume Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture (2009b),

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has provided a larger perspective in which to situate the author museum, including not only homes, but also graves, walks, parks and landscapes. It raises questions of differing desires – and disappointments – connected to different spaces: that is, the spaces of the author’s birth, life and death, of writing (the joining point of life and literature) and of fictional happenings that can be identified with actual landscapes (Watson 2006: 1–4, 123–24). These desires to see the actual living places of the author pose a particular challenge to literary scholars who have been trained by Russian Formalism, New Criticism and poststructuralism to deride historical-biographical interpretations of literature; but as Watson makes clear (ibid.: 6–8), places and homes can function as active paratexts to literary works, and visits to them can be seen as part of extended material practices of reading. Literary tourists can connect especially landscapes to the fictional settings that are identifiable with them (ibid.: 129–200). However, as Watson points out, it is uncommon for authors’ home museums to privilege a fictional world at the expense of their function as authors’ living places (ibid.: 202–7); notably, her two counterexamples are home museums dedicated to children’s writers: Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) and Lucy Boston (1892–1990). Watson and others have also shown how literary tourism and authors’ homes have been understood in relation to an extensive corpus of written texts such as place-related poetry, guidebooks, travelogues, picture books, literary geographies and plaques (Watson 2006; Booth 2016; Hendrix 2020). Authors’ homes can be seen as part of literary reception (Watson 2009a: 5) and adaptation (ibid.: 6).

What Counts as an Author Museum? There is also extensive research on the history of literary museums and author museums in German, with a particular focus on museums in German-speaking countries. Questions addressed in this corpus include the role of such museums as places of memory and remembrance (e.g. Borsdorf and Grütter 1999), the history of personality museums in Germany (Bohnenkamp et al. 2015), the history of literary exhibitions (Seibert 2011, 2015), and the future of literary museums and exhibitions (Kussin 2001). Research on literary tourism as a cultural and historical phenomenon plays a minor role compared to its prominence in English-language research. Watson (2020: 7) makes a distinction between the writer’s house museum and the author’s house museum, reminding us that part of research has focused on the musealized homes of writers who might not always be considered to be literary writers (an example would be Charles Darwin,

Introduction9

1809–1882). Whereas there are close connections between these types of museums, which deserve to be explored further, we focus on the writer of literary work in this volume. Fiction and poetry open themselves to differences in reading experiences and venues of imagination to a greater extent than do scholarly or scientific work. Our choice of the common denomination ‘author museum’ in the present volume is made so as to include the wide variation we see in the genre today, with also general literary museums, author centres and even literary theme parks in some sense being open to interpretation as ‘author museums’. At the same time, the term ‘author museum’ also retains a focus on authors and authorships, and on the original tradition of authors’ home museums or musealized authors’ homes, which is undergoing multiple transformations. Particularly in German-language research, the question of the genre and genre denomination has been central. What kind of museum may be defined as a literary museum (Barthel 1996)? In which museal category do literary museums belong (e.g. Didier 1991)? What characterizes authors’ home museums? German literature scholar Christiane Holm (2013: 570) sees the author’s home museum (often called Gedenkstätte, ‘memorial site’, in German, thereby emphasizing its commemoration aspect, but sometimes also Personalmuseum, similar to English ‘personality museum’) as a subcategory of the literary museum. Cultural studies scholar Anna Rebecca Hoffmann (2018: 36) differentiates between two ideal types in the German-speaking museum landscape: the literary memorial site (literarische Gedenkstätte) and the literary museum (literarisches Museum). Whereas the former focuses on the author, on authenticity, place and emotion, and manages a collection specialized on the author and their work, the latter may be dedicated to one or several writers (connected to a locale, theme, school, period, nation or language, for example), does not depend on the idea of an authentic home, has an extensive and more general collection, and presents a place of rationality (Ort der ratio), with a focus on an academic approach. The focus in our volume is on the former, the ‘literary memorial site’, but, as Hoffmann points out (2018: 36), it is vital to remember that these two museum types are often mixed. In emphasizing the difficulty of a clear differentiation between these types, Hoffmann follows a tendency in the German-language research – not so present in research in English – to discuss literary exhibitions in various cultural institutions and in authors’ home museums as part of the same context. This may be a result of exhibition strategies that feature prominently in author museums in German-speaking countries, where informative exhibitions and reconstructions of the home are often combined, sometimes even in the same room. By contrast, in many British

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and Scandinavian author museums, there is a more clear-cut distinction between the reconstructed living place and an informative exhibition on the author’s life and literature, with the latter often placed in an annex or a special room.

What Are the Spaces that Make Up Author Museums? Looking at the author museum landscape in Norway, a third ideal category, the ‘literary centre’ or more commonly the ‘author centre’ (forfattersenter), emerges. Examples include Hamsunsenteret (Knut Hamsun, 1859–1952) on Hamarøy, Garborgsenteret (Arne and Hulda Garborg, 1851–1924 and 1862–1934) in Bryne, and Olav H. Hauge-senteret (Olav H. Hauge, 1908–1994) in Ulvik (see Egeland 2020; Hoel 2020; Aarbakke 2020). These often have a strong didactic focus and are not necessarily linked to an ‘authentic’ place or collection. Often these centres, along with other new or expanded author museums in Norway, feature striking architecture, as discussed by architectural historian Elin Haugdal in her contribution to this volume. Her focus on the outer space of the building rather than on its exhibitions helps us to approach author museums from a further angle: here the architect and not the curator becomes a vital interpreter of the author and her work, adding new layers to the question of which genre an author museum may belong to. This tendency to create new, signal architecture for author museums is also widespread in Japan: examples include the Mori Ōgai 森 鴎外 (1862–1922) memorial museums in Tokyo and Tsuwano, the Natsume Sōseki 夏目 漱石 (1867–1916) memorial museum in Tokyo, and the Seichō Matsumoto 松本 清張 (1909–1992) memorial museum in Kitakyushu.1 We may ask whether these buildings – sometimes built as replacements of missing homes, as annexes to existing homes or, in some of the Japanese examples, encasing reconstructed homes or rooms – change our perception of what an author’s home museum is. Are authentic spaces necessary so as to define a place as an author home? Or can we imagine such a place through contemporary architectural language? Certainly, the past two centuries of author museum history have shown that both outer and inner aesthetic spaces form the visitor’s view of the author and their literature. Different times privilege different exhibition and architecture aesthetics. In her chapter, art historian and curator Eva-Maria Orosz discusses how the aesthetic transformation of an author home can lead to new interpretations of the functions an author home might have. Her case study is the home of the nineteenth-century Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872), which in partly

Introduction11

deconstructed form has been exhibited since the 1880s as part of the main permanent exhibition of the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien (Historical museum of the city of Vienna – today, the Wien Museum). Politics, changing literary canons and visitor expectations have helped to shape the more than century-long succession of displays, which – placed among other museum displays and objects – today are often perceived more as historical interiors showing the aesthetic of the Biedermeier Period (1814/15–1848) and of the subsequent two decades, rather than as a memorial to the author. The Wien Museum is currently developing a new permanent exhibition on the history of the city of Vienna (to be opened in 2023). Considering Grillparzer’s diminished relevance for the literary canon and public reception today, what place will the apartment find in the new designs, new history narratives and new literary canon of the twenty-first-century? How might or should, as Orosz asks, a modern contextualization and critical treatment of Grillparzer’s legacy look? As these examples show, the question of which genre the author’s home museum belongs to may have to be extended and be asked anew. German literature scholar Anna Bers (2017: 213) has offered a refreshing perspective to this question. She suggests that rather than starting with their role as museum genre or subgenre, it might be more useful to take the display in these museums as the defining point of departure. If the author is placed at the centre of the exhibition, it may be called a memorial author house museum, or if literature is the focus, then it could be called a literary museum. Alternatively, an emphasis on the house as a historic representation may turn it into a folk museum, or one on its history into a history museum. If the meaning of the author and their literature for the nation is central, it might be defined as a national museum. Bers’s approach opens for a more playful way of dealing with preconceived ideas and expectations of what an author museum consists of and represents, and challenges the often seemingly seamless connection between author, home and literature. The varying functions of author museums come to the fore when their spaces are combined with other institutions – municipal and national museums, houses of literature, libraries and archives. Some author centres and museums – such as the Garborgsenteret in Bryne in south-west Norway, and the Franz Michael Felder Museum Schoppernau (Franz Michael Felder, 1839–1869) in Vorarlberg, Austria – share buildings with public libraries. The permanent Daniel Owen (1836–1895) exhibition in Mold in Wales is an integrated part of the town museum, which in turn shares its building with the town library and art gallery. We have just mentioned the Grillparzer interiors in the Wien Museum, and below we address the

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insertion of a duplicate of the personal archive of Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf (1907–1968) in his reconstructed room in Sigtuna. Such concatenations are intended to create connections and synergies, and will affect our understanding of the author museum genre. Another form of extension of the genre author museum we discuss in this volume is the literature museum, more specifically the Petőfi Literary Museum in Budapest, Hungary (see also Gfrereis et al. 2020 on working with the Museum of Modern Literature and the Schiller National Museum in Marbach, Germany). The Petőfi Literary Museum is the national literature museum of Hungary. It is an author museum in the sense that it has all Hungarian authors as its theme, but also an author museum in the sense that it is named after the Hungarian national poet Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849) and contains a fixed exhibition about him. Museologist Anna Benedek’s case study in this volume comprises several projects that she and her colleagues developed at the Media Archives of Petőfi Literary Museum, where they tried to build ‘virtual homes’ for literature together with the museum’s young visitors by extending the space of the museum not only through the use of videos and oral recordings, but also literary tours through the city. The active reinterpretation of the passedaway authors and of the places of their literature within today’s digitalized world might make the author museum just one of many memory spaces, questioning its long-standing ascription as the main portal to the writer’s life and work. It moreover shows the need to address new visitor groups if we wish literature to remain relevant.

How Do Author Museums Relate the Tangible to the Intangible? There are numerous ways to exhibit the author and their works, depending on historical, cultural and political circumstances. Several chapters in the present book focus primarily on the multidimensionality of authors’ home museums – in particular the relationships between authors and literary works, and between the tangible and the intangible – and how this multidimensionality can be addressed from various perspectives and with innovative exhibition strategies. The chapters we have already mentioned show how author museums are formed by spatial requirements such as architecture and place, with the extension of the boundaries of museum spaces affecting the way in which museum genres function and create interpretations. Benedek’s chapter points also to how physical space is constantly transgressed by imagined spaces and the combination of different mediums. She shows that one way of thinking about the multidimensionality of author museums can be their use of new media, integrating

Introduction13

new, virtual spaces for the museums to communicate with their visitors. Museums, like any form of space (Tuan 1977; de Certeau 1984; Soja 1989; Lefebvre 1991; Simmel 1997; Massey 2005), are much more than their physical location and form. The most obvious transgression of physical space in author museums is that literature in itself creates imaginative spaces, opening new venues not restricted by daily routine. New methods may be needed to analyse the multidimensional aspects of author museums. Inspired by a German-language research tradition for semiotic analysis of museums in general (Scholze 2004) and narratological analysis of literary museums in particular (Hoffmann 2018), Schimanski and Spring (2020) have developed a model for the literary museum’s ‘double act of communication’. Literary and author museums are (1) acts of communication (in Roman Jakobson’s sense, 1960) from museum practitioners/owners to visitors about (2) acts of communication from authors to readers. This model sheds light on the many paradoxes and questions that author museums raise: why so much focus on the author and so little on their works, which is the reason we are at all interested in them? How can one make a home represent a lifetime, with the writer only present as a kind of ghost (Watson 2020; see Spring and Schimanski, this volume)? Could one imagine alternative focuses for literary museums, such as museums about readers, or about literary theory? Analyses using the double communication act model can show how new museum genres can make people other than the author – such as readers, visitors, reader-visitors, curators, designers, sponsors – visible in author museums and other forms of literary museum. Author museums attempt to convey now intangible lives and practices of human subjects not only through material and tangible objects – as do cultural history museums in general – but through their focus on human subjects whose occupations so emphatically turn around the public expression of private, inner lives and emotions in the material form of literature. This potential for imagination extends also to the author, as historian Ulrike Spring and literary scholar Johan Schimanski show in their discussion in the present volume of both Selma Lagerlöf ’s home Mårbacka (Selma Lagerlöf, 1858–1940) in Sweden and the ghost stories in her writings. The author’s ghost is present here, and her texts influence how her house may be understood. Could a focus on the spectral and its transcendental nature also be a way of counteracting the tendency to make the museum into a monument or memorial to the author? One of the central challenges for author museums has been to find the balance between a focus in the exhibition on the author on one side, and their work on the other. Should biography be central, or the literary work

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itself, or its reception? Throughout the past two centuries, author museums have approached this with different degrees of emphasis and awareness, with earlier museums tending to focus on the author, and more recent ones tending to explore the potential of exhibiting literature. The latter process has been helped by the advance of new media forms, which have opened new ways of conceptualizing and concretizing imagination. Both the ethnographer and previous director of the August Strindberg (1849–1923) museum in Stockholm, Stefan Bohman (2010), and the Danish literary sociologist Niels D. Lund (2016: 107–8), have focused on the balance between the mediatization of biography and literature in author museums, with Lund also discussing the use of digital media in the museum. The question of location raised in discussion of the spaces in author museums also has consequences for the (re)presentation of the author. It is possible that literary museums and exhibitions that are not located in an author’s previous home focus more on literary works than on author biography, and tend to be more playful and artistic in their displays and less bound to traditional ways of staging the author – though there is plenty of room for creative strategies in already established authors’ home museums, as many examples show. However, we must also take into account the author’s home as a project of the author, who may have both chosen its location and integrated it into their literary vision. This added dimension is the second of the two central staging strategies in author museums that Hendrix in his edited volume (2008c) characterizes as ‘Cultural Memory’ and ‘Self-Fashioning’. As already indicated by Watson in her book on Literary Tourism, Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford (Sir Walter Scott, 1771–1823) is an example of self-fashioning, not only being the ‘first house in Britain to have been shown as the site of the writer’s work’, but also the first ‘consciously designed by a writer to display’ their status and writing, and ‘to be visited by admirers from the outset’ (Watson 2006: 91). Hendrix and his co-contributors point to Abbotsford and many other examples – including the houses of Horace Walpole (1717– 1797), Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863– 1938), the Goncourt brothers (1822–1896 and 1830–1870), William Morris (1834–1896), Mario Praz (1896–1982), and Pierre Loti (1850– 1923) – in which authors have staged their personalities, memories, writing practices and aesthetics, often along with their literary imaginations (Hendrix 2008d; Rigney 2008; Colaiacomo 2008; Fortunati 2008; see also Hendrix 2008b, 2010). In the present volume, Spring and Schimanski examine one such self-fashioning project, Selma Lagerlöf ’s home Mårbacka. Also Gunnar Ekelöf ’s museum room, discussed by literary scholar

Introduction15

Helena Bodin, may be included here, although only conditionally, as the initiative came from his widow. Scholars have also examined the musealized homes of authors such as Mario Praz, W.H. Auden (1907–1973) and Lucy Boston, who have written literary works about or set in these homes, focusing on objects, rooms and fictional plots (Watson 2006: 204–7; Colaiacomo 2008; Neundlinger 2018a). Erin Hazard (2009) has shown how American authors who visited Scott’s Abbotsford were inspired to build homes that reflected their writings in the United States, and thus reveals part of the global circulation of the concept of the author museum. Houses like these can be (and were) seen as literary creations in their own right, or at least textual supplements to the author’s works (Watson 2006). Booth suggests that not only authors use their homes as stages for self-fashioning, but also visitors, who may for example wish to take writers as their models (Booth 2016: 17). The focus on authors’ homes as stages for self-fashioning (and even as tourist attractions) before their eventual musealization suggests an overlap between the study of author museums and the study of authors’ homes (Kennedy and Lee 2020). Hendrix (2008d: 4–6) suggests that the author’s house can be a tool for writing, not only by providing a space for writing and helping to form that writing, but also as a mnemonic device. The house becomes a depository of private memories to be turned into public expression and then later into museums (ibid.: 4–5). For Watson in her monograph on The Author’s Effects (2020), the effects she finds in writers’ house museums – be they bodily remains, pet animals, clothing, furniture or other household items – delineate a transition from private life to public fame, a transition always in a sense marked out by the death of the author as establishing their literary afterlife (ibid.: 22). Authors’ home museums then struggle with the paradox that in this afterlife, the actual author and their living body have gone missing. One way of overcoming this gap is by connecting objects to writing: this is the garment they wore, the chair they sat on, the desk they wrote on, the pen or typewriter they wrote with, the teapot they used, and the cat they were disturbed by while writing (e.g. ibid.: 91, 95, 101). The scene of writing itself is the bridge from private experience and literary imagination to public expression (ibid.: 101–2), often also before the actual death of the author and the musealization of their home. Elizabeth Emery (2012) has traced the connections between the musealization of authors’ homes in France and journalistic photographs of these homes, including staged portraits of authors in their homes. Watson’s monograph continues a previous focus on authors’ home museums as places in which to imagine past and imaginary persons (Atkin

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2009; Booth 2016: 11), but places the focus more concretely on the way in which writers’ house museums use belongings and objects in order to conjure forth ‘a figure of the author’ (Watson 2020: 4) and create an imaginary or atmospheric space in the domestic in which visitors are co-located with the author’s body (ibid.: 14–15), similar to what Polly Atkin calls ‘co-presencing’ (2009). In these spaces, visitors can ‘stage scenes of reading, which disavow the medium of the book, erasing it in favour of a fantasy of immediate intimacy with the author’ (Watson 2020: 21). In a book chapter with the title ‘Virginia Woolf ’s Glasses: Material Encounters in the Literary/Artistic House Museum’, Nuala Hancock (2010) has investigated the former residence of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) in Charleston. She encounters Woolf ’s spectacles in a storage room, and speculates on its object biography, the glasses’ relation to Woolf and, metaphorically, how Woolf saw the world through these very glasses. Woolf ’s spectacles ‘offer us something tangible of her material existence’, she argues (ibid.: 119).

How Can Author Museums Exhibit Literature? One of the central paradoxes of literary museums is that their subject, literature, is eminently intangible – though even books always have a material dimension and are involved in material practices. One of the major topics in German-language research literature since the 1980s has been the question of whether it is at all possible to exhibit literature (e.g. Barthel 1990, 1996; Hügel 1991; Lange-Greve 1995; Gfrereis 2007; Käuser 2009; see also Vanessa Zeissig, this volume). Does the immaterial character of literature, as something happening in our heads and in our imagination, make literary exhibitions futile or even impossible? Most prominent in initiating this discussion was Wolfgang Barthel, who proposed his thesis of the impossibility of exhibiting literature (Unausstellbarkeit von Literatur) in the mid-1980s (Barthel 1984, 1990). Three decades later, art historian Britta Hochkirchen and cultural pedagogue Elke Kollar (Hochkirchen and Kollar 2015: 7) note a change in this debate, and see a move towards a perspective where the question of whether one can exhibit literature or not, is replaced by the question of what the term ‘literature’ entails. Depending on its definition, curators may choose different strategies: for example, if literature is defined as something happening in our heads and hence cannot be visualized or displayed, then the focus in literary exhibitions will be on the author as its creator. Extending their reflections, we would also like to add the role of the reader; after all, literature could also be claimed to be something that happens in readers’ heads.

Introduction17

The alternative to author or reader is to accept that only substitutes of literature may be exhibited, such as authors’ biographies or literary texts. Literary researchers Lis Hansen, Janneke Schoene and Levke Teßmann (2017) approach this topic from the perspective of the material/immaterial opposition: if literature is immaterial, they ask, how can it be exhibited in a setting that is as material as an exhibition? They conclude that it may not be constructive to differentiate between these two, and rather that it is a question of being aware of whether one wishes to focus on either the material or the immaterial aspects of literature, and how this will impact exhibition and communication strategies. Hochkirchen and Kollar (2015: 12) point out that a focus on the materiality of literature rather than on its semantics opens up a wide variety of possible ways of communicating literature. Hoffmann (2018: 45) suggests exhibiting ‘literary communication’ (literarische Kommunikation) – that is to say, quotes, autographs, information about the work’s reception, how works came about and what stages they were written in. One possible way to materialize literature is thus to focus on the writing process and its circumstances, on the study and the desk, and their function as places of literary production (Jens 2013; Kastberger and Maurer 2017; Krajewski 2018), an argument also made within the English-language tradition by Watson, as we have seen already. A material semantics approach (Materialsemantik) may help to exhibit the physically accessible parts of literature such as the handwriting or typescript, the ink or the writing machine, or the very materiality of the book (Böhmer 2015). Another approach entails asking how the various objects may generate aura, and what ‘aura’ means for understanding the medialization of literature (Kroucheva and Schaff 2013). In addition, in their introduction, Hochkirchen and Kollar call attention to the literary tradition in which the curator positions her- or himself and how this also has an impact on the exhibition. If one prefers a hermeneutical approach to literature, one will consider the author as essential for understanding literary work, and hence their biography becomes important: exhibiting the author’s desk may help us to understand their work. In the tradition of reception aesthetics or poststructuralism on the other hand, the author’s role is less important, and the focus may shift to their work and away from biography (Hochkirchen and Kollar 2015: 12–13). Hendrix (2008d: 2–3) suggests that the house in particular is a solution to this paradox, as it can be made to stage both literature and the literary imagination. Approaching author museums from the perspectives of the material turn and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has shown that objects and exhibition strategies can challenge uniform narratives by creating links to

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the world outside the museum (Aarbakke 2019, 2020). ANT offers a perspective that gives insight to how the world of things – such as design and objects – shape how we interpret the stories being told in the exhibition rooms about authors and their literature. In museologist Thea Aarbakke’s contribution to this volume, the focus is on the materiality of books, and specifically on how they are perceived through various displays and how they transgress the physical boundaries of the museum. Her starting point is the book collection formerly owned by Norwegian writer and Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset (1882–1949), today on display in the author’s home museum Bjerkebæk. Although the books are closed off from visitors in glass cases, the museum has made them accessible through a public database that visitors and others with interest can scroll through. Personal belongings hence are transformed into sources for research, and dislocated from their place of belonging. As Aarbakke argues, this also transforms the author museum into a private archive or a library, opening up to new potential functions for the author’s home museum. She thus examines how different media may influence the way in which relations between the author and her book collections are communicated to the museum’s physical and online visitors. Author museums can house authors’ book collections, but also collections of their papers. In recent years, new actors entering the academic field in German-speaking countries, such as literary scholars working in and with literary archives, have examined the role literary archival institutions and archives have for the imagination and representation of the author and their work. In 2017, Petra Maria Dallinger and Klaus Kastberger launched a book series focusing on the intersection of literature and archive. In particular, its first and third volumes (Kastberger and Maurer 2017; Kastberger et al. 2019) discuss the role of literary archives in the context of exhibitions and as providing a stage for literature. Literary archives may also be responsible for author museums and for curating their exhibitions, as is the case at the W.H. Auden house in Lower Austria (Neundlinger 2018b). The role of author museums as archives is the main focus in Helena Bodin’s case study of the estate of the Swedish modernist poet Gunnar Ekelöf, in the present volume. In the Gunnar Ekelöf room in Sigtuna, Ekelöf ’s widow created a duplicate archive which was to become a major point of entrance to her husband’s life and work. In her contribution to the present volume, scenographer Vanessa Zeissig reflects on various ways of how (not) to exhibit literature, blending theoretical and practice-based concerns in an appeal to think differently about literary exhibitions. Taking a workshop that she had organized with author museum scholars and museum professionals as her starting point,

Introduction19

she asks us to take a step back and not to start with the question of the aesthetic or how to materialize biography and literature in exhibition space, but instead to ask why we choose a particular space for exhibiting literature? Returning to questions of space and genre, Zeissig argues for a perspective that allows each exhibition to have its own flow and not be bound by ‘universal’ exhibition rules. By starting with the ‘space’ of the exhibition rather than with the author’s biography or works, one can develop a deeper understanding of how each particular writer created art, and how the curator imagines this process of creation. Such an approach might also help us to question established literary canons and preconceived ideas about an author’s life and work. As several contributors in this volume show, the location of writing might in fact be a central question also for author museums, as it forces us to reconsider why certain geographical localities are said to represent the author to a greater degree than others (see e.g. Narve Fulsås’s contribution to the volume).

Politics In Part II of the volume, the role of author museums as contested political and politicized cultural institutions is central. Author museums can be formed by national cultural policy and have also been important to local politicians in their work on regional identity-building. Museums can be part of the political establishment and may be used to achieve certain political goals, but they also have the potential to resist and to create their own narratives – see the contributions by sinologist Emily Graf and historian and heritage scholar Anastasia Felcher on the Chinese and Soviet contexts, respectively. Some authors may be more suitable as the subjects of author museums, depending on the political and cultural climate. As political environments change, some author museums strive to reinterpret the past and find new ways of communicating across former social and political divisions (see the contribution by Dana Ryan Lande on South African author museums), and museums are dedicated to previously marginalized authors. Author museums may also ignore or downplay political issues (as Marianne Egeland shows in her contribution on Norwegian author museums). In the end, it all boils down to which authors are musealized and, as historian Narve Fulsås points out in his contribution on how various museums of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) came to be established, how authors should be remembered, where they should be remembered, and to whom they are important.

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Who Gets an Author Museum? Asking about the changing roles of the relations between author and work in author museums, leads on to what is basically a political question underlying our discussion of the transformative potential of these museums: who gets a museum? After all, despite the active flux of author museums worldwide, most writers will never be chosen to have a museal afterlife, and we have already mentioned the patriarchal tendency to let white male authors writing in canonical modes dominate the author museum landscape. Scholars define various reasons that help to turn an author’s life into a museal exhibition; we have previously mentioned self-fashioning and the role of the author’s descendants, when an author or their family take the initiative to create a museum or even to manage their own homes as museum-like spaces (Hendrix 2008d; see also Bodin, this volume). Literary scholar and sociologist Karyn Wilson-Costa (2009) discerns several motivations that help to transform a place into a literary place, and legitimize the opening of such a museum: the author should preferably (1) have lived in that area, and (2) have made the place, the surroundings or the local people part of the literary work. It also helps if (3) other authors or literary fans have started visiting this place (and have written about it, for example as travel memoirs), and (4) the place is marketed as the author’s home in tourist brochures or travel guides (ibid.). In addition, it is primarily authors who are already part of a regional and preferably national and international canon, and who are considered important for local, regional or national cultural politics (and more recently, place-branding), who are assigned an author museum (see e.g. Olsen and Spring 2020). Until recently, another factor affecting who got a museum and who did not, was class and prosperity: one needed to have owned a house in order to get a house museum. Today, as Elin Haugdal reminds us in her chapter, author museums can also be placed outside the former homes of authors, in new buildings designed by ‘starchitects’, or within larger, national literature museums or historical museums. This development points to a process of democratizing the definition of ‘house’, ‘home’ and ‘museum’, and has opened up new possibilities for lesser-established authors to be musealized. In addition to geopolitical, cultural and class imbalances in the selection of author museums, also gender and sexual identities can exclude authors from musealization. The focus of representational critique on marginalized groups in museums such as women and indigenous people has led to research on the representation – or, rather, non-representation – of gender in museums, such as the LHBTQ+ movement, and has been

Introduction21

inspired by masculinity theory, feminist theory and gender studies (see, for example, Levin 2010; Brenna and Hauan 2018; Grahn and Wilson 2018; Adair and Levin 2020). In his chapter ‘House Museums or Walk in Closets? The (Non)Representation of Gay Men in the Museums They Called Home’ (Adair 2010), Adair discusses the ‘straightening’ of biographical records in conventional House Museums, such as in the writer Jesse Shepard’s (1848–1927) former home in San Diego. He argues for a more honest presentation of the past, in which people who do not fit into the heteronormative category can be represented in a respectful way. Watson suggests that more monumental forms of staged writing are more likely in the homes of male rather than female authors (Watson 2006: 107; see Spring and Schimanski, this volume, for an exception), and she is highly aware of the gendered connotation of ‘home’ and ‘domesticity’ (ibid.: 108–10). The house museums of women writers are, however, no less susceptible to being restaged in accordance with expectations stemming from their fiction (ibid.: 110–11; Alexander 2008). The present volume addresses these demands by including research on museums dedicated to female authors and authors from outside the ‘West’ or Global North, such as the Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) in South Africa (Lande), and Mo Yan 莫言 (b. 1955), Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936), Lai He 賴和 (1894–1943) and Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–1976) from the People’s Republic of China (Graf ). Two chapters in the first part of the book discuss multidimensionality in museums dedicated to the Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf in Sweden (Spring and Schimanski) and Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset in Norway (Aarbakke); although queer perspectives are not central in either, both cases might have a potential for such an approach, given the increased attention given to the close relationships these two authors had with other women (Palm 2019; Myrvang 2020). A further contribution on the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf (Bodin) brings the author’s wife into the story, pointing to a democratizing tendency in personality museums to focus also on partners, other family members and servants. As Bodin shows, the author’s widow Ingrid Ekelöf (1911–2005) copied his manuscripts meticulously and created a ‘Home Archive’ that was a duplicate of the official archive of her deceased husband. It is this archive that researchers can use today in his musealized room in Swedish Sigtuna. The room dedicated to Gunnar thus becomes also a room belonging to Ingrid. As Bodin asks, ‘[w]hat if the room devoted to Gunnar Ekelöf ’s memory might also be regarded as a memorial site for the mediating work of his widow?’ Her example shows that an author museum can include many more voices and actors than just the author himself. Its borders are porous, and, in

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this case, family members actively use, shape and change the space of the museum. Bodin here addresses an issue that runs through the museum narratives of (mostly male) author homes: they are often represented as the genius loci of the author’s inspiration and work, but they tend to neglect the role that family and servants played in bringing this place about. The question of the presence of the author in their homes discussed earlier becomes a question of plural presences in their homes, leading to a decentring of the author and an opening for an approach based on collective biographies. As literary scholar Marianne Egeland shows in her chapter on the Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910) home museum at Aulestad, this onesided focus on the (male) writer may reinforce a gendered perspective of nation, house, writer and work. The inclusion of other inhabitants is part of a wider tendency to democratization in the author’s home museum. As all chapters show, these museums are ‘in process’, rather than stable institutions.

What Identities Do Author Museums Build? Research has underlined the way in which author museums have staged authors and localities as representative of spirits of place, region, nation and even empire (Watson 2006; Zemgulys 2008; Rigney 2008: 86; Hendrix 2008d: 6–7; Booth 2016: 4). The nation-building function of author museums is one that has also been emphasized in other national contexts, such as the Swedish, where Bohman has examined the close relationships between personality house museums (including many author museums), celebrity culture, canonicity and the reinforcement of national identity (Bohman 2010). A recent research project carried out by literary museum practitioners in Norway has resulted in a collection of essays focusing on ‘memory politics’ (Grepstad 2018), closely related to nation-building. Both Bohman and, in Norway, Marianne Egeland have addressed the problem of authors and other personalities disturbing constructed national idylls in museums by their involvement in problematic activities (Bohman 2010: 128–49: Egeland 2018a, 2018b, 2020). As mentioned earlier, writers have mostly been given museums on the basis of their literary status as canonized writers, closely linked to their roles in nation-building and international sacralization. Even within a more democratic era, there is still a tendency for authors who for various reasons cannot be associated with national identities, particular places or canons – for example, women, migrants, travel writers, writers of popular fiction, science fiction and fantasy writers – not to be musealized.

Introduction23

The growing number of museums celebrating lesser-known authors on the national stage – authors who are associated with local/regional rather than national identities – has changed the picture somewhat. Developments in the author and literature museum genres, with the rise of general literature museums and temporary literary exhibitions, have led to new opportunities to exhibit marginalized authors. The research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums (TRAUM 2016) – out of which this book has come – has particularly focused on two types of author museums on the fringes of the major national narratives, not included in this volume: those about authors who write in lesser-used languages such as the Nynorsk written norm in Norwegian (Aarbakke 2020; Hoel 2020), and ‘transnational’ author museums located in a country not directly identified with the authors concerned, such as the August Strindberg and W.H. Auden museums in Austria. Author museums within dominant, national traditions may actively focus on transnational or local elements in their exhibitions, where such elements have previously often been undercommunicated. Author museums can be actively used to support new and more inclusive national narratives, such as in the Olive Schreiner Museum in South Africa (see Lande, this volume). However, national canonization, combined with the need for positive branding, can cause author museums to undercommunicate controversial aspects of canonized writers and their museums (for the latter see Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Aulestad; see Egeland, this volume). In such cases, author museums can become arenas for the negotiation of biographical and historical narratives. Author museums may function both as spaces of resistance and as spaces of reinforcing state ideology. Anastasia Felcher reminds us in her chapter on author museums in the Soviet Union between 1940 and 1979 of the central role culture plays in politics. One reason for the rapid spread of author museums after 1944 in the Soviet Union was the official policy to integrate newly acquired territories into Soviet life through culture. Writers’ biographies were rewritten as a result. As Felcher shows, this process of politicizing culture in general and literature specifically had profound consequences for the definition of the various regional literary canons, as the regional museums were forced to negotiate between necessary adaptation to state ideology and resistance. Emily Graf, in her chapter on contemporary author museums on mainland China and in Taiwan, focuses on their potential as a destabilizing force. As in Felcher’s study, the notion of literary canon is central: who defines and decides the canon and what consequences does this have for literary exhibition strategies? Graf ’s examples, taken from exhibitions in author museums and

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in museums of literature, show how slight changes in design and choice of artefact may open up new narratives and interpretations of the author and their literature. At the same time, both Felcher and Graf demonstrate how powerful national and other narratives are by either confirming or contesting the dominant interpretations of the author and their work. The author museums in various republics or regions of the Soviet Union and its successor states, or in China/Taiwan, may create counterspaces to state or literary establishment ideologies, but they themselves may also create narratives that serve specific cultural-political goals. This continuous process of confirming and contesting hegemonial narratives is the topic in literary scholar Dana Ryan Lande’s chapter on the South African Olive Schreiner museum. After the end of apartheid, South Africa had to rethink existing definitions of culture and find new ones, and many heritage sites today aim at inclusive and reparative strategies. Lande’s analysis of the textual display at the museum of the feminist writer Olive Schreiner shows that the relevance and meaning of writers is continuously being negotiated, depending on political and cultural needs. How might a pre-apartheid author coming from a missionary family be integrated in post-apartheid narratives of community-building and new South African literary identity? Lande’s study demonstrates that not only the author’s literary heritage needs to be reinterpreted, also the representative space she occupied, where she worked and lived.

How Can Author Museums Deal with Controversy? In Lande’s research, the reinterpretation of the past with the aim of creating a liveable and inclusive future is central, but her case study also points to the process of collectively disremembering painful pasts by laying them to rest in books, museums and other archives of culture, and by constructing conciliatory narratives. In her chapter, Egeland focuses on such a process of disremembering, but in the very different cultural and political context of Norway. The writer and Nobel Prize laureate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s home Aulestad is one of Norway’s oldest house museums (opened in 1935) and has an important place in national memory, even if Bjørnson no longer attracts the attention of readers to such an extent. Egeland discerns ‘a distinctive Aulestad discourse’ produced and formed by the museum throughout the years, which has reinforced the national relevance of Bjørnson and his home. Possibly because of this close connection between nation and writer, the museum has mostly disremembered Aulestad’s darker legacy as a place of Nazi activities after Bjørnson’s death, initiated by his son Erling.

Introduction25

The larger question that Egeland’s chapter raises is how heritage institutions such as author museums might deal with difficult pasts and legacies. Does a biographical museum include stories of the house and its occupants, even though these go beyond the life and works of this one person? To what extent should author museums consciously activate processes of remembrance and disremembrance in their strategies, exhibition designs and outreach activities? The underlying question concerns which role author museums should take in today’s societies. As the chapters in Part II show, this is also a question of what pressures, demands and opportunities states provide. In his chapter, Narve Fulsås explores the delayed musealization of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). In contrast to admirers of his contemporary Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, and despite Ibsen being part of the established canon and being world-famous at his death, fans had to wait for half a century before Ibsen’s former homes were opened as museums. Fulsås’s analysis reveals the multiple reasons why an author may be slow in being assigned a museum space, ranging from unclear financing, class tensions, and country/city- and periphery/centre-divisions to the question of whom a writer belongs to: is it the world, the nation or the places where he was born or lived and worked? At the same time, his case study shows that there exist varying and possibly contradictory interpretations of what the national consists of, and that writers and their work may accordingly be integrated into one of those national spaces, but rejected from another. Museum buildings themselves also contribute to turning authors into regional or national icons. As Haugdal’s examples of recently constructed museum buildings in Norway show, the nineteenth-century idea of the museum as a temple of art and science, expressed through grand imposing buildings, is still present today. The difference is that whereas this earlier desire for grandeur only applied to national or other museums that were perceived as culturally and scientifically significant for the nation, today this also holds true for smaller museums, such as personality museums. As Haugdal’s examples illustrate, prominent architects have been building twenty-first-century temples to writers and their work. While this trend has to be seen as part of an effort to promote tourism, it is also an indication of the importance assigned to art in national contexts – and it reinforces the relations between authors, literature, place and nation. In many ways, the tendency to expand the canon of authors constituted through author museums to cover authors previously perceived as having less symbolic importance to the nation can be read as signalling a different conception of the nation. When theorist of nations Benedict

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Anderson (1991) posits the development of the modern nation-state as dependent on a homogeneous and horizontal conception, this conception is one that avoids the need for the national heroes of the kind represented by great authors. The success of the nation-state is precisely a product of a homogenization of everyday national identity across national space. Author museums may always retain a form of sacral aura as places a pilgrimage, but their often-regional location and expansion in numbers to include also non-canonical authors allows them to play the role of Anderson’s national ‘plurals’ (ibid.: 30), metonymies rather than symbolic metaphors of the imagined community, often assigned to authors – for example, Arne Garborg and Olav H. Hauge – who are only known and recognizable within a national context. Ulrike Spring is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oslo. While working on this book, she was also affiliated as Professor II to the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. She works on museum history, exhibition analysis, and nineteenth-century Arctic history, in particular on expeditions and tourism. She was the leader and co-coordinator (with Johan Schimanski) of the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums (2016–19) and leads the research group Collecting Norden (2021–22). She has co-edited a special issue of Nordisk museologi on ‘Communication Processes in Author Museums’ with Johan Schimanski (2020). Johan Schimanski is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on borders in literature, Arctic discourses, and literary exhibition practices. At present he leads a NOS-HS workshop on Temporalities and Subjectivities of Crossing. Recent co-edited volumes include Living Together (2019), co-edited with Knut Stene-Johansen and Christian Refsum, and Border Images, Border Narratives (2021), co-edited with Jopi Nyman. With Ulrike Spring, he was co-coordinator of the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums (2016–19), and they have co-edited a special issue of Nordic Museology on ‘Communication Processes in Author Museums’ (2020). Thea Aarbakke works at the Women’s Museum in Norway. She is Project Coordinator for ‘There She Goes Again’, a project about gender representations in Norwegian museums in relation to collections and exhibitions. While working on this book, she was affiliated to the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and the University of Oslo. Aarbakke holds a PhD in Museology, and was doctoral fellow in the research proj-

Introduction27

ect TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums (2016–19). In 2020 she defended her dissertation on contemporary author museums in Norway dedicated to Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun and Olav H. Hauge.

Note   1. We use the English-language convention of placing given names first and family names last in transliterated Japanese and Hungarian names – except the pseudonym Mori Ōgai, which is conventionally written with the family name first in English. We place family names first in Chinese names.

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Part I

Expansion

Chapter 1

New Architecture in Author Museums and Centres Elin Haugdal

In recent decades, many new and expensive buildings designed by renowned architects have been erected throughout Norway to celebrate literature and individual authorships. The buildings serve a wide range of functions, from interpretation and exhibition of an author’s life and work, much as in a traditional author’s home museum, to serving as visitor centres and as settings for public activities. But obviously, the architecture of these museums and centres has functions and significance far beyond protecting the author’s historical and personal belongings, and far beyond creating spaces for exhibitions and literary events. As architecture has a profound impact on our senses and body, and on our cognition and memory,1 these new buildings affect and may reinforce or even transform the visitor’s view of the author’s life and literary works. The architect, then, is taking on an important role in designing an architectural work through which the author and texts are transmitted in form and space. This chapter is a study of the architecture of four major author museums and author centres built in Norway since the millennium (see Figure 1.1): the Ivar Aasen Centre, the Petter Dass Museum, the Visitor Centre at Sigrid Undset’s museum Bjerkebæk, and the Hamsun Centre, with the latter as the main example. Additionally, the chapter also discusses the Garborg Centre and the Prøysen House, and briefly mentions the first new building for an author museum in Norway, the Aukrust Centre, built in the mid-1990s. Author museums have in recent years been analysed as part of museological studies as well as literary studies, both internationally and in the Norwegian context (Hendrix 2008; Selberg 2010; Aarbakke 2019; Watson 2020). The subject of these studies has primarily been the

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Figure 1.1. Recently built author museums in Norway: a. The Hamsun Centre in Hamarøy (2009); b. The Petter Dass Museum at Alstahaug (2007); c. The Ivar Aasen Centre in Ørsta (2000); d. The Aukrust Centre in Alvdal (1996); e. The Visitor Centre Bjerkebæk in Lillehammer (2007); f. The Garborg Centre in Bryne (2012); and g. The Prøysen House in Ringsaker (2014). Photographs a, c, d, e and g by Elin Haugdal, 2017. Photograph b by Ingebjørg Hage, Arkitekturguide for Nord-Norge og Svalbard, CC-BY-SA 4.0, 2010. Photograph f by Asle Haukland, Jærmuseet, 2012.

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b

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exhibition spaces and the curatorial intentions, be it in old buildings and author homes, or in the new author museum buildings. The intentions of the architecture have received less attention, even if the architectonic projects are unique, and even though, in some cases, ‘the architecture is the museum’ (Giebelhausen 2006). Studying the architecture of the author museum implies exploring the complex relations between architect and author, building and literature, place and public. This complexity is not to be considered in general, but has to be addressed in relation to specific author museums and centres because of the varied institutional functions and the particular authors they are dedicated to, as well as their unique architectonic design and situatedness in different landscapes. Each building is treated as a case, guided by a set of approaches. The first is to examine the idea and concept of the architect, accompanied by critical distance to the architect’s own rhetoric on their architectural work. The second is to explore how the architecture works, phenomenologically and semiotically, and how it may affect the visitors. Thirdly, based on the profound understanding of architecture as the ‘art of place’ (Norberg-Schulz 1995), it is important to investigate in each case how the building relates to its surroundings and responds to the site. The ambition to commemorate individual authors by erecting new buildings seems to be an incomparable phenomenon in an international context. In Norway these new museums and centres may be regarded as monuments in a national narrative. They have a broad geographical distribution, as part of decentralization policies and based on a desire to strengthen local activity and identity (Eriksson 2004: 13), and their architecture is adapted physically or symbolically to the different places and regions. Thus, I would claim that architecture plays a substantial role in relocating literary canon from chronology to place. The ‘centre’ concept is constituent of the process of reinventing the museum and breaking down its hierarchical position in relation to the public and society (Witcomb 2003; Casey 2003; Anderson 2004; Eriksson 2004; Høyum 2008). Some of the author centres are designed as humble backgrounds to the author’s home or belongings, to the literature and the exhibitions, emphasizing spatial and contextual qualities. Paradoxically, and as the boom of author museums coincided with a postmodern and figurative phase in architectural history in the 1980s and 1990s, other buildings give rise to the reverse process by presenting themselves as strong figures in the landscape and as outstanding monuments. An overall question in this chapter is how author museums and author centres act as monuments in contemporary culture.

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Architecture and Literature Most author museums are established in places that were once the author’s home or writing location. It is tempting to interpret those buildings in accordance with historical-biographical methods as places of origin of their literary works, interpretations boosted by phenomenological theories on the genius loci or the poetics of space.2 However, regarding new architecture in author museums, the situation is the opposite: it is tempting to see the literary works as the origin of the building, as a point of departure for the architect’s design. But both interpretations seem to have fallacies. The intention of most of the recently built museums seems to be to produce new narratives on deceased authors. The architects’ drawings and rhetoric confirm this objective. In those cases where architectural competitions have been arranged, we are even given the opportunity to compare the architects’ different visual and written interpretations of the authorship, and how they acknowledge architecture as a mediator of literature. The architect may intend to design a building as a ‘materialized’ work of literary fiction, closely related to the author’s literary universe. Or the architect may use the opportunity to create ‘an alternative or even a substitute’ (Hendrix 2008: 3) to the author’s life and work, which entwines in an autonomous or even confrontational way with the author’s factual and fictional universe. In any case, the architectural work may be conceived as an artificial construction that demands ‘reading’ and interpretation, parallel to that of the literary texts. The relationship between architecture and literature, as between building and language, is a complex one, and it is a dedicated field within architectural theory (Forty 2000; Sioli and Jung 2018: xix–xxi, 1–6). Scholars point to different kinds of analogies between architecture and literature. Some highlight syntactic analogies that consider the idea of the grammar and structure of the construction and the built space. Others are more concerned with semantic analogies, searching for metaphors and production of meaning in the building’s figures and details. Of interest is the historical idea, which peaked during postmodernism, to understand architecture as language or, more specifically, as text. Arguing against this position are those who claim architecture to be non-representational and likened more to music than to literature. All such analogies and approaches to architecture and literature are identifiable in texts written on the new architecture author museums, both in the architect’s own presentations and in scholarly reviews. The differences between architecture and literature are, however, larger than their analogies. The obvious distinction is that architecture is physi-

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cally bound to the situation, to the place. Unlike movable and reproducible media such as music, painting, film and literature, the architectural construction is ‘intertwined with the experience of place’, to quote Steven Holl, the architect of the Hamsun Centre (Holl [1989] 1997: 109). Architecture, literature and place meet and are entangled in the author museums, as well as in this chapter, in a productive process. The architecture becomes part of literary history. Through the building, the author is inscribed in architectural history.

Writing Architecture Architectural history has tended to emphasize the mental and creative work done prior to the building, the architect and their idea, architectus ingenio, according to architectural theorist Adrian Forty in his Words and Buildings. However, the words with which the experience of the architecture is articulated in speech or writing, and in everyday, academic or poetic language, are just as important as the architect’s initial idea (Forty 2000: 11–12). The language that explores the qualities of a building is not a supplement to the architecture, but a part of it. In relation to author museum architecture, Forty’s further concern is that the words used about architecture are always metaphorically relevant (including the modernist’s abstract concepts of space, form, structure and function), in addition to the overall argument that these metaphors direct the ways we think and talk about architecture (ibid.: 19–27, 63–85, 87). The words used to describe the buildings of author museums help to direct the ways in which we think and live with the author and their literary universe. My descriptions of the individual author museums on the following pages are thus attached to the buildings as figures of speech, as metaphors, and are therefore a contribution to the study of buildings as produced by architectus verborum, the architect of words. The descriptions are to be considered as acts of interpretation from one media to another. These descriptions are given weight as attempts to grasp the architecture as a gestalt, in a phenomenological sense, as well as to identify the signs, in semiotic terms, through which the building communicates. However, an aspect that is not always verbalized is remembrance in the experience of a building. This includes remembering the literary texts and their images when visiting the building, and remembering the building while reading the text, beyond the physical site. The physical and mental impressions of the architecture blend with other images of buildings and sites: material, fictional and imagined. This is not a passive process, rather

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a kind of curatorial work as we as visitors ‘actively engage and perform in organizing or selecting pathways and markers’, both in real space and in our minds: ‘we are all architects in some measure’ (Hornstein 2011: 4–5). When studying the author museum, I find it essential to understand architecture as built space that is perceived bodily, emotionally, cognitively. However, it is also essential to view architecture as imagined space, available to us in memory and in literature (Psarra 2009: 10; Sioli and Jung 2018: 1–6). It is fruitful to discuss the new architecture of the author museums as an entity in dialogue or in productive conflict with the author, the literary texts and the literary discourse, with the potential to form new metaphors and new narratives. This is true to the museum as an institution and to how the architecture influences the organization of exhibition narratives (Casey 2003; Duncan and Wallach 2004; MacLeod 2013; Tzorzti 2015). This, I would argue, is also true to the author museum’s visitors, whether they know the authorship well or even not at all, whose understandings of the author’s life and work are affected emotively and cognitively through the experience of the building.

Why New Buildings for Old Authors? As institutions, these Norwegian author museums differ considerably. Only one of them is actually labelled a ‘museum’, another a ‘house’, and the rest have chosen to use the ‘centre’ concept. Some of the new buildings are ‘visitor centres’, a rather novel type in architecture, which typologically subordinates the main attraction (Dalton 2017), the author’s home or another place related to the author. Some buildings serve as community centres, and incorporate social functions for local people, such as areas for meetings and a library. Centres have also been established in the name of an author as settings for activities and amusements to enhance tourism. Others are national centres with the mission to conduct research devoted to documentation, literature and language in general. Further, it is possible to differentiate between, for example, author museums, literary museums and museums of writing and language.3 For all institutions, however, it seems important to focus more generally on literature and culture, writing and language, despite their being dedicated to individual authors (Grepstad 2018c: 64). A complex of motivating forces to build new museums or centres can be identified – historical, social, cultural, political and commercial – in addition to the mere interest in literature and language itself (Bohman 2010; Lund 2016; Grepstad 2018a). The building of these new author

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museums coincides with a European reversal of ‘memory policy’, according to Grepstad, where museums are intended to play a more profound role in society (Grepstad 2018b: 11). The situation in Norway, however, seems exceptional, considering both the number of new museum buildings and their high costs compared to examples in other countries, both Nordic and elsewhere. Many of these author museums can be seen as ‘products of initiatives by persons or institutions interested in constructing a particular kind of public memory or a commercially exploitable tourist attraction’ (Hendrix 2008: 1). However, local and national sociopolitical interests are the primary driving force for building author museums in the Norwegian context. These author museums are part of a more general building boom of new museums and cultural centres in the 1980s and 1990s, which in Norway culminated in the government’s idea of marking ‘millennium sites’ all over the country, either by preserving existing cultural heritage or by establishing new meeting places for the local community (Regjeringen 1997–98). These millennium sites were also recognized as important in the national narrative related to the centenary celebration in 2005 of the dissolution of the union with Sweden. One author museum, the Petter Dass Museum in Nordland, benefited from this cultural policy. This new building (2007) complemented the old museum (established in 1966) on the historical farmyard and site of the church where Petter Dass (1647–1707) had been a clergyman from 1689 until his death. Another author museum declared a millennium site is the Aukrust Centre in Alvdal (opened 1996), dedicated to the writer and cartoonist Kjell Aukrust (1920–2002).4 The background and founding of the individual author museums are as varied as their architecture. The Ivar Aasen Centre in Ørsta was erected, after a long process, with the aim of extending the old museum buildings commemorating the linguist and poet Ivar Aasen (1813– 1896), and, more importantly, strengthening the centre for the culture of one of Norway’s two written standards, namely Nynorsk, ‘New Norwegian’ (Grepstad 2000). Twenty national collaborators, several of them research institutions, were involved in the founding of the centre, and the Norwegian government also contributed to the funding. However, the local resistance to this centre was strong (Grepstad 2002: 307–10). Other factors lie behind the visitor centre at the Nobel Prize laureate Sigrid Undset’s (1882–1949) home in Lillehammer, connected to the listed property, Bjerkebæk. Undset’s descendants sold the property to the state, thus agreeing to open her home and garden to the public. The need for a ‘public building’ was addressed, an architectural competition was announced in 2001, and the visitor centre was built in 2006–7. At the

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same time, the old buildings on the property were restored to their 1930s condition. For the Hamsun Centre in Hamarøy, the initiative was taken in the mid-1980s, parallel to Nordland County’s pioneering project to create an international sculpture landscape in more than thirty municipalities. The Hamsun Centre was opened for the 150th anniversary of the Nobel Prize laureate Knut Hamsun’s birth in 2009. The story of this author centre is strongly intertwined with local enterprise, and with the architect’s fifteen years of sketches and words on this spectacular and expensive building. Far less time, however, was needed to plan the Prøysen House in Ringsaker, which came into being thanks to a private initiative and donations to celebrate the centenary of the birth of the popular author Alf Prøysen (1914–1970). The most famous contemporary Norwegian architect firm, Snøhetta, was asked and agreed to design a building that could replace the more anonymous Prøysen House from 1997.5 The project to build a Garborg Centre to commemorate the 150th anniversary in 2001 of the birth of author and journalist Arne Garborg was initiated by the local language society, led by the regional museum and funded by the county. The dispute about the best location for the author centre, whether rural or urban, engaged regional architects to produce different designs. Not all these Norwegian authors who have been dedicated a new building have retained the significance they had in earlier decades when a national literary canon was established, and the choice of individuals to be honoured with architectural monuments may be disputed. Highly relevant aspects that are worth examining are: Which authors were chosen, and by whom? Who paid for the buildings? And who selected the architects? Although these are not my main questions to answer, they do underlie the analysis. Related to this is the fact that the authors’ productions belong to quite different literary genres – from baroque poetry and hymns to non-fiction linguistics, and from children’s literature to existential novels – which will attract and affect different audiences. The architecture facilitates these differences in the distribution of space, but the question is whether or how these varied genres, functions and tasks are identifiable in the exterior appearance of a building, or in the overall architectonic gesture.

The Hamsun Centre: Architectural Sculpture The Hamsun Centre in Hamarøy was designed by the renowned American architect Steven Holl, after being personally invited by the board for the

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new museum. The Oslo-based firm LY Arkitekter were Holl’s associates in the project. Holl’s earliest outlines took shape after visiting the site in Hamarøy in Nordland in 1994, and the building was completed in 2009 (see Figure 1.1). His initial watercolour sketches show a strange tower, a building that the architect called an interpretation of Hamsun’s literature and a character from the novels. The architect’s visual ideas were maintained throughout the project until realization. Likewise, the architect’s words on the building, some of them scribbled on the sketches, others well formulated in essays and interviews, have also been cemented and are now part of the Hamsun Centre’s presentation of its building (Holl 2010). Holl’s words to describe the building, and his figures of speech, actually establish an analogy between the architectonic figure, the authorship of Hamsun and his best-known literary texts, which is difficult to ignore. Professor of architecture Peter MacKeith said in a review the year after the opening of the Hamsun Centre building: Indeed, so powerfully allusive are the intentions and experiences of Holl’s designs for the Hamsun Center, so closely do they adhere to the delirious, disoriented, and specifically imagined perceptions of Hamsun’s characters, it might well be said (to paraphrase Voltaire) that if Knut Hamsun did not exist, it would have been necessary for Steven Holl to invent him. (MacKeith 2010)

The Hamsun Centre aroused attention and debate in the decade following the millennium. One reason was the choice of location in the small community centre of Presteid in Hamarøy. Hamsun lived in this area as a child and a young man, but his childhood home, which is seasonally open to the public, is situated about five kilometres away from the centre. Another reason for debate was related to Hamsun’s advocacy and recognition of the Nazi ideology, which of course is a challenge to those who have promoted the building of a monumental museum to celebrate his authorship. A third reason for the debate was the architecture itself, which aroused powerful reactions after the presentation of Holl’s first drawings. A fourth critical objection has been articulated in the recent years, namely the colonial aspect of the Hamsun Centre. The building and its infrastructure dominate the small village and brand the whole region as ‘Hamsunland’ (Hareide and Mariner 2021). According to this argument, the Centre reinforce the oppression of the indigenous Sámi people living here, a people which Hamsun in some of his texts describes quite condescendingly (Storfjell 2011). Even after the opening, the architecture was criticized. The sculptural building was called ‘a vertical insult in the midst of the landscape’,6 a comment the author museum incidentally has turned to its advantage in their self-reflection and self-representation.

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Today the building is nationally and internationally renowned, and has received numerous awards. However, the architecture is still disputed in terms of dedicating a museum to the person Hamsun, and with regard to the position of the architectural monument in contemporary culture. Set on the banks of a fjord surrounded by sloping fields at the entrance to the small village of Presteid, the Hamsun Centre has a prominent position. The main building is a 23-metre-tall concrete tower, juxtaposed with a large detached auditorium that is much lower, and in every way subordinated to the high-rise construction. The tower is clad in dark-stained pinewood, punctuated by irregular openings and excrescences, and tilting slightly outwards on the top floors. On the roof terrace, an installation of four-metre-long bamboo reeds sways against the sky. The ground level is formed as a parallelogram with irregular angles, and is repeated on five levels from the entrance floor. Each level of about 100 square metres offers flexible exhibition spaces that the museum designers have filled with interesting items and texts arranged floor-wise according to topics related to Hamsun’s life and literature. These floors are connected by a central lift and an encircling staircase, which accentuates the levels on the upper floors and helps us to realize the scale of the building. The twisted staircase, bridges, balconies and platforms, and also detours and voids, are architectural indexes pointing towards movement in space, and in this case the ascent of a building. They also give the visitor the opportunity to move more freely in the exhibition, starting from the top floor and going down or starting from any floor. Obviously, these stairs and thresholds produce bodily resistance which activates senses other than the ocular, according to phenomenologists such as Pallasmaa, and this resistance increases our experience of the place (Pallasmaa 2012: 43–49 and passim). The varied fenestration throughout the building is also of immense importance in the experience of the inner space. Both Holl himself and analytic scholars (Rosbottom 2009: 66–67; MacKeith 2010; Aarbakke 2019: 76–81) have described the windows in the Hamsun Centre. The openings in the wall are arranged differently in each room and direct the natural light and shadows in significant and ‘choreographed’ ways. The openings also frame the visitor’s view of the natural landscape. This strategic framing and directing of the view enhance the architecture as a catalyst of literary images. Other openings in the walls, like the balconies and terraces at different levels, also give the visitor access to view the cultivated landscape and the nearby ocean from determined points. The architect has shaped the fundamental elements (floors, walls, windows) in such ways (sloping, oblique, varied) that they function as signs,

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as analogies to Hamsun’s literary universe – at least for those familiar with the author’s writings. However, the analogies are more intrusive in the figurative elements of the building and in the details than in the fundamental elements. The most striking sign, the tower, which is the architect’s main concept, appears in a number of Hamsun’s texts, primarily in the novels that inspired Holl, Mysteries (1892) and Hunger (1890). Other examples with direct references to the literary universe of Hamsun are the handle of the main door, formed as ‘a narrow dog-collar made of nickel silver’ in analogy to a passage in Hamsun’s novel Hunger (1890) in which a ‘big brown dog sprang right across the street … it had a narrow collar of German silver’ (Hamsun 1996: 12). Further, the building’s balcony with yellow glass railings refers to the same passage in Hunger, where a girl leans out of her window to clean it on the outside, and the yellow colour recurring in Hamsun’s novels. The so-called ‘violin case’ balcony refers directly to the instrument of the main character Nagel in the novel Mysteries (1892). These analogies are not merely visual and spatial, but incorporate both touch and sound. Such multisensory experience is actually always present in the experience of architecture, but is nonetheless seldom accentuated as it is in the Hamsun Centre. Two very clear examples are the auditory installation on the violin-case balcony, playing recordings from the sea nearby, and the airy feeling on the roof terrace, where the wind plays on bamboo reeds. The building seems to communicate through signs and symbols referring directly to the author’s literary universe. These semiotic riddles, I would argue, are tempting to reveal, but they presuppose the visitor’s knowledge of Hamsun’s novels. For those visitors without this prior knowledge, the centre’s official guided tour introduces the architect’s signs and written intentions as truths, making the building highly readable – a texte lisible. Typologically, the tower is a tall, free-standing, self-supporting construction. In the setting of the Hamsun Centre, these typical features are strengthened against the backdrop of the slightly sloping landscape. The building is not adapted to its surroundings, neither to the lines of the landscape nor to the existing settlement; the building ‘responds to place, but remains an outsider’ (Rosbottom 2009: 67). Rather, the dark tower gives the author museum a strong identity as an upright body, confronting visitors on their arrival. Architect Holl insists on such an anthropomorphic analogy (an old one in architectural theory), by titling his concept ‘Building as a Body’. Given a distinct figure and conceptualized as a body, and dedicated to one remarkable person, this tower thus follows the logic of the monument as well as the logic of the sculpture. The sculptural monument is ‘a commemorative representation’ and ‘sits

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in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place’ (Krauss 1979: 33). The scale of the Hamsun Centre enhances these monumental and sculptural qualities, as does the distinct relationship between figure and ground. However, while the traditional sculpture and the traditional monument have been separating during modernity, architecture has taken over the position and tasks of the monument (Haugdal 2008: 45–51; Haugdal 2014). Statues of men on high pedestals have been replaced by unusual buildings such as the Hamsun Centre. Despite this monumental appearance, the Hamsun Centre’s strong body has some phenomenologically weakening features and gestures, such as the tilting pose, the elements piercing the wooden skin, the absurd silhouette against the sky. Holl’s sketches for the project highlight these odd elements. This weakening of the architectural monument seems to be of immense importance due to the fact that Hamsun is a contentious and ‘difficult’ author who needs to be continuously debated (Høyum 2008; Holl 2010; Dvergsdal 2019). The weakening elements are not only visible in the building’s outer appearance, but are also experienced in the way the visitor is allowed to occupy and use the building. From the entrance up to the roof terrace, access is given to the building’s inner and outer body. Further, the building’s central spine of stairs and lift is continually kept alive by the visitors’ movement upwards and downwards. The visitors penetrate, climb, sense and seize the monument from within. The weak elements of the building may also be described on an interpretative level. In fact, the architecture produces powerful semiotic redundancy or density; every architectural element seems to have a decipherable symbolic meaning. At the same time, however, this redundancy produces complex and contradictory signs, and thus allows for manifold and ambiguous readings and interpretations, which, I would argue, add uncertainty to meaning and weaken the building’s monumentality. To launch the Hamsun Centre as such a complex and contradictory texte scriptable (with my reference to Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 1973) was important to the project leader of the centre before the building had been opened (Høyum 2008: 15–17). This has also been a guiding principle in the centre’s exhibitions policy (Dvergsdal 2019). Thus, although the figure of the Hamsun Centre is strong, the architect is willing to play with the paradoxes, to weaken the construction, phenomenologically and semiotically, and to give the monument ‘a jovial, almost comic, physiognomy’ (Rosbottom 2009: 67).

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The Petter Dass Museum: A Transparent Cave Next to Alstahaug Church dating back to the Middle Ages and the vicarage dating from the eighteenth century, we find the Petter Dass museum building from 2007 (Figure 1.2). Alstahaug was one of the largest parishes in Helgeland, very rich and this was its main church. Dass had strong ties to this site. In his writing chamber he produced hymns, catechisms, songs and poems in a vigorous baroque style, canonized in national literary history and considered important to the identity of the northern regions of Norway. Dass paid reverent homage to the people and landscape through his writings, among them his topographical cycle of poems Nordlands Trompet (The Trumpet of Nordland), probably written in the 1670s and published in 1739. Dass has been recognized as a powerful spokesman for the common people, both in relation to God and the state, and this admiration peaked in 1999 when he was named the man of the millennium in the northern regions of Norway (Jaklin 1999). According to some historians, the understanding of Dass’s societal role ought to be debated (Hagen 2006; Forland 2019), and he also needs to be situated more clearly in the larger European culture of writing of his time rather than tied to the northern coastal region (Lauvstad 2007: 143). The architects in the Norwegian firm Snøhetta were involved in the museum project from their initial sketches in 2001 until its completion in 2007, the year of the 300th anniversary of Dass’s death. The architectonic challenge was to subordinate the existing site (the protected church and vicarage), and at the same time to have this brand new building facing out to sea, and to present it to a broader audience, as this was chosen to be the county’s millennium site. The historical axis from past to present, and the spatial axis from the local site to ‘the world’, became guiding principles in the design process, according to the architects, as referred to by the Petter Dass Museum. Upon arrival at Alstahaug, the old church building with its heavy masonry and its refined onion dome (not added until the 1960s) is what first attracts one’s attention. The museum building, located close to the church, is cut into the landscape and is hardly visible from a distance. As the visitor approaches, a dramatic overhanging cave-like entrance area defines the site (Figure 1.2). Seen from the sea on the other side, the new museum building stands out like a cantilever rising from the ground and breaking out of the cliff (Figure 1.1.b). The museum is constructed as an elongated free-standing volume placed in a precisely excavated cleft in a small hill, approximately seventy metres long and fifteen metres wide. The slightly curved zinc-clad

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roof follows the line of the terrain, filling in for the stone block that was removed. The cleft was cut with a cable saw, thus leaving shiny granite surfaces on both sides of the transparent walls. The cleft gives access to both sides of the building, with steps leading to the top of the hill on one side, and a narrow passage to the sea on the other. The building adapts to its natural and historical surroundings through its height, materials and form. At the same time, the cleaving of the hill and the expressive replacement are a powerful, ‘baroque’ gesture. While the old church building follows its typological orientation, with the choir and the high altar in the east and the entrance for worshippers in the west, the museum building at Alstahaug adapts the symbolical meaning of this axial orientation, but in reverse. Museum visitors are welcomed through a deep entrance area, further progressing in sequential steps through the museum’s ‘nave’ until they reach a panoramic view of the ever-changing seascape to the west. A view of museums as ritual and ceremonial monuments in modern culture has been discussed in detail by other scholars (like Duncan 1995: 17–20), but is given a double meaning in this author museum dedicated to a clergyman. The museum building has an area of 1,350 m² over three floors, connected by an interior staircase running parallel to the exterior one. The axiality and the high degree of transparency offer visitors a clear and logical orientation in space. The Dass exhibition on the first floor is organized

Figure 1.2. The entrance to the Petter Dass Museum facing the old church and yard, Alstahaug. The exhibition area is in the upper front. Photograph by Elin Haugdal, 2017.

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along this axis: at one end, on the ‘church side’ of the building, Dass the clergyman is put on display. On the other side, towards the large glass window framing the natural landscape, Dass the poet is exhibited. Additionally, on the arched top floor, we find a library, meeting rooms and offices. The museum as a whole focuses upon writing culture and poetry, the common culture of the Dano-Norwegian union, religion and church history, and thus provides a broad context for the historical figure to which it is dedicated. The new museum building mediates between different layers of history and geography. Snøhetta wished to realize a kind of continuum in time, taking the visitors on a journey with ‘transformative power’ (Taylor 2019: 9). In the first part, the entrance, the church reverberates as a reflection in the large glass wall, thus recalling the past in a kind of ‘weak’ monumental gesture (Haugdal 2008: 183). Further, the transparent walls expose the blocks of granite on the outside, as a reminder of the forces used to cleave the mountain to create this new space. Finally, and especially when seen from the bay, the building breaks through the landscape like a trumpet. Firm steel bearings and high technology extend the building’s volume over the cliffs, and make this a strong articulation of the author museum. In Snøhetta’s initial sketches, the building’s plan form was trumpet-shaped, probably to express this analogical idea between architecture and literature, with reference to Petter Dass’s main work, Nordlands Trompet (The Trumpet of Nordland). In Dass’s most renowned hymn from the late seventeenth century, ‘Herregud ditt dyre navn og ære’ (Mighty God, to thy dear Name be given), and in his baroque poetry in general, we find contrasting and transformative forces present. On another level of analogy are the dramatic contrasts of baroque elements in Snøhetta’s museum building, between glass and stone, voids and masses, verticals and horizontals, not to forget light and darkness in the winter. Unlike the Hamsun Centre’s sculptural figure, and also in contrast to the eleven-metre-high Petter Dass memorial stone erected on the hill at Alstahaug a century earlier (1908), the Petter Dass museum is more to be recognized as an underground building or, in archetypical terms, as a cave. The transparency of this cave-like building lets the visitor experience being inside, while at the same time it opens the horizontal view. Digging into the ground to provide space for looking out at the landscape and back in time, this author museum building may be characterized as horizontal monumentality, or perhaps better, ‘inverted’ monumentality. Snøhetta has long challenged the concept of monumentality (Haugdal 2009). With reference to the title of the Norwegian author Kjartan Fløgstad’s architect biography of Snøhetta, ‘the unnoticed monumental’

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seems to fit in this case at Alstahaug (Fløgstad 2004). The new architecture subordinates the old buildings at this historically important place, but without leaving visitors unaffected by the prominence and power of Petter Dass.

Language in Concrete: The Ivar Aasen Centre The modest birthplace of the linguist and author Ivar Aasen was established as a museum as early as 1898 and is actually the oldest museum in Norway dedicated to a person. Enthusiasts also claim this to be the first linguistic museum in the world (Bjerknes and Vevang 2015). Today there are five buildings at the Ivar Aasen Centre on the hillside close to Ørsta, including an outdoor amphitheatre (2000) on a site where people have gathered for cultural and political meetings since the 1880s. The new centre from 2000 is a significant contribution to the museum site. The building was designed by the internationally renowned Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn, who was offered this project by the government in 1996 in honour of his career. Fehn’s mission, in cooperation with architect Henrik Hille, was to create a building for the interpretation of the significance of Ivar Aasen, to house a cultural centre for Nynorsk, the Norwegian written language that Aasen constructed based on dialects, and also to house a centre of language and writing in general (Grepstad 2000). Throughout his career, Fehn has explored the museum as an idea and an institution; he has participated in architecture competitions and was commissioned to design many museum buildings in the 1990s, among them the Aukrust Centre in Alvdal, opened in 1996 (Figure 1.1.d). The architecture of the Aukrust Centre is internationally renowned and has been presented in dozens of architectural journals, although the author, Kjell Aukrust, is much less well known. However, the choice of Fehn for this task of regional and nation-building importance ‘was highly surprising’, as long as Fehn in his career ‘has been concerned with one of the images or tropes of modernity – mobility, dislocation, a complex and cosmopolitan identity’ (Postiglione 2001: 47). The author centre dedicated to Ivar Aasen obviously seemed to be the complete opposite. Fehn’s rough sketches and his words about the Ivar Aasen Centre were mainly concerned with how to adapt to the site. Fehn was challenged by the natural topography, describing how the architect’s initial approach to the situation was to dig the building into the quite steep ground (Fehn 2001: 14–25). The building’s sections and the main construction system clearly demonstrate how the architect has solved this challenge, and this

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is also visible to visitors at the main entrance. Through a variety of strong vertical elements, the gravitational forces of the hill are affirmed, making it appear that we are activating our bodily empathy, but at the same time this is countered in the construction. Innermost in the hill there is a protective wall that continues in an arched roof over the glassed entrance area. Further, the upper floor has an overhang that threatens to fall out onto the valley below. Outermost, however, the pylon-like element in raw concrete, cast in one piece, stands as a heavy counterforce that keeps the whole construction in place. In addition to its supporting function, the pylon has strong, monumental associations to the large-scale gateways to ancient Egyptian temples. The Aasen pylon, which faces the valley, makes the centre visible from the road and from the airport (Figure 1.1.c). However, more important than the visual or ‘scenographic’ elements are the material and tactile qualities in the architecture of the Aasen Centre. The large wall is left bare in its raw concrete, only decorated with an enlarged signature of the author. This firm concrete building, which Fehn has adapted to the place, has the ‘the capacity to cultivate a resistant, identity-giving culture’, to use words from the architectural theory of critical regionalism (Frampton 1991: 16). Or as Grepstad puts it, the architecture of the Aasen Centre manifests regional ‘writing culture in solid concrete’ (Grepstad 2002: 287, 318). The use of materials is simple and in accordance with Fehn’s so-called ‘poetic modernism’, as well as with the critical

Figure 1.3. The exhibition area in the Ivar Aasen Centre. The axial plan is divided into spatial sequences, Ørsta. Photograph by Elin Haugdal, 2017.

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regionalism in the international architectural discourse. The extensive use of raw concrete, where the traces of the formwork are visible, and the considerable use of wood, make this a building ‘without make-up’, according to Fehn (2001: 23). The ‘line’ in the landscape is a frequently used metaphor to describe Fehn’s architecture, and so also in the Ivar Aasen Centre. The line in this case is drawn along the hillside from the old Aasen farmstead, and materializes in the axial plan of the new building. At the entrance, the visitor can already see through the whole exhibition from start to finish (Figure 1.3). However, this open aisle is divided in spatial sequences by regularly placed loadbearing concrete elements, alternating with bays. The repetition of a basic element, such as the triangle shape and the light openings, strengthens the experience of rhythm and order throughout the interior. These triangles operate like morphological elements to be compared to the verbal language. They are used in different ways and materials, in large constructive elements as well as in details, such as the glass cases and the shelves. The exhibition bays are arranged along the main axis to create a meaningful narration, and are the syntax in Fehn’s architectural language. Some more of Fehn’s museum buildings follow this syntactic order, which makes the exhibition space clear and readable. On the left-hand side of the exhibition aisle, and facing towards the valley, the visitor is introduced to Aasen’s life and work, and to the history of Nynorsk. On the righthand side, the exhibition bays are dedicated to language in general and in a global perspective. The visitor is free to move across the main axis in the Ivar Aasen exhibition, but not without breaking the spatial logic or the order of the exhibition. Fehn’s axis would be described as quite ‘deterministic’, according to research on spatial syntax (Hillier and Tzortzi 2006: 283, 290), in particular studies of human movement patterns in museums, which confirm humans’ inherent urge to move linearly. An exhibition narrative requires some kind of spatial succession, and ‘architecture can promote or question it’ (Liefooghe 2019: 12). Fehn worked along the same lines in the Aukrust Centre (Figure 1.1.d), although the landscape in Alvdal is wide and levelled, in contrast to the hillsides of Ørsta in western Norway. Fehn’s search for a new museum typology, a new architectural language for museum functions, is particularly evident in this plan form – that is, the straight line that determines the movement through the building, sequentially alternating between small bays for the exhibition units and dedicated places for the museum objects. Both these buildings demonstrate that Fehn’s museum architecture is ‘not just about man and space but also about objects. His exhibition projects clearly show how objects are taken care of and given their own space’ (Lie 2009: 72).

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Although Fehn has stated ‘the space of the Ivar Aasen Centre is designed as if you were walking into a book between its covers’ (Fehn 2001: 23),7 the building does not aim to interpret the author’s life and work in such exterior figures, representational signs or literary analogies. Rather, emphasis is laid on the basic elements of building in general: site, materials, construction, space, light and shadow, and how the architectural elements may be scaled and combined to a meaningful language. The Ivar Aasen Centre is based on a modular order, a sort of ‘grammar’ or syntax, which is the underlying meaning of all buildings. On the one hand, then, the architecture recalls Ivar Aasen’s life, home and travels, and his research on the basic rules of spoken Norwegian, as manifest in his grammar and dictionary. On the other hand, the architecture is designed to let the visitor experience, through body and mind, the nature of every language.

The Enclosure: Sigrid Undset’s Home and Garden In 1919, Sigrid Undset moved to an old log house in the hillside facing Lillehammer, a town at the entrance to the valley Gudbrandsdalen (Figure 1.4). During her years at Bjerkebæk, as she named her property, Undset transformed the stony ground into a blooming garden of beauty and utility, and relocated another old house. These buildings were in vernacular eastern Norwegian style, with their massive timber construction, dark-stained facades, organized close to each other to form an inner yard. The model seems to be loosely based on the large farms described in Undset’s medieval novels, yet Bjerkebæk is clearly marked by Undset’s private taste and way of life. The author lived here while she wrote the novels that gave her the Nobel Prize in Literature, including the trilogy about Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–22), which takes place in Gudbrandsdalen. The visitors to Undset’s hundred-year-old home today experience the authenticity of the place, a strong genius loci (Bohman 2010: 40–41; Kristiansen 2015: 85–95), but blended with the sites of the author’s historical fiction. With reference to Hendrix, we can explain how authors’ houses, especially those of Undset’s kind, are turned into monuments: [E]xpression and remembrance fuse most in houses created by authors as a work of art, as a parallel or an alternative to their poetry or narrative. Such places are not only thought to be statements on art, on what is expressed and how it can be best expressed. They, moreover, perpetuate these artistic assertions, being turned into monuments by the builders themselves, their heirs, or by later generations of admirers. (Hendrix 2008: 13)

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Undset set up high fences around her property while living there with her children, to avoid the gaze of curious people. Moreover, she did not wish her home to become a museum after she was gone. ‘After me, there should be no one staring’, she declared to her family (Blindheim 1982: 12).8 However, Bjerkebæk was restored in the 1990s to the condition of Undset’s 1930s home, and opened as a museum in 2007 together with the new visitor centre. The visitor centre building was designed by the

Figure 1.4. The property of Bjerkebæk seen from the visitor centre’s southern pavilion towards Undset’s home, Lillehammer, in montage with the architect Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk’s site plan. Photograph by Elin Haugdal, 2017. Drawing: www.holmebakk.no/bjerkebaek/drawings.html.

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renowned architect Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk, who won the architecture competition in 2002, out of sixty-four participants. The centre serves a purpose in relieving the garden and old houses from wear and tear, but also accommodates an auditorium, areas for exhibitions, a shop, cafe, and other service functions and offices for the staff. The visitor centre was established as a new and increasingly popular building type internationally in the decades around the millennium. In providing access to heritage sites, the buildings are functional, relational and subordinated to their physical and cultural context, which in this case is the author’s home. Despite their secondary role, these buildings are highly profiled as emblematic entrances that give visitors their first impression of the site. The visitor centre at Bjerkebæk is set as a long and low masonry wall against the busy road on the upper side of the property, thus replacing the high fence and the very distinct border that Undset herself set between her home and its urban surroundings. The only public doorway to the museum facilities is through the glass doors in this enclosed wall. When inside, however, the airy entrance offers the visitor a broad gallery with an overview of the garden and the old buildings, but at a respectful distance and seen from behind. There is a significant shift in character from the closed fence towards the road, with undulating glass walls on the garden side embracing pavilions and a row of slender classical columns.9 Further, an organic site-cast concrete bridge or ramp, which bends around trees, connects the visitor centre with the garden and the author’s home (see Figure 1.1.e and Figure 1.4). The freely growing greenery that dominates the visitor centre’s garden may well intensify the picturesque and romantic aura of the old Bjerkebæk, but it is far removed from Undset’s well-kept garden. There is a strong inward orientation towards the backyard of Undset’s home, enclosed from the outer world. Architect Hølmebakk’s interpretation of the overall situation seems to fulfil the need of a place to retreat. Seen from the garden, the visitor centre’s glass facade almost dissolves in reflections of the old log buildings. Additionally, the architect has combined architectural elements traditionally used for recreational purposes in parks and gardens, like the colonnade, the pavilion and the promenade ramp. Not least, the use of classical elements links Bjerkebæk to a larger world in time, space and literature, which was always present in Undset’s life, mind and writings. Undset’s conversion to Catholicism in the 1920s and her subsequent pilgrimage to Rome are well known. It should also be mentioned that the architect’s lyrical title for his competition project, ‘God’s beautiful daughters’, was taken from an essay that Undset wrote while in exile in the United States during the Second World War, and

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published in 1947 when back at her peaceful property (Undset 1947). Her essay deals with human life in a shattered world, and claims the importance of the ancient virtues of the beautiful, the good and the true to a contemporary society. The Bjerkebæk visitor centre provides depth of time, and seems to fulfil the famous credo of Sverre Fehn, Hølmebakk’s teacher. Fehn writes about his ‘confrontation with the Middle Ages’, when he was to design a museum among the ruins of the Bishops’ Fortress in Hamar: ‘I realized, when working out this project, that only by manifestation of the present can you make the past speak. If you try to run after the past, you will never reach it’ (Eriksson 2004: 22).10 Fehn made the site-cast concrete bridge running through the ruins of the old barn an important element in his museum project in Hamar. Hølmebakk uses the bridge or ramp in a similar way, to manifest the connections between present and past, and also to embody the differences. In the case of Bjerkebæk, the concrete ramp is curved into a path that leads around trees into the garden, and keeps the visitor at a humble distance from the historical site. Hølmebakk’s visitor centre was listed in 2018, and subject to the same protection as the rest of the property, and thus a part of the reception of Sigrid Undset’s authorship for visitors to Bjerkebæk.

Decorated Sheds in Stone and Wood: The Garborg Centre and the Prøysen House Two more buildings dedicated to Norwegian authors will be mentioned here, the Garborg Centre (opened in 2012) and the Prøysen House (opened in 2014). They are situated in different parts of the country, and celebrate authors whose writings were strongly connected to their distinctive landscapes: windy, rocky Jæren on the south-eastern coast of Norway, and the wooded countryside of Hedemarken in the interior of the country (Figures 1.1.f and g). Both buildings are regular volumes rather than figurative expressions, and appear as ‘decorated sheds’. The buildings communicate their meaning through added signs, primarily through the use of materials in the outer cladding.11 The National Garborg Centre is an author museum dedicated to the husband-and-wife authors Arne (1851–1924) and Hulda (1862–1934) Garborg. The centre is run by Jærmuseet, which also runs museums at the authors’ home Garborgheimen and their cottage and writing place Knudaheio, close to the moors. After much discussion and indeed disagreement, the Garborg Centre was located in an urban context in Bryne,

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next door to high-rise buildings and collocated with the city’s new library (Fidjestøl 2007). The Stavanger architect Rolf Skjelstad’s initial ideas presented the Garborg Centre as a horizontal volume composed of cubes, and clad in contrasting materials. One of the ideas included heavy walls of gabion cages filled with natural stones, associated to the authentic sites of Garborg, to the stone fences and the reinforcing stone gable at the author’s home and writing place. Another idea was to use the facades as the backdrop for changing scenography related to the various activities in the Garborg Centre and the library. When adapted to the real urban and economic situation, the proposals were reduced to more prosaic stonepanel cladding, but decorated with quotations by Arne Garborg translated into several languages (Figure 1.1.f ). This decoration of the facade has a historical forerunner in Henri Labrouste and his facade of Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1843–50; the first library in Paris that was actually built as a library), where panels listing the names of famous scholars feature as decorative elements (Levine 1982). The architect seems to have interpreted the tension between Arne Garborg’s local identity and his European scope quite literally. The ‘decorated shed’ was introduced in postmodern architectural discourse in opposition to the sculptural ‘ducks’ in order to describe differences in the external appearance of individual buildings (Venturi, Brown and Izenor 1972: 87–89). In the case of the duck, the building communicates its function and meaning through an overall figurative expression. In the other case, as in the Garborg Centre, signs are applied to a rather ordinary, box-like structure. The facade cladding and the inscription that decorate this shed are intended to shout out ‘I’m a Monument’ (Venturi, Brown and Izenor 1972), albeit in between tall buildings and parking lots. In contemporary urban culture the competition for attention in words, images and buildings make this shout heard by those who are responsive in the first place. As I see it, the discussion on the Garborg Centre sums up three main perspectives related to the architecture of the author museum. First, the wish for an individual monument to celebrate the author: ‘If we are serious about this being a national Garborg Centre, the building must have a distinct architectural expression’. Secondly, the debate on the placement, and the demand to subordinate the new to the author’s authentic site: ‘It is wonderful to come to Knudaheio, people are devoted’, and ‘it is possible to build a centre gently into nature, with large sections of the building below the ground’. Thirdly, the primary need for a vital place for literature: ‘Culture should not only be great visible symbols but practical useful things that people can benefit from and enjoy in their daily life’ (Fidjestøl 2007).12

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The Prøysen House appeals to an audience of families and tourists, unlike the Garborg Centre, both because of its rural location and the different character of the authorships. Prøysen is well known to past generations through wide broadcasting of his stories and songs, his children’s books and his newspaper articles. The new cultural centre was initiated by the above-mentioned desire to build a monument to celebrate the author on the centenary of his birth in 2014; ‘Alf Prøysen is a national icon who deserves a signalbygg’ (Næsheim and Haakenstad 2012) – the word ‘signalbygg’ is a Norwegian particularity meaning a building of high architectonic quality that functions both as a landmark and as branding. The private investor who made this new centre come true claimed, like many others, that the Prøysen House from 1997 was outdated (‘a garage-like building behind the gas station along the E6 main road’), and feared the author would be forgotten. Implicitly, Snøhetta’s architecture was intended to uphold the memory and give life to the author’s heritage. The approach to the new Prøysen House is laid as a short walk through the wood from the author’s birthplace and home at Prestvegen, which often appears in Prøysen’s varied writings. The unpretentious exterior blends in with the surrounding nature (Figure 1.1.g). Rather than being grasped in an overall view, the building can only be perceived in glimpses through the dense spruce forest. This fluctuating perception is maintained in the facade, where the outer layer is made of vertical pinewood battens placed in a forest-like pattern that lets the underlying red walls shine through. The decorated shed in this case is not only reminiscent of a former life and site, as in the significant stone-clad Garborg Centre, but has a presence of phenomenological quality. However, the Prøysen House is equipped with recognizable signs, familiar to the visitors who know Prøysen and his literary universe. One example is the traditional wooden fence, the skigard, which is set up along the paths by the road, and which Snøhetta has integrated into its design. If the visitor did not notice it on arrival, a fragment of such a fence is displayed in the exhibition inside, thus elevating this element to symbolic level. The building itself is a contemporary frame, thus subordinated to the author and his stories, as well as to the authentic site.

Place and Aura In these concluding sections, I wish to highlight the architecture of the author as place and monument based on my readings of the diverse centres and museum buildings. The relation between authorship and place

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is frequently proclaimed in the author museums, and often in a double meaning as ‘places in the writer’s texts that have become public, common places, and sites or locations where an author has actually been living and writing’ (Grepstad 2018a: 358). The choice of location for a new author museum has been disputed in some cases because of the unique museum building’s cultural capacity and potential for putting the geographical location on the map. Disagreement on location can also arise over concerns related to the author’s biographical belonging, historical facts, and thus the authenticity of the site. Authenticity, aura and attraction are among the qualities of any real site. These qualities, I would argue, are of particular importance for the author museum to bring forth, in order to legitimize its very physical existence. Why not just keep on reading the books? Why visit an author museum? Some visitors come to the author museum to feel ‘the spirit of the author’, which is believed to coincide with the spirit of the place, the genius loci. The real and authentic place allows the visitor to imagine how the author-subject has woven a creative relationship with time and world (Lund 2016: 113). This strong relationship between author, home and place is of course most obvious in the author’s house museums, but this relation ought also to be questioned (Egeland 2018). The new author museum building does not leave these literary or historical places untouched. Architecture has the power to reinforce or to confront relations between authorship and place. Further, architecture has the prerogative to inaugurate another place for the author, without any connection to the books or biography. This is a challenge for the architecture of the author museum: to mediate its new place, if not authentic, at least valid here and now. The new author museums in Norway have been erected in disparate geographical regions. Their site-specificity, their adaptation to the particular situations and to the different geographical and cultural landscapes, is obvious. If the visitor happens not to notice, then the architect’s verbal rhetoric underscores the importance of place and region, and it is repeated in the museum’s flyers, website and guide. The author museum legitimizes itself strongly in the place as much as in the authorships; the building is made for a particular place as much as it is for a particular author. Consequently, place, region, author and texts are entangled in an architectural work. While literary texts are reproducible and have the power to deterritorialize the visitor, the building is all about the opposite – territorial anchoring of the visitor and thus fulfilling the experience of being ‘here and now’. Some of these author museums may be considered as auratic

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works of art, with reference to Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura (Benjamin 1935). The reproduction of the architecture in glossy two-dimensional photography in tourist advertisements or on social media attracts visitors to experience the original work. The author museum becomes a site of both architectural and literary pilgrimage. The relevant question for further studies is whether visitors to the new author museums are primarily attracted to the author or to the experience of the building of a ‘starchitect’? In many cases, architectural works serve as destinations for pilgrimages by tourists searching for authenticity and aura in the origin of the authorship, or in the original of the architect. For the local inhabitants, the author museums are incorporated in the physical and mental landscape and become part of their identity. This is true at least in those areas of Norway where both population and remarkable buildings are sparse. For those who visit an author museum only once, like most tourists, the image of the landmark architecture is imprinted on body and mind, and disseminated through photography. The buildings are recalled as images, ‘associated one to another in one’s personal and collective imagination or experience’, and constitute a ‘new map of cultural memory’ (Hornstein 2011: 109, 114). Further, the reproduction and dissemination of the images of the iconic building consequently boost the mechanisms of the auratic work, and add value to the experience of the original building at the specific site.

The Contemporary Author Monument The geographical distribution of the Norwegian author museums, from north to south, east to west, can be explained, as initially mentioned, by decentralization policies and a general turn towards the regional and the local. This also coincides with the state-funded creation of tourist destinations aiming to cover the whole country.13 Thus, the author museums may be considered part of an overall national memory policy (Grepstad 2018b: 11–26). Ever since the independence of Norway in 1814, authors have had a strong position in the nation-building project. Those who were cast in bronze or carved in stone in this period of sovereignty were not the politicians, nor the philosophers, but the authors of the nineteenth century (Øverås 2019). Interestingly, the Norwegian authorities have continued this nation-building project and have used considerable resources on highlighting the collective identity of an imagined community, including through literary history and canonized authors.

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With such a perspective, the author museums in Norway function as built monuments in a new national narrative. In his book on ‘person museums’, the Swedish museologist Stephan Bohman moves the national narrative down from a governmental to a societal level: ‘Never before has society felt such a strong need to put faces on the national image than today’; there is a need for ‘someone to identify with, look up to’ (Bohman 2010: 185). Others explain the focus on author museums as a reaction to depersonalized society in general, and the compensatory creation of new autofictional narratives (Lund 2016: 113). The increasing number of author museums may also be explained as part of a more general re-evaluation of the parameters of modernism during the twentieth century, in light of both the return to the biography in literary history and the recent developments in literary geography (Andersen 2006; Lund 2016: 114–15). In memory policy, architecture has long since replaced the statue. The new Norwegian author buildings, dedicated to individual authors, are manifest examples. Rather than being represented and commemorated in sculpture, individual authors are offered space where literature can actually take place, be interpreted, actualized and used. Nevertheless, the sculptural forms of contemporary architecture are reminiscent of the past cult of monuments on high plinths. Obviously, the figurative Hamsun Centre is an extraordinary example. The anomalous and weakening elements in this building, however, take the whole idea of the monument to its limits. The architecture of the Ivar Aasen Centre classifies as monumental in a traditional sense. The concrete construction inscribed up in the hillside bears no contradictory signs, other than being in stark contrast to Aasen’s old home nearby. The building literally elevates and cements both Aasen and the written language Nynorsk as immortal. The architecture of the Petter Dass Museum comes across as being quite the opposite. Engraved in the hill and subordinated to the surroundings, the museum building appears more as a ground than a figure, thus directing our attention towards the historical layers in the landscape. Nevertheless, the powerful action of cleaving a cliff to make an exhibition space for the author’s texts and belongings has monumental qualities, and it anchors Dass’s position in the national history – in fact, as much in architectural as in literary history. Subordination is also characteristic of the visitor centre at Bjerkebæk. The glassed and graceful pavilion architecture connects through undulating bridges and a freely growing garden to meet up with Sigrid Undset’s home and writing place. The centre’s fence-like building embraces a place of retreat, and mediates between the past and the present. The walk along the bridge into the garden opens

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subjective remembrance and personal monuments of thought, and implements another kind of monumentality than the impressive architectonic figure. This case, in particular, invites further reflections on architecture and monuments in relation to the author’s gender, to literary genres, and the place and use of the museum building. Elin Haugdal is professor in Art History at UiT The Arctic University of Norway – The Arctic University of Norway. Her main research area is architecture in the Nordic Countries and the Arctic, and concerns topics of monumentality, regionalism, ecology and indigeneity. Haugdal has edited books and published articles related to architecture, landscape and gardens, photography and contemporary art. She currently leads the research group ‘Worlding Northern Art’.

Notes   1. A diversity of theories on perception, spatial behaviourism and cognitive interpretation examine how architecture affects the human body and mind at the individual and collective level. My study draws on a wide range of architectural theorists, including Norberg-Schulz 1979, 1995; Pallasmaa (1996) 2012; Findley 2005; and Psarra 2009.   2. Frequently used in research on the relation between space and literature, buildings and authors are Christian Norberg-Schulz’s concept of genius loci (1979), and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958; originally La Poétique de l’Espace, 1957).   3. For a study of the use of concepts and of the literature, see Lund 2016.   4. Also worth mentioning is the park related to the Norwegian poet Paal-Helge Haugen, which was designated as the millennium site in Sogndalen in Agder, southern Norway.   5. For the coming decade, the following author museums and centres related to Norwegian authors are planned: The Vinje Centre in Telemark, using Hille Strandskogen Arkitekter’s design from 2017, is scheduled for opening in 2021. In 2018 the Skien City Council arranged an architectural competition (parallel assignment) for a new Ibsen Library as their major investment in cultural buildings in the city centre for the coming years. In 2020, the jury stated that the winning project by Japanese Kengo Kuma & Associates (in collaboration with Mad Architects) is ‘Ibsen in architecture’ (Arkitektnytt 2020). The Falkberget House project started in 2015 with the intention of building a national centre of literature in Røros, commemorating the author Johan Falkberget (1879–1967). The house has not been realized. Initial concepts have been made for Cora Sandel’s (1880–1974) House in Tromsø.

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For the children’s literature author Anne Cath Vestlys (1920–2008), a ‘family park’ and museum in Lyngdal in Agder is to be opened in 2022.   6. My translation of the artist Karl Erik Harr’s utterance, ‘Bygget er en loddrett frekkhet midt i landskapet’, which is referred to in Lysvold 2009. For the use of this provocative statement by the Hamsun Centre, see Hamsunsenteret 2019.   7. My translation of Fehn, quoted in Byggekunst 1, 2001: ‘Rommet er formet som om du går inn i et bokverk mellom to permer’.   8. My translation of the quotation in Blindheim 1982: ‘Efter meg skal det ikke komme glanere’.   9. After a rebuilding of the visitor centre in 2019, the pavilion with its classical columns is less visible. 10. My translation of ‘Løper man etter fortiden vil man aldri nå den igjen. Kun ved å manifistere nuet får man fortiden i tale’. This well-known Fehn statement, from his ‘Notes from the 1960s’, is quoted in many books and articles, including Hege Maria Eriksson’s study on contemporary Norwegian museum architecture. Eriksson emphasizes Fehn’s significance in Norwegian and international museum and exhibition architecture during the past fifty years (Eriksson 2004: 8, and passim). 11. The Arvid Hanssen (1932–1998) House at Dyrøy in Troms should also be mentioned in this context; it was opened in 2006 after a design by architect Viggo Ditlevsen. 12. All quotations are from a feature article in the newspaper Klassekampen (Fidjestøl 2007). My translations of, respectively: Tarald Oma (the initiator of the centre); Solveig Aareskjold (author) and Ole Serenius Trodahl (architect); and Bjørn Kvalsvik Nicolaysen (professor of reading science). 13. One particular project should be mentioned, the Norwegian Scenic Route – a state-funded project costing billions of NOK, which has been ongoing since 2001 (Nasjonale turistveger, n.d.).

References Aarbakke, T. 2019. ‘Forfattermuseumsfunksjonene. Musealiserte relasjoner mellom liv og litteratur. En studie av Hamsunsenteret, Bjerkebæk – Sigrid Undsets hjem og Hauge-senteret’, PhD dissertation. University of Oslo. Anderson, G. 2004. Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Andersen, P.T. 2006. Identitetens geografi: Steder i litteraturen fra Hamsun til Naipaul. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Arkitektnytt. 2020. ‘Skien valgte Kengo Kuma’, Arkitektnytt, 6 March. Retrieved 10 March 2020 from https://www.arkitektnytt.no/notiser/skien-valgte-kengo-kuma. Bachelard, G. 1958. The Poetics of Space. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Benjamin, W. 1935. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’], Gesammelte Schriften, Band I. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1980, pp. 431–69.

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Bjerknes, S.S., and M.K. Vevang. 2015. ‘Her er det eldste språkmuseet i verda’, NRK, 21 January. Retrieved 22 October 2019 from https://www.nrk.no/mr/ det-eldste-sprakmuseet-i-verda-1.12160863. Blindheim, C. 1982. Moster Sigrid: Et familieportrett av Sigrid Undset. Oslo: Aschehoug. Bohman, S. 2010. Att sätta ansikte på samhällen: Om kanon och personmuseer. Stockholm: Carlssons Bokförlag. Casey, V. 2003. ‘The Museum Effect: Gazing from Object to Performance in the Contemporary Cultural-History Museum’, Archives & Museum Informatics, Europe 2003. Retrieved 5 January 2020 from http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim03/095C. pdf. Dalton, R. 2017. Designing for Heritage: Contemporary Visitor Centres. London: Lund Humphries. Duncan, C. 1995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge. Duncan, C., and A. Wallach. 2004. ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, in B.M. Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 51–70. Dvergsdal, A. 2019. ‘The “Difficult” Author’. Panel discussion. Museologisk salong, Perspektivet Museum, Tromsø, and Transforming Author Museums (TRAUM), 21 May. Egeland, M. 2018. ‘Bjørnson og Aulestad: “Uadskillelige” og “Uløselige”? Fortellinger om en Dikter og hans hjem’, Sakprosa 10(1): 1–38. Eriksson, H.M. 2004. Museumsarkitektur: En studie av nyere norske museumsbygg. Oslo: ABM-utvikling. Fehn, S. 2001. ‘Ivar Aasen-tunet’, Byggekunst 8(1): 14–25. Fidjestøl, A. 2007. ‘Garborg senter i Haugtussas land?’, Klassekampen, 26 April. Retrieved 16 December 2019 from https://www.klassekampen.no/45386/article/item/null/ garborgsenter-i-haugtussas-land. Findley, L. 2005. Building Change: Architecture, Politics and Cultural Agency. New York: Routledge. Fløgstad, K. 2004. Hus som vil meg hysa: Snøhetta og det umerkeleg monumentale. Oslo: Samlaget. Forland, G. 2019. ‘Vil bygge kjempestatue av dikterprest’, NRK, 15 December. Retrieved 15 December 2019 from https://www.nrk.no/nordland/bygger-10-meter-hoy-statueav-petter-dass-pa-alstadhaug-pa-helgeland-1.14821759. Forty, A. 2000. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson. Frampton, K. (1983) 1991. ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points of an Architecture of Resistance’, in H. Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend: Bay Press, pp. 16–30. Giebelhausen, M. 2006. ‘The Architecture is the Museum’, in J. Marstine (ed.), New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Grepstad, O. 2000. ‘Ivar Aasen-tunet: Eit kulturpoltisk underverk’, Språknytt 2: 9–13. . 2002. Det nynorske blikket. Oslo: Samlaget, pp. 287–335. (ed.). 2018a. Forfattarens skriftstader: Litterære museum i norsk minnepolitikk. Oslo: Samlaget. . 2018b. ‘Litterære museum i norsk minnepolitikk: Ein introduksjon til omgrep og innhald’, in O. Grepstad (ed.), Forfattarens skriftstader: Litterære museum i norsk minnepolitikk. Oslo: Samlaget, pp. 11–26.

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. 2018c. ‘Museum mellom skriftkultur og minnepolitikk: Eit essay om minne og skrift i det nordiske demokratiet’, in O. Grepstad (ed.), Forfattarens skriftstader: Litterære museum i norsk minnepolitikk. Oslo: Samlaget, pp. 27–73. Hagen, R.B. 2006. ‘Tegner et nytt bilde av Petter Dass’, Dagbladet, 5 July. Retrieved 15 December 2019 from https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/ tegner-nytt-bilde-av-petter-dass/66230404. Hamsun, K. 1996. Hunger, trans. S. Lyngstad. Edinburgh: Rebel Inc. Hamsunsenteret. 2019. ‘Et loddrett frekkhet midt i landskapet’. Retrieved 30 January 2020 from https://hamsunsenteret.no/Nyheter/?Article=312. Hareide, H.H., and D. Mariner. 2021. ‘Skal ein ta Hamsun på alvor, må ein også ta rasismen hans på alvor’, Morgenbladet, 24 Aprile. Retrieved 24 April 2021 from https://www.morgenbladet.no/boker/aktuelt/2021/04/23/skal-ein-ta-hamsunpa-alvor-ma-ein-ogsa-ta-rasismen-hans-pa-alvor/. Haugdal, E. 2008. ‘Ny monumentalitet’. PhD dissertation. University of Tromsø. Retrieved 20 January 2020 from https://hdl.handle.net/10037/1324. . 2009. ‘Et sosialt monument’, Kunst og kultur 4: 216–29. . 2014. ‘Landemerker og stedsidentitet’, in H.H. Stien (ed.), Vit at jeg elsker deg: Om kunst og sted. Stamsund: Orkana akademisk, pp. 100–9. Hendrix, H. (ed.). 2008. Writer’s Houses and the Making of Memory. New York: Routledge. Hillier, B., and K. Tzortzi. 2006. ‘Space Syntax: The Language of Museum Space’, in S. Macdonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 282–301. Holl, S. (1989) 1997. ‘Anchoring’, in C. Jencks and K. Kropf (eds), Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture. Chichester, West Sussex: Academy Press, pp. 109–10. . 2010. ‘Concept 1998’, in A. Vaa, N.F. Høyum and E.F. Langdalen (eds), Hamsun, Holl, Hamarøy. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, pp. 177‒81. Hornstein, S. 2011. Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place. Farnham: Ashgate. Høyum, N.F. 2008. ‘Hamsunsenteret på Presteid: “Intet er som å bli pustet på av det levende liv”: Utfordringer i presentasjonen av et forfatterskap’. Hamsun i Tromsø IV. Hamarøy: Hamsun-Selskapet, pp. 11–25. Jaklin, A. 1999. ‘Årtusenets Nordlending’, Nordlys, 31 December, pp. 34–38. Krauss, R. 1979. ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8: 30–44. Kristiansen, A.S. 2015. ‘“Det levde livet”: En fenomenologisk studie av 10 personers opplevelse av personmuseet Bjerkebæk’. Master’s thesis. Department of Archeology, University of Bergen. Lauvstad, H. 2007. Helicons Bierge og Helgelands schiær. Trondheim: Unipub forlag. Levine, N. 1982. ‘The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève’, in R. Middleton (ed.), The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson, pp. 138–73. Lie, T. 2009. ‘Ordtyven: Per Olaf Fjeld om Sverre Fehns ord’, Arkitektur N 7: 72–75. Liefooghe, M. 2019. ‘Buildings for Bodies of Work: The Artist Museum after the Death and Return of the Author’, Architectural Histories 7(1): 1–13. Lund, N.D. 2016. ‘Litteraturen og forfatteren på museum: Traditionsformidling udfordret af den stigende musealisering’, Nordisk Museologi 1: 101–20. Lysvold, S.S. 2009. ‘Hamsun ville hatet dette bygget’, NRK, interview with Karl Erik Harr, 4 August. Retrieved 28 November 2019 from https://www.nrk.no/ nordland/--hamsun-ville-hatet-dette-bygget-1.6719071.

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MacKeith, P. 2010. ‘Battleground of Invisible Forces’, Arkitektur N. Retrieved 28 November 2020 from https://architecturenorway.no/questions/building-reviews/ mckeith-on-hamsun-10/. MacLeod, S. 2013. Museum Architecture: A New Biography. London: Routledge. Nasjonale turistveger. n.d. Nasjonale turistveger: Norwegian Scenic Routes. Retrieved 15 December 2020 from https://www.nasjonaleturistveger.no/en. Næsheim, A., and T. Haakenstad. 2012. ‘– Det skal ikke stå på kroner og øre’, NRK, 28 August. Retrieved January 2020 from https://www.nrk.no/innlandet/ buchhardt-vil-lage-proysenhus-1.8298859. Norberg-Schulz, C. 1979. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli. . 1995. Stedskunst [Art of place]. Oslo: Gyldendal. Øverås, T.E. 2019. ‘Å lese leserne’, Prosa 6. Retrieved 10 January 2020 from https://prosa. no/artikler/essay/a-lese-leserne. Pallasmaa, J. (1996) 2012. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley. Petter Dass-museet. n.d. ‘The Architecture’. Retrieved 28 November 2019 from https:// www.petterdass-museet.no/?page_id=1080. Postiglione, G. 2001. ‘Negotiating Tradition’, Arkitektur N 1: 46–49. Psarra, S. 2009. Architecture and Narrative: The Formation of Space and Cultural Meaning. London: Routledge. Regjeringen. 1997–98. ‘St.prp. nr. 55 (1997–98). Om markeringen av tusenårsskiftet 2000–2005’. Retrieved 29 November 2019 from https://www.regjeringen.no/no/ dokumenter/stprp-nr-55-1997-98-/id201853/sec4. Rosbottom, D. 2009. ‘Knut Hamsun Centre’, The Architectural Review 1351: 60–67. Selberg, T. 2010. ‘Places of Literary Memory’, Arv: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 66: 179–96. Sioli, A., and Y. Jung (eds). 2018. Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience. New York: Taylor & Francis. Storfjell, T. ‘Worlding and Echoes of America in Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil)’, in S. Dingstad et al. (eds), Knut Hamsun: Transgression and Worlding. Acta Nordica, Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press, pp. 189–203. Taylor, R. (ed.). 2019. Snøhetta: Collective Intuition. London: Phaidon Press. Tzortzi, K. 2015. Museum Space: Where Architecture Meets Museology. Farnham: Ashgate. Undset, S. 1947. ‘Guds skjønne døttre’, Verdens Gang, 22 December. Vaa, A., N.F. Høyum and E.F. Langdalen (eds). 2010. Hamsun, Holl, Hamarøy. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers. Venturi, R., D. Scott Brown and S. Izenour, S. 1972. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Watson, N.J. 2020. The Author’s Effects: On the Writer’s House Museum. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Witcomb, A. 2003. Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. London: Routledge.

Chapter 2

A Displaced Apartment of a Poet in a Museum Staging and Reception of Franz Grillparzer in the Wien Museum Eva-Maria Orosz

As for myself: I am not German, but Austrian; more precisely, Lower Austrian, and all things considered, Viennese —‘Die Nationalitätenfrage nach 1848 [The question of nationality after 1848]’, lecture by Franz Grillparzer, 1853

Since its opening in 1888, the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna (today’s Wien Museum), has featured extensive presentations paying tribute to the Austrian national poet Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872). Upon receipt of the entire estate of the poet in 1879 from Grillparzer’s sole heir Katharina Fröhlich, the City of Vienna agreed to exhibit the estate in an ‘appropriate’ space, which would bear the name Grillparzer Room (Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien 1888: 218). This gave rise to Vienna’s very first historical site to commemorate a poet – albeit, placed within a museum (Watson 2020: 10). Basically, there have been three Grillparzer presentations at the Wien Museum over the course of the past 130 years, and each presentation has been modelled on the poet’s actual apartment at Spiegelgasse 21 in Vienna’s city centre. For a museum’s expression of appreciation for a poet, a reconstructed apartment seemed the appropriate medium. Museologically, the aim was to combine a civic-secular historical site and a Period Room, two formats favoured by museums in the late nineteenth century for historical depictions (Schubinger 2009: 81–110; Rahl 2015: 41–57).1

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The home of a national poet integrated in a historical museum is able to perpetuate and stage identity in a very specific way. Not only the presentation of a displaced apartment – the ‘how’ – but also its contextual embedment in the museum and its depiction of history – the ‘where’ – simulate a reading and politico-cultural interpretation of historical identity. In the following, I will examine the exhibit’s deterioration to a relic due to the steady loss of significance of the national poet Grillparzer, which rendered it a historical object in and of itself, and how this happened. These considerations arise on the occasion of the structural and museological redesign of the Wien Museum, whose reopening is planned for 2023. As I am a curator at the museum and my research focuses on interior design and furnishing, I have been asked to participate in the curatorial conceptualization of the Grillparzer apartment as well as two other reconstructed Period Rooms (Orosz 2014: 263–84).2 The author John Irving delivered a devastating critique of Grillparzer’s poems and the museum’s commemorative site over forty years ago in his novel The World According to Garp: It was a perfectly ordinary room, but the bed worked too small – like a child’s bed. The writing table looked small, too. Not the bed or the table of an expansive writer, Garp thought. The wood was dark; everything looked very breakable; Garp thought his mother had a better room to write in. The writer whose room was enshrined in the Museum of the History of the City of Vienna was named Franz Grillparzer. Garp had never heard of him. … Garp would later argue that Grillparzer did not deserve to survive the nineteenth century. (Irving 1978: 325–26)

Garp considered Grillparzer’s stories unreadable. In his opinion, ‘Franz Grillparzer died forever in 1872 and, like a cheap local wine, does not travel very far from Vienna without spoiling’ (ibid.: 330–31). Franz Grillparzer, who was regarded as complex in his art as a writer and contradictory as a person, was still entirely relevant as a source of self-pride for the Austrians in the late 1970s. Grillparzer was born in 1791 in Vienna, capital of the Habsburg multinational state, in which via its crown lands more than ten different languages were spoken. He studied philology and law, entered public service and became director of the court chamber archives in Vienna. Grillparzer wrote his first play while still a student, enjoyed great success in the Hofburgtheater in 1819, and was given a five-year contract as Imperial and Royal Poet of the Court Theatre, which he nonetheless soon terminated. Grillparzer’s most important plays and works emerged in the Biedermeier mood of the years between 1820 and 1831, a restorative political epoch following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which greatly

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restricted political expression and action. The loyalist yet critical writer was spurned at times by censors, critics, and also audiences. In the historical drama König Ottokars Glück und Ende (King Ottokar, his rise and fall) (1823), which deals with the Habsburg Rudolf I’s victory over the somewhat Napoleonic Bohemian King Ottokar, Grillparzer included an ode to Austria, glorifying the concept of the Austrian state. Following the disastrous reception of his comedy Wehe dem, der lügt! (Woe to liars) in 1838 at Vienna’s Burgtheater, he withdrew from both the theatre and public life. Grillparzer was a precise and critical observer of political events in the Habsburg dynasty, and he loved Austria, for which he suffered. He saw the smouldering nationality conflict as a key factor in the crisis afflicting the Habsburg Empire’s state and social policies (Pichl 2016: 134). The nationalistic aspirations among the crown lands, which had arisen due to the different possibilities available to the ethnic groups to participate in shaping their own politics, led him to anticipate the monarchy’s collapse. In his journals he is revealed as an oppositional, bourgeois, contemporary and cultural critic. Grillparzer was again included in the Hofburgtheater’s programme around 1850, and was increasingly reviewed and appropriated primarily by German speakers as an Austrian classic, as the embodiment of the Austrian, as ‘patriotic’.

The Grillparzer Room 1888–1941 When the history museum was opened in the newly built city hall in 1888, the estate was exhibited in a three-part Grillparzer Room (Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien 1888: 218), in keeping with the previously mentioned agreement regarding the endowment and in ‘due admiration to the great Austrian poet’. A larger biographical section of the museum contained portraits of and artefacts from influential personalities in Vienna’s cultural life, primarily from music and theatre. The apartment’s division into foyer, room and cabinet reveal the museum management’s early efforts to replicate the apartment – without reconstructing its ground plan. Shown in the foyer are portraits of the poet and the Fröhlich sisters, who lived with Grillparzer from 1849 as lodgers. The poet met Katharina Fröhlich in 1821 and the two became engaged, yet never went on to actually exchange vows. From 1849, the three unmarried Fröhlich sisters looked after the aging poet, in a friendship agreement. The installation of the estate was carried out ‘with the greatest reverence’ (ibid.: 219). That is, all of the details in Grillparzer’s living room – ‘the Room’ – were reconstructed as meticulously as possible. Although the desk, library and

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writing utensils were, indeed, present, the attention of visitors was guided towards the environment in which Grillparzer lived and died rather than to his work as a writer. The space was staged as an authentic commemorative site and death room; as explained in the museum catalogue, the poet died here in a black leather arm chair on 21 January 1872 (ibid.: 225). Grillparzer’s writing of poetry and the reception of his works was presented in the cabinet – former library – where original furniture was combined with three museum display cases. A high desk referred to the act of writing; Grillparzer had purchased it with his earnings from a drama, and he wrote his further works at it (ibid.: 226).3 Only one of the display cases showed original manuscripts of poems and plays (Figure 2.1). Their selection was intended as a staging of Austrian identity: Sei mir gegrüßt mein Oesterreich (I greet you, my Austria), Volkshymne (nationalistic anthem), and the plays Ahnfrau (The ancestress) 1817 (first sheet), König Ottokars Glück und Ende (King Ottokar, his rise and fall) 1825 (first page), as well as Hero und Leander (Hero and Leander) (first page) (ibid.: 231).4 This comprises the presentation of the literary estate, which according to the endowment, was made up primarily of printed and unprinted handwritten documents. Evident here is a link to other then-contemporary literature exhibitions that integrated autographs and further material traces of the life of the writer in their presentations (Seibert 2011: 18).5 This first presentation of the Grillparzer Room was able to attract the visitors’ attention with a great number of beloved relics, which attested to a deep veneration for the poet and a still vivid memory of him.6 In a charged relationship between sensual closeness and temporal distance, the presentation was oriented on a fascination with individual objects associated in an authentic, immediate way with the poet. The list of objects of homage and those who donated them, which ultimately filled a dozen pages in the museum catalogue, represented the high regard for Grillparzer and his social environment. Although the Grillparzer Room remained essentially unchanged for fifty years in the form described,7 the institution continued to study the literary inheritance. Key was the work by Karl Glossy (1848–1937) who took over the management of the archive, library and Historical Museum of the City of Vienna in 1890 (Hundert Jahre Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien 1987: 102). The literary and theatre scholar co-founded the Vienna-based Grillparzer society, which opens up and mediates new approaches to the poet’s work. The society, whose yearbook Glossy edited for many years, is still active today and is among the oldest literary societies in Austria. In 1891, Glossy put together the Franz Grillparzer exhibition in the museum on the occasion of the poet’s one hundredth birthday; in

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1903, he published the writer’s letters and journals; and in 1905, he edited the catalogue, ‘Das Grillparzer-Zimmer im Wiener Rathaus’, which he describes as ‘the most beautiful adornment to the city’s collection’ (Glossy 1905: II ). The museum’s presentation of the room where Grillparzer lived and died can be considered a success, as Franz Kafka, who enjoyed reading the poet’s journals, could not differentiate between the original and the museum’s reconstructed room – the latter distributed on a photo postcard. In a

Figure 2.1. Grillparzer’s Library at the City Hall, in 1891. Photograph by R. Lechner. Vienna, Wien Museum, inv. No. 1667/2. © Wien Museum / Foto Birgit und Peter Kainz, used with permission.

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letter to his pen pal and confidant Grete Bloch in 1914, Kafka states: ‘For my part, I, wouldn’t want to be in Vienna, not even in May. … The Grillparzer Room in City Hall is the one thing I should like to see; I missed it, not having heard of it until too late’ (Kafka 1973: 348). Several weeks later, Kafka urged Grete Bloch to have a look at the room and describe it to him. With the help of her description, Kafka imagined his own physical presence in the room, and envisioned living there: It was very kind of you to go to the museum. I did not expect to learn anything new (although I actually did), but I felt the need to know you had been to the Grillparzer Room and that thus a physical tie had also been established between me and the room. One doesn’t get more than that even by going oneself, at least not much more, especially in view of the exhibits having been moved around. Is the picture you sent me that of the actual room or the room at the City Hall? A lovely room in any case, pleasant to live in, pleasant to sleep in, in an armchair at sunset. (Ibid.: 404)

The Grillparzer Apartment 1941–57 A ‘Grillparzer Week’ was held in Vienna on the occasion of the writer’s 150th birthday in January 1941. The Nazi politician Reich Governor Baldur von Schirach was patron of the event, and the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda provided ample funding (DeutschSchreiner 1994: 181). The museum held an anniversary exhibition with a ‘true-to-original reconstruction’ of the entire apartment as its centrepiece (Figure 2.2). The artistic realization was entrusted to the academic painter Otto Völkel (Wanschura 1943: 18),8 and the curatorial concept of the staging to Reinhold Backmann (1884–1947), a Grillparzer scholar and later temporary state librarian at the Vienna City Library (ibid.: 20). Backmann, a German scholar, born in Leipzig, was a member of the NSDAP, the national socialist party, and since 1937, co-editor together with August Sauer of the historical-critical Grillparzer edition. In a study, Backmann staunchly supported the building of an enclosure for the reconstruction of the apartment, and presented a description based on a precise study of all the pictorial sources, Grillparzer’s own depiction in his journals, and descriptions from former guests, while also including his own interpretation (Backmann 1937). He thus wanted to see the reconstruction of ‘trivial matters’ of everyday life that were not depicted in the paintings of the room by Rudolf von Alts – such as two bell pulls: ‘My proposal does not stop at a mere restoration, but rather, also extends to supplementation of missing parts’.9 The large and spectacular exhibit of more than eighty-two

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square meters had the qualities and impact of a stage setting, and integrated original structural elements (window and door frames, etc.). Visitors were given the illusion of visiting Grillparzer: they could ring the original bell at the door and enter through the front door into the foyer shared by Grillparzer and the Fröhlichs, and from there, had access to the library (Cabinet) and ‘the Room’. The windows facing the courtyard and the street were backlit, the frontage across the way indicated by scenery. This staging intentionally relied on people’s emotions: ‘Through their simplicity and true-to-life nature, the entire apartment and furnishings have a strong effect on the viewer, and through the knowledge that Grillparzer walked through this space countless times, that he lived and suffered surrounded by these objects, sets the visitor in a hallowed mood’ (Wanschura 1943: 21). The suggestive staging was a gesture of homage by the national socialists who celebrated Grillparzer as a großdeutsche poet (one belonging to the ‘greater German area’). The programme for the Grillparzer Week in January 1941 served to disentangle Grillparzer from Austria. The theatre scholar Deutsch-Schreiner points to the political and cultural intentions: The poet was situated as a ‘herald of the German nation’, who had suffered his entire life from ‘Austrian separatism’ and had yearned for a ‘Großdeutsche empire’. Grillparzer worked as an integrational figure meant to emotionally bond the

Figure 2.2. The living room of the  Grillparzer apartment in Vienna City Hall, in 1941. Vienna, Wien Museum, inv. No. 226.496/1. Photo: © Wien Museum used with permission.

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population of what was now the ‘Ostmark’10 to the ‘Third Reich’, in order to gain a new identity as the ‘south-German clan’, within Großdeutschland. This prevented the ambitions of the ‘Ostmärker’, who, after the loss of their political independence, endeavoured to guarantee themselves at least a distinct cultural position with reference to Grillparzer. (Deutsch-Schreiner 1994: 181)

The reconstruction of Grillparzer’s entire apartment presented a new interpretation of the memorial site and genius loci. Backmann banished the museum display cases containing manuscripts and objects of homage from this ‘holy’ area, a move that would have future consequences.11 After the close of the exhibition, the new Grillparzer apartment remained preserved, and following its storage outside of the museum during the war it was reinstalled in the museum in the City Hall in 1947. At that point at the latest, the museum assigned it a second level of meaning. The memorial site, which during the war had become a walk-through apartment, was therewith also an example of Biedermeier domestic life and early bourgeois Viennese interior design.12 After 1947, the museum saw the Grillparzer apartment dualistically: as a site of commemoration and as a ‘typical old-Viennese interior’ in dignified bourgeois style.13 Its furnishings and the original building structure were subsequently the objects of analysis in studies of living spaces. The Forschungsstelle für Wohnen und Bauen (Research department for housing and construction) founded in the Stadtbauamt (City building office) in 1952, led by the architect Franz Schuster (1892–1972) who took advantage of the changing political systems and was particularly active in social housing, had the exhibit documented in photos and evidently studied it in great detail.14

The Grillparzer Apartment 1961–2019 and Aspects of a History of Mentalities With the historical museum’s move into a modern museum building (1959 to 1961), Backmann’s Grillparzer apartment was shown once again in a new staging, which was on exhibit until the closure of the museum in 2019 (Figure 2.3). From the perspective of historical preservation, a ‘realistic reconstruction’ had been carried out (Pötschner 1962: 20). The costly structure was solid and of good quality, and most importantly, it was precisely constructed, replicating even the irregularities and thicknesses of the walls of the building on Spiegelgasse.15 For the first time, even the original floorboards were used. Nearly all of the means of staging from 1941 were adopted, but a critical or distanced attitude to the Nazi installation and its politico-cultural context was missing.

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The museological texts in which the Historical Museum presented its new building and permanent exhibition make evident how the Grillparzer apartment was intended to be seen at the time. An increased emphasis on the high standards of its historical preservation were meant to veil the relocated apartment’s curatorial staging. ‘The apartment… should not be seen as a museum piece. It is a memorial site, and most visitors, who enter with a sense of awe, consider it as such. For nearly a quarter century, Grillparzer lived – which for him meant dreamed, thought and suffered – in these spaces’ (Pötschner 1962: 27). Museum director Franz Glück (1899–1981; director 1949–68) underscored the typology of the large exhibit as a Period Room conveying a ‘true feeling of the times’: ‘One of the principles of the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna’s installation is to avoid false connections. Only those interiors are shown that have been preserved in full, and whose precise dimensions are known. … it is also a unique testimony to the mid-century; Grillparzer’s apartment, preserved, with all of its contents, genuine’ (Glück and Pötschner 1963: 10–11). With this didactic integration in the chronology of the permanent exhibition, the director advanced his interpretation of the higher-ranking issue of Period Rooms in museums as cultural-historical testimony. The Grillparzer apartment, understood in this way as both memorial site and Period Room, was situated in the museum’s Biedermeier section. Important paintings and the Biedermeier style were presented on its outer walls, as belonging to a specifically Viennese culture. In comparison with the

Figure 2.3. The living room of the Grillparzer apartment in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna, in 2009.  Photograph by Enver Hirsch. Vienna, Wien Museum. © Wien Museum / Foto Enver Hirsch, used with permission.

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first presentation in the City Hall in 1888, fewer memorial objects – such as diplomas – were on display, and the selection of literary archives from the estate was missing entirely. What is symbolized in the overlapping of a Period Room presenting old-Viennese interior design with a site commemorating Grillparzer from 1961 onwards can be identified as a building block of an Austrian national awareness that had to be developed after the Second World War. In the initial decades after 1945, Franz Grillparzer was accorded an important role. For example, when the Burgtheater, whose building had been burned down, resumed its programme in emergency quarters on 30 April 1945, Grillparzer’s Sappho was the first piece performed. Although that can be attributed to organizational issues, it was nonetheless politically and culturally significant. In the postwar reconstruction period, Grillparzer was an important symbolic figure, especially for conservatives. For the reopening of the rebuilt Burgtheater in October 1955, a fierce cultural-political debate was carried out, analysing what piece should be performed. While the socialists made the case for Egmont, Goethe’s drama on freedom, the conservative Catholic camp argued for Grillparzer’s look backward in König Ottokars Glück und Ende. The coalition government was split. The conservative minister of education threatened to step down should the decision be made in favour of the classical German author rather than the Austrian national poet, and he won out in the end. Traditional values and virtues were highly touted in the political climate of the conservatively led Austrian government, which Grillparzer, as an old-Viennese figure, was meant to uphold. Grillparzer was harnessed in the presentation of the ‘new Austrian identity’. Localized in Grillparzer’s work were ‘harmony and depth of feeling’, and the preserving of ‘eternal human’ values in a special Austrian way. Thus, also the cloak that the Austrians donned as their new image, which saw Austrians as musical, strong in character, faithful, and honest, and beyond anything excessive or radical – which, for its part, was seemingly ‘blood-based’, and in any case, an existential-ontological definition – and saw Austria ‘as a refuge of reconciliation’. (Deutsch-Schreiner 1994: 189–90)

In a 1965/66 performance, audience members at the Burgtheater still spontaneously rose to applaud the scene with Josef Meinrad’s ode to Austria, the ‘Loblied auf Österreich’ in König Ottokars Glück und Ende.16 As long as Grillparzer was anchored in collective memory, the memorial site in the museum could be viewed as a site of identity formation. Whereas Garp, the hero in John Irving’s novel, had no interest in the dramas or the reconstructed apartment in 1978, a questionnaire from 1979

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showed that Grillparzer was quite well known in Austria, even if he was not accorded any great importance (Bruckmüller 1996: 107). Although he was read and taught in Austrian schools until the 1990s, and his sayings were given as homework and final exam themes, Grillparzer’s importance had diminished rapidly (Strigl 2016: 10). Presenting an ever-greater obstacle in the classroom was the writer’s indirect form of expression and ‘halting language’, which young people no longer understood, and which no longer made the content of the plays accessible (Pfeifer 1989). Austrian education policy for German lessons has long distanced itself from a traditional national history and reading of classics (Strigl 2016: 20). Young museum visitors and international tourists who are not acquainted with the poet’s significant production of meaning in literary and cultural history therefore have no choice but to view the memorial site simply as a Period Room and as an example of domestic life around 1850. The ‘trueto-life’ memorial site has, itself, become history.

Outlook The concept for the upcoming Grillparzer presentation at the new Wien Museum is currently being developed with a focus on the key questions: What narrative does the museum want to display with its Grillparzer apartment? And how is it possible to stir visitors’ interest in a poet who has fallen from the canon and his living space? The Wien Museum has decided, as of now, to reconstruct the semi-authentic historical staging (Hoffmann 2018: 173–76) of its Grillparzer apartment with significant changes. Rather than all three spaces, only the living room will be on view, which should be made more self-explanatory through a series of curatorial measures. In contrast to the former staging, a large walk-through area will make clear the exhibit’s status as a reconstructed room view (ibid.: 47) in a museum-based staging. Beyond that, taking Grillparzer’s loss of significance into consideration, it will be necessary to render the memorial site recognizable again as the site of a writer, and highlight and integrate writing utensils and manuscripts. Equally essential will be to show the politico-cultural appropriation of Grillparzer and the historicity of the Grillparzer Room as a museum object. Contemporary literary scholars have recommended an approach to Grillparzer via his autobiography, which reveals aspects of his personality – misanthropic as well as humorous – or via selected topics, such as the examination of the role of women in his theatre plays (Strigl 2016: 21; Dusini, Kaufmann and Reinstadler 2017). The Wien Museum will

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most definitely follow the course of his life and his unusual relationship to the unmarried Fröhlich sisters, with whom he lived under one roof, and thereby highlight gender roles around 1850. Reflection on one’s own writing, which through the use of social media has become more important and widespread than ever before, is a valuable tool for bridging Grillparzer’s writing parlour to the visitors’ present-day lives. Perhaps the new Grillparzer Room in the universal Wien Museum can invite a critical look at contemporary media, and thereby contrast the writing subjected to censorship in the Biedermeier period with that that currently triggers outrage in social media. For that, it will be necessary to select and integrate manuscripts from the writer’s literary estate. As compensation for the discontinued performative character of the exhibit (visitors will no longer be able to walk through the spaces), alternative forms of visitor interaction are possible – once again, on the theme of writing. The writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach reports that at breakfast time, Grillparzer would write verse to express his mood at the moment, and then crumple it up (Ebner-Eschenbach 1915: 2). Anna Fröhlich would unfold and arrange the verse, learn it by heart, and to Grillparzer’s dismay, recite it back to him. This anecdote, which crumpled paper in the writing parlour could refer to, might perhaps be an invitation to visitors to reflect on their own acts of writing, their motivation for writing, and the expectations they have associated with it – those that have been met, and also those that have not.

Acknowledgements Reuse of short passages in this chapter by kind permission of transcript Verlag, which previously published Eva-Maria Orosz, ‘Historische Wohnräume im Wien Museum: Vom Personenkult zum Wohnbild’, in I. Nierhaus and A. Nierhaus (eds),  Wohnen Zeigen: Modelle und Akteure des Wohnens in Architektur und visueller Kultur, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2014. DOI: 10.14361/transcript.9783839424551.263. Eva-Maria Orosz studied art history and history in Vienna, and has been on the staff of the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna since 1996, and curator for applied arts and furniture at the Wien Museum since 2004. She has curated exhibitions and published on Vienna’s art and cultural history. Her research focuses are domestic culture and interior architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, period rooms, and museum and collection histories.

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Notes   1. When Grillparzer’s home was demolished in 1900, the museum dismantled all of the infrastructural elements such as the wooden floor, door and window frames, windows, and stove, and had his living area (hallway, cabinet [original library], and living space) carefully measured with a view to a 1:1 reconstruction. This, supplemented by watercolours of the rooms by the artists Rudolf von Alt and Franz Alt (which served as documentation of the mood and colours, among other things), in addition to material evidence from the life of the poet, provided the basis for every staging from then on.  2. The other two interiors were an unfurnished Pompei-style salon with wall panelling and silk carpets from 1800, and the architect Adolf Loos’s living space and sitting room with fireplace from 1903.  3. From the payment for Ahnfrau in 1817, Grillparzer purchased the high desk, on which he wrote the plays Sappho in 1818 and Das goldene Vliess in 1819/20 (Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien 1888: 226).  4. A Grillparzer exhibition was also put on in 1891. The catalogue listed dramatic plays from his youth (Führer durch die Ausstellung im Neuen Rathaus zur Feier des 100. Geburtstags Franz Grillparzers 1891: 21–22, 26–27).  5. The significance in the register of the endowment was weighted as follows: (1) printed and not printed manuscripts with the poems; (2) documents, diplomas, remembrances; (3) book collection; and then (4) furnishings from the room and the cabinet (Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien 1888: 218).  6. The memory of Grillparzer was still tangible in 1891 on the occasion of the exhibition for his one hundredth birthday, as people enthusiastically contributed numerous objects, even if only loosely related to the writer (Glossy 1905: II).  7. In 1921 the Historical Museum was able to purchase in the art market three pieces of furniture formerly owned by the Fröhlich sisters, which were added to the presentation in the foyer of the Grillparzer Room (see Wien Museum,

inv. no. 43: 440–42).

 8. See the replica of the original Grillparzer apartment at Spiegelgasse 21 for the Grillparzer exhibition in 1941 (Wien Museum, file: Grillparzer, III/4 1377/40).  9. ‘I would like to place two other fruit baskets made of cane on the little table, as well as a large marble fruit bowl’ (Backmann 1937: 188, 191). 10. The Nazi name for Austria (Ostmark) and Austrians (Ostmärker). 11. ‘All display case style is forbidden in the framework of the holy room’ (Backmann 1937: 192). 12. During the Nazi era, also in its acquisition policies, the museum focused on ‘old-Viennese interior design’ and purchased Biedermeier furniture ensembles (see Orosz 2012: 263–67). 13. Wien Museum, file 135/1878. ‘Grillparzer und Wien. Zur Wiedereröffnung des Grillparzerzimmers in den Räumen der St. Sammlungen’ (typed manuscript).

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14. See photos taken by the research department. Wien Museum, inv. no. 97.334. 15. See Wien Museum, file 135/1878. Letter Wenzel Hartl to the Magistrate of the City of Vienna on 17 March 1961. 16. Interview with Elfriede Kmonicek, secondary school teacher in Vienna, 30 January 2020. The mentioned staging with Josef Meinrad as Ottokar von Horneck premiered in December 1965 and was performed until 21 May 1966, a total of thirty-five times (see Alth 1977: 756).

References Alth, M.v. 1977. Burgtheater 1776–1976: Aufführungen und Besetzungen von zweihundert Jahren, vol. 1. Vienna: Ueberreuter. Backmann, R. 1937. ‘“Willst Du, ich soll Hütten baun?…”: Eine Studie über Grillparzers Alterswohnung’, Jahrbuch der Grillparzer-Gesellschaft 34: 173–205. Bruckmüller, E. 1996. Nation Österreich: Kulturelles Bewußtsein und gesellschaftlich-politische Prozesse, 2nd edn. Vienna: Böhlau. Deutsch-Schreiner, E. 1994. ‘Die Österreicher und ihr Grillparzer’, in H. Haider-Pregler and E. Deutsch-Schreiner (eds), Stichwort Grillparzer. Vienna: Böhlau, 181–94. Dusini, A., K. Kaufmann and F. Reinstadler (eds). 2017. Franz Grillparzer: Selbstbiographie. Salzburg: Jung und Jung Verlag. Ebner-Eschenbach, M. 1915. ‘Meine Erinnerungen an Grillparzer’, Neue Freie Presse, 24 October, 1–2. Führer durch die Ausstellung im Neuen Rathaus zur Feier des 100. Geburtstags Franz Grillparzers. 1891. Vienna: Gemeinderaths-Präsidium. Glossy, K. 1905. ‘Das Grillparzer-Zimmer im Wiener Rathause’. Glück, F., and F. Pötschner. 1963. ‘Die Neuaufstellung der Schausammlung im Historischen Museum der Stadt Wien’, Museumskunde: Fachzeitschrift herausgegeben vom Deutschen Museumsbund 32(1): 1–18. Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien (ed.). 1888. Katalog des Historischen Museums der k.k. Haupt- und Residenzstadt Wien. Vienna: Eigenverlag der Museen der Stadt Wien, pp. 218–31. Hoffmann, R.A. 2018. An Literatur erinnern: Zur Erinnerungsarbeit literarischer Museen und Gedenkstätten. Bielefeld: transcript. Hundert Jahre Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien. 1987. Vienna: Eigenverlag der Museen der Stadt Wien. Irving, J. 1978. The World According to Garp. New York: E.P. Dutton. Kafka, F. 1973. Letters to Felice, edited by E. Heller and J. Born, trans. J. Stern and E. Duckworth. New York: Schocken Book. Orosz, E.-M. 2012. ‘Wiener Kunstgewerbe in den Städtischen Sammlungen: Einblicke in die Erwerbsstrategien der Jahre 1938 bis 1945’, in E. Blimlinger and M. Mayer, Kunst sammeln, Kunst handeln: Beiträge des Internationalen Symposiums in Wien. Vienna: Böhlau, pp. 255–67.

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. 2014. ‘Historische Wohnräume im Wien Museum: Vom Personenkult zum Wohnbild’, in I. Nierhaus and A. Nierhaus (eds), Wohnen zeigen: Modelle und Akteure des Wohnens in Architektur und visueller Kunst. Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 263–84. Pfeifer, I. 1989. ‘Was ist los mit Grillparzer?’, in ibf – Informationsdienst für Bildungspolitik und Forschung, report from 1 February 1989, typoscript. Vienna: Archive Elfriede Kmonicek. Pichl, R. 2016. ‘Das Elend des Nationalismus’, in B. Fetz, M. Hansel and H. Schweiger, Franz Grillparzer: Ein Klassiker für die Gegenwart. Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, pp. 133–37. Pötschner, P. 1962. ‘Die Wiederherstellung der Alterswohnung Grillparzers im Historischen Museum der Stadt Wien’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege 16: 15–29. Rahl, P. 2015. ‘Schillers Häuser und der Anfang weltlicher-bürgerlicher Gedenkstättenkultur in Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in A. Bohnenkamp et al. (eds), Häuser der Erinnerung: Zur Geschichte der Personengedenkstätte in Deutschland. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, pp. 41–57. Schubinger, B. 2009. ‘Period Rooms als museographische Gattung: “Historische Zimmer” in Schweizer Museen’, Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 66: 81–110. Seibert, P. 2011. ‘Literaturausstellungen und ihre Geschichte’, in A. Bohnenkamp and S. Vandenrath (eds), Wort-Räume. Zeichen-Wechsel. Augen-Poesie: Zur Theorie und Praxis von Literaturausstellungen. Göttingen: Wallstein, pp. 15–37. Strigl, D. 2016. ‘“Und die Größe ist gefährlich”: Über den schwierigen Umgang mit einem Klassiker’, in B. Fetz, M. Hansel and H. Schweiger (eds), Franz Grillparzer: Ein Klassiker für die Gegenwart. Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, pp. 9–23. Wanschura, V. 1943. ‘Die Grillparzer-Ausstellung in Wien 1941’, Jahrbuch der Grillparzer-Gesellschaft 3: 1–26. Watson, N.J. 2020. The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 3

From Cobwebs to a Web-Based Reality Drawing Young Adults into a Memorial House Anna Benedek

Preface When, at the beginning of 2020, I finished this chapter about digital solutions and virtual exhibitions used in the museum sector, and stories outside the museum space itself, I had no real idea of the changes we were about to experience. I had no idea of how my own everyday life would be impacted by the three months of total lockdown introduced in Hungary in mid-March in response to the Covid pandemic, nor how the life of the museum would change in the months ahead. Working at the Petőfi Literary Museum (PIM) in Budapest, and being forced to turn our backs on our former goals, our team had to come up with a set of different solutions, which evolved from one day to the next. Whereas before, the most important goal had been to get as many visitors as possible into the museum and appeal to the greatest possible range of age groups – schoolchildren, university students, adults, and seniors – in mid-March the building was completely shuttered. Thus, there were no exhibition openings, no eagerly awaited annual literary festival, no city walks and readings, and no Night of the Museums event in midsummer. How, then, do you hang on to your audience? Communication and the announcement of new events was through various online platforms even before lockdown: we regularly shared content on Facebook, YouTube and Spotify. This included digital recordings and the series of interviews I will discuss below too. But as visitors could

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no longer come to the museum, we could no longer prepare exhibitions or carry on our background work in the museum itself in the traditional way either. The Digital Archive at PIM was already accessible online but was mostly known only to researchers. From March, however, we made the sound and video recordings in the collection, including interviews and readings, available to the public at large. A blog documenting the professional life of the museum was also given a boost during this period, while those colleagues working from home dealt with literary themes related to authors, life stories, and topics that had already been the subject of previous exhibitions. Among other things, ‘lockdown interviews’ with literary figures were produced, as well as readings and theatre-based readings without audiences, which were broadcast online. Additionally, the museum’s photographers made portraits of writers behind windows, and the museum’s educational staff held virtual walks and virtual tours of the museum, using online applications. At the same time as these changes, we were also increasingly thinking about the extent to which keeping in touch with our audiences would impact the museum and its functioning as a whole. Who is it that we can reach like this, and who do we lose? The people who can connect in this way – will they prove long-term adherents? And how can we make room for traditional works of art and museology in the chaotic jumble of the sudden explosion of online events? The approaches demonstrated in this chapter try to present this changing landscape and approach, from a time before lockdowns, through to disinfectant at the gate, and temperature-checked, masked visitors.

Introduction: Entrance through the Bedroom As a mother of three teenagers, I have an almost daily problem of how to convince my children and their friends to indulge in traditional culture and literature. They rarely read books, let alone printed ones. They spend most of their free time in front of various screens. They browse through YouTube channels and online forums, or play computer games, and they spend hours chatting and ‘criticizing’ music and movies. But should they come across anything slightly resembling school or curricular material, they immediately become bored and exhausted. Working at PIM, I have the same experience when I see guided visits for classes of adolescents. As most of the exhibitions are about dead poets and printed material, no wonder you see yawning, blank faces and boredom. This is not a unique problem, for it is common among most

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students in the Western world. How could we transform their minds to forget the cobwebs and dust surrounding books and museums, and integrate them into the colourful and interesting world of literature? The problem is partly rooted in the Hungarian education system. The average secondary school is quite traditional. The students have to study literature in chronological order, focusing on biographical facts and events. They can hardly imagine that these writers were real people with familiar challenges. Young people learn that these men (since most of the poets in textbooks are men) starved to death, went blind or died very young of tuberculosis, were abused by their teachers and parents, and were suppressed by political powers. Literature classes in secondary schools focus mainly on authors from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, on poets who were active both culturally and politically at the time of the independence movements of around 1830 and 1848, along with writers who attempted to introduce West European traditions in literature and philosophy.1 It is difficult to explain to a young student today why nationalism and patriotism are connected to progress in the nineteenth century, though the connection would have been obvious for people at the time. One can also learn about literature through historical events and autobiographical facts, and many books with a more intimate focus on the private life of historical authors have been published recently. Anecdotes from these biographical narratives are also circulated on the internet, mainly focusing on details of their private lives: marriages, love affairs, strange habits, and so on. Sometimes it seems that such books have made ‘an entrance through the bedroom’,2 with interesting and exciting stories serving the propagation of reading on the one hand and simplifying interpretation of the literary texts on the other. Through these books, students are made to feel that there is a hidden, alternative view of literature, even if they rarely contain new information for specialists and researchers. But these facts, given without context – a drug addiction or alcoholism, love affairs with prostitutes – are interpreted as if the oeuvre of these authors could be solved through such mysteries. Below I will discuss the growing desire to discover the real author behind the texts that is signalled by such books. Museum workers such as curators, museum education experts and programme coordinators have to take note of this effect, which can potentially make people who are outsiders to literary culture into the future visitors of exhibitions. We are asked by visitors on an almost daily basis about the truth of these legends, or so-called hidden facts. It is also clear that one can relate more to literature through recognizing similarities to one’s own experience, and we

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assist in making this connection. However, building on personal features is not a new curatorial practice. Exhibition spaces have changed or grown significantly in recent years, and it has become easier to keep in touch with visitors before and after a visit to the museum. Via online platforms and Web 2.0 content, we can share details about the exhibition and get more feedback from our audience. It has also become easier to measure the number of viewings of published articles or posts, so as to assess the success or failure of a certain topic. My focus here is on the changing spaces of memorial exhibitions – or to introduce a new term, ‘virtual memory spaces’ – taking as my departure point examples from my own experience as a museologist. According to PIM’s statistics, most of our visitors are school groups, aged eight to eighteen. A school’s top priority for their students is to learn more about Hungarian literary topics, especially about Sándor Petőfi, a distinguished poet from the nineteenth century. Working in PIM’s Media Archives Department, we would like these youngsters to become frequent guests in our museum and participants in our activities. Apart from these groups, we try to reach young adults who have finished school and perhaps given up the habit of reading and relating to literature, or those who like reading but do not have any connection to contemporary culture or institutions. Here I will present three literary memorial projects, where we – museologists at the media archive – have attempted to extend the limits of our previous practice, so as to reach out to our potential future audiences. Preparing these projects, we have had to rethink certain questions: Who do we want to reach? Through what channels? How do we want to establish connections with them? What are their expectations? How can we use the material in our audiovisual archive, the department’s recordings of readings, and oral history interviews with authors and literary historians? A common feature of these projects is that we attempt to enlarge exhibitions with digitized recordings, trying to make separate spaces for them. We have tried to underline that our sound and video recordings can function as an organic part of the collections of a literary museum, not only as illustrations or additional appendices to a memorial exhibition. By introducing digitized recordings, we have wished to emphasize their personal and authentic quality. We have also wanted to show that they can be a possible channel through which to reach younger generations. In the media archives collection, we saw potential for presenting authors’ ideas to young people, to make use of the cult of fandom somehow, and to involve a wider audience in reshaping the ‘cultic’ space around major literary figures.

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With the help of three examples, I will examine the transformation of memorial spaces in the twenty-first century. Thanks to virtual connections through webpages and social media platforms, these transformations are the consequences of our changing relationship with privacy and community. Because the visitors enter the exhibitions through these interfaces, many of them find additional knowledge about our work on these platforms. The collection of a media archives department has special importance today, or at least it is more important and visible than it was thirty years ago. I will argue that how we deal with memories in written texts or in audiovisual interviews today is connected to how we exhibit them. The first project was organized within the celebration of the bicentenary of the Hungarian poet János Arany, titled ‘Arany 200’. It offered connections to a poetic world outside the exhibition room, via the museum’s social network presence and website. Two hundred short videos were made, each no more than three minutes long and consisting of a statement by living artists and celebrities. These could be seen online, as a tableau of opinions and also as a collection of the readers’ own relationships with the persona and poetic world of a nineteenth-century poet. The second project was intended to address the museum’s blind spots, focusing on those people who rarely visit museums. This story is about the relationship between personal memory of the memorialized author and official remembrance, through a memorial house, now under the aegis of PIM.3 The question was how we could enlarge the cultic space with the views and experiences of a visitor without literary training. We at the Media Archives Department tried to connect these personal experiences to the cult of the poet Attila József by displaying the personal memories of a contemporary literary fan of the poet. The third project was a literary tour, an activity outside the space of the museum, on the streets of Buda. There are several reasons why György Petri, a cultic poet of the socialist era, might lack a memorial place. How could we evoke this poet without connecting him to one physical space? Is it possible to connect the texts of an author to biographical facts not connected to his home? In a rapidly changing world, where one often finds buildings demolished or in ruins, how could we point out somebody’s places and memories? The methodology of our projects is rooted in our department’s past. From the beginning of the 1960s, oral history interviews were made by the Media Archives Department, and pre-existing recordings were also collected from writers, poets, literary historians and close friends and relatives of these individuals. These were preserved on tape, and from the

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2010s onwards in the form of digitized recordings. We also collect movies and film tapes, portraits of authors, and recordings of public readings and other public appearances. The core collection of the department is a series of interviews from the 1960s. Portraits and memorial interviews were recorded by the authors’ own contemporaries and family members. This genre was given new meaning and relevance in the new millennium. Thanks to the published memoirs and oral history interviews of recent years, a new window opened onto the private and hidden life of the socialist era. Some of the recordings from the collection of the media archives were published in book form,4 and even interviews with more or less unknown figures were given a new context in a new spotlight. The other parts of the collection are readings from well-known authors, now in a digitized format, which brings new content and hence activity to our online platforms, as many of these readings were shared by readers and museum visitors on their own Facebook pages. In preparing our projects, we have attempted to learn from previous experiences and have adopted new technical tools in our recordings and in their use. On a more theoretical level, we have had to rethink our relationship with confessionary and autobiographical genres in order to reflect changes in memorial projects and celebrations as public events. The main focus of this chapter is thus to highlight ways in which literary museums can connect to younger generations by finding those pieces in their collections that can be integrated into educational activities and attract youngsters, who could be getting in touch with literary themes and projects, as possible visitors to a literary museum. I also focus on catching the moment when new virtual spaces change the cult of a classical author. How can we enlarge, or soften, these cults by using the memories of our own contemporaries? How can we transmit this cult to future readers? Can we involve ‘fandom’ in curatorial practice? And on a more practical level, how can we use mediality and virtuality (digitized sound and visual recordings) in contemporary exhibitions?

Participation in a Memory Process Spaces of memory as starting points of remembrance connect oral traditions with the shared histories of a community. As communities have been given new dimensions in the partially private spaces of social networks on the internet, places of memory (les lieux de mémoire, cf. Nora et al. 1984–92; Nora and Kritzman 1996–98) are now located in virtual space as well – for example, in the form of memorial websites or the

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websites of the virtual exhibition of an author. How can we who work at museums link these online acts of memorialization to real buildings and the relics of once-living authors? Although literary museums and especially writers’ houses focus mainly on the past and on the lives of previously living authors, visitor expectations change over time. Why do people visit such places? What are the expectations of a twenty-first-century visitor or a student in the virtual era, whose first reflex might be to check the Wi-Fi connection so as to share some moments of their presence at the museum? It is impossible for us to know whether this visitor wants to connect to the exhibited objects or is just checking the weather report or continuing a conversation with friends in a chatroom. Whatever their motives and interest, we should offer them a chance to use our virtual network and alternative content. Nicola Watson emphasizes the motivations of a nineteenth-century literary tourist as a witness of the recent past, as someone who would like to get closer to an author’s oeuvre by visiting a place familiar from biographies: This period [the eighteenth and the nineteenth century] saw the practice of visiting places associated with particular books in order to savour text, place and their interrelations grow into a commercially significant phenomenon, witnessing the rise of William Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford, Robert Burns’ Alloway and the Brontë sisters’ Haworth, amongst other flourishing sites of native literary pilgrimage. (Watson 2006: 1)

Watson later develops on the idea of literary tourism as a form of heritage: [Tourists] could feel the piety of the pilgrim of the past visiting the Holy Land: ‘pilgrimage’ to the relics of writers is based on a Protestant memory of Catholic pilgrimage to adore the relics of saints, so too a pilgrimage to a writer’s birthplace must contain memories of the core Christian pilgrimage to see Bethlehem in the Holy Land. (Ibid.: 57)

The ideology behind pilgrimage to literary places is more complex than I could describe in a few words, but as Watson emphasizes later, it is connected to a kind of feeling of being chosen, that one could feel or enjoy a text in the very place of writing – even if it is a place of dubious fate, like Môtiers-Travers in Rousseau’s life (Watson 2011: 7).5 Although the social context two hundred years ago was very different, the desire to connect to something in person, and feeling the uniqueness of an author’s oeuvre that Watson describes concerning the feelings of readers of Rousseau, is similar to present fandoms surrounding celebrities. This form of

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fandom is different from one that is driven by the works of cultic books or television series, as it originates from the ‘reality hunger’ – searching for autobiographical facts in fiction. It is the name of an author that makes the ideology machine work. Many need heroes or stars, and a real place in which to get in touch with them in person. Harald Hendrix writes that ‘[a]s a medium of remembrance, writers’ houses not only recall the poets and novelists who dwelt in them, but also the ideologies of those who turned them into memorial sites’ (Hendrix 2008a: 17). Like Hendrix, I would emphasize the need to examine the ideologies behind the buildings. Evoking a moment from Hungary in the early twentieth century, we have to consider the foundation of the first writers’ house to become a museum, as a result of a civic movement organized by official literary circles. The house was that of the iconic poet of the Romantic era, Sándor Petőfi, who died in 1849. The Petőfi House6 opened in 1909, after a determined effort to collect the poet’s real or presumed belongings. The founding of the Petőfi House – the predecessor of the present Petőfi Literary Museum – was encouraged not only by the institutionalization of the Petőfi cult, but also by the realization that the writer’s papers, although part of national heritage, were not included in the collections of libraries, museums and archives. An undertaking to preserve these valuable papers was therefore launched by a circle of writers, the Petőfi Society, journalists and scholars. They ensured that the Petőfi House included the collection of Petőfi’s manuscripts, books and relics available at that time; but they also purchased a house on Bajza utca in Budapest, owned jointly by Mór Jókai, another well-known and popular prose writer of the nineteenth century, and his son-in-law, the historical painter Árpád Feszty. Thus, the Petőfi House set about keeping and conserving Jókai relics and maintaining his cult. I would claim that the literary tourist who is seeking to find the genius loci and ‘visiting places associated with particular books in order to savour text, place and their interrelations’ (Watson 2006: 1) does not belong to the present, but rather to previous generations. It is hard to imagine that a monument or even a tomb, covered by a wreath, has the same effect on visitors (in keeping alive the memory of a late author) as a movie or a multimedia installation, which can show the author as a living person, playing cards with his friends, travelling, or resting in his garden during a holiday. Visiting a place where a cultural icon or ‘influencer’, to borrow a phrase from teenagers, lived before, visitors want to become part of the story and leave a message – on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or in a visitors’ book – as a footnote to that story.

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Our cultural memory relies more and more on visual realia – we attempt to connect a photograph to every moment, and they become the strongest evidence of our presence. On the other hand, the reliability of such documentation and recordings become highly important. As visual credibility has become a basic expectation, audiovisual recordings – both sound and film – have acquired a new importance. We have experienced this in the growth in the number of searches by scholars and students in the collection of the media archive of PIM. Private recordings from an author’s life have been given a new meaning. Literary historians, and readers, have both begun to focus on films, tapes, interviews, and such like. When we watch a video from an old 16 mm film of the famous Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy riding a sledge and throwing snowballs on the streets of Budapest in 1909, we also see a man’s soundless, Chaplin-like movements. Add to that, these films were shot in what is now a busy city centre. With the appearance of specific digital tools, you can connect to the internet even from an exhibition space, and parallel realities can be built into an exhibition about a certain author. It is easier to find gossip about his or her scandals than to check the truth of this information. Returning to what I said about fandom, in order to evoke an author today the visitors can gather information from several channels. Their impressions about an author are fragmented; sometimes it is difficult to find the sources. Our aim as teachers and museologists is to find the balance when interpreting a written text between information that is important and that which is irrelevant or unreliable.

Remembrance and Autobiography The collection of the audiovisual archives in the Petőfi Literary Museum preserves a huge amount of oral history interviews dating from the 1960s and 1970s. Thanks to changes in attitudes as an effect of microhistory and oral history studies, such testimony is receiving increased attention. It is especially important in postsocialist countries, because as in the case of the personal documents and diaries of an author, the testimonies of lesser-known contemporaries might contain hidden information or facts about the author’s private life and personal relationships. Although some of these long recordings (made by an author or by their family members, friends or colleagues) have already been published, during the past five years there has been a renaissance of publishing autobiographical interviews in Hungary. One of the main publishing houses,

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Magvető, has a whole series of oral history interviews, under the title ‘Facts and Witnesses’. Examining the story of an onlooker or a minor figure, perhaps somebody who could themselves have been an author, one can see moments in the official version of an author’s history from another view. Listeners of a story might identify more easily with the position of this kind of storyteller than of the actual author out on a distant horizon. The memorial house of a writer of the twenty-first century might be conceived as a network of testimonies and interviews in a virtual space, making up a collection of memories. It is also connected to the imagination of Pierre Nora’s sites of memory (Nora et al. 1984–92) or Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact (Lejeune 1975). Memory is blind to all but the group it binds – which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs has said, that there are as many memories as there are groups, and that memory is thus by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority. Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects; whereas history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative. (Nora 1989: 9)

Introducing the monumental project of Les Lieux de Memoire in his essay ‘Between Memory and History’ (ibid.), Nora emphasizes the multiple nature of memory, and its plural and individual qualities as well. This multiplicity also applies to the memory processes involved in shaping the figure of an author in the eyes of his contemporaries. Speakers – contemporaries, friends, relatives of an author – in our recordings talk about personal relationships in these testimonies, often highlight specific observations of the author that are hidden from others. Their stories have been authenticated by the name of the author, which also lends some visibility to themselves. When talking about a symbolic or sometimes cultic person, the speakers, regardless of their own fame, want to share their own importance of being in a story. Crossings and junctions make a map of connections between more or less similar historical facts. These nets of personal stories could show a more human author than the biographies in textbooks. The name of the author is a monument (just think about Nora again) and hard to connect even to his or her own story. The creation of autobiographical space, however, is a complex process that needs, as Lejeune (1975) argues in his work on autobiographies, authentication by the reader of the texts – but how can we authenticate the testimonies of the contemporaries of an author?

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The trustworthiness of these testimonies can be verified by the recorded sounds themselves. Like motion pictures, sound recordings confer a certain reliability. Speaking can be influenced by many circumstances, whether it is a public performance or a face-to-face conversation, not to mention the efforts of some authors in fashioning different personas when speaking in public or to posterity. I would underline the physical reality of these recordings, the materiality of the sound itself. Similar to the description of a location in a text, from which the reader can identify a real building or street, a recording from a once-living person – either the author or a contemporary – in an author’s house exhibition reassures the visitor as to the authenticity of the scene. Personal belongings and relics, which can be seen as illustrations of the intimate sphere of an author, can also evoke his or her presence. Although Hendrix interprets the visitable spaces of authors’ homes as ‘alternative autobiographies or self-portraits’ (Hendrix 2008b: 4), memorial exhibitions also simulate this kind of atmosphere when involving the audience. Objects carry the imprints of a personality, the ‘inner self ’, in the case of sound recordings. So what seems specific about houses as expressive media is that they allow the persons who build, decorate or just inhabit them to link a particular space to what they consider their inner self, their emotions, memories and psychological disposition. The house, moreover, facilitates structuring this inner self and communicating it in a coherent fashion. As such, it is ideally fit as an autobiographical technique, and in fact most of the houses that have been shaped or reshaped by writers may well be read as alternative autobiographies or self-portraits. (Hendrix 2008a: 4)

These homes and collections of objects tell us almost as much about the era as about the author themselves. The sound of an author, or of a certain place, calls forth the once-living person in our mind.

The Bicentenary of János Arany: Creating a Memory Net for Future Generations Previously I argued that one way to get young adults interested in literature and authors is through the personal stories of authors. How can museums evoke such stories if they do not have any of the author’s belongings in their collection? Can we reinterpret an author after two hundred years? How can we account for the way in which experiences of his texts have changed throughout the intervening period?

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The list of the ten most common street names in Hungary contains the names of five poets and four historical figures. One of these is János Arany (Fehér 2020). If we ask a student about the most important moments of Arany’s life or about his personality, we must expect some vague answers. Arany was one of the iconic poets of the nineteenth century beside Petőfi. The latter died in his twenties on the battlefield, while Arany lived for thirty-three years after his friend’s death. After the failure of the Hungarian Revolution in 1849, Arany became the ‘wise old poet’ of Hungary, suffering however from several illnesses and from depression. For most Hungarian students since then, reading his epic poems and ballads will have been their first experience of poetry. The year 2017, the bicentenary of Arany’s birth, provided an exceptional opportunity for the Ministry of Culture to resurrect the poet. Our museum also participated in this year-long series of celebrations. ‘By George, I have never thought about it’ – as Arany once supposedly said when his interpreters tried to ‘solve’ the meaning of his poetry. He might not have thought too much about his own works, nor even about his own importance. A true memorial site was absent – though this absence is also an iconic one, for the Arany János Memorial Museum in Nagyszalonta, Romania, founded by his son László Arany in 1885, was located in a bell tower, as Arany’s childhood home had been demolished. Posterity has had to make something to take the place of his original birthplace, to show some private moments and create intimacy around the author’s figure. One of our projects in the media archives was to measure Arany’s presence in our time, to give sound to the figure, and to reach out to a twenty-first-century audience. We began this project by producing a series of short video interviews, because we were curious about the motivations of professional and ordinary readers: why did they read these poems, how could they find themselves in his poetic world 150 years after his death? First, we wanted to record some interviews with researchers and curators of the memorial exhibition in a ‘question and answer’ format. We asked the participants to talk about their first experiences of Arany’s poetry, and about the importance of this poetry for twenty-first-century readers and scholars. We soon decided to enlarge the circle of respondees. We created a list of artists, teachers and students who had dealt with the works of Arany or whose ideas on Arany might be interesting for a wider audience. I have chosen two popular and widely known speaker’s samples from this collection as examples here. The first example is the poet and actor Géza Röhrig. Röhrig is well known as the main character from the film Son of Saul, which won an

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Oscar in 2016. At the time of the shooting of these videos, his face could be seen almost every day in posters advertising the movie that had been placed all around Budapest, and he participated in several public events about the Holocaust, literature, and religious life in the twenty-first century. Röhrig often referred to the poet Arany as providing him with one of his most important literary experiences. During the three-minute interview he talked about having been miserable and lonely in his own childhood, like Arany. He also mentioned an object familiar from the memorial exhibition of Arany, a lockable notebook. A similar copy had been given to Röhrig as a present from a carer in his orphanage. I didn’t know exactly who Arany was, but I wanted to be a poet. I hadn’t written a poem yet, when I got a secret birthday present. It was a secret, because we weren’t allowed personal birthday presents where I grew up. I was told not to show it to anyone. I got it from one of my carers at the orphanage, and I didn’t understand what it was. It was just an empty book. She told me it was a ‘lockable book’ and that I could write poems in it. And she added that when I was older I should go to Margaret Island and look for the oak trees there, and I should write poems on the empty pages of this book. (‘Röhrig’ in Arany 200, my translation)

The second speaker was a slam poet, Zsófi Kemény, a popular figure among the younger generations (around 20 years of age) in Hungary. Kemény is well known for her tough and cool lines, which are easy to understand and are sometimes featured on the covers of newspapers and magazines. She spoke about Arany’s personality, as opposed to that of his friend, the young poet Sándor Petőfi. I think the slam poets prefer Petőfi to Arany, because we talk about revolution. Arany was an introverted poet, he stood in the shadows, spoke quietly, and Petőfi was just the opposite. A slam is a ‘stand up and speak out’ thing. But I think I sympathize with Arany more, because I would like to stand in the shadows as well. I might have a personality like him. (‘Kemény’ in Arany 200, my translation)

We published the collection of interviews both on Facebook and in the memorial exhibition on Arany in the museum. It was interesting to see which pieces had the most viewers and how new opinions helped to reshape the former cult of the poet in 2017. There were more views of videos with only one speaker. We published four videos together and matched them thematically, but fewer showed interest in them. Among other options it could have meant that the speaker’s own personality and fame was a stronger attraction than the poetic world of Arany. The highest numbers of views – more than 150,000 – could be seen for recordings of a well-known writer of children’s books, a young actor and a famous

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Hungarian actress, mostly familiar to the generation of the 1960s. We registered only 2,000 views under the name of a male singer, a star of the alternative musical scene. His name did not make the audience click on the video, though the YouTube channel of his band has been followed by 42,000 viewers. By connecting this series of videos to the collection of the media archives, we could preserve this kind of virtual memorial space, a cross-section of Arany’s poetry, in cultural memory.

Illusions of Memory Officially organized remembrance events – memorial years, centenaries – are much more predictable than the memory processes of fans, readers and individual initiatives. Although the protagonist in my next example does not belong to the young generations of the 2010s, I would like to present the encounter of a former schoolboy with literature in a memorial house, as an example of someone who only had experiences of literature from his schooldays – but these early experiences led this visitor to the museum in 2017. Some years ago, a retired boxing trainer visited the Media Archives Department of PIM, offering to donate an audio cassette from his school years. As he told us, he had recorded an interview with the sister of the famous Hungarian poet, Attila József, who had lived in the first half of the twentieth century. József ’s poems are also at the centre of the literary curriculum for primary and secondary schools today. It is not hard to understand how a seventeen-year-old student is willing to enter modern literature through real places. The Attila József Memorial Room was opened in 1964 in Budapest in a small studio apartment where the poet had lived with his family in his first months, after which his family moved several times during his childhood. After his family broke up, József moved from Budapest to the southern part of the country. When this boxing trainer came into the museum, he told us the story of his visit to the memorial room in 1973. For extra credit, his secondary school teacher had encouraged him to present a lecture on a contemporary writer. During a conversation with the museum’s guard, he was directed to the apartment of the late poet’s sister. He recorded the conversation with the family member, by then an old lady, and was inspired to read more from the poet. Forty years later, he decided to donate this audio cassette to our archive, and so the collection has thus been enriched with the story of a former student, along with the author’s sister’s testimony.

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What is the message of the story of this cassette for museum workers? On the one hand, locating memory in a real place makes it easier for a school student to feel at home in the author’s oeuvre. On the other hand, the story is also about the desire to experience the author’s ‘presence’, and how a visitor became involved in the story of a writer’s home museum. The visitor’s place in the story exists in spite of the inaccuracy of the testimony of Etus József, the sister of Attila József. When we examine the genre of this kind of testimony, we have to face its double-facedness – a testimony belongs to fiction as a story in its own right, but to history as a piece in a mosaic, a source of oral history. The fixing of the past is at the centre of the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s examination of the different mechanisms of memory in his six-volume book, My Struggle. Insofar as his language imitates the intimacy of a diary – speaking in the first person singular, talking about his emotional shifts and opinions – we are able to feel as if we are in a relationship of trust with the author’s own life. Memory is not a reliable quantity in life. And it isn’t for the simple reason that memory doesn’t prioritise the truth. It is never the demand for truth that determines whether memory recalls an action accurately or not. It is self-interest that does. Memory is pragmatic, it is sly and artful, but not in any hostile or malicious way; on the contrary, it does everything it can to keep its host satisfied. Something pushes a memory into the great void of oblivion, something distorts it beyond recognition, something misunderstands it totally, something, and this something is as good as nothing, recalls it with sharpness, clarity and accuracy. That which is remembered accurately is never given to you to determine. (Knausgård 2014: 10)

The memorial house of Attila József no longer exists in the form that the former schoolboy saw it in 1973, but it is still a Memorial Room dedicated to the poet. This story, which started from the physical space, has now moved into a virtual memorial space, as a trace of the past. At the media archives we wished to find a way of exchanging the former student’s impressions and memories with the official remembrance process, so we published a recording about the story of the cassette and the preparations of the 1973 interview on the website of the museum. It was published on a symbolic day, the birthday of the poet, which is the official annual Day of Poetry in Hungary. PIM wants to communicate that this day is about the audience and the reader of the texts, and not just professionals – the critics, literary historians and poets.

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Literary Tours in the City: Reading the Map as a Text The introduction to a literary guide of Franz Kafka and Prague promises that it will invite ‘readers into Kafka’s world. It teaches you to see Prague as Kafka saw it’ (Salfellner 2000). After the Second World War, many Hungarian authors lived and worked in public spaces, in their favourite bars, cafes and pubs. Many of them also wrote extensively about these places. They wrote about their way of life, that kind of underground, quasi-oppositional lifestyle which was quite common in the 1950s and 1960s. Some of the cafe interiors preserve mementos of the former life in them; photos, descriptions of famous habitués or groups, mainly from the periods before the Second World War. These memorials show the atmosphere of bourgeois culture before the socialist regime; in the 1950s and 1960s, cafes were often transformed into bars and small coffee houses, becoming the home of writers and journalists – and the secret service. The regime was highly critical and suspicious of intellectuals and of progressive trends in cultural life. As a way of getting acquainted with an author’s surroundings, their favourite cafes and bars, organized walks have emerged as a leisure activity for tourists in their town or city. Participants can learn about the hidden stories of buildings and inhabitants by following the author’s daily routes. Visitors of these programmes do not feel they have to be experts, as they might in a museum or at a cultural event, and this could be the reason why such thematic walks have become popular, including among younger generations. The literary tourist of our time can walk with a guide, an expert, who gives access to stories behind the scenes, as if they were walking with the author. These walks also raise the question of whether a location has had an impact on the texts of a certain author, or whether there was something in the air in these places, in the characteristics of the buildings or the inhabitants, or a reason why many artists lived and worked there. Is it possible to find the scenes of a novel or a poem? Watson writes that literary countries and the genres associated with them typically tie verifiable topography, whether rural or urban, primarily to an author’s works, rather than to authorial biography, and they are almost invariably associated with novelists. Their formation is driven in the first instance by the impulse to naturalise individual texts to particular places … The literary country represents a diffusion of characters and events drawn from the author’s entire oeuvre across the whole range of realist settings that the author has exploited. (Watson 2006: 169–70)

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György Petri was born in Budapest in 1943 and died in the same city, in August 2000. His exceptional lyrical talents, both as a poet and translator, earned him many prestigious literary awards. Petri always pursued a solitary path, becoming something of a cult figure and Budapest legend as an uncompromising and outspoken dissident, even under the more trying times of the post-1956 communist era. He lived in the first district as a child and then as a student, and in his adult years he lived in rented flats and went to bars in the same part of the town. When he started writing poetry, he soon became involved in underground and illegal opposition circles. The regime infiltrated these circles, and after 1989, when the regime had collapsed, Petri and his friends could read reports by secret informants about their everyday lives. Petri was a typical underground intellectual with his low, raspy voice, wearing a creased suit, with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He died of cancer in 2000, but despite a relative consensus about the importance of his poetry, no memorial can be found to him in Budapest’s first district. He does not have a plaque on his birthplace, a statue or a memorial flat. When some of us at PIM decided to organize a walk around his haunts, the first time being in October 2015, we wished to draw attention in public to Petri’s importance. We visited the building where his flat had been, then some of the bars he frequented, and listened to readings and films about Petri, trying to recall him. In the first verse of his poem ‘That I might reach the strip of sunshine beaming’, in Owen Good’s translation, Petri writes: ‘It started as a routine summer night. / I wandered from pub to pub. / Perhaps I was drinking at The Polythene, / a booth beside the station at Margit Bridge / (or had it been demolished already?). I don’t know, / maybe I was on Boráros Square’ (Petri 2016). There are numerous interviews and recordings about Petri in the Media Archives Department, so it was easy to make use of them on our tour. As we walked into the space of the author and into the territory of his poems, we created an imagined memorial place for him. We tried to find the path of a poet, and we tried to behave like him (it was very well known that Petri drank wine or beer with a straw, and smoked cigarettes while reading his poems). Participants in the walks were following a myth, though acting as literary tourists. Returning to the problem of autobiographical approaches, it is debatable whether we mixed biographical facts and texts. It might be connected to the nature of those literary oral history interviews I have mentioned before, but there is something else that made the reinterpretation of these ‘facts’ urgent. In socialist times, official approaches to history and especially contemporary literary history were ignorant of the possibilities of reading the so-called poetry

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of public life, as was a common genre in Hungarian poetry in the 1970s, especially Petri’s poetry. Several stories turned up after the 2010s concerning the intelligence operations of the regime: about intellectuals who were observed by the secret service, or writers who were acting as informants or spies of the regime. In Petri’s poems we often see those ‘personal shadows’; in one of his famous poems is ‘Night Song of the Personal Shadow’ with its grumpy narrator: ‘I must wait for my relief, I’ve got to wait / till you crawl out of your hole’ (Petri 1989–91). In No Live Files Remain, a novel by András Forgách, who was Petri’s friend, we could see the poet through intelligence reports. It was not hard even to recognize the place where those reports were written – from an apartment across the street (Adams 2018). Pubs, espresso bars and street names: real places, borrowed from documents and poems by Petri, became stops on our literary walk – and walking became the link between them. Like the figure of Baudelaire in Walter Benjamin, where walking, or the act of strolling, connects the person to the city, our walks linked the poetry to the private space of the author and then to other stories of that part of Budapest. To quote Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on Baudelaire and Paris: Baudelaire’s genius, which is nourished on melancholy, is an allegorical genius. For the first time, with Baudelaire, Paris becomes the subject of lyric poetry. This poetry is no hymn to the homeland; rather, the gaze of the allegorist, as it falls on the city, is the gaze of the alienated man. It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of life still conceals behind a mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city dweller. The flâneur still stands on the threshold of the metropolis as of the middle class. Neither has him in its power yet. In neither is he at home. He seeks refuge in the crowd. (Benjamin 1999: 15)

If we try to imagine the memorial house of a flâneur, it would be easier to find a place outside, on the streets of a city, in which to do so. We tried to find out if there was a reason why our Hungarian poet Petri did not move somewhere else, far from political harassment and obvious poverty? He seemed to stick to these places, as someone insisting on keeping his personal belongings. He knew all the buildings and stories of these streets, and we could find the proof in his poems, so it might have been the reason why he could not move elsewhere. Mixing referenciality and the fictional character of the poems, we also used sound and video recordings, shared on tablets; and guided by two ‘experts’, a young poet and a journalist, we aimed to invent the closed territory of Petri’s thoughts and poetry – just as if we had visited an exhibition in a memorial house.

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Conclusion Facing new challenges and changes in the museum in the 2010s, we have had to think anew the connections between our audience and our collection in the Department of Media Archives in PIM Budapest. On the one hand, thanks to digitization, it has been possible for us to open our collection to a wider audience. In the past, we mainly served researchers and scholars, and helped to stage exhibitions with the sound and media recordings of writers and literary people. In recent years, we have tried using recordings as a starting point for projects. The series of interviews, as memorial networks, helped to gain the interest of younger generations as well. On the other hand, changing perspectives on privacy and the use of digital tools has let us introduce a different view on literature. The private lives of authors have seemed to be of interest to the public, and oral history has become more important in the remembrance of the past. Changes in the discipline of historical studies, including a new focus on microhistorical approaches, have also influenced everyday life. There is a wide desire to reinterpret the past, especially in the postsocialist countries, and parallel to this, the need to participate in the shaping of remembrances has become more important in the Western world as well. Instead of shaping a cult around a literary figure by collecting personal relics, cultic spaces have gained momentum. The presence of an author can be measured through their presence in the virtual realm – also by the number of readers, visitors and researcher studies. Instead of pointing at one specific place of remembrance, in the form of a place of memory, museums should find other channels to reach their audience, and involve visitors in finding new approaches to canonized or unnoticed authors’ oeuvres. With the museologists of the Department of Media Archives, we intended to reflect on these processes. Using materials recorded in the 1960s and 1970s, we tried to find their place outside the conventional space of the museum, in the virtual space, or outside the city, and also tried to connect them to the biographical space of certain authors. We wished to record new pieces, to shape our relation to contemporary literature and authors, and also to today’s visitors. The growing number of visitors has confirmed our presuppositions, though these virtual visits – for example, viewing videos on social media – have sometimes also revealed other phenomena: the strategy of promotion of museums, its role in social media, the credibility of the collection and, as I have suggested, the situation of school education, among other things. The rethinking of memorial exhibitions and writers’ rooms involves high stakes, as the falsification of history or the distortion of social mem-

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ory could lead to dangerous outcomes. On the other hand, it is also our task to clarify and reinterpret classical oeuvres for the public. A memorial place of a writer is important for the local community as a presentation of identity, but it might be important for the wider audience, especially for younger generations. Memory surrounds us everywhere, in daily posts and photographs shared on social networks, or in the speeches of politicians, and we have to find the ways to connect everyday practice to museology. By reconsidering the methods of archiving, making memories more visible and audible may give future readers and visitors opportunities to get closer and become involved in the history of literature. Anna Benedek is a museologist and graduate (MA) in Hungarian Literature and Comparative Literature Studies in Szeged. She was a secondary school teacher of literature and language, and stayed at home for eight years with three children on maternity leave. In 2010 she began working as a museologist in the Media Archive Department of the Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest. Her main focus is contemporary Hungarian literature, oral history interviews and autobiographical fiction.

Notes  1. Nyugat (The West) was a literary periodical founded in 1908 by poets who aimed to connect Hungarian literature to Western traditions such as Art Nouveau and modernism, in themes and language, instead of late romanticism and historicism. Several translations and essays were published on foreign language literature among young authors’ poems and short stories.   2. The term ‘entrance through the bedroom’ refers to a well-known ‘mockumentary’ or false documentary film about ‘authorship’. Exit Through the Gift Shop: A Banksy Film, directed by street artist Banksy.  3. The Association of Hungarian Literary Memorial Houses (MIRE in its Hungarian acronym) was founded on the initiative of the Petőfi Literary Museum in 2008 to help the preservation, up-to-date operation and development of literary memorial houses.   4. Former head of department Erzsébet Vezér published many of her interviews recorded in the Media Archives Department of PIM – for example, interviews with György Lukacs, or confessions about Endre Ady. See Vezér 2002.   5. Also: ‘Such pilgrims aspired both to “be” Rousseau and to join the select club of those who could boast a sufficiency of Rousseauistic sensibility. However, the locus classicus for this sort of self-identification with Rousseau was not Môtiers-Travers but the little Île St Pierre, located in the Lac de Bienne, where Rousseau had spent a few short but idyllic months writ-

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ing his Confessions and collecting material for the Rêveries d’un Promeneur Solitaire before being forced to leave there, too, in October 1765’ (Watson 2011: 7).   6. See https://pim.hu/en/history-museum (last accessed 26 April 2021).

References Adams, T. 2018. ‘Andras Forgach: My Mother was a Cold War Spy’, The Guardian, 25 March 2018. Retrieved 12 January 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/ mar/25/my-mother-was-a-cold-war-spy-hungary-novelist-andras-forgach. Arany, J. ‘Works in Translation’. Retrieved 14 October 2019 from https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/hu/Arany_János-1817. Arany 200. 2017. Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum. Retrieved 12 January 2020 from https://pim. hu/hu/pim-media/arany-200. Banksy. 2010. Exit Through the Gift Shop. London: Paranoid Pictures Film Company. Benjamin, W. 1999. Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris: The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fehér, K. 2020. ‘TOP 10 utcanév Magyarországon’, GeoX. Retrieved 12 January 2020 from http://www.geox.hu/hirek/top-10-utcanev-magyarorszagon/. Hendrix, H. 2008a. ‘The Early Modern Invention of Literary Tourism: Petrarch’s Houses in France and Italy’, in H. Hendrix (ed.), Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 15–59. . 2008b. ‘Writers’ Houses as Media of Expression and Remembrance: From Self-Fashioning to Cultural Memory’, in H. Hendrix (ed.), Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–11. Knausgård, K.O. 2014. My Struggle 3: Boyhood Island, trans. D. Bartlett. London: Vintage. Lejeune, P. 1975. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil. Nora, P. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26(2): 7–24. Nora, P., et al. 1984–92. Les Lieux de Mémoire, vols I–III. Paris: Gallimard. Nora, P., and L.D. Kritzman. 1996–98. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vols I–III, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Ithaca, NY: Columbia University Press. Petri, G. 1989–91. ‘Night Song of the Personal Shadow’, trans. G. Gömöri and C. Wilmer. Retrieved 14 October 2019 from https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/ hu/Petri_Gy%C3%B6rgy-1943/A_szem%C3%A9lyi_k%C3%B6vet%C5%91_ %C3%A9ji_dala/en/65940-Night_Song_of_the_Personal_Shadow. . 2016. ‘That I Might Reach the Strip of Sunshine Beaming’, trans. O. Good. Retrieved 14 October 2019 from https://hlo.hu/new-work/petri_gyorgy_that_i_ might_reach_the_strip_of_sunshine_beaming.html. Salfellner, H. 2000. Franz Kafka and Prague. A Literary Guide. Prague: Vitalis. Vezér, E. 1967. Emlékezések. Budapest: PIM. . 1989. Lukács György: Megélt gondolkodás. Életrajz magnószalagon. Budapest: Magvető.

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Vezér, E., and I. Maróti (eds). 2002. Távolról a Mostba: Vallomások Ady Endréről. Budapest: Magyar Irodalomtörténeti Társaság. Watson, N.J. 2006. The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. . 2011. ‘Fandom Mapped: Rousseau, Scott and Byron on the Itinerary of Lady Frances Shelley’, Romantic Circles Praxis Series: Romantic Fandom. Retrieved 14 October 2019 from https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/fandom/praxis.fandom.2010. watson.html.

Chapter 4

Ghostly Voices in the Author Museum Ulrike Spring and Johan Schimanski

Visiting an author museum can be like visiting a haunted house. Not all author museums are where the author lived, but in some sense there is always a ‘non-presence’ of the author’s body to deal with. The objects and rooms suggest to us the author is living there, but the author is conspicuously absent. Trying to find the author in the museum, or even in one of their texts, is similar to trying to conjure up a ghost. Ghosts, understood as the uncanny and ephemeral apparitions of the dead, help us to transgress time and space. They help us to remember life beyond the everyday. Ghosts are also rewarding museum objects and curatorial strategies, as they can be moulded into different shapes and may be assigned different messages. In a way, curators, designers and guides all assume the role of mediums, translating the messages of the past for the present visitor. Can a focus on ghosts and the various ways they appear and are articulated help to create space in the museum for a more interactive approach to biography and individual genius, by moving away from the idea of the author as a coherent and ultimate authority? How might one play with the concept of ghosts in creating literary exhibitions, in author home museums or elsewhere? How can ghosts be staged in author museums? Ghost tourism was a popular part of the heritage industry for most of the twentieth century, and increasingly so in recent decades (Hanks [2015] 2016: 16–17). It has been subject to much scholarly analysis (e.g. Holloway 2010; Hanks [2015] 2016; Dancausa, Hernández and Pérez 2020), but has to lesser degree been associated with literary tourism. Author

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museums can curate ghostly presences, for example through effigies, voice recordings, holograms, or through allowing the spirits of authors guide literary tours (see Benedek, this volume; Inglis and Holmes 2003: 58 for Walter Scott; Gentry 2007; Holloway 2010). However, these are usually only traces, vague spectral remembrances rather than explicit uses of the author as a ghost. Only a few museums – one example being the Selma Lagerlöf house museum Mårbacka in Sweden – actively employ stagings of ghosts in their exhibition practices or outreach activities. The cautious handling of ghostly associations may have to do with various factors, for example ethical considerations connected to the relative proximity in time of the author’s death, the apparent contradiction between the irrationality of ghosts and the factual evidence of the author’s home, concern about fan culture and the personal attachment many visitors have with the writers, or even the wish not to scare away visitors. Ghosts may be seen as unserious, as belonging to forms of entertainment rather than to the enlightenment ideals that museums often lay claim to. But exactly this caution and respect hides the fact that author museums are built upon the idea of the author as ghost. By not addressing this foundational aspect of author museums and the use of the author as ghost as a museal strategy, the museum assumes (and pretends) that it is possible to conjure up an authentic image of the past. Author museums may risk giving the impression that it is the past (and the author through letters, books, personal belongings) that speaks in a direct and unmediated fashion to the visitor (see also Inglis and Holmes 2003: 58). Yet there are many other voices in play in the author museum. Moving away from the idea of a relatively unmediated evocation of the past in the present opens up questions about who is speaking, and about authority and intention. Our argument is that ghostly strategies in author museums are omnipresent, whether they are made explicit or not. Ghostly presences could be said to be a feature of personality museums in general. They have received some attention in research on author museums. While not invoking ghosts directly, Harald Hendrix (2008) points to the function of house museums as material carriers of memory – and memory, like the ghost, invokes a mixing of the past and the present. Nicola Watson, in her books The Literary Tourist (2006) and The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums (2020), and Alison Booth, in her book Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries (2016), both reflect on the ghostly effects of the writer in writers’ house museums, figuring the ghost as a metaphor for the paradoxical absence of the author in the museum that strives to make the author present. For Watson, writers’ museums are already intimately connected to death, not only because of their historical

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association with writers’ graves (both are objects of literary tourism), but also because ‘[d]eath completes the birth of the poet to posterity’ (Watson 2020: 23), with the author museums partaking in this temporal structure. In her examination in The Author’s Effects of the various objects that point metonymically to the absent body of the author – bodily remains, preserved pets, clothes, chairs, writing desks, household objects – she is often aware of the way in which museums may stage such objects as uncanny or ghostly reminders of the writer (ibid.: 75, 77–79, 83, 89–90), and states that the ‘power’ of the literary relic ‘resides in the object’s admonitory materiality, but all the same might be best described as super-material in its ability to raise the ghost of the author’ (ibid.: 12). Author museums are liminal spaces, uncanny and phantasmic in the way they convey ‘the feel of the familiar in the unfamiliar’ (ibid.: 15). Booth (2016: 16) connects the ghost to the boundaries between the domestic and the public as they are inverted in the musealized home. Watson notes how ghosts can also appeal to visitors; in some cases, such as at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, it seems as if visitors want to be haunted and are drawn in through a form of ‘tourist gothic’ (Watson 2006: 7, cf. also 122). Both ghosts and the gothic can create pleasure through controlled fear, in a form of the Romantic sublime. Booth writes that ‘[t]he repetition of imagined presences in real places seems to produce a pleasurable brush with death’ (Booth 2016: 11). Her focus on ghosts swivels around the term ‘haunt’, in English both a place of ghostly haunting, a sign of familiarity and indeed domesticity (a person’s ‘haunts’ are the places they often go), and in a more specialized sense, a genre of essay collection or guidebook for literary tourists current in the nineteenth century, one example being William Howitt’s Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (Howitt 1874). Both Booth (2016: 16) and Watson (2006: 211–12) suggest that the play with physical objects and imagined presences in the author museum are extensions of the act of reading literature, implying that literature itself may be a form of haunting. In this chapter, we wish to go a step further and link the musealized author home directly to the role ghosts play in European and possibly also other cultural contexts. We begin with ghosts rather than with the author, opening up to the possibility that there might be other ghosts than that of the author in the author museum. Since such museums are places in which biography, history, literature and the imagination intersect and are on display, they might also be haunted by servants, family members, fictional characters, or even curators and visitors. Some writers actively involve ghosts and other uncanny phenomena when writing about houses and objects, and Watson’s invocations of gothic literature in connection

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with writers’ museums (Watson 2006: 106, 207; 2020: 16) have inspired us in suggesting that museums about such writers might use ghostly strategies to refer allegorically to their fictional worlds. Moreover, we wish to examine more closely the use of ghostly media strategies in the author museum, and the possibility that ghosts may attract visitors, much as ghost stories attract readers. Our main example here is an author with an interest in ghosts, the Swedish Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940), and her home Mårbacka, today a museum. Mårbacka lies in Värmland, a region in south-west Sweden and the setting of many of Lagerlöf ’s novels and stories, not least one of her most famous ones, her debut novel Gösta Berlings saga (The Saga of Gösta Berling, 2009), first published in 1891. Unlike other landscapes, such as the Scottish one, which David Inglis and Mary Holmes call ‘a repository of the mysterious and ghostly’ (Inglis and Holmes 2003: 51), with supernatural associations going back to the eighteenth century, ghost tourism has only recently become a popular activity in Värmland (see Visit Värmland, n.d.). Ghosts are present in Lagerlöf ’s biographical connection to Mårbacka, where she grew up and later established herself as a mature author; as she grew older, while sceptical of spiritualist activities, she also entertained the possibility of being in contact with the dead (Palm 2019: 464, 510–13) – including those who had lived at Mårbacka – believing as she did in the immortality of the soul (ibid.: 458). In Lagerlöf ’s fiction, ghosts contribute to a neo-romantic aesthetics typical of this period in Scandinavian literature, figuring either in longer novels that include episodes involving ghosts, shorter novels such as Löwensköldska ringen (1925) that have a ghost story at their centre, or short stories belonging to the gothic, some of which are stories about ghosts (for an overview of Lagerlöf ’s considerable use of gothic motifs in general, see Wijkmark 2009: 8–9; similarly, for the presence of the dead in her novels and stories, see Palm 2019: 468). Ghosts are part of a wider motif in her writing of characters moving between the realms of the living and the dead (Palm 2019: 468), and what her biographer Anna-Karin Palm (2019: 455–56) characterizes as a general literary project of giving voice to previous generations – now dead – in a period characterized by the transformations of modernity. In her fiction, Lagerlöf uses ghosts in particular to link up houses, family histories and household objects within a larger system of motifs involving squandered inheritances, injustices, auctions and utopian visions. The history of Mårbacka itself and Lagerlöf ’s autobiographical self-fashioning play into this larger system, and Mårbacka as a museum has also used ghosts actively in its activities.

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Underlying our argument here is the concept of the author museum involving interwoven layers of voices. We have suggested elsewhere (Schimanski and Spring 2020) that every literary museum is in fact a double act of communication: a museal act of communication about a literary act of communication. This means that every author museum contains an uncanny overlayering of curatorial, authorly and fictional voices. Applying Roman Jakobson’s semiotic model of the communication act (Jakobson 1960) to the curatorial act of communication in author museums, we argue that the element he calls context and assigns the referential function in the communication act – that is, what the communication is about – can in the museal act of communication refer to many different elements or ‘actants’ in the literary act of communication (Schimanski and Spring 2020). As a consequence, visiting the author museum, we might hear the voice of the author (both public and private or inner voices) but also other actors in their social-historical contexts, literary theorists and historians, visitors and visitor-readers, material objects and texts, and not least literary or fictional characters. It is, however, difficult to imagine any form of literature that is not a multilayered act of communication in itself: the novel, for example, is typically the communication act of an author about the communication act(s) of one or several narrators about the communication acts of multiple characters. The potential for polyphony and multidimensionality in the author museum is thus rife. In this chapter we see ghosts as ways of staging such voices, and constructing intention and authority on the part of the museum. Ideally, our analytical approach might also show ways forward to new curatorial strategies, to a more playful approach in dealing with ghosts in author museums. Looking at the various communication acts with ghosts in mind helps us to find out more about the museum’s intentions and the distribution of authority: Who is speaking? And who is really speaking?

How Do Ghosts Work? Before we attend to how ghosts function in author museums and at Mårbacka specifically, we would like to explore the notion of what a ghost might be, at least in a European context. We enlist as an example a text by Lagerlöf, along with references to Jacques Derrida’s analysis in his book Specters of Marx ([1994] 2006) of the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1994). In 1925 Lagerlöf published a story – where it appeared, we will return to later – about the famous pirate and commander Lars Gathenhielm.

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Gathenhielm (1689–1718) was a real historical person from Gothenburg, on the west coast of Sweden. His fame and riches came in part from his activities as a smuggler and privateer, but as such he was useful to his contemporary, King Charles XII of Sweden, a major actor in the Great Northern War of 1700–21, who ennobled Gathenhielm in 1715 and licensed Gathenhielm’s privateering as part of his war effort (Grill 1964– 66; for more on the practice of privateering, see Wold 2020: 11–20). Also, according to Lagerlöf ’s story, Gathenhielm, in spite of the successes of his short life, was not satisfied in death. He was buried in Onsala, a small coastal community south of Gothenburg, and, as Lagerlöf writes, his visitations in the local church were so disruptive that his coffin was moved to a small skerry out in the open sea. However, he and the ghosts of all the sailors he had had thrown overboard from ships he had attacked as a privateer now became a problem for the local fishermen. A daring fisherman managed to receive instructions from Gathenhielm’s ghost, and to lay it and all the other ghosts to rest (Lagerlöf 1925: 58–61; 1991: 35–36). How are we to understand this story, its intention and function? It introduces some of the typical aspects of ghosts, some of them explored by Derrida in his analysis of a famous ghost story, Hamlet: the possibility that the dead are both absent and present among us, that it is difficult to talk to ghosts, and that ghosts ask us to address injustices that must be laid to rest (Derrida [1994] 2006: xviii). Selma Lagerlöf also tells the story for other reasons, to do with her ambivalent attitudes (as expressed in her novels) to a violent past typically characterized by the excesses of famous male heroes (such as Gösta Berling, and as we shall see, Bengt Löwensköld) and by social injustices in general. Lagerlöf also purposefully makes her attitudes to the real and the supernatural ambiguous by introducing other voices into the telling. The story is part of the novel Löwensköldska ringen (1925, first published as a Christmas novella in 1924; translated as The Löwensköld Ring, 1991), and not only does this novel have an explicit (if unidentified) narratorial voice, but the story about the ghost of Gathenhielm is told by the fictional Göran Löwensköld, the son of the Löwensköld of the title, to his neighbour the parson. The fact that the parson shows impatience as Göran tells this ghost story makes clear his scepticism to tales of the supernatural: ‘[W]hen it became clear to him that his neighbour had nothing but a common ghost story to tell, he could hardly suppress a gesture of impatience’ (Lagerlöf 1991: 35–36).1 Indeed Göran, a rational and modern man, shares this scepticism and the parson’s attitude to the violent excesses of people like Gathenhielm and Charles XII. He himself had

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overheard the story being told to his sons by their tutor, and had been much irritated by their enthusiasm for exciting tales of daring deeds from a less enlightened era. However, when Göran attempted to correct this enthusiasm, he was himself interrupted, and that by the inarticulate voice of another ghost that appeared to haunt his mansion house. No sooner had I said these words than I heard a loud moan behind my chair. It sounded so much like my late father, the way he used to groan and sigh in his old age, that I thought he was standing there behind me, and I leapt to my feet. There was no one to be seen, but I was so sure it was his voice I had heard that I could not return to the table. I’ve been sitting here all alone ever since, thinking about it. (Lagerlöf 1991: 37)2

It is difficult not to read the story of Gathenhielm as Lagerlöf ’s metafictional comment about the short novel in which it appears, Löwensköldska ringen. The novel is the story of a ring stolen from Göran’s father’s grave, the curse it carries with it through various generations of owners, and how the ghost of his father returns to haunt the country mansion of the Löwenskölds. Göran’s father, Bengt Löwensköld, was – like Gathenhielm – a rather dubious character ennobled by Charles XII for his help in the war, and in addition given two other things: a mansion and a signet ring. The mansion was inherited by the Löwensköld family. The ring was buried with Bengt Löwensköld, in what could be seen as an act of egoism on his part. However, it was soon stolen from the grave. It was then passed from hand to hand, until it ended up hidden in the mansion. Some of the ring’s owners wished to have the heavy gold ring melted down across the border in Norway in order to become rich, but they were prevented, mysteriously, from doing so. All felt the curse of the ring, and it becomes increasingly obvious that the ghost of Bengt Löwensköld is behind this series of catastrophes. It is after Göran Löwensköld tells the parson the story of Gathenhielm and of his hearing the moan of his dead father that the first efforts are made to lay the ghost of Bengt Löwensköld to rest. The curse only ends when the ring is removed from the mansion and returned to his tomb. As we have already suggested, the two stories – those of Lars Gathenhielm and Bengt Löwensköld – point to several features of ghosts. Ghosts make the dead both absent and present among us – we may call them ‘traces’ of the absent living body. They show that it is difficult to talk to ghosts: ghosts observe us (Derrida [1994] 2006: 5), but their lack of physicality and their traumas that block communication make it difficult to understand their intentions. They struggle to reach through to the material sphere, and invest much effort in making the materiality of

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the voice and of objects like rings help get their message through. This difficulty of access can also be expressed through the multilayered voicing of ghost stories – as Göran’s story of his dead father’s moan shows us, the ghost must cross between narratorial layers to convey his intentions. This form of narrative metalepsis, in which ghost stories are told within ghost stories, is also present in another short novel by Lagerlöf, Körkarlen (1912: 24–31; translated as Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!, 1921), and shows clearly the multilayering of ghostly voices in literary texts. Ghosts moreover convey suffering from injustices, which must be laid to rest. These injustices can be personal, but they can also involve families, communities and the common good. This last point also implies that ghosts mix the past, the present and the future, in that the injustice is in the past, is presented in the present, and must be righted in the future: ‘time is out of joint’ (Hamlet I.5, line 189, Shakespeare 1994: 130; cf. Derrida [1994] 2006: 1).3 As ‘revenants’ (literarily ‘re-comers’), they constantly repeat the past in the present (Derrida [1994] 2006: 2, 11). The second story, about the Löwenskölds, also tells us that ghost stories can be exciting for listeners and readers; as they developed in the gothic, their association with death and danger became an effective vessel with which to convey the sublime. Ghost stories can involve famous or iconic people, although they bring with them a sense of unease and the uncanny rather than celebration. They imply that there is another world alongside our own. In other words, ghost stories convey a liminal ontological ambivalence about the world. Typical of the fantastic mode in literature, they move between supernatural and scientific explanations (Todorov 1975: 33), and thus, metafictionally, between fiction and reality, leading us enlightened listeners and readers perhaps to dismiss them altogether. Not surprisingly, ghost stories develop fully in the nineteenth century and the era of positivist modernity, when the border between the rational and the irrational becomes a nodal point in the dominant discourse (ibid.: 166–68). The final lesson of the layered ghost stories in Löwensköldska ringen is that they often involve inheritances, passing from generation to generation (e.g. from father to son). Ghosts can thus be associated with objects (a ring) and with houses (a mansion). This theme of inheritance and the responsibilities that houses, with their objects, bring with them runs through Lagerlöf ’s collected works. The motif of the home and its variants home-making, home-caring and home-dissolution are repeated through her novels to an even greater extent than that of the ghost, in itself related through the idea of the haunted house. Objects are similarly an important motif, not only as a cursed or symbolic thing, but also as

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a feature in her dramatic house auction scenes, as attempts to dissolve homes are made in Gösta Berlings saga (Lagerlöf 1891, I: 164–74) and Jerusalem I (Lagerlöf 1901: 256–73).

The Ghost in the Museum The stories of the ghosts of Lars Gathenhielm and of Bengt Löwensköld provide us with ways of thinking through ghosts (be they metaphorical or staged) in order to understand author museums and their exhibition strategies, and to raise questions about them. The presence of ghosts in author museums – and the existence of author museums more generally – owes much to the cult of the genius and the fan cultures that emerged as mass phenomena in the nineteenth century. Monuments were built, streets and parks named after famous people, and former artist residencies opened as museums. Memories materialized and became part of visual culture: they were fossilized in monuments and could be directly experienced in the former homes through personal objects. Whereas monuments could be erected at any place (Selbmann 1988: 2), in author museums the memory of the celebrity was activated in a more corporeal and sensual way. In the author home museum, one was as close to the author as one ever could be: touching their former belongings, walking through the house they had occupied and admiring the desk or the table where they had written their work. At least metaphorically, the author becomes the ghost in the museum. What does this imply? Firstly, ghosts function like cultural memory or heritage, conflating the past with the present, and helping us to establish a connection to the past. The lingering presence of the author turns the author museums into an auratic and attractive place, and turns both the author and the home into heritage by transporting the past into the present; heritage, as Lowenthal reminds us, makes the past ‘congenial’ (Lowenthal [1996] 1998: 148). Derrida suggests a further implication of ghosts, that the mixing of times they cause also asks us to look to the future (Derrida [1994] 2006: xviii– xix). In addition to asking how author museums bring the past into the present, we must also ask how the past can point to future transformation in the author museum. Can the author museum be seen as a utopian space, a space that promises a new relationship between authors, readers and visitors? As we shall see later, this question is especially relevant to Selma Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka, in the home Lagerlöf re-created as a community space.

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Secondly, ghosts’ ambivalent connections to place can give us keys to understanding the role of a sense of place in author museums. Ghosts are usually seen in certain spaces, their haunts – often houses, such as towards the end of Löwensköldska ringen, in Löwensköld’s erstwhile mansion. However, as the dead, they are in fact displaced: they should be in their proper place, inside and not outside their graves. The place of a ghost is a liminal space, with both a concrete material dimension and an ambivalent, imaginary dimension. Thirdly, the way in which ghosts interact with objects (e.g. cursed objects, hidden objects, heirlooms – Löwensköld’s ring is all of these) might tell us something new about the way museum objects function, and about how author museums relate to the authors’ bodies. When Watson invests objects in writers’ museums with an ‘admonitory materiality’ (Watson 2020: 12), she ascribes them an insistent but thwarted voice, much like that of a ghost. Fourthly, ghosts mirror the curatorial responses an author museum brings to bear in a variety of situations. Some ghosts make themselves present, whether we wish it or not, such as former inhabitants or visitors of Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka do, as a museum employee remembers (Kanal12iVarmland 2012); others we evoke, others we can banish and others we can ignore. Since ‘appearance’ is part of the very definition of a ghost, as terms such as ‘spectre’ (from Latin spectrum, ‘appearance’) and ‘apparition’ make clear, ghosts imply both spectators and a form of staging (Derrida [1994] 2006: 10–11). Ghosts may help to explain how author museums select their subjects by staging them. The way in which ghosts are present in author museums can tell us about what the museum wishes us to hear, see, remember, bury or forget. In her study of a new exhibition on Ellis Island in New York, Jo Frances Maddern points out that the process of ‘restoration involved simultaneously exorcising and conjuring ghosts, excavating and burying histories and material assemblages’ (Maddern 2008: 369, her emphasis). The staging and displaying of author homes work in a similar way. Author museums are heritage sites where some stories are left out, some reinterpreted and others added. Guides tell stories based on their understandings of the author’s biography and work, and visitors interpret these stories and the museum exhibition depending on their own knowledge of and interest in the author and their work. Ghosts are laid to rest and are evoked at the same time. If they can be both conjured forth and exorcized, they will contribute to strategies of both visibilization and invisibilization, forming part of the ‘politic aesthetics’ (Rancière 2004) of the museum, deciding what we learn and what not. Correspondingly, their critical potential is that they disturb that act of learning, because

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they never allow us to settle on a definitive image or narrative. As Derrida writes, they stand for the paradoxical ‘furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible’, and for a ‘tangible intangibility’ (Derrida [1994] 2006: 6). Fifthly, ghosts have authority; they are the voice of the ancestors, of the symbolic patriarch (Hamlet’s father, Göran Löwensköld’s father, Selma Lagerlöf ’s father) in laying down the law. This raises the question of with which authority and intention the author museum speaks about the author. Does the voice of the author’s ghost, or of other ghosts connected to the author and their works, give the curatorial voice authenticity? Ghosts being fictions (the subjects of ghost stories) or at least not quite part of reality, might tell us about the relationship between fact, fiction and literature in author museums, and thus about authority, as authority is often about separating truth from lies. Through their play with authority, ghosts contribute to the multivocality of the author museum, adding to our theory of the multilayered communication act taking place in such museums, especially where the question of who has authority and intentionality in an author museum is concerned. ‘Ghosts’ can, for example, function as giving authority to the often hidden or implicit voice of the curator, or to the voice of the guide. On meeting a curatorial strategy, we must always ask: Whose voice do we hear? Or in other words: Who translates the ghost’s voice? Who is the medium? In most cases, we assume, visitors to museums are not that interested in who the curator is or what their intentions and museological methods are; they are more interested in the author or their writings, or simply in a historical atmosphere. The first person, or ‘I’ of the author museum is usually seen as the author, even if they are not present, or only present in ghostly form; this is particularly the case in staged homes. Using the terms of Jakobson’s model of the communication act (Jakobson 1960), the focus in author museums has traditionally been on this ‘sender’, with many authors homes and museums emphasizing the biographical dimension. Some may also provide information on the social and historical context of their work, or convey the fictional worlds in their texts (this happens especially in museums and amusement parks dedicated to children’s authors). Thus most author museums contrast strongly to art museums, in which the focus is on the message itself; however, author museums also sometimes feature the texts themselves, in the form of books, manuscripts or quotes. Author museums remediate literature and authors, presenting previous mediations in a new medial form. Thus new layers are added to multilayered narratives. The author, or an authorship, can be seen as a media event

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in which the museum takes part alongside other kinds of literary display, including festivals and library exhibits. Museums are caught in the circulation of narratives and images that make up part of literary reception and cultural memory. We would suggest that author museums can employ different media as part of spectral strategies to counteract tendencies to reproduce the reductive narratives and images of literature and authors circulating in the public sphere. Sixthly and finally, ghost stories are exciting, they attract attention. Ghosts enchant places; they take them out of the mundane, the everyday (see e.g. Holloway 2010). From this perspective, the reliance on ghostly presences in author museums may not come as a surprise; literature, after all, leads to an enchanting and enchanted world, and author museums can function as a continuation of this experience of reading. While ghosts can be scary, ghosts in an author museum are seldom so. For fans, feeling the ghostly presence of the author may even be a dream come true. However, we would argue that once we start to think about ghosts, we will also begin to hear their accusations, and their exhortations to right wrongs and to address injustices. Biographical, historical and social injustices can often be hidden by the celebratory discourse of the author museum. Many author museums attempt to lay the ghosts to rest and to deny them the possibility to make themselves heard; we must work to hear them.

How Ghosts Speak at Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka works particularly well as an example for the ghostly presence in author museums for several reasons. Mårbacka not only illustrates the idea of the author museum as a haunted house, but most of all Mårbacka’s history is closely interconnected with the personal and historical injustices of the past as experienced by Lagerlöf. Mårbacka was Lagerlöf ’s childhood home. It had originally been registered as a farm in 1609 (Palm 2019: 63), and the small manor house she was born in was built in 1755. Lagerlöf ’s ancestors had been the owners of the manor for generations (for several generations, it had been passed down to the new vicar, who had married the previous vicar’s daughter), but in 1890 – when Lagerlöf was on the verge of her debut as a novelist – all of it had been sold out of the family, beginning with the auction of household objects in 1888 (Palm 2019: 45, 51). A contributing cause of this (for Lagerlöf ) traumatic event (ibid.: 51) was that her father Erik Gustav Lagerlöf had, through ill-management, squandered the family inheritance before dying in 1885 (Larsson 2017: 8; Palm 2019: 14, 74–75).

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Tellingly, Lagerlöf ’s fiction contains many stories of ghosts and injustices concerning houses and profligate, larger-than-life and often attractive men who destroy their houses and dissipate inheritances (i.e. their family heritages). Manor houses and ghost stories are intimately connected in her world. Telling a ghost story from another part of Sweden in her children’s book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906–7: 391) – translated in complete form as Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden (2014), although the first translation into English had appeared in 1907 – it is natural for Lagerlöf to write that ‘nowhere else in the country are there as many manor houses and as many ghost stories’ (Lagerlöf 2014: 285).4 She also connects Mårbacka with ghost stories. In her books about her childhood at Mårbacka, Lagerlöf retells ghost stories that she has been told (Lagerlöf 1922: 65–73; 1930: 65–66), and speaks of her fear of a dark corner of the attic, on the way to the children’s room, as she thought the Devil lived there (1930: 67–68). In her 1908 essay about the origins of her writings, ‘En saga om en saga’ (‘A saga about a saga’, which was a tale about her first novel Gösta Berlings saga), Lagerlöf describes how the Värmland stories that gave rise to the novel had grown organically out of Mårbacka; the first specific examples she mentions are ‘peculiar ghost stories’.5 While Lagerlöf writes to her partner Sophie Elkan in 1894 that she has lost her fear of ghosts (Lagerlöf 1992: 12), after buying back Mårbacka she still experiences mysterious phenomena, describing in a letter how in 1911 she sees an old woman in the grounds whom she at first assumes to be a tourist, but who disappears; afterwards she understands that the woman was a portent of her aunt’s death (ibid.: 364). Here the question of who ‘(g)hosts’ who, the ghost or the owner of the house, is reversed, with a tourist turning into an apparition, suggesting a way of seeing the visitors to home museums as those who haunt these sites. However, another form of visitors and imaginary beings, characters in novels, are also described as apparitions, within the materiality of the house as a writing space. In a letter to her long-time friend Anna Oom, Lagerlöf describes lying on the sofa at Mårbacka and waiting for ‘a hole in a wall to open, behind which I glimpse figures [gestalter], but still unclearly’.6 Lagerlöf regained Mårbacka as an adult. She earned enough as a highly successful writer to be able to buy back parts of the estate in 1907 (Palm 2019: 394), and in 1910, with the money she received as a winner of the Nobel Prize, she was able to buy the whole property (ibid.: 420) and could subsequently develop it further. She had already begun rebuilding parts of the main building into a mansion in 1908 (ibid.: 408–9), and in 1919 she initiated a major rebuilding and expansion in neoclassical style, designed by architect Isak Gustaf Clason and his son Gustaf Clason. This

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rebuilding was completed by 1923, with her constant involvement and with her wishes sometimes going against the principles of the elder architect (Bonnevier 2007; Palm 2019: 537–38, 560), though Lagerlöf and the two architects ‘all had as a starting point … that Mårbacka was both going to be a home and a public display of Selma Lagerlöf, her life and work’ (Bonnevier 2007: 224). Combined with her status as a celebrity and the increase in car ownership, the alterations led to a large influx of tourists (Palm 2019: 561). Biographer Anna-Karin Palm calls the new house ‘a sort of staging of her own story’;7 at the same time, it was clear that this house, being quite changed over the course of fifteen years, was in no sense a musealization of the childhood home (ibid.: 563) she celebrated in her autobiographical and some of her fictional writings. Lagerlöf did, however, exploit the rush of tourists by opening a shop selling among other things postcards depicting Mårbacka and Lagerlöf herself (Palm 2019: 566). As she grew older, she began to take steps to control and preserve her reception, including asking her correspondents to return letters to her so she could form an archive (ibid.: 615). In her will she left the whole estate to the Mårbacka Foundation under the condition that Mårbacka was to be made open to the public (Nordlund and Wanselius 2018: 391); and two years after her death, in 1942, the Mårbacka museum was opened (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1. The main building at Selma Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka. Photo: © KM IDÉ, number KM_15189.

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Lagerlöf ’s biography is one of somebody who struggled (quite strategically and successfully) against the injustice of gender norms in order to make herself heard in her historical context (Palm 2019). She chose to write in a specific neo-romantic style typical of her period in Scandinavia, a style that mixes realism with the mythic and often the supernatural, in order to make her voice audible. These histories and fictions create a rich resource of potential narratives about ghosts, objects and houses to work with in curating the Mårbacka museum. Upon regaining Mårbacka, Lagerlöf decided to turn her house into an ideal community, introducing new agricultural and technological practices in the rural region in which it was situated. Mårbacka was thus not only a repository of the past, but also took on heterotopian or utopian aspects. As architect and theorist Katarina Bonnevier (2007: 215–362; 2012) has shown, Lagerlöf queered – or in Bonnevier’s architecturally inspired term ‘cross-cladded’ – the house at Mårbacka through her renovation and later rebuilding of most of the main building, starting in 1908 and then continued in 1921–23. She was criticized for the showiness of the house (Bonnevier 2007: 282), which made it comparable to more impressive manor houses in the region. Since these were often the models for manor houses in her writing, the house came to represent her fictions as well (ibid.: 269–70). Bonnevier characterizes the rebuilt house in contemporary terms as a combination of ‘power suit’ and ‘camp’ (Bonnevier 2012: 717). Lagerlöf made sure that the architects disturbed its neoclassical style with a veranda with five pairs of columns instead of the standard four (ibid.: 294–95). She had her library and study, symbolic of her role as a famous writer, placed centrally where such country mansions would traditionally have their master bedroom (ibid.: 320, 324–25), and created a room that was a memorial to her friend and fellow author Sophie Elkan (1853–1921). Part of the focus of the latter was their travels together, not least their journey to Egypt and Palestine in 1899–1900, and the room contained furniture that Lagerlöf had been given through Elkan’s will (Palm 2019: 564). Throughout this transformation she actively built new memories; the new house not only made the dream of her father to have such a house come true (Ek-Nilsson 2005: 67), but it also influences the visitor’s perception that she lived her life in grandeur, including in her childhood – even though the house had more humble dimensions then. However, the addition of a second floor is also, in effect, an exorcism of her childhood fears. As author Jeanna Oterdahl, who stayed at Mårbacka as a young woman in 1915, writes in her Lagerlöf biography for children: ‘She had the roof raised, creating a light and beautiful upper floor. The loft, which had been so horrible for

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a small girl with her head full of legends and superstitions, was turned into pleasant halls’.8 Lagerlöf eventually planned for another form of utopian project after her death, when the house was to be opened to the public as a museum, a reversal of her father’s perceived selfishness in playing the house away, but at the same time an acknowledgement of the ambitious utopianism of many of his own failed projects for the house (Palm 2019: 74), projects described in her first autobiographical volume (Lagerlöf 1922). In a comparative analysis of the gendering of Mårbacka and the Strindberg Museum (Strindbergmuseet, commemorating August Strindberg 1849– 1912) in Stockholm, Katarina Ek-Nilsson writes that the house is often presented ‘as a lifework and as a revenge’.9 The high status Lagerlöf gave to the housekeeper Ellen Lundgren and the responsibility she felt for servants and local people constituted an attempt to harmonize class differences and mitigate social injustices (Palm 2019: 541), and this is mirrored in the museum’s focus on characters from her staff, in addition to Lagerlöf and her companions. This utopian temporality implies that her presence literally reaches across time and into the future. While many author homes have been musealized without the knowledge (or approval) of their former inhabitants, a significant number have become museums on the initiative of the author (Hendrix 2008). Lagerlöf was one of several Swedish authors who used their homes as a form of self-staging (Ek-Nilsson 2005: 68). The Mårbacka of Selma Lagerlöf ’s childhood was a hospitable place open to many guests and social gatherings (Palm 2019: 66–67, 73). In 1907 Lagerlöf visited the manor for the first time since it had been sold out of the family, after definitively beginning to think about rebuying the house. Indicating its representative value, she wrote to Elkan: ‘Hundreds of tourists apparently visit the place nowadays during the summertime. If only for this sake, it cannot stay as it is now’.10 After she moved in again, she continued the tradition of having many guests at Mårbacka, but also became bothered by tourists (who would sometimes look in through the windows and even attempt to invite themselves in; their presence eventually made it impossible to write in a tent in the garden in the summertime, Palm 2019: 576–77). In spite of her problems with the tourists, she still retained the notion of Mårbacka as part of the public sphere, taking the initiative to open the house and the grounds around Mårbacka to schoolchildren (Cederblad 1949: 34). In a 1939 letter to her younger acquaintance, the teacher and writer Ida Bäckmann (1867–1950), she describes going to her parents’ grave, and hearing her dead parents asking her to think of Värmland and to preserve Mårbacka as ‘an attraction for tourists’, but at the same time

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to transform it into a foundation that would welcome to it ‘those weary of work, for female authors, for female teachers, and for poor, unmarried ladies in general’.11 She was familiar with the idea of musealized authors’ homes, and was, for example, deeply impressed during a visit in 1912 to the home of Victor Runeberg (1804–1877) in Porvoo/Borgå, Finland (Palm 2019: 448), which had been opened as a museum in 1882. The refashioned house at Mårbacka contained many memorials and ‘exhibits’ of her life, such as the mural sketches in the dining room of scenes from places she had known, the many souvenirs from her travels and gifts she had been given by admirers of her work, and of course the room memorializing Elkan (Ek-Nilsson 2005: 71). Her presence and voice may thus be more palpable than in other such museums. We stated at the beginning of this chapter that author museums may be conceived of as haunted houses. This raises questions about the relations between house, author and literature, along with the functions that ghosts have served historically and that might explain their presence at Mårbacka. We will here return to the six functions we have assigned to ghosts in author museums and discuss them in relation to Mårbacka,12 making reference also to other author museums. Firstly, we have argued that author museums are part of the heritage industry that has developed since the nineteenth century, and that ghosts function like heritage by mixing the past with the present, while also establishing a connection to the past (and the future). Inglis and Holmes (2003: 55) discuss how Scottish novelist Walter Scott (1771–1832) used his fiction to turn the Scottish landscape into one haunted by ghosts and spectres, ‘to remind the reader that in Scotland the past is always present in the contemporary world’. Whereas Scott’s aim was to emphasize the relevance of the past and tradition in a changing world, in line with his conservative political stance (ibid.), Lagerlöf, writing at the end of the century in a neo-romantic style, used the supernatural in order to criticize social injustice and to negotiate symbolically a gendered relationship to the modern world. She conceived of Mårbacka not only as a space memorializing the past, but also as a utopian space pointing towards the future. The museum evokes the past in the present by presenting a historical house, and also by enacting the past and the utopias of the past – for example, by selling in the museum shop a regional variety of oat flour (skrädmjöl, brought there by Finnish immigrants in the fifteenth century) that had been made and sold at Mårbacka as one of Lagerlöf ’s projects for the manor (Palm 2019: 566). Through the curatorial strategy of keeping the dinner table ready laid, the ghostly presence of the past is transferred

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into the present, while suggesting a ‘past future’ when someone (Lagerlöf?) may sit at the table again. Secondly, thinking of the author museum as a place of ghosts tells us that a sense of place is important in creating connections between the material and the imaginary, between the tangible and the intangible. Mårbacka as a place and not least as a house is intrinsically linked to Lagerlöf, more so than the other houses in which she lived. Lagerlöf herself affirmed this connection through her letters, autobiographical writings, other works and her will. Early biographies confirm this. In Marius Kristensen’s (1917) and Johanne Grieg Cederblad’s (1949) biographies of Lagerlöf, the photographs feature mainly Lagerlöf and Mårbacka, and emphasize the close connection between the author, Mårbacka and Värmland. Cederblad even lets the house speak to her before she bought it and its grounds back in stages between 1907 and 1910: ‘It was as if she heard the old house whisper: Why don’t you come and take me, when I need it?’13 The house itself assumes a liminal, ghostly presence, a voice from the past. In the exhibition on Lagerlöf ’s life in one of the farm buildings at Mårbacka, a text on the board ‘The Dream of Mårbacka’ starts with: ‘Mårbacka was the core of Selma Lagerlöf ’s life’. At the same time, the house of her childhood cannot be seen anymore, due to Lagerlöf ’s alterations and transformations. What does this say about the relations between the material reality of Mårbacka today and then? Do ghosts remain unchanged despite such grave and utopian architectural alterations? We would suggest that the logic of ghosts actually allows a strong connection between the past and the future, pointing to an entanglement of ghostliness and refurbishment. Thirdly, the way in which ghosts interact with objects allows us to explore the relations between the materiality of the house, the objects exhibited and the ghostly presence they convey. Author museums conjure up ghosts by combining biographical realities and literary fictions. They display objects formerly owned by the author, creating the illusion of the visitor being able to have an intimate relationship with the author. What is more private than entering someone’s house, walking through their study, peeking into their bedroom, looking at their personal belongings? These material objects convey immaterial imaginations, they materialize the ghostly presence of the author. At Mårbacka, visitors are given ample opportunity to wallow in the historicity of interiors and objects, and by limiting access to the house’s interior to guided tours only, with no photography allowed, the museum creates an atmosphere of evanescent and perhaps ghostly images in visitors’ memories of their visits.

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Place and objects come together in author museums. In his analysis of a ghost tour to a house in York, England, where a child had died in the seventeenth century, Julian Holloway discusses the significance of the window where the girl allegedly appears from time to time ‘as a literal and discursive frame that produces a sense of spectral possibility’ (Holloway 2010: 624). He points out the relevance of combining architectural materialities and narratives in order to produce such a feeling of possibility (ibid.: 625), just as do objects. Likewise, in author museums it is the physical presence of the house and of personal belongings that enable this spectral potential. The fact that the visitor can walk around the rooms that the author once occupied, opens up the continuous potential presence of the author; the hope of actually catching a glimpse of them lingers constantly. In Mårbacka, the curators have implemented such strategies, but also opted for a more explicit reconstruction of the home, giving the impression of an authentic space the author has just left. The interior concentrates on Lagerlöf ’s life there, but the guides invoke the time before by integrating stories from her childhood into their narratives. The estate’s life during the time when it belonged to someone else is largely absent, however, as the house’s narrative is intrinsically linked to Lagerlöf and her family. Similarly, the objects on display invoke the presence of Lagerlöf, functioning as a direct access to the past. Small and insignificant items may ooze more aura or ghostly presence than major ones such as furniture (cf. Workman 2007). An example at Mårbacka would be the taxidermied goose that is placed prominently on the mantlepiece in the entrance hall. As the guide informs us, this goose was a gift to Lagerlöf given by children who believed the dead bird to be the leader of the wild geese, Aka, from Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906–7: 391). Lagerlöf becomes eerily present when we learn that she used to stroke the goose each time she passed it; her touch still lingers on this bird and the ontological distinction between subject and object is dissolved. Our fourth function of ghosts concerns the way in which their multivocality is translated into curatorial strategies and stagings in author museums, and what these strategies can tell us about whom and what the museum remembers or forgets. Author museums encourage the feeling of potential encounter with the former occupant of the house in various ways. The museum might include more or less life-like effigies or images of the author, such as in the Edgar Allan Poe museum in the New York Bronx, where a life-size cardboard figure of Poe (1809–1849) welcomes the visitor to the first floor, creating a slightly uncanny feeling as one rounds a corner and comes face-to-face with him; or a black and white photograph of W.H. Auden (1907–1973), blown-up to life size

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and printed on translucent cloth and hung in front of the entrance to his home in Kirchstetten, Lower Austria – now a museum – like a ghostly apparition (Figure 4.2). Or they may give the impression of a lived-in space, such as in the August Strindberg (1849–1912) flat in Stockholm, part of the Strindberg Museum, where moving through the flat sets off the playing of a sound recording of a sick man’s coughing and the flushing of the toilet. Just the fact of being able to cross into the house, to look behind half-open doors, encourages this impression of moving between two worlds (Holloway 2010: 624). As we have shown, the narratives told in Mårbacka mainly focus on Lagerlöf ’s life there; the estate and its daily life is central. Yet, as Cederblad writes of Lagerlöf ’s daily workload, her everyday life transgressed the borders of the estate: Sometimes, she would wish that she was seven Selma Lagerlöfs, for the hours in a day were never sufficient. She had to write books and be the main supervisor of a large farm with fifty cows and nine horses. She had to be present at public celebrations and answer hundreds of begging letters. She had to be the friend of her friends, and only seldomly was she the private person Selma Lagerlöf. (Cederblad 1949: 32)14

Figure 4.2. The entrance to the W.H. Auden-Gedenkstätte in Kirchstetten, Lower Austria, with a photograph of Auden placed so that he seems to be standing in the place he stood when the photo was taken. Photograph by Carmen Osowski © Landessammlungen Niederösterreich.

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The visitor gets glimpses of her many activities outside Mårbacka through souvenirs in the house, the guide’s stories, the exhibition of carriages and the biographical exhibition in the barn (Ladan). They remain peripheral, however, and mainly function as a way to underline her attachment to Mårbacka. In this narrative it becomes the main place for conjuring up Lagerlöf ’s ghost. This may be in line with her own intentions, as her work and letters illustrate the significance that she assigned to Mårbacka in her life. The main building reinforces an impression of authenticity by forbidding free movement inside the house, with visitors having to follow a guide along a roped-off route. The upper floor of the house is off-limits, used by Lagerlöf ’s descendants so that, as the guide informed us on our visit in 2018, one can sometimes hear footsteps coming from the upper floor. As a result, the living family are turned into ‘house ghosts’, as they can only be heard (sometimes) but not seen, indicating the presence of their ancestor through heredity. Previous inhabitants including staff members are described verbally during the guided tour, especially her partner Elkan in the Elkan room and the housekeeper Lundgren in the kitchen. Her father is for the most part invisible; the museum primarily gives focus to those working in the house in Lagerlöf ’s second period there. Some author museums, such as the Garborgs’ Knudaheio house in Southern Norway (Arne Garborg, 1851–1924, and Hulda Garborg, 1862–1934), include the graves of the former inhabitants. The South African writer Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) is buried in the vicinity of her house, today a museum (see Lande, this volume). Mårbacka does not include Lagerlöf ’s grave – the writer is buried some kilometres from her house in the churchyard of Östra Ämtersvik – but the question is to what extent musealized author homes are also part of a burial culture, indicated by the historical connections between authors’ homes tourism and authors’ graves tourism (Watson 2006: 23–55; Hendrix 2009: 14). This question is worth raising, especially when the inhabitant’s ghost is conjured up through audio recordings, statues, personal belongings and a staging of the house as if the author just has left or is on the brink of returning. Few museums go so far as the Arne and Hulda Garborg Centre in Bryne and its environs, Norway, which plays upon the tendency to memorialize the author by giving the author a ghostly presence – a presence with unclear intention and authority. QR codes placed inside and outside the Garborgs’ summer house at Knudaheio and Arne Garborg’s birth house allow visitors to conjure up augmented reality videos giving them often humorous access both to the fictive landscapes of his literature set in the landscape and to more biographical episodes. One of

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these provides a new interpretation to Hulda and Arne Garborg’s graves inside the enclosure at Knudaheio, allowing visitors to see Hulda being resurrected from her grave (Garborgheimen, n.d.). The two authors are not allowed to die: their presence is constantly evoked by the curators, the museum guides and the visitors. As Hans Ruin states, ‘[i]n the end, the grave is not a house for corpses, but a vehicle for spirits of the once living’ (Ruin 2015: 138). This also applies to the author museum: the image usually conveyed is of direct access to the author, despite their absent body. The question of who speaks and whose voice we can hear in museums has received fresh impetus in recent years as a result of new digital technologies. Nowadays it is not uncommon in house or personality museums to meet digitally evoked ghosts, who represent the former occupant of the house and now function as guides for those who come after them (for example, at the Lloyd George Museum in Llanystumdwy, Wales, not an author museum, but a politician and writer museum). Mårbacka does not go that far, but as we have mentioned, Lagerlöf is present through aural representation in the last room of the guided tour, her study. The setting conveys the impression of the author just having have left her desk, to return soon. After explaining Lagerlöf ’s work and work schedule, the guide switches on an audio playback machine placed on the window sill next to the desk, and we hear a recording of Lagerlöf ’s voice. Listening to her voice in the very room where she worked to create her literature, generates a feeling of authenticity, of being close to her, rather than one of fright. Voice recordings and holographic revivals of the author are all, to adapt Wolfgang Ernst’s observation of the historian Jules Michelet’s archival experience, ‘a medium for the voices of the dead’ (Ernst 2006: 112). Ghosts or ‘spectral traces’ may, as Maddern (2008: 375) shows in her case study of the musealized migration reception centre on Ellis Island, New York, ‘provide a more unmediated access to memory’ because they are not limited by temporal or spatial constraints. Unlike when hearing the recording of a ghostly voice as part of ghost tourism in haunted houses or old castles, visitors may identify with the person speaking more easily when hearing the recording of an author’s voice. This is in part because the author, while speaking with a ‘ghostly’ voice, has been recorded as a living person and not as a ghost, but also because the visit may feel less intrusive when the author is present than when not. In addition, the ghost of the author does not usually speak back, and this allows access to an author who reflects the visitor’s desires and wishes. Tellingly, the audio recording of Lagerlöf at Mårbacka is of her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, reinforcing a narrative in which the winning of the Nobel Prize for Liter-

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ature in 1909 is seen as the culmination of her career, even if she went on to write many major works afterwards. It is also here that the tour ends. Ghosts in author home museums can, however, never be wholly exorcized; they can never be laid to rest, as this would mean the end of these museums as we know them. If the author would be at rest, what would such a museum look like? Would the focus be on literature, with the author finally dead, or on a historical interior, as may be the case in the Grillparzer apartment that Eva-Maria Orosz discusses in this volume?

Staging Ghosts at Mårbacka We stated earlier that the curator in the author museum and her or his intention is seldom of interest to the visitor, even if they may strongly influence the way the museum is seen and understood. However, with Harald Hendrix (2008), we must acknowledge that Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka, like a number of other author home museums, is for a large part a creation of the author who lived there, in the sense that her home was both an act of self-fashioning and planned as a future museum. An author can be the author not only of literary texts, but of their own home and museum. Behind the present-day curators of Selma Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka is Lagerlöf herself in the role as curator. An author may thus have authority (and ‘author-ity’) long after their death, and thus we arrive at our fifth function of ghosts in author museums, the remediation of literature and author, and the question of who speaks in the museum. The implication of Lagerlöf ’s concern with how men can bring houses and inheritances to ruin is that one might also take care of a home with the intention of making it part of a common heritage. By refashioning Mårbacka into a writer’s home and a museum, Lagerlöf was in a sense laying her father’s ghost to rest, or perhaps even exorcizing it. Making Mårbacka into a museum – and making Lagerlöf ’s voice as a curator be heard – was an action very much in line with the themes in Lagerlöf ’s fiction. For the visitor-reader, this intertwining of literature and biography is underlined by ‘Mårbacka’ not only being the name of a museum, but also the title of the first of three autobiographical works published in 1922, 1930 and 1932 by Lagerlöf (the second and third have the subtitles ‘Mårbacka II’ and ‘Mårbacka III’) in which she describes her childhood experiences in the house in a highly literary manner. Here we hear a second authoritative voice, Lagerlöf as a life-writer. These site-focused biographies, along with the fictionalized version of the house in the novel Liljecronas hem (Lagerlöf 1911) and other novels and stories set in the region, provide the

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museum with extra virtual and artistic layers (cf. Bonnevier 2007: 224, 269–70). However, the official name of the museum today, ‘Selma Lagerlöfs Mårbacka’ (in English, ‘Selma Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka’), brings with it a spectral paradox: Mårbacka today is a product of Lagerlöf ’s intentions, but she is no longer present as its owner. Only the memory of her remains, something that is reflected in the terminology used on the official welcome board, which advertises the grounds in Swedish as minnesgården (memorial farm/mansion), in German as Gedenkstätte (memorial place) and in English as ‘memory estate’. The authority for Mårbacka’s narrative lies today with the Mårbacka Foundation (Mårbackastiftelsen), founded by Lagerlöf herself and premised on her authority as former owner and central occupant. A third authoritative voice, as suggested already, is Lagerlöf ’s fiction. Often literary and biographical aspects merge, and the Mårbacka museum actively employs this sort of mixing as a curatorial strategy: for instance, in the grounds belonging to the house where, during our visit in May 2018, visiting adults and children were invited to answer questions affixed to wooden boards. Question 10 for adults asked for the title of Lagerlöf ’s debut novel, whereas the same question for children asked for the names of Harry Potter’s friends. Attached photographs of Lagerlöf and of the three main actors in the Harry Potter films emphasized this mingling of fiction and reality, and linked Lagerlöf and her work to a magical world. There is no doubt that Lagerlöf ’s neo-romantic style, its magical realism avant la lettre, would suggest conjuring up ghosts at Mårbacka. The ghostly, the magical and the uncanny are not only recurrent topoi in her fictional works and her autobiographical texts, but also in the biographies written about her and at Mårbacka itself. Visiting Mårbacka today is a multisensual experience focusing both on biographical and literary narratives – an experience that, going back to our third and fourth functions of author museums, can evoke ghosts as a curatorial strategy of staging. The most striking parts of the museum, the interiors of the main building, are an exercise in authenticity, in which rooms and objects are staged around the absent body of the author. The tour guides in the main building carefully supplement the interiors of Lagerlöf ’s later life with verbal stagings of the building in different periods. We should not forget that strategies for creating authenticity in author museums are part of careful biographical staging. The author’s voice is also a representation, selected by the curator and transmitted through a technological device that again distorts the original. As Ivan Ross points out in his writing on digital ghosts in history museums, ‘the “original” exists only by virtue of the existence of its repetition’ (Ross 2013: 829).

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The fact that the recording mentioned above is placed next to Lagerlöf ’s writing desk further emphasizes the feeling of authenticity, authority and ghostly presence; most likely the effect would have been different had we listened to the recording in the kitchen or the hallway. After Lagerlöf ’s death, visitors were guided around the museum by a former teacher and friend of Lagerlöf, Thyra Freding, who was known to borrow Lagerlöf ’s clothes and masquerade as the author, limping as Lagerlöf had (Edberg 2002: 9). The housekeeper Lundgren is said to have also done this before Lagerlöf ’s death, to provide photo opportunities for tourists while the author worked undisturbed (Bonnevier 2007: 266). Mårbacka continues to provide ‘dramatic tours’ (gestaltande omvisningar), in which costumed museum workers take on the roles of people who have lived in the house, assuming their voices (Linder 2015: 51; Bukkemoen Minkara 2017: 69). Lagerlöf ’s literary texts are also staged and voiced for a present-day audience, in a more fragmentary fashion, most clearly in parts of the museum intended for children and placed in outhouses (these include a children’s theatre). Various scenes from her books are also staged in the drawings and paintings that make up part of the interior of the main building. Staging, like ghosts, was a topos in both Lagerlöf ’s life and literature that she often connected with houses and homes – her first experience with theatre was in the form of amateur theatricals at Mårbacka, and plays staged in manor houses and a theatrical mode of fiction are central to a work such as Gösta Berlings Saga (1891), as Ulla-Britt Lagerroth (2005) has argued. Bonnevier sees the interiors at Mårbacka as stagings in themselves, as tableaux vivants designed by Lagerlöf to be looked at by visitors (Bonnevier 2007: 265, 303). Just as theatricality can be part of prose fiction, it is often a central aspect of the conjuring up of ghosts (including the various hoaxes typical of spiritualist seances), and furthermore of museums (Hanak-Lettner 2011), and of the development of scenography as a part of museums – and of literary museums in particular – as Vanessa Zeissig argues in her contribution to the present volume. Theatricality is partly about staging on a scene, in the case of staged tours the house museum, but also about dialogue, a characteristic feature of the dramatic mode. By creating staged tours, museums partake in a form of curatorship that allows, like drama, different voices to come to the fore, not just that of a narrator or author. While Lagerlöf is one of the main authors of Mårbacka, as a museum it involves, just like her ghost stories, many layers of communication and narration, combining the intentions of Lagerlöf herself, of the foundation as museum curators, and, prominently, in the materiality of their voices

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and those of the various guides. When people who have lived in Mårbacka are played by the guides, a ghostly temporality is implied, though without the uncanniness of an actual ghost. The effect is similar to the shifting narrative perspectives of Lagerlöf ’s novels, where the narrator often delegates focus to different characters in different chapters in order to provide a multifaceted insight into events and psychology from different social positions. The authority of Lagerlöf ’s fictions, and the role played there by ghosts, imagined or not, is given more weight when the Mårbacka guides play ghosts, which is slightly different to the ghostliness of playing historical people as if they were alive and corporeal. In 2013, among the ‘staged tours’ of the house, there were also ghost tours, during which various supernatural phenomena were staged (Linder 2015: 198), and on the official website of Värmland tourism one can watch a film on ghostly presences at Mårbacka, the last part of which shows a male medium walking through the house and describing human presences through its aura (Visit Värmland, n.d.; Kanal12iVarmland 2012). These ghost tours are primarily used according to our sixth function of ghosts, that is, as an attraction feeding on Gothic models of sublime horror and fear, pleasurable when distanced from nearby reality in some way. Today, many visitors to personality museums take pictures of themselves posing in the writer’s study or in front of her books, and inserting themselves into the house and the related narratives, assuming a closeness to the former inhabitant and, by posting the pictures on the web, creating new stories about the house, the author and her work (Forgan 2012: 261). This may be more than pure consumerism or desire for spectacle, also involving a new way of engaging with the past. The museum at Mårbacka, however, tries to confine this multivocality and to keep the main power of definition over Lagerlöf and the other inhabitants by not allowing any photographs to be taken in her former home. What the museum also does here is to limit the number of points of contact between author, work and visitor. While this may help to conserve the integrity of the author and her personal space, it may also take away an opportunity for visitors to engage with the past and thereby lay it to rest. Given Lagerlöf ’s position as a major national and world author, Mårbacka will always tend to iconicize and memorialize the author and her literature, ultimately returning authority to her as a biographical person, and thus exorcizing ghosts and their complexity. Faced with the paradoxical absence of the main subject of the museum, the author, biographical author museums like Mårbacka simply let objects and interiors imply past presences, letting visitors imagine the intangible inside their minds with-

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out any explicit performance on the stage that these objects and interiors provide. However, Mårbacka also attempts to stage the dead, responding to a perceived desire to see the past brought back to life. Again, the messy uncanniness of ghosts could be avoided by staging the dead as living beings or re-enactments rather than explicitly as ghosts. Such a strategy would ultimately not eradicate all traces of a ghostly logic however, and Mårbacka has occasionally chosen to stage the ghosts of the dead as a way of attracting visitors. This more playful approach can be an opportunity to explore the paradoxes involved in evoking the past for the visitors. The balance between imagination, re-enactment and ghosts in historical museums is uneasy, each implying as they do the underlying presence of the others. In the epilogue to her recent biography of Lagerlöf, Anna-Karin Palm describes walking in the Mårbacka garden and imagining Lagerlöf ’s bodily presence there so concretely that imagination almost becomes re-enactment (Palm 2019: 636). The staging of ghosts also reverts to the safety of re-enactment as soon as the visitor realizes that a staged ghost is not a real ghost. While ghosts have been explicitly staged at Mårbacka, to our knowledge Lagerlöf herself has not been included among them, at least recently; if staged, she has mostly been re-enacted as a living being. It is said however that Mårbacka’s first guide, Freding, while showing visitors around and dressed in one of Lagerlöf ’s dresses, would lie down in Lagerlöf ’s bed, saying: ‘And here I laid when I died’.15 The unease with allowing Lagerlöf herself to enter the stage today is an indication of the conundrum at the heart of author museums: author museums are attempts to lay ghosts to rest, but they have to constantly reawaken them in order to do so. Ulrike Spring is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oslo. While working on this book, she was also affiliated as Professor II to the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her research interests are museum history, exhibition analysis, and nineteenth-century Arctic history, in particular on expeditions and tourism. She was the leader and co-coordinator (with Johan Schimanski) of the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums (2016–19) and leads the research group Collecting Norden (2021–22). She has co-edited a special issue of Nordisk museologi on ‘Communication Processes in Author Museums’ with Johan Schimanski (2020). Johan Schimanski is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on borders in literature, Arctic discourses, and literary exhibition practices. At present he leads a NOS-HS workshop

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on Temporalities and Subjectivities of Crossing. Recent volumes include Living Together (2019), co-edited with Knut Stene-Johansen and Christian Refsum, and Border Images, Border Narratives (2021), co-edited with Jopi Nyman. With Ulrike Spring, he was co-coordinator of the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums (2016–19), and they have co-edited a special issue of Nordic Museology on ‘Communication Processes in Author Museums’ (2020).

Notes  1. ‘men då han nu märkte, att hans granne endast hade en vanlig spökhistoria att berätta, kunde han knappast kväva en rörelse av otålighet’ (Lagerlöf 1925: 59). Our translations throughout, unless otherwise indicated.  2. ‘Knappt hade jag talat ut, förrän jag bakom min stol hörde ett högt stönande. Och detta stönande var så likt den trötta suck, som min salig far brukade upphäva, då han plågades av ålderdomens krämpor, att jag tyckte mig ha honom bakom mig och rusade upp. Då såg jag väl ingenting, men så viss var jag om att jag hade hört honom, att jag inte mera ville sätta mig till bords, utan har suttit här i min ensamhet och begrundat saken ända till nu’ (Lagerlöf 1925: 62).  3. For those familiar with Shakespeare’s play, the rhythmic and morphological patterning of the names ‘Gathenhielm’ and ‘Löwenskold’ in Lagerlöf ’s text makes them echo Shakespeare’s Scandinavian names ‘Rosencrantz’ and ‘Guildenstern’ – who famously ‘are dead’ (Hamlet act 5, scene 2, line 411), and whose story also involves a pirate.  4. ‘ingenstans i landet finns det så gott om herrgårdar och spökhistorier som i Sörmland’ (Lagerlöf 1907, II: 42).  5. ‘besynnerliga spökhistorier’ (Lagerlöf 1908: 8).  6. ‘att det skal gå hål på en vägg, bakom vilken jag skymtar gestalter, men otydligt ännu’ (Letter to Anna Oom dated 19 February 1911; Lagerlöf, Oom and Malmros 2009–10, I: 449).  7. ‘ett slags iscensättande av den egna historien’ (Palm 2019: 563).  8. ‘Hon lät höja taket, så at det skapades en ljus och vacker övervåning. Vinden, som hade varit så hemsk att gå över för en liten flicka med huvudet fullt av sägner och skrock, blev till en trevlig hall’ (Oterdahl 1948: 9).   9. ‘som ett livsverk och som en revansch’ (Ek-Nilsson 2005: 67). 10. ‘Hundratals turister lära besöka stället nu om somrarna. Bara för den skull, kan det inte få vara som det är’ (Letter 2013B to Sophie Elkan, written beginning of April 1907; Lagerlöf 1992: 299). 11. ‘en lockelse för turister’; ‘arbetströtta, för författarinnor, för lärarinnor och för fattiga, ogifta äldre damer i allmänhet’ (Letter to Ida Bäckmann, dated 3 September 1939. Lagerlöf 1969: 361; quoted in Palm 2019: 631).

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12. We followed two guided tours of the house in 2018, one in May and one in June. The first was a standard guided tour in Swedish, and the second a tour for participants at the ‘Selma Lagerlöf 2018’ conference in Karlstad and Mårbacka. 13. ‘Det var som om hun hørte den gamle gården hviske: Hvorfor kommer du ikke og tar meg, når jeg trenger det?’ (Cederblad 1949: 32). 14. ‘Stundom kunne hun ønske at hun var syv Selma Lagerlöfer, for dagens timer strakk aldri til. Hun skulle skrive bøker og ha overoppsynet med en stor gård på femti kuer og ni hester. Hun skulle være til stede ved offentlige fester og svare på hundrer av tiggerbrev. Hun skulle være sine venners venn, og hun skulle en sjelden gang være privatmennesket Selma Lagerlöf ’ (Cederblad 1949: 32). 15. ‘Och här låg jag när jag dog’ (Edberg 2002: 9).

References Bonnevier, K. 2007. Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture. Stockholm: Axl Books. . 2012. ‘Dress-Code: Gender Performance and Misbehavior in the Manor’, Gender, Place & Culture 19(6): 707–29. Booth, A. 2016. Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bukkemoen Minkara, S. 2017. ‘Å komme hjem? En analyse av biografiske museer belyst gjennom forfatterhjemmene Bjerkebæk og Mårbacka’. MA thesis, University of Oslo. Cederblad, J.G. 1949. Selma Lagerlöf. Oslo: Gyldendal norsk forlag. Dancausa, G., R.D. Hernández and L.M. Pérez. 2020. ‘Motivations and Constraints for the Ghost Tourism: A Case Study in Spain’, Leisure Sciences, 13 August. Retrieved 20 April 2021 from https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2020.1805655. Derrida, J. (1994) 2006. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Edberg, L. 2002. ‘Mårbacka och Mårbackaguidningarna 60 år’, in L. Edberg (ed.), Mårbacka Minnesgård under 60 år: 1942-2002. Sunne: Mårbackastiftelsen, pp. 3–11. Ek-Nilsson, K. 2005. ‘Titanen och sagodrottningen: Kulturella representationer av August Strindberg och Selma Lagerlöf ’, in I.-L. Aronsson and B. Meurling (eds), Det bekönade museet: Genusperspektiv i museologi och museiverksamhet. Uppsala: Uppsala universitet, pp. 53–91. Ernst, W. 2006. ‘Dis/continuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multi-media Space?’, in W.H.K. Chun and T. Keenan (eds), New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 105–23. Forgan, S. 2012. ‘“Keepers of the Flame”: Biography, Science and Personality in the Museum’, in K. Hill (ed.), Museums and Biographies: Stories, Objects, Identities. London: The Boydell Press, pp. 247–63. Garborgheimen. n.d. ‘Garborgløypa’. Retrieved 20 April 2020 from https://www.jaermuseet.no/garborgheimen/garborgloypa/.

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Gentry, G.W. 2007. ‘Walking with the Dead: The Place of Ghost Walk Tourism in Savannah, Georgia’, Southeastern Geographer 47(2): 222–38. Grill, E. 1964–66. ‘Lars Gathenhielm’, in E. Grill (ed.), Svenskt biografiskt lexikon: Band 16. Stockholm: Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, p. 753. Hanak-Lettner, W. 2011. Die Ausstellung als Drama: Wie das Museum aus dem Theater entstand. Bielefeld: transcript. Hanks, M. (2015) 2016. Haunted Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Ghost Tourism, Populism, and the Past. London: Routledge. Hendrix, H. 2008. ‘Writers’ Houses as Media of Expression and Rememberance: From Self-Fashioning to Cultural Memory’, in H. Hendrix (ed.), Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–11. . 2009. ‘From Early Modern to Romantic Literary Tourism: A Diachronical Perspective’, in N.J. Watson (ed.), Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 13–24. Holloway, J. 2010. ‘Legend-Tripping in Spooky Spaces: Ghost Tourism and Infrastructures of Enchantment’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 618–37. Howitt, W. 1874. Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets. London: Richard Bentley. Inglis, D., and M. Holmes. 2003. ‘Highland and Other Haunts: Ghosts in Scottish Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 30(1): 50–63. Jakobson, R. 1960. ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in T.A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 350–77. Kanal12iVarmland. 2012. ‘Här spökar det’. Retrieved 20 April 2020 from https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=g7KrH_WpbSE. Kristensen, M. 1917. Selma Lagerlöf. Kjøbenhavn and Kristiania: Gyldendalske boghandel. Lagerlöf, S. 1891. Gösta Berlings saga. Stockholm: Frithiof Hellbergs förlag. . 1901. Jerusalem: I: I dalarna: Berättelse. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag. . 1907. Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag. . 1908. ‘En saga om en saga’, in S. Lagerlöf, En saga om en saga och andra sagor. Stockholm: Alb. Bonniers Boktryckeri, pp. 5–24. . 1911. Liljecronas hem: Roman. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag. . 1912. Körkarlen: Berättelse. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag. . 1921. Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!, trans. W.F. Harvey. London: Odhams Press. . 1922. Mårbacka. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag. . 1925. Löwensköldska ringen. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag. . 1930. Ett barns memoarer: Mårbacka II. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag. . 1932. Dagbok: Mårbacka III. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag. . 1969. Brev 2: 1903–1940, ed. Y. Toijer-Nilsson. Lund: Gleerup. . 1991. The Löwensköld Ring, trans. L. Schenck. Norwich: Norvik Press. . 1992. Du lär mig att bli fri: Selma Lagerlöf skriver till Sophie Elkan, ed. Y. Toijer-Nilsson. Stockholm: Bonnier. . 2009. The Saga of Gösta Berling. London: Penguin. . 2014. The Complete Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden, trans. P. Graves. London: Norvik Press. Lagerlöf, S., A. Oom and E. Malmros. 2009–10. Selma, Anna och Elise: Brevväxling mellan Selma Lagerlöf, Anna Oom och Elise Malmros åren 1886–1937, ed. L. Carlsson. Landskrona: Litorina.

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Lagerroth, U.-B. 2005. ‘Selma Lagerlöf och teatern’, in M. Karlsson and L. Vinge (eds), I Selma Lagerlöfs värld: Fjorton uppsatser. Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion / Selma Lagerlöf-sällskapet, pp. 9–37. Larsson, Lisbeth. 2017. ‘Förord’, in Selma Lagerlöf: Mårbacka: Ett barns memoarer: Dagbok. Sockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, pp. 7–11. Linder, J. 2015. ‘Den lokala profilen: Person, plats och kulturarv’. PhD dissertation, Stockholm University. Lowenthal, D. (1996) 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maddern, J.F. 2008. ‘Spectres of Migration and the Ghosts of Ellis Island’, Cultural Geographies 15(3): 359–81. Nordlund, A., and B. Wanselius. 2018. Selma Lagerlöf: Sveriges modernaste kvinna. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Max Ström. Oterdahl, J. 1948. Herrgårdsflickan som blev världsberömd: Selma Lagerlöf. Stockholm: Missionsförbundets förlag. Palm, A.-K. 2019. ‘Jag vill sätta världen i rörelse’: En biografi över Selma Lagerlöf. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag. Rancière, J. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill. London: Continuum. Ross, I. 2013. ‘Digital Ghosts in the History Museum: The Haunting of Today’s Mediascape’, Continuum 27(6): 825–36. Ruin, H. 2015. ‘Housing Spirits: The Grave as Exemplary Site of Memory’, in A.L. Tota and T. Hagen (eds), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 131–40. Schimanski, J., and U. Spring. 2020. ‘Hva kommuniseres i forfattermuseer?’, Nordisk Museologi 28(1): 23–41. Selbmann, R. 1988. Dichterdenkmäler in Deutschland: Literaturgeschichte in Erz und Stein. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Shakespeare, W. 1994. ‘Hamlet’, in T.J.B. Spencer (ed.), William Shakespeare: Four Tragedies. London: Penguin, pp. 3–300. Todorov, T. 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. R. Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Visit Värmland. n.d. ‘Haunted Sites in Värmland’. Retrieved 20 April 2020 from https:// www.visitvarmland.se/en/haunted-sites-varmland. Watson, N.J. 2006. The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. . 2020. The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wijkmark, S. 2009. ‘Hemsökelser: Gotiken i sex berättelser av Selma Lagerlöf ’. PhD dissertation, Karlstad University. Wold, A.L. 2020. Privateering and Diplomacy, 1793–1807: Great Britain, Denmark–Norway and the Question of Neutral Ports. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Workman, L. 2007. Dr Johnson’s Doorknob and Other Significant Parts of Great Men’s Houses. New York: Rizzioli.

Chapter 5

Unpacking the Book Collection Following a Guide, a Curator and a Librarian in an Author Museum Thea Aarbakke

One of the most extensive collections at the museum ‘Sigrid Undset’s home – Bjerkebæk’ in Lillehammer, in terms of both volume and value, is Undset’s personal book collection. Approximately nine thousand books are on display at the former house of Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset (1882– 1949) (Åslund and Haug 2007). The book collection, and especially the museum’s use of it, constitutes an interesting starting point for investigating and discussing how an institution such as the author museum can communicate the author not just as a writer but as a reader, and perhaps also as a researcher and a collector. Today, the house is owned by the Norwegian state and operated by the open-air museum Maihaugen. Bjerkebæk is situated in the city of Lillehammer, north-east of Oslo, a two hours’ train ride from the capital. Bjerkebæk opened up to the public in 2007 and belongs to the genre of historic house museums. It is a reconstruction of the property and its interior to its 1930s appearance, when Undset lived there together with her three children and several housekeepers. In addition to the book collection, the museum’s collection contains over five thousand objects that belonged to Undset (the books are registered in a separate catalogue), the property and the two log houses in which Undset lived. When the museum opened, a visitor centre was also built to house the ticket sales, a cafe and a gift shop. The museum is only open to the public during the

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summer season, and visitors are welcomed into the laureate’s home in groups of up to twelve, accompanied by a guide. Books are complex objects to put on display. The written word ‘is normally produced to be read as a piece of text rather than gazed at as an object. … But reading, in all its different forms, is still a fundamentally different activity to that of viewing an object in a museum or a gallery’ (Loxley et al. 2011: 4). Behind a glass case, they become fixed as objects, but their content remains unreachable. In this chapter, I ask what we can learn about Undset through the museum’s presentations of her book collection. In addition to the actual book collection, the analysis involves digital technologies and groups of experts and individuals, from both within the museum staff and outside. All books at Bjerkebæk are searchable in the national academic digital database Oria, whose search engine allows you to search all of the library’s resources (UNIT 2020). Following Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the book collection is part of a larger network consisting of curatorial strategies, exhibition technologies and museum staff (Law 1999; Latour 2005). It is especially the relations between these actors that are of interest in an actor-network analysis. The word ‘network’ is understood as a metaphor, and is used as an analytical tool to understand how things and concepts are interconnected. Drawing on ethnological methods, such as fieldwork, I have studied the book collection from three perspectives made possible by the museum: as objects within the exhibition, as single volumes that can be studied by their content, and as digital objects that are part of an online database. I will highlight how different kinds of knowledge about the book collection, in relation to Undset, present themselves through different actors, both human and non-human. The fieldwork consists of observations and semi-structured interviews at the actual site, but also investigation of the digital platform, Oria. The choice of method is shaped by an interest in studying the museum from a processual perspective: informants I met at the site gave important insight into aspects of the place that are not written in words, such as the daily practices and routines of the museum’s guides, curator and librarian. Ethnologists have for a long time been interested in studying people’s daily practices and their work tools (Öhlander 2011: 14), and it has proven to be a fruitful method for researchers who want to study museums from a processual perspective (e.g. Macdonald 2002; Yaneva 2003). As society has changed, so has the fieldwork. Today, the internet has become part of the fieldwork (Öhlander 2011; Hyltén-Cavallius 2011), and I include the internet in my material because I want to study how the museum’s digital platform shapes its content.

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The empirical material was collected during two field trips in 2016 and 2018. During the first field trip, I followed a guided tour as a regular museum visitor. In the second, I also met actors whom visitors do not usually meet in the museum: the curator and the librarian. Meeting the librarian and observing her management of the book collection through a database led me to my third perspective, seeing the book collection as part of a larger database.

Writers’ Book Collections Several researchers before me have been interested in authors’ book collections (Popperwell 1966; Gribben 1986; Åslund and Haug 2007; Norman 2009; Oram and Nicholson 2014; Hevrøy 2016). Ronald Popperwell, for example, has been interested in the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun’s (1859–1952) reading practices. Hamsun’s private library is still in his study at Nørholm and is private property. Popperwell (1966) sees private book collection as offering potential insights into Hamsun’s thought processes. This is also the case in a study of the poet Olav H. Hauge’s (1908–1994) book collection (Hevrøy 2016). Hauge’s books are today on display at the author centre in Ulvik, dedicated to the poet. Stein A. Hevrøy connects what Hauge read to his creative work. Both Popperwell and Hevrøy investigate Hamsun’s and Hauge’s private book collections as sources for the authors’ preferences and inspirations. Neither of them is particularly interested in how the books have been put on display; they study mainly the books’ contents, and especially of those that have been annotated. The edited volume Collecting, Curating and Researching Writers’ Libraries (Oram and Nicholson 2014) provides a useful introduction to issues and challenges connected to capturing and studying authors’ libraries when they become part of a public institution. Its principal editor, Richard Oram, has worked at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where they have a long tradition of preserving authors’ private book collections. Principally, Oram raises awareness about the potential of writers’ libraries not just for their single volumes but as a whole: ‘The examination of a single volume annotated by a writer may offer considerable insights,’ Oram writes, ‘but the study of an entire library, or even a significant portion of it, may open a much wider window’ (Oram 2014: 3). Oram calls this the curatorial issues of authors’ libraries. Like Oram, I am interested in the library as a whole and its spatial arrangement inside Undset’s former home. But I also consider what happens to it when the

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collection transcends the exhibition room’s physical space by becoming part of a larger digital library system. Several contributions in this volume have also been interested in writers’ libraries. Helena Bodin writes about the Swedish modernist Gunnar Ekelöf and the memorial room dedicated to him, which houses his book collection. Emily Graf mentions that the first visitors to Lin Yutang’s Memorial Library in Taiwan were allowed to borrow books from Yutang’s collection and could even take the books home to read.

Unpacking In 2011, an anthology on museum collections was published by Sarah Byrne, Anne Clarke, Rodney Harrison and Robin Torrence, under the title Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum. In the introduction, the editors lay out a frame for their project: ‘The act of “unpacking” museum collections seeks to problematize collections as material and social assemblages through an interrogation of how they developed, the impacts they have had over time and the roles they continue to play in the contemporary world’ (Byrne et al. 2011: 4). I use ‘unpacking’ as an analytical term to investigate Undset’s private library as part of a museum collection, where many actors are involved in making it a unifying whole. The term ‘unpacking’ challenges the perception of museums and their collections as static entities. By drawing on insights from ANT regarding agency and materiality, I suggest here new ways of thinking about the relationships between objects, between objects and people, and between objects, people, exhibition design and public databases. I investigate how technical choices and spatial infrastructure have an effect on our understanding of a book collection put on display in exhibition rooms and through other forms of interface. In line with ANT, we cannot assume that only humans act on objects; objects have agency too (Latour 2005). Museum collections exemplify the sort of assemblages of humans and non-humans that Bruno Latour has called ‘actor-networks’ (ibid.: 217–18). Complex operations of agency can be studied through this framework. ‘Museums, collections and their objects are alive, have their own histories and continue to have agency in the present’ (Byrne et al. 2011: 15). Looking at museum collections as processes rather than as static assemblages of objects, the focus shifts from a representational critique of the final results of the museum to its practices.

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Unpacking Bjerkebæk’s book collection, which was once Undset’s private book collection, involves acknowledging the fundamental entanglement of the material and the social (after Byrne et al. 2011: 5; see also Latour 2005). In this case, Bjerkebæk’s book collection is understood as a collection shaped by the museum’s guided tour, its curator and the librarian. In addition, it is shaped by the concept of the exhibition, its design, informants, photographs, receipts, technologies of display, the internal structure of the database and the museum building itself. The visitor is also an actor in this network. In this way, ANT becomes a tool that helps us to see networks in operation through different spatial and chronological settings. The network metaphor makes it possible to detect how different kinds of agency are enabled (Byrne et al. 2011). However, ANT is not just an abstract term. It is grounded in empirical case studies (Law 2008). In this analysis, Bjerkebæk’s contemporary museum environment constitutes my field site, where knowledge is negotiated and created. The guide, the curator and the librarian at Bjerkebæk take me to different sites at the museum. I follow a guided tour inside Undset’s former home, I meet the curator while she is returning a book to the exhibition, and I join the librarian in her office where she manages the collection through the digital database Oria. I explore Undset’s book collection from three different subject positions, and I reflect on what kind of knowledge it is possible to obtain through these positions. Fredrik Svanberg, who is an archaeologist and works at the National Maritime Museum in Sweden, writes that ‘[u]nfolding the connections, relationships and biographies of objects opens them up to new interpretations and narratives in museums, and lays the foundation for new exhibitions and other communication’ (Svanberg 2017: 93). These insights can have implications for curatorial practices in the future and for the engagement of the public with museums today. My aim is to unpack the book collection and open it up to new possible narratives and interpretations within the museum’s context.

Sigrid Undset, the Bjerkebæk Museum and Its Book Collection Sigrid Undset ranks among the most famous Norwegian authors, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, ‘principally for her powerful description of Northern life during the Middle Ages’ (Nobel Media/The Nobel Foundation 2020). Undset lived at Bjerkebæk from 1919 until she died in 1949; when she moved to Lillehammer and Bjerkebæk, she was already an established author. Her debut was the contemporary novel Fru

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Marta Oulie (1907), which begins with what was considered at the time a scandalous utterance: ‘I have been unfaithful to my husband’.1 Her literary breakthrough came with the novel Jenny, published in 1911. The protagonist, Jenny, lives a free-spirited life in Rome, but she commits suicide when she cannot have the life she desires with the man she loves. Both novels are positioned within the contemporary debate on women’s rights. Conservatives criticized the free-spirited life of Jenny, while the intellectual left did not embrace the portrayal of her breakdown. At Lillehammer, Undset started writing a trilogy of historical novels set in Sel, a place not far from Lillehammer. In the trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–22) and the two books about the master Olav Audunssøn (1925–27), she writes about the life of women and men during the Middle Ages in Norway. It was for this work that she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 48, being the third woman ever to win the prize, and at that time one of the youngest laureates. From 1922 onwards, Undset received an annual poet’s stipend from the Norwegian government (Ørjasæter 1993: 181). The trilogy about Kristin Lavransdatter was already a success, and together with the poet’s stipend, it gave her the economic freedom to build a home according to her own taste, and to buy the books she wanted to own and read. Undset lived at Bjerkebæk together with her children and housekeepers. Her husband, the painter Anders Castus Svarstad, visited her but never lived at Bjerkebæk. In 1924, she filed for divorce and converted to Catholicism (ibid.: 201–2). In the same year, Undset initiated an external survey of her book collection. Her private library grew with the many books she received as gifts from other authors, friends and publishing houses, and she invited the librarian Johan Albert Julius Kjær to catalogue her books. Kjær’s catalogue system, which included some one thousand entries, marks the starting point of an external systematization of Undset’s book collection (Bjerkebæk Sigrid Undsets hjem, n.d.). After Undset died, the house became the home of her youngest son and his wife, Hans Benedict Undset Svarstad (1919–1978) and Christianne Undset Svarstad, née Neraas (1917–1996). Undset’s belongings intermingled with those of the later inhabitants (Hauglid 2016). Between 1965 and 1970, the librarian Borghild Krane was invited to Bjerkebæk to further catalogue Undset’s book collection. Altogether, Krane’s catalogue contains 6,640 catalogue cards divided into five sections according to their genre: poetry, religious literature, geography, philosophy and history. Krane also noted on the catalogue cards which books had marginalia from Undset, such as her signature, a dedication or an underlining (Krane 1981).

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Christianne Undset Svarstad lived at Bjerkebæk until her death in 1996, and two years later the Norwegian state acquired the property. Maihaugen, Lillehammer’s open-air museum, was in charge of the dayto-day management. Their staff began the laborious task of transforming the house into a museum. The museum’s photographer first documented the bookshelves at Bjerkebæk and the books’ placement within them. Maihaugen’s conservators then removed all the books from the property, checking them for mould, and cleaning them at Maihaugen. Inside the books, the staff found a number of letters, bookmarks and pictures, all of which were taken out and registered. Books published after Undset’s death were removed from the collection so as to re-create her personal collection, giving it authenticity. Old pictures, receipts and letters she had written helped the museum staff to decide which books belonged to her and which did not. The books were then put back onto their bookshelves at Bjerkebæk (Hauglid 2016). In 2005, the museum’s book collection was also registered in the national academic library system, BIBSYS (today’s Oria). After the house opened as a museum in 2007, visitors were introduced to a reconstruction of the laureate’s home as it would have appeared in the 1930s, displayed as a lived-in interior. In line with Byrne et al., a museum is understood ‘not merely as material assemblages but also as social collections’ (Byrne et al. 2011: 4). Over a period of time, new actors have been introduced to the actor-network of the book collection, such as external librarians and museum employees. There has also been a shift in agency from Undset and her family to conservators, experts and museum guides. Informants, photographs and receipts have also been important actors in strengthening the museum’s concept of a reconstructed home.

Following a Guided Tour Bjerkebæk takes the shape of an author museum in its most conventional form, in line with the writers’ homes that became popular objects of literary pilgrimages in nineteenth-century Europe (Hendrix 2007; Watson 2009). Visitors to the museum, branded as Sigrid Undset’s home, encounter the sight of two connected brown-stained log houses surrounded by a garden with flowers and apple trees in spring (see Figure 5.1). As part of the musealization of Bjerkebæk, a separate visitor centre was built. My main concern in this text is with Bjerkebæk’s book collection, which has been placed in the laureate’s former home. The visitor centre is thus not a part of my analysis, but it is presented and analysed in Elin Haugdal’s

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contribution to this volume. The visitor centre is an important part of the actor-network that makes up the property that was Undset’s home; by placing all the commercial parts of the museum, such as ticket sales and the shop, at the visitor centre, the reconstruction of the log buildings and the garden as they were in the 1930s is strengthened. As a visitor at Bjerkebæk, you can only get access to the house via a guided tour, during which you follow the guide’s pace and educational programme during the one-hour walk through the rooms on display. The guide is clearly an important actor in determining how Bjerkebæk and its book collection are presented. Visitors are invited inside the house as ‘guests’, and the guide refers to the house as Undset’s ‘home’. Both terms strengthen the experience of entering someone’s home rather than just a museum that has been curated by professional museum workers. Inside the rooms, curatorial strategies play well together with the carefully selected words in the guide’s presentation. Large selections of Undset’s former belongings fill up the spaces of the living rooms, kitchen, hallway, bedroom, bathroom and office. Sometimes objects are positioned so as to give the impression that someone who lives there has just left the room; at Undset’s desk the chair is pulled out as if someone left just a moment ago and will soon return. Fresh flowers stand in a vase. By bringing living flowers into the exhibition, the museum plays with our perception of time, and becomes an important actor to draw us into the illusion of a house in which people actually live.

Figure 5.1. Bjerkebæk, Sigrid Undset’s home. Lillehammer, in 2018. Photograph by Thea Aarbakke.

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The most important light source in the exhibition is the windows, and so the rooms only appear bright on a sunny day. The old windowpanes make everything on the outside somewhat blurry. The juxtaposition of furniture, books, flowers and other belongings within the rooms work together to strengthen the atmosphere of a home. Kevin Hetherington, who has published several works on museums and spatiality, brings elements from ANT into his analysis. He writes that (modern) ‘[m]useums have become all about seeing clearly; of looking at objects on display and being able to interpret them effectively with the help of the spatial regime and order of the museum’ (Hetherington 1999: 52–53). The spatial regime at Bjerkebæk helps visitors to interpret and perceive the exhibition in a particular way as Undset’s home, and the objects as her belongings. The smells of the house also contribute to the experience. Dust, the smell of old books and textiles, the very logs of the building and the flower arrangements all contribute to the perceptions of the visitors. The smell connects the museum to this particular site – a smell that you could not re-create in a place other than Undset’s home, Bjerkebæk. Although the book collection is situated in a lived-in interior where bookshelves are part of every room, I would argue that the way the books are presented reduces them to illustrations and backdrops within the exhibition space. The shelves present the books as they were placed when people lived in the house, but as they are now protected by glass it is no longer possible to take a book down to obtain more information about its content. Ropes are used as barriers, and chairs at the visitor’s disposal are also placed in front of the shelves, creating a physical distance that hinders visitors’ access to the exhibited books (Figure 5.2). The often dim natural light from the windows makes it difficult to read the books’ titles and authors. Therefore, I argue that the book collection on display in the exhibition becomes a mere illustration, and is reduced to a prop for the domesticized lived-in interior. In a theatre or on a film set, props play an important role, but unlike the objects they imitate, they do not necessarily have the same function. The books on display at Bjerkebæk become similar to props, as we can read neither their titles nor their content. They are there to play a part in the museum’s reconstruction of a home. Or to formulate it in actor-network terminology, during a guided tour the book collection becomes an actor in the actor-network of the curatorial strategy of making the museum a private home and a lived-in interior. However, walking through the many rooms – all filled with books, except for the kitchen and bathroom – also creates a physical experience that is only accessible within the actual rooms. Although we do not know how many of the books Undset actually read, it is possible to obtain an

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immediate glimpse of the writer’s intellectual life during the one-hour guided tour inside her former home. It is one thing to read, or in this case hear, the figure ‘9,000 books’, and another to see those books and the amount of space they demand, whose visualization provides another form of knowledge about the magnitude. In addition, the collection also follows Undset’s own arrangement. The museum staff have used pictures and informants to reconstruct Undset’s own library system, which makes it a possible source of knowledge about the kind of books she placed in different rooms. What kind of books are there in her study, in the hallway or in her bedroom? The titles and the authors of the books are not perceptible during the guided tour, but questions regarding the arrangement of the books can be answered at Bjerkebæk with the aid of its curator or a guide if you are able to visit the museum outside its regular opening hours. This tells us that information about the book collection (other than its titles and authors) has been prioritized when the books have been put on display and used within the museum’s educational programme. The museum’s reconstruction of Undset’s own arrangement of books in the very rooms in which she placed them is quite unique. In his historical overview on writers’ libraries, Oram (2014) explains that most writers’ libraries are not preserved, and if they are, the books are most likely to be moved from their original setting to become part of a larger archive or library system. Because Undset’s books are put on display in her former house, and arranged after her own system, they can also be a source of information about its general order and physical disposition.

Figure 5.2. Bookshelves protected by ropes. Bjerkebæk, Sigrid Undset’s home. Lillehammer, in 2018. Photograph by Thea Aarbakke.

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This points to questions about the exhibition’s authorship: who are the actors, and who acts? The books are now part of a collection in which Undset’s name is the unifying factor. It has taken considerable work to reconstruct the house into a 1930s home interior, involving both human labour and objects. Because the museum was once Undset’s house and the exhibition concept is a reconstruction of her home in the 1930s, it can seem like a smooth surface where the past is presented effortlessly. The exhibition gives the impression of an ‘untouched’ home and Sigrid Undset as its sovereign owner. This is not the case; it is a part of the museum’s exhibition strategy of reconstructing and playing with concepts such as ‘home’ and ‘lived-in interior’. My analysis shows that many actors are engaged in presenting the books at Bjerkebæk as a single collection that belongs to Undset. Making Undset its sole owner is dependent on a network of actors, including the building, the guide’s educational programme, and specific choices of words, objects, the smell and natural light, curatorial strategies and exhibition techniques. By highlighting this network, I have made the materiality, the volume of books and their arrangement visible too. My ambition is not to dissolve the illusion that the museum has built so impressively. It is rather to sharpen a sensitivity to the particular museological practices that make this illusion function.

Meeting Bjerkebæk’s Curator In March 2018, I was back at the museum. It was closed, and the property was covered in snow. I had an appointment with the curator, and we met outside the museum. She carried a plastic envelope that contained a book from Bjerkebæk’s collection and a printed request from a borrower (see Figure 5.3). What she was holding in her hands was thus one of Undset’s former belongings that was being returned to the exhibition at Bjerkebæk. During my previous visit to Bjerkebæk, I had been presented with a book collection stabilized within the exhibition. Although we came close to the books during the guided tour, they were out of reach, but here one of the books was right in front of me. Researchers on fieldwork methodology describe how the field can surprise you and can provide unexpected knowledge about your object of investigation (see, for example, Tjora 2012). Seeing one of the books outside the exhibition surprised me. It made me aware of the flexibility of a collection, which often disappears when objects are put on display. It raised new questions and presented another entrance to the book collection: who has access to the book collection, and what kind of knowledge can be found in these

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books? Different actors with other agencies were at work, and the books had a broader catchment area than just the exhibition space. Meeting the curator provided an opportunity to investigate the museum’s usage of the book collection beyond its exhibition space. When I asked the curator about the curatorial considerations when taking museum objects out of the exhibition, she replied that the books within the exhibition carry a double meaning. They are understood both as Undset’s former belongings and as research objects. Therefore, the books are not fixed within the exhibition space, but circulate between the exhibition rooms and the museum’s office three kilometres away. When a researcher reserves a book through Oria, the curator opens the glass protecting the museum’s bookshelves and then carries the specific specimen to her office. If the researcher cannot come to Bjerkebæk, the librarian will scan the material and make a PDF file before the book is returned to its proper place on the bookshelves. The fact that the curator and the museum provide this service opens up a different accessibility to Bjerkebæk’s book collection. For example, it is possible to study the marginalia of the books. Of the books, 319 have underlinings that connect them to Undset in a different way from those that do not have any signs of use. Undset was a bibliophile, which means that she collected more books than she read, and many books were also gifted to her (Åslund and Haug 2007). It is impossible to know exactly how Undset read her books, but the underlinings provide us with a hint of what

Figure 5.3. A single volume from Undset’s book collection, returned to Bjerkebæk, Sigrid Undset’s home, by the curator. Lillehammer, in 2018. Photograph by Thea Aarbakke.

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she reacted to, found interesting, or did not agree with. The visible signs of use in the book collection make it possible to speculate further about Undset’s intellectual life as a reader, researcher and writer. The first version of the collection inside the exhibition and the second version of a specific excerpt show how different actors play important roles in how externals can perceive the collection in relation to Undset. The book collection presented on the guided tour tells the story of a home, and of Undset as foremost a collector of books; but the chance to see her marginalia inside her books also tells the story of an aware reader, and maybe a researcher.

The Digital Library System Oria, and Bjerkebæk’s Librarian Bjerkebæk’s book collection is registered within the Oria library system. Contrary to Bjerkebæk’s collection of Undset’s former belongings – such as furniture, photographs and interior decoration – which is registered in the Norwegian and Swedish museum database (digitaltmuseum.no), the book collection is registered in a digital library catalogue. In the database, the book collection is treated primarily as a library and not as a museum collection. At DigitaltMuseum (digital museum), museum objects are supplied with images and historical contextual content. In Oria, information about the books is limited to their titles and authors. Public databases are not only a tool for archiving practices; they also represent a democratization of the collection by making information about it accessible to everyone who has access to a computer. In theory, you can now browse through Bjerkebæk’s book titles and author names from your personal computer in your own home. Every registered user is allowed to search Oria’s database, but loans are restricted to students and researchers. Writing about museums, the cultural studies and media scholar Michelle Henning argues that ‘new media is best thought of as a means to organize and structure knowledge … in the museum’ (Henning 2011: 303): in this specific case, a digitized way of structuring and organizing the book collection allowing different information to be extracted from it than what is possible to be gathered while present at Bjerkebæk. The search tools in Oria enable other interfaces with the collection, albeit translated into textual data. But the immediate connection between the books and Undset, which is present within the exhibition concept and the guided tour at Bjerkebæk, is challenged. If you know how to navigate the database, you can easily obtain an overview of the number of books by, for example, William Shakespeare

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(44) or Elisabeth Gaskell (8) that Undset owned, by simply typing in the authors’ names. It is possible to carry out a search that shows that Undset owned 59 books by the author Gilbert Keith Chesterton, that 319 of her books contain underlinings, and that 47 of them contain marginalia. The five sections from Krane’s 1960s catalogue system ­– poetry, religious literature, geography, philosophy and history – are still to be found. This information is of importance if the museum ever wants to produce another exhibition from the same material at a later date, or just to extract more information about the collection as a whole, or about a single specimen. It also puts the visitor in the position of the curator, and enables every user to curate their own search topics and information from the collection. In this fashion, ‘[n]ew media offers the museum a means to undo the separation of public display and research collection in the museum’ (Henning 2011: 309). It captures new practices of information management, which break down disciplinary boundaries of cataloguing, opening up the resources of museums to a wider audience (Witcomb 2003: 121). While the digitization of the book collection makes it more accessible to a larger audience, Oria’s potential for external users is yet to be realized. I was first able to use Oria as a search engine for Bjerkebæk’s book collection after participatory observation of the museum librarian’s use of the digital database. With her guidance, I was able to navigate the digitized book collection. The database has its own internal structure and sorting of knowledge, and this influences what kind of information is accessible through its search engine. In Oria, Bjerkebæk’s book collection is part of a larger database connecting several libraries in the Norwegian higher education system. This prevents meanings produced within the museum from remaining enclosed within it. As part of a larger database, the connection between the books and Undset can also be lost because of the database structure and its capacity for automated searches. As previously demonstrated, Undset is made a strong actor at the museum Bjerkebæk. Following a guided tour, the books’ origin does not disappear; all the books are understood as belonging to Undset. In Oria, the books are no longer ‘limited to the part given them in the context of a particular narrativized display’ (Henning 2011: 209). On the other hand, the knowledge about the previous owner of the books can also remain unnoticed to the majority of Oria’s users, on account of Oria’s internal structure. The digital database presents lists of books, titles and authors. But the stories behind the books – what has been underlined, and who gave them to Undset – is not available online at present. Andrea Witcomb has written about online databases as an opportunity to manage information

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content. She argues that it is not enough to simply provide information. The museum must rather interpret the information and add value to the information it possesses (Witcomb 2003: 121). This is a continuous process and negotiation of resources within today’s museums. At Bjerkebæk, I noticed that the digital database is first and foremost a list that provides an overview of the collection’s literary genres, languages, authors and book titles. Receipts, letters and the study of marginalia in single volumes show that there is the potential for the museum to engage in storytelling and not just the provision of lists. This potential can be of value for several museum practices, such as educational programmes and the production of new exhibitions. It is also an argument for closer interdisciplinary collaborations between different members of the museum staff, such as curators and librarians.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown how the museum makes it possible to extract different kinds of knowledge by providing three different approaches to the presentation of Undset’s book collection. The exhibition confronts us with the collection’s large volume, which is presented as a whole. But by being displayed at a distance from the visitors, behind bars and glass, it is reduced to a backdrop interior, and its content remains inaccessible. At Bjerkebæk, the book collection plays an important role in creating a domesticized home interior and presenting Undset as a collector. Volumes from the collection can be made available individually through the digital database, or by the curator, who withdraws a specimen from the exhibition and makes it available for researchers who have reason to study it. The service destabilizes the books as fixed objects within the museum and adds a second understanding of them as research objects, and of Undset as a reader and researcher herself. In the digital database, the whole collection can be viewed from a personal computer screen. This makes it easier to obtain an overview of the authors and the literary genres that Undset collected. But her own cataloguing system is also challenged by the digital database’s own internal systematization, which disrupts the connection between the books and their previous owner. The overview in Oria is of a different character from the one we get if following a guided tour inside Bjerkebæk. According to Oram, private book collections ‘reveal their final shape … once they have been made public’ (Oram 2014: 14, citing Manfron 2004) and, I would add, once they have become part of a museum’s collection.

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By using ethnological methods such as fieldwork, my intention has been to unpack the museum’s collection, using Bjerkebæk’s collections of books as a case study. By following the actors who made the museum’s book collection public, I have made visible the social and material agency of humans and non-humans that have shaped Bjerkebæk’s book collection as it is today: how ropes make barriers and glass protects books, the internal logic of a database, and the guide’s tour. By doing so, I also hope to have shown that the public book collection has not necessarily revealed its final shape. The exhibition, the guided tour, the librarian, the database and the curator all continue to negotiate the presentation of the book collection. By making their practices visible, my intention has been to show their agency in the present and possible future of the museum. Thea Aarbakke works at the Women’s Museum in Norway. She is Project Coordinator for ‘There She Goes Again’, a project about gender representations in Norwegian museums in relation to collections and exhibitions. While working on this book, she was affiliated to the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and the University of Oslo. Aarbakke holds a PhD in Museology, and was doctoral fellow in the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums (2016–19). In 2020 she defended her dissertation on contemporary author museums in Norway dedicated to Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun and Olav H. Hauge.

Note   1. ‘Jeg har vært min mann utro’ (Undset 1907: 3).

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Hauglid, O.A. 2016. ‘Oppdrag Bjerkebæk – en rapport, 1997–2001’. Unpublished report. Hendrix, H. (ed.). 2007. Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. New York: Routledge. Henning, M. 2011. ‘New Media’, in S. Macdonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 302–18. Hetherington, K. 1999. ‘From Blindness to Blindness: Museums, Heterogeneity and the Subject’, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 51–73. Hevrøy, S.A. 2016. ‘Olav H. Hauges “Kom ikkje med heile sanningi” som metapoetisk orakeldiktning’, Edda: Scandinavian Journal of Literary Research 103(4): 284–94. Hyltén-Cavallius, S. 2011. ‘Internet och fältarbete’, in L. Kaijser and M. Öhlander (eds), Etnologiskt Fältarbete. Lund, Denmark: Studentlitteratur, pp. 205–33. Krane, B. 1981. Letter to the University Library, now The National Library of Norway. Nasjonalbibliotekets Privatarkiv: Ms4° 3545. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J. 1999. ‘After ANT: Complexity, Naming and Topology’, in J. Law and J. Hassard (eds), Actor-Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1–14. . 2008. ‘On Sociology and STS’, The Sociological Review 56(4): 623–49. Loxley, L., et al. 2011. ‘Exhibiting the Written Word’, in L. Loxley et al. (eds), Exhibiting the Written Word. University of Edinburgh, pp. 4–11. Retrieved 25 November 2020 from https://www.ed.ac.uk/files/imports/fileManager/Exhibiting%20the%20Written%20Word.pdf. Macdonald, S. 2002. Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. New York: Berg. Manfron, A. 2004. ‘Le biblioteche degli scritton’, Associazione italiana biblioteche 44(3): 345–58. Nobel Media/The Nobel Foundation. 2020. ‘Sigrid Undset: Facts’, The Nobel Prize. Retrieved 5 March 2020 from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1928/ undset/facts/. Norman, W. 2009. ‘Unpacking Nabokov’s Library: Historical Materialism and the Private Collection’, in C. Patey and L. Scuriatti (eds), The Exhibit in the Text: The Museological Practices of Literature. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 143–59. Öhlander, M. 2011. ‘Utgångspunkter’, in L. Kaijser and M. Öhlander (eds), Etnologiskt Fältarbete. Lund, Denmark: Studentlitteratur, pp. 11–35. Oram, R.W. 2014. ‘Writers’ Libraries: Historical Overview and Curatorial Considerations’, in R.W. Oram and J. Nicholson (eds), Collecting, Curating and Researching Writers’ Libraries: A Handbook. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 1–28. Oram, R.W., and J. Nicholson (eds). 2014. Collecting, Curating and Researching Writers’ Libraries: A Handbook. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Ørjasæter. T. 1993. Menneskenes hjerter. Oslo: Aschehoug. Popperwell, R.G. 1966. ‘Knut Hamsun og hans bøker på Nørholm’, Edda: Scandinavian Journal of Literary Research 50(4): 297–307. Svanberg, F. 2017. ‘Unfolding the Collection’, in H.L. Pousette (ed.), History Unfolds: Contemporary Art Meets History. Stockholm: Art & Theory, pp. 77–100. Tjora, A. 2012. Kvalitative forskningsmetoder i praksis, 2nd edn. Oslo: Gyldendal akademisk. Undset, Sigrid. 1907. Fru Marta Oulie. Oslo: Aschehoug & Co. . 1911. Jenny. Oslo: Aschehoug & Co.

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. 1920–22. Kristin Lavransdatter. Oslo: Aschehoug & Co. . 1925–27. Olav Audunssøn. Oslo: Aschehoug & Co. UNIT (Directorate for ICT and Joint Services for Higher Education and Research). 2020. ‘Hvordan bruke Oria?’ Retrieved 16 April 2020 from https://www.unit.no/ en/node/620. Watson, N.J. (ed.). 2009. Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Witcomb, A. 2003. Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. New York: Routledge. Yaneva, A. 2003. ‘When a Bus met a Museum: Following Artists, Curators, and Workers in Art Installation’, Museum & Society 1(3): 116–31.

Chapter 6

The Gunnar Ekelöf Room and the Poet’s Widow as Archivist and Author Helena Bodin

The Swedish modernist poet Gunnar Ekelöf (1907–1968) has no grave. Instead, his ashes were scattered in the River Pactolus (Sart Çayı) in western Turkey by his widow, Ingrid Ekelöf (1911–2005). A member of the Swedish Academy, he was not only of national importance and interest, but internationally also, and was translated into many languages, for example into English by W.H. Auden. Gunnar Ekelöf is one of the modernist poets included in the literary canon not only in Sweden and Scandinavia, but also in the Western canon (Bloom 1994). Although he has no memorial or gravestone in Sweden, there is a reconstructed memorial museum – the Gunnar Ekelöf Room (Gunnar Ekelöf-rummet) at the Sigtuna Foundation (Sigtunastiftelsen) – situated in the small town of Sigtuna on Lake Mälaren in Uppland, where the poet lived in the 1950s and 1960s. There are also two personal archives. The widow’s decision to copy and document everything is the reason Gunnar Ekelöf ’s life and work are archived and on display at two different sites, in Uppsala and in Sigtuna.

The Duplicate Archive in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room Gunnar Ekelöf ’s will left the copyright and responsibility for his literary works to his wife Ingrid. Thus, she was commissioned to continue the transfer of his original manuscripts, notebooks and letters to the Gunnar

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Ekelöf Collection in Carolina Rediviva at Uppsala University Library, the oldest university library building in Sweden. This was a donation, a Vorlass, initiated during his lifetime, in 1960. Before accomplishing this huge task, Ingrid Ekelöf set to work copying his manuscripts, drafts and notes, thereby creating the Home Archive – containing also her own letters and notes from her correspondences with translators, publishers, media producers, scholars, critics and friends – in her house on Stora Malmgatan in Sigtuna, an undertaking that lasted several years. Due to advancing age, in 1997 she had to move from the house that had been her home for more than forty years, and since then, the Home Archive has been stored in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room, created through the initiative of the Gunnar Ekelöf Society (Gunnar Ekelöf-sällskapet) at the Sigtuna Foundation. The Home Archive forms, thus, a peculiar duplicate of the archive at Uppsala University Library, and its function in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room is central to this chapter.1 As a non-profit organization rooted in Christian humanism, the Sigtuna Foundation serves as a neutral meeting place and conference venue for interfaith and intercultural dialogue. It is beautifully situated in an impressive building on a hill overlooking the small town of Sigtuna, some 50 kilometres north-west of Stockholm and 30 kilometres south of Uppsala. The small reconstructed memorial museum named the Gunnar Ekelöf Room serves as a miniature version of the poet’s final home, located about one kilometre away on Lake Mälaren. The room houses his book collection in five of his specially designed bookcases, in which the Home Archive is stored in built-in cabinets. The room also contains several of his Orthodox icons and other small pieces of art in various techniques, his spinet, gramophone and gramophone records, his Olivetti typewriter and some of his furniture, such as the divan-like bed, the armchair, the writing pulpit and a large, inherited secretaire. These are all original items from the Ekelöfs’ home, donated to the Sigtuna Foundation by Ingrid Ekelöf and Suzanne Ekelöf, their daughter. Aside from original articles from Ekelöf ’s home, only booklets and recordings produced by the Gunnar Ekelöf Society are allowed into the room, which in this respect forms a closed archive.2 The Gunnar Ekelöf Room, recreating the atmosphere of Ekelöf ’s home, is open for visitors once a month, as well as being the setting for public readings of his poems arranged by the Gunnar Ekelöf Society.3 Interested readers, not merely students and academics, are invited to read and study the copied manuscripts in the Home Archive. Nowadays, the archive has a searchable catalogue set up by Petra Lyon, the room’s long-serving guide (Lyon 2010; see also her two brochures, n.d.). The

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Gunnar Ekelöf Room is thus not a literary museum or a writer’s house in the conventional sense but a reconstruction of a vital part of Ekelöf ’s final home, one that offers a temporary and imaginative milieu for researchers, who can work there almost as if they were the Ekelöfs’ invited guests (Figure 6.1). Ingrid Ekelöf was a certified Montessori teacher as well as an experienced librarian, secretary and tourist guide, and was 39 years old when she married. As Gunnar Ekelöf ’s wife she became his secretary, and as his widow she assumed the role of archivist. Moreover, she contributed in a crucial way to the further posthumous publication, storing, remembering and researching of his work, taking on the role of its intermediary. Thanks to the extensive correspondence between Ingrid Ekelöf and the literary scholar and critic Brita Wigforss (1908–1996), all stored in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room in a blue cardboard suitcase box, we know plenty of details about her work with the Home Archive. In this way, the story of the origin and early use of the Home Archive is both deposited and told at the same spot where the archive itself is stored.

Figure 6.1. At work in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room, reading the correspondence between Ingrid Ekelöf and Brita Wigforss, stored in a blue cardboard suitcase box. Sigtuna Foundation, in 2015. Photograph by Helena Bodin.

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Archives and Writers’ Houses as Texts and Media Against this background, the present chapter will describe and discuss Ingrid Ekelöf ’s many archival and media-technological tasks, as well as the communicative roles she assumed in the preservation and dissemination of the poet’s work. These can be read within the context of the broader field of the study of literary afterlives and writers’ house museums that are facilitated by the writers’ partners (widows or widowers), close friends and relatives, or by writers’ societies. My particular intent is to explore and discuss the illuminating example of Ingrid Ekelöf ’s archival work on Gunnar Ekelöf ’s manuscripts and book collection, and the Home Archive’s situation in the poet’s reconstructed room at the Sigtuna Foundation.4 What if the room devoted to Gunnar Ekelöf ’s memory might also be regarded as a memorial site for the mediating work of his widow? Since its publication in 1989, Carl Olov Sommar’s biography of Gunnar Ekelöf has been the authoritative source concerning his life, but reference will also be made to several other books and articles, as they add yet more personal memories to our knowledge about the poet and the lives of all three of his wives. As Aleida Assmann has emphasized, it is important to acknowledge that not only canons but also archives are selective, particularly with regard to intersectional aspects of class, race and gender (Assmann 2008: 106). In this case, especially the aspect of gender applies to analyses of the content of Gunnar Ekelöf ’s two personal archives, as well as to the examination of his widow’s role as archivist, a role that has passed more or less unnoticed in previous studies – probably, as it seems, in accordance with her personal wishes. I intend, however, to present new information about Ingrid Ekelöf ’s work, based on her extensive but previously neglected correspondence with Brita Wigforss, a correspondence that continued for twenty-five years after Gunnar Ekelöf ’s death (i.e. between 1968 and 1993). It comprises more than five hundred letters and postcards, which so far have not been published – with the exception of some excerpts in my recent articles in Swedish (Bodin 2018/19 and 2019). Alluding to an idea expressed by Margaret Atwood, Aleida Assmann has furthermore proposed that the archivist may be understood as the guardian angel of the archive (Assmann 2008: 103–4). As will be demonstrated, this is certainly true where the significance of Ingrid Ekelöf for the Home Archive is concerned; however, her function as a guardian angel had been established much earlier. Without doubt, it was her competence, her subtle humour and empathic skills that helped the poet to survive in the 1950s and early 1960s, and to revive his poetry in its last phase. It is no secret that Gunnar Ekelöf had problems with alcohol. The relationship between

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the archivist as a guardian angel and the archive is far from being a passive one; it is rather inventive or even creative. Taking cultural semiotics and cultural memory studies as points of departure, this chapter aims to focus on the particular capacity of literature to both create and critically reflect on cultural memory, as the object in this case is a writer’s oeuvre (Erll 2011). It is furthermore inspired by recent approaches that study archives and writers’ home museums not as things (Stoler 2009; Shepherd 2016) but rather as processes, as social and collaborative texts (Douglas and MacNeil 2009), or as media (Hendrix 2008a: 1–2). That is, the archives and writers’ houses mentioned here not only store literary texts, but are themselves read and interpreted as texts. As media they also transmit the remembrance of a writer’s life and work. Douglas and MacNeil have even proposed that archiving may be studied as an ongoing conversation between the writer and the archivist, and, by extension, each user of the archive. As will be demonstrated, the Home Archive displays in several ways such a conversation between the widow as archivist and her deceased husband as writer. Not least, Ingrid’s letters to Wigforss bear witness to this interaction. If the Home Archive created by Ingrid Ekelöf is understood as a text, can it then be concluded that she is its ‘paratext’ (Genette 1997) – that is, what surrounds or frames the central text – or is she rather its author? The first sections of this chapter are devoted to the background of the Ekelöfs’ life and work, especially Ingrid Ekelöf ’s role and the circumstances of the Turkish memorial to Gunnar Ekelöf. Subsequent sections are dedicated to an exploration of his two personal archives and his widow’s many tasks as archivist, followed by reflections on the metaphors and metonymies of the archive, which shape the interrelation of the archive, the archivist and the users of the archive in processual, textual and medial terms. Throughout this exploration, the correspondence between Ingrid Ekelöf and Brita Wigforss is employed as a source text of decisive importance, as it forms a significant and tremendously rich source of knowledge about Ingrid Ekelöf ’s considerations and reflections while she set up the Home Archive in her home on Stora Malmgatan in Sigtuna and prepared the three posthumous volumes of her husband’s poetry and notes, all of them published within the five years following his death.

Marrying, Writing and Travelling A Russian bon mot has it that to attain literary fame a man must marry three times (Goscilo 2006: 64). This applies also to Gunnar Ekelöf. After

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only a short period of marriage, his first wife Gunnel Bergström left him in the early 1930s for another poet, the modernist Karin Boye. After a new marriage which lasted for nine years, his second wife Nun (Gunhild) Flodquist consigned him to her younger sister, Nini (Ingrid) Flodquist. This arrangement was embraced by all the three people involved, and so Gunnar Ekelöf ’s third marriage, to Ingrid, began in 1951, while Nun remained their close friend. As a matter of fact, both sisters had earlier, in the 1940s, begun literary careers of their own. In 1945, Nun Ekelöf had published a collection of poems, and on other occasions she also translated from French together with Gunnar Ekelöf, while Nini Flodquist was the author of a 1949 poetry collection. It has been said that Nini Flodquist underwent a sudden metamorphosis when she became Ingrid Ekelöf, spouse of the poet Gunnar Ekelöf (Mosskin 2017: 370). As his secretary, Ingrid Ekelöf transcribed writings in longhand and wrote out fair copy for her husband. She took dictation and notes, recording poems as well as letters, to which she often added her own greetings if the recipients were friends of the family. Like a manager or agent, Ingrid Ekelöf arranged (or cancelled) travel and social events according to her husband’s varying needs for stimulation or seclusion. Together with Gunnar and sometimes with their little daughter, who was born in 1952, there were trips of decisive importance for his late poetry to the Mediterranean – to Italy and Greece in the 1950s, and to Turkey with its Byzantine heritage in 1965. Ingrid Ekelöf also continued to take notes when her husband was terminally ill, registering every word in a way that – in terms of media technology – was reminiscent of a tape recorder. Without her notes, his last words – ‘this is the heart’ (in Swedish, ‘det här är hjärtat’) as he pointed with his pen to his heart – would not have been saved or passed down, and the Swedish novelist and poet Bodil Malmsten would not have been able to quote them as the title to her 2015 book (Ekelöf 1971: 300; Malmsten 2015; for the last days of Gunnar Ekelöf, see also Lagercrantz 1994: 213–17). At the end of the 1950s, Brita Wigforss became acquainted with Gunnar Ekelöf, and, within a few years, also with Ingrid. A literary scholar at the University of Gothenburg, she had in 1945 published a dissertation on the Danish writer J.P. Jacobsen; she also wrote academic articles under both her maiden name Felländer and her married name Tigerschiöld. In 1959 she remarried, her new husband being Harald Wigforss, the editor-in-chief of what by that time was the leading daily morning newspaper in Gothenburg, the Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning. As a literary critic in the paper, she was often in a position to afford Ekelöf a venue for the publication of his poetry.

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In 1959 and 1963, Brita Wigforss published essays on his poems ‘Samothrake’ and the suite ‘En natt vid horisonten’ (A night on the horizon) in the literary journal Bonniers Litterära Magasin (Wigforss 1959, 1963). After reading them, Gunnar Ekelöf wrote long letters to her with corrections, comments and sometimes very personal explanations, and after a few years they became friends and continued their correspondence. Their letters are important sources of knowledge about Gunnar Ekelöf ’s way of thinking, and his wife often helped to write them on his behalf. A few of these letters have been published and quoted previously, including Ingrid Ekelöf ’s edition of her husband’s autobiography En självbiografi (Ekelöf 1971; see also Ekelöf 1989: 211; Bodin 2013: 161, 193). The correspondence between Ingrid Ekelöf and Brita Wigforss had thus started while Gunnar Ekelöf was still alive. Ingrid and Gunnar Ekelöf ’s travels to Istanbul and Turkey in March 1965 stimulated tremendous productivity that lasted almost until the poet’s death from laryngeal cancer in March 1968. The result was three new collections of poetry, published successively: Diwan över Fursten av Emgión (Diwan over the Prince of Emgión, 1965b), Sagan om Fatumeh (The tale of Fatumeh, 1966) and Vägvisare till underjorden (Guide to the underworld, 1967). Collectively they are called the Diwan Trilogy, and elaborate on Byzantine themes of cruelty and intimacy. Inspired by Orthodox Christian icons and hymns, they are centred around the fictitious Prince of Emgión, a Kurdish-born so-called Akritis or frontiersman, who had been blinded by the Byzantines, and his female companion Fatumeh, after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.5 Thus Ekelöf ’s trip to Istanbul and the many Byzantine-inspired poems signalled an unparalleled revival of his poetry. He had already republished his debut volume and his collected poems (Ekelöf 1962, 1965a), without foreseeing a new, late period of creative flowering (Bodin 2011: 213). While he continued to dream of returning to Greece, Turkey, or perhaps North Africa, and sometimes planned to live in one of these places, his poor health hindered him from leaving Sweden. From 1958, the home of the family had been the low, yellow wooden house on the street called Stora Malmgatan in the town of Sigtuna, next to the boardwalk on Lake Mälaren. There – being an aesthete since his early years – he had carefully designed a set of bookcases to store his selective book collection, and a collection of Orthodox Christian icons dominated the walls around his bed. As mentioned above, these are now in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room. From the end of 1967 until his death in March 1968 he was very weak and made regular visits to the hospital to receive radiotherapy. Thus, he was never able to complete a planned, impressively grand suite of poetry

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consisting of at least five volumes, of which only the first three – the Diwan Trilogy – were ever finished, and which together were intended to form a ‘vault’ or ‘ruin’ (Bodin 2011: 247).

Between Forgetting and Remembering In his biography of Gunnar Ekelöf, Sommar (1989: 605) recounts how, as Ingrid Ekelöf was deciding about the burial of her husband, two of his poems were on her mind. They told about not being confined in a grave and about being burned to ashes to be thrown in the sea (‘Stäng inte in mig i graven’, Ekelöf 1956; and ‘Nej, först brännas till aska / att kastas i havet’, Ekelöf 1960). In late spring 1968 she decided to travel once more to the Mediterranean, so as to bring her husband’s ashes to the place where he had been happy and content for the last time: the valley surrounding the gold-bearing river Pactolus, flowing through the ancient city of Sardes and its Temple of Artemis, about one-hour east of Izmir. Gunnar Ekelöf had said of this site, ‘we have been given a place for our desire’ (‘vi har fått en ort för vår längtan’; Sommar 1989: 606). And it certainly embodies the meaning of the locus amoenus topos in ancient poetry: a calm place with a brook, greenery, poplars, a slight breeze, birds and some sheep, surrounded by distant mountains. Accompanying Ingrid Ekelöf on this charter trip to Turkey, with stays in both Istanbul and Izmir, were five people: their teenage daughter Suzanne, Nun Ekelöf, Ingrid’s and Nun’s young nephew Peter Mosskin with his spouse Louise Markstedt, and Reidar Ekner, a scholar and close friend of the family who specialized in Ekelöf ’s poetry. Ingrid carried her husband’s urn in an ordinary old-fashioned blue tote bag to the chosen site. Together with her daughter and sister, she scattered his ashes in the river and marked the spot with a flowering branch (Ekner 1984; Mosskin 2010). A noteworthy point relating to Gunnar Ekelöf ’s non-existent tomb in Sweden is the fact that in 1993 a grandiose memorial sketched by the Turkish architect Erkal Güngören (SALT Research, n.d.), was suggested by Zafer Keskiner, mayor of the town of Sahlili, near ancient Sardes. This plan was not approved by the mayor’s successor, however, and another site for the memorial had to be found. On a much smaller scale, the sculptor Gürdal Duyar crafted a bronze relief of Gunnar Ekelöf ’s head, bizarrely somewhat reminiscent of portraits of Kemal Atatürk. It was positioned on the inside of the wall that partly surrounds the Swedish Research Institute on the grounds of the Consulate General of Sweden in Istanbul (Can 2004; Mosskin 2010).

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Lately it has become a poetic pilgrimage of sorts, a kind of exclusive cultural tourism, to visit the same places in Turkey as Ingrid and Gunnar Ekelöf once did. Such travels take the Swedish readers of Ekelöf ’s poetry far away from home to the former Byzantine lands of his fictitious Prince of Emgión, and may also include a short visit to the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul to see the Turkish Ekelöf sculpture (Bodin 2014). As has been emphasized by Yuri Lotman (1990) and, more recently, by Astrid Erll (2011), literature has a particular capacity for creating cultural memories that go beyond our personal and private memories. Erll proposes that literature is a medium that both builds and observes memory, as it is a medium of critical reflection upon memory and its processes of representation (ibid.: 159). This is certainly true with reference to the poetry of Gunnar Ekelöf in which he mediates and reflects critically upon various kinds of written sources such as Roman graffiti and Byzantine hymns and epics, as well as literary classics, which from the perspective of Swedish national literature and his own literary tastes may be Carl Michael Bellman, Erik Johan Stagnelius, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist and the Finland–Swedish modernist Edith Södergran (for Stagnelius and Södergran, see Bodin 2009: 380–82; 2011: 65–75).6 Obviously, not only literature but also writers’ archives and house museums play decisive roles in the formation of cultural memories. According to Erll’s model, such archives function as storage media that not only refer to their stored content but also to themselves as archives – that is to say, by simultaneously remembering something and being remembered themselves (Erll 2011: 127), and writers’ houses function as media cues, similar to Pierre Nora’s well-known notion of lieux de mémoire, by triggering and signalling collective remembrances of particular locations associated with specific narratives about past lives and individual fates (ibid.: 128). Ekelöf ’s personal archive in Uppsala and his reconstructed writer’s room in Sigtuna serve as such cues in Ekelöf ’s case, as do the memorial in Istanbul and the site by the River Pactolus close to the ruin of the Temple of Artemis; these signal a remembrance of the Swedish poet, who does not have a grave in Sweden, but whose ashes were scattered in a river in Turkey in accordance with, and in fidelity to, his late poems. Peter Mosskin notes, in his recollections of the trip to Turkey with Gunnar Ekelöf ’s ashes, that Ingrid Ekelöf was somewhat hushed and tired after her many hardships during the winter and the early spring. Nevertheless, it was her initiative to carry out this very last journey of her husband, just as she did when she transferred his manuscript to his personal archive at Uppsala University Library. Ingrid was only four years younger than him, but she outlived him by thirty-seven years and was active and

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productive during at least thirty of them. In this way, her posthumous publications of his poems and notes implied a second life for his oeuvre. In fact, it was published, disseminated, studied, commented upon and promoted under her auspices for almost as long as it had taken the poet to compose it during his lifetime.

The Many Tasks of the Widow as Archivist The day after Gunnar Ekelöf ’s death, Wigforss sent a letter of sympathy to Ingrid Ekelöf in which she expressed the tremendous debt of gratitude that Swedish literature owed to Ingrid. Furthermore, she wrote that she expected this debt to increase even more once Ingrid had begun to put into order the heaps of manuscripts that Gunnar Ekelöf had left (letter from Brita Wigforss to Ingrid Ekelöf, 17 March 1968). Only a few months later, another letter notes that Ingrid had already set about the task, and Brita Wigforss believed that this work would help ‘to bring Gunnar back’ by filling the empty space he had left (letter from Brita Wigforss to Ingrid Ekelöf, 10 May 1968, my translation).7 With a nod towards Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ (Benjamin 1923) on the task of the translator, one could say that in this case the task of the widow – to preserve and disseminate Gunnar Ekelöf ’s works – was manifold. It consisted of several undertakings involving various media technologies and professional communicative roles. The source for the following account of Ingrid Ekelöf ’s many different tasks is my exploration of the Home Archive in August 2015 and, primarily, the extensive correspondence between her and Wigforss – which yet awaits its editor. This correspondence is a treasure trove for present-day research, as it embraces the continuous story of the very first beginnings, establishment, development and ongoing use of the Home Archive by scholars, translators and journalists during the period when Ingrid Ekelöf was still living in her home on Stora Malmgatan. Ingrid Ekelöf sorted and collected all of her husband’s manuscripts, drafts, notes and notebooks. She copied them meticulously and, notably, by hand. As far as her letters to Wigforss can tell, she made photocopies at the local post office – but only a few times, and late in her life. She often copied the graphic appearance of the manuscripts as well – that is, not only the texts but also the drawings and the layout of the pages of the notebooks, where drawings and writings were sometimes combined (Figure 6.2). She also added cross-references between various manuscripts, and information about possible inspirational sources or biographical background.

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Figure 6.2. Ingrid Ekelöf ’s copy of the actual appearance of one of Gunnar Ekelöf ’s notebooks, with her comments and cross-references in square brackets in the margins. Photograph by Helena Bodin.

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She edited three posthumous volumes, Partitur (Score), En självbiografi (An autobiography) and En röst (A voice) (Ekelöf 1969, 1971, 1973), for which she selected the poems and wrote the comments and introductions. These books made large parts of Gunnar Ekelöf ’s unfinished work accessible to readers all over Sweden, including the autobiographical sketches, which he had never decided how to complete or finalize. Having copied and posthumously published several of her husband’s manuscripts, drafts and notes, Ingrid Ekelöf was responsible for the transfer of the original manuscripts to Uppsala University Library, delivering them in several batches. Assisted by a professional librarian, she also catalogued his book collection. Ingrid Ekelöf ’s intention when creating the catalogue of the Home Archive was different from the systematically constructed archive at Uppsala University Library.8 Her wish was to keep and continue to use the associative system that the poet himself had initiated, and this is still the ambition of the Gunnar Ekelöf Room organization today (Figure 6.3). Yet another of Ingrid Ekelöf ’s tasks as a widow was to negotiate with publishers about copyright and contracts. Furthermore, she was herself in charge of the Home Archive, and supplied scholars, translators, composers, journalists and film-makers with information and material, receiving them in her home to allow them to study the manuscripts. When the originals had been transferred to Uppsala University Library, visitors were still welcomed into her home in Sigtuna to examine the copies she had produced. In many respects she herself also fulfilled the role of a researcher, as it is hard to mention any finding among Ekelöf ’s poems, drafts and notes first made by anyone other than herself. She also studied the published essays and dissertations carefully, and added comments and corrections. Because of her long experience as a researcher and critic, Brita Wigforss was able to support, encourage and stimulate Ingrid Ekelöf in her many undertakings and contacts with publishers, academics and translators. Both women were in their sixties when their correspondence started, and with the exception of Wigforss’s essays and studies, research on Ekelöf was for many years more or less the purview of male academics. When one scholar was not content with her achievements, Ingrid Ekelöf complained in a letter to Brita Wigforss, whose reply was written with a twinkle in her eye: ‘perhaps he suspects a women’s conspiracy?’ (17 December 1972).9 Ingrid Ekelöf welcomed all of them – for example, Reidar Ekner, Bengt Landgren and Anders Olsson – in her home, however; but she did not always agree with their theoretical perspectives or their conclusions. Having been married to the poet, she could not accept the poststructuralist

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theories that reached Sweden in the early 1980s. She made serious intellectual endeavours to inform herself, but in letters to Brita Wigforss she protested against the statement ‘[t]he text is the author’ (3 August 1981, my translation), and she was angry with Foucault for ‘abolishing the author’ (20 June 1985).10

Figure 6.3. Ingrid Ekelöf ’s notebook, labelled ‘Where everything is’, serving as a guide to the Home Archive’s associative system, initiated by the poet. Photograph by Helena Bodin.

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Ingrid Ekelöf ’s vision for the archive was to make ‘as much as possible of the material accessible for all who need it’. She articulated this ambition in a letter to Brita Wigforss in which she reflects on a research focus on the existential struggle of artists (and writers), and proposes that such research ought to be a means to continue that struggle, not a means to ‘draw maps’. What Ingrid Ekelöf sought was studies that ‘convey living life, rather than conclusions!’ (Letter from Ingrid Ekelöf to Brita Wigforss, 5 July 1970, my translation).11 While archivists have often been described as – or educated to be – anonymous, silent, impartial and detached, never expressing their own views or making any marks or personal notes, none of these characteristics seems to apply to Ingrid Ekelöf or her archiving work with her husband’s manuscripts. Her achievements were in several respects similar to those of the Russian literary wives who acted in a milieu where being ‘a writer’s wife was a profession in itself ’ (Popoff 2012: 10). Ingrid Ekelöf may be likened to Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, who has demonstrated by her memoirs and verbatim transmission of her husband Osip Mandel’shtam’s work that widows do not have to act as shadows of their writer husbands. They can be writers themselves, writers of ‘formidable power’ (Goscilo 2006: 67), and like Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, a widow can take the stance of a ‘cultural historian who arrogates to herself the power of moral and aesthetic judgement’ (ibid.: 65). These Russian views of writers’ wives and widows as professionals apply to the role of Ingrid Ekelöf, as well.

Metaphors and Metonymies of the Archive Aleida Assmann distinguishes between the archive as the passive memory of ‘the past past’, and the canon as the active memory of ‘the past present’ (Assmann 2008: 98). Gunnar Ekelöf ’s oeuvre and life story are in this respect parts of both the archive and the canon, as ‘the past past’ found in his personal archives is activated over and over again as a past present – for example, when celebrating his centennial, remembering his work fifty years after his death, in popular lecture series and in new editions and reprintings of his poems. His personal archives may well exemplify spaces of the kind that Aleida Assmann views as ‘located on the border between forgetting and remembering’ (ibid.: 103). Such a view of the archive as located on the border relies, in turn, on a definition of the border as an activity, a mechanism or a process, rather than a barrier (Lotman 1990: 131–42; Schimanski and Wolfe 2007). Against this background, it comes as no surprise that instead of a stable object, archiving may be

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described and studied precisely as a process that involves perspectives of time, space and agency (Stoler 2009: 20; Shepherd 2016: 85). Similarly, the archive may be understood as a text – perhaps as a social and collaborative text, as proposed by Douglas and MacNeil (2009: 39), involving readers and users who value and interpret it. On a metalevel, such an understanding would also consider the archive holder’s principles of selection and choice. In any case, the archive will still be concerned with mediating and transferring ‘the past past’ into an active remembrance of ‘the past present’. This is the kind of ongoing conversation that Douglas and MacNeil have proposed as yet another metaphor and a field of study regarding archives and their archivists and users. Understood in this way as a process, a text and a conversation, the Home Archive is capable of telling several stories. It provides not only information about what Ingrid Ekelöf found among Gunnar Ekelöf ’s drafts, notes and excerpts, but, through her correspondence with Brita Wigforss, it also tells – and stores – the story about how her work was set up and pursued. This is an unusual, indeed remarkable feature of an archive. Although Ingrid Ekelöf was occupied with the major part of her copying and cataloguing as early as the late 1960s and 1970s, there is no doubt that she was conscious of her intermediating role and its importance. At a certain point in her correspondence with Brita Wigforss it becomes clear that both of them realize they are writing their letters not only for themselves but also for the future (see, for example, a letter from Ingrid Ekelöf to Brita Wigforss, 27 January 1985). A decade earlier, there had already been jokes in that direction, when Brita Wigforss suggested that they, for a change, ought to publish their own correspondence and particularly Ingrid’s letters – that is, implicitly, not only Gunnar Ekelöf ’s and his friends’ letters (letter from Brita Wigforss to Ingrid Ekelöf, 1 August 1974).12 It should also be mentioned that when using a typewriter, Ingrid Ekelöf often made carbon copies of her letters to Brita Wigforss. She seems not to have made any distinction between taking down her husband’s letters or typing her own. Both kinds of letters were worth copying, and perhaps the copies were intended not only for the archive but were also of ordinary and practical use as memory aids, should there be any disagreements or misunderstandings in subsequent correspondence. An alternative way to illuminate the essence of an archive or a writer’s house is to examine the metonymical relations of material proximity that characterize the archivist’s work in the archive. Rather than thoughts, ideas or other immaterial aspects of poems and literary works, the var-

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ious physical materials of the archive are regarded as its content. Items such as sheets of writing paper, pencil strokes on paper, notebooks and well-thumbed printed books that have once been in actual contact with the writer could metonymically replace his or her presence whenever these items are touched and handled by the archivist or the reader (academic, scholar) working and studying in the archive. Memories are thus archived in order to be activated and remembered, but in its turn the archive also creates and mediates new memories of the olfactory and tactile qualities of the stored material. Qualities such as the ‘promise of paper’ and the ‘longed-for sense of intimacy’ are mentioned as generated by the materiality of the archive, and are traditionally attractive to researchers (Shepherd 2016: 85, quoting Dever 2014: 285). In the case of the Gunnar Ekelöf Room, I think that such metonymic operations may also be associated with the common conflation of woman, home and memory, as well as with the ‘romantic intertwining of memory, home and meaning’, or they can be associated with the so-called synaesthetic memories that give rise to multisensory stories (Hurdley 2013: 95–96). If such physical and sensory contact with original documents is desired, then the Home Archive offers yet new aspects and levels of the metonymic principles that generally guide archival work (Hendrix 2008b: 237; Douglas and MacNeil 2009: 27). The Home Archive demonstrates in this case Ingrid Ekelöf ’s direct and intimate contact with both the papers and the living body of the writer. Therefore, it is not only the absent referent of the archive (that is, its originator, Gunnar Ekelöf ) who is recovered or made present again by means of the metonymic operations inherent in archives. Moreover, the circumstance that Ingrid Ekelöf, as Gunnar Ekelöf ’s wife, secretary, reader and archivist, loved him and his texts makes her work stand out as exemplary for any reader’s experience of attachment to Ekelöf ’s poetry. Every reader of her copies of Gunnar Ekelöf ’s drafts, drawings and poems in the Home Archive has to gain access to his notes and writings through hers. Although she often made copies that exactly correspond to the original, as far as the layout of the text on the sheet of paper is concerned, she has only seldom imitated her husband’s handwriting, which most often is neat and clean, almost as he must have been instructed to write in school as a little boy, while her own handwriting is fluent and vigorous but always easy to read (Figure 6.4). Another suggestion, based on metonymic principles and on the archive understood as a text, is that the archivist may be regarded as its paratext (in Genette’s terminology; Kaplan 1990: 103), a notion that usually signifies everything that comes with the text. The paratext of a book is, for example, its cover image, its title page, and the blurb on its back cover

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Figure 6.4. On the top of this page, Ingrid Ekelöf has imitated her husband’s handwriting as a schoolboy: ‘Write / I am a poet’ (in old-fashioned Swedish spelling: ‘Schrifw / jag är poet’). Photograph by Helena Bodin.

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with information about the content and the author. Actually, the real paratexts of published books on Gunnar Ekelöf seem to be places where Ingrid Ekelöf ’s role as archivist and intermediary is mentioned – for example, in her posthumous editions of his poetry (Ekelöf 1969: the title leaf; 1971: 7–15, Introduction; 1973: 7, Preface), in Sommar’s biography of the poet (Sommar 1989: 6, Preface; ibid.: 609, Sources and literature), and in Sommar’s edition of Gunnar Ekelöf ’s letters (Ekelöf 1989: 6, Preface). In the case of the Home Archive in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room, we have seen that the paratext of Ingrid Ekelöf as archivist brings important contexts and information to our understanding of Gunnar Ekelöf ’s life and poetry.

Conclusion The memory of Gunnar Ekelöf has been affected in several ways by Ingrid Ekelöf ’s decision to scatter his ashes in the River Pactolus in Turkey, and to copy all his manuscripts and store them in her Home Archive. There is no grave to visit in Sweden, but – thanks to Ekelöf ’s Turkish readers – we can see the bronze relief in Istanbul (and the drawings of a never-realized monument in Sahlili), and there is the special Gunnar Ekelöf Room at the Sigtuna Foundation where his copied manuscripts and his workroom may be examined and experienced by all devoted readers, not only by scholars. At the same time, Ingrid Ekelöf accomplished the transfer of the poet’s original manuscripts to his personal archive at the Uppsala University Library. Thus, his widow’s initiative and undertakings have abundantly compensated for the absence of a gravestone. The fact that Ingrid Ekelöf ’s agency – her many different roles as secretary, archivist, librarian, agent and editor – has not previously been explored, signals the selectiveness of literary canons and archives, particularly as regards aspects of gender and, as in this case, the decisive importance of the work of male writers’ wives and widows. In this chapter on the duplicate archive in the reconstructed memorial museum of Gunnar Ekelöf, the differentiating tension between the two traditional poles – the passive memory of stored material in the archive (‘the past past’) versus the active remembering and mediation of the writer’s life as a part of the Swedish literary canon in the museum’s exhibition (‘the past present’) – seems to have lost significance. The presumed difference between the storage function of the Home Archive, kept in the cabinets of the bookcases, and the room’s exhibition of the poet’s reconstructed home becomes less relevant, as the associative order created by the poet has been preserved in the Home Archive. In both the Home

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Archive and the Gunnar Ekelöf Room, the spatial, associative structure has been respected. Also, it is of significance that the Home Archive, just like Gunnar Ekelöf ’s book collection, has been stored in the original bookcases from the Ekelöfs’ house on Stora Malmgatan. Both contain and render Ekelöf ’s notes – by his own hand, as in the volumes in his library, or by his wife’s hand, as in the copies of the Home Archive – and both have been catalogued by her initiative. In this way, the poet’s library and his bookcases exhibit a part of his reconstructed home, simultaneously forming a part of the room’s archiving function. Guided by Lotman and Erll, I have emphasized the capacity of literature to create cultural memories that go beyond private ones and to critically reflect on cultural memory. In this chapter, we have seen that both the Home Archive and the Gunnar Ekelöf Room function as texts to be read and interpreted, and also as media, actively triggering cues for collective remembrance. While Ingrid Ekelöf never produced her own memoirs and remains invisible in the Gunnar Ekelöf Collection of Uppsala University Library, we have two powerful texts created by her in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room at the Sigtuna Foundation: the Home Archive and her part of the long correspondence with Brita Wigforss. My conclusion is that it would not be fair-minded to let Ingrid Ekelöf as widow and archivist remain only in the paratexts of the posthumously published volumes of Gunnar Ekelöf ’s poetry. Nor would it be correct to regard her role as archivist, figuratively speaking, as only the paratext of the archive considered as a text. Both as an archivist and a correspondent, Ingrid Ekelöf ought to be recognized instead as a writer herself, perhaps according to the model of Russian writers’ widows such as Nadezhda Mandel’shtam. If the Home Archive in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room is regarded as a text that can be read and interpreted, then Ingrid Ekelöf is not only its paratext but its author. Such a standpoint should not, however, be misunderstood as conflating the widow’s text (i.e. the Home Archive) with the text of her husband’s original poems stored in his personal archive at Uppsala University Library, in which she is not included. While she continued the transfer of her husband’s Vorlass to his personal archive in Uppsala after his death, her own Vorlass as archivist and writer was entrusted to the Home Archive and donated to the Sigtuna Foundation. It is thus solely the Gunnar Ekelöf Room at the Sigtuna Foundation, not the Gunnar Ekelöf Collection at Uppsala University Library, that mediates the memory of both the poet and his widow, remembering her not primarily as the archivist and guardian angel of the archive, but as the author of both

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the Home Archive and the several hundred letters to Brita Wigforss, their mutual friend. Helena Bodin is Professor of Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. Her research concerns the functions of literature at the boundaries between languages, nations, arts and media. In particular, she has studied modern literature’s engagement with the Byzantine Orthodox Christian tradition. Bodin currently works on issues of literary multilingualism and multiscriptalism. She is the co-editor (with Stefan Helgesson and Annika Mörte Alling) of Literature and the Making of the World: Cosmopolitan Texts, Vernacular Practices (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

Notes   1. Spring (2019) provides a more general discussion of the functions of archival material in writers’ house museums.   2. For the story behind the creation of the Gunnar Ekelöf Room, see Alström and Linder 2010.   3. See further information on the internet: Gunnar Ekelöf-sällskapet, n.d., and Sigtunastiftelsen, n.d.   4. Similar cases – one Norwegian and one German – of author museums that in some way include the archival work of widows are the Hauge Centre (Olav H. Hauge-senteret) in Ulvik in Hardanger, Norway and the Brecht-Weigel Museum in Berlin. Bodil Cappelen (b. 1930), married to the poet Olav. H. Hauge (1908–1994), edited her deceased husband’s works and donated his book collection to the museum at the Hauge Centre (cf. Aarbakke 2019: 9, 148). Helene Weigel (1900–1971), the widow of Bertolt Brecht (1898– 1956), founded the Bertolt Brecht Archive in her apartment in Berlin, which she left to the archive in 1957, when she moved to another apartment in the same house. Today, this house contains the Brecht-Weigel Museum, the Bertolt Brecht Archive and the Helene Weigel Archive (Akademie der Künste, n.d.). For a thorough exploration and discussion of the various functions of book collections in author museums, see Aarbakke’s contribution to this volume and Aarbakke 2019: 151–91.   5. For a presentation in English of Ekelöf ’s late poetry and the role of Byzantium and the Byzantine tradition, see Bodin 2009.   6. A peculiar detail in this context is that a small painting in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room depicts Södergran’s grave in Raivola, Karelia.   7. In Swedish: ‘bringar Gunnar tillbaka’.

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  8. For the history and cataloguing of the Gunnar Ekelöf Collection at Uppsala University Library, see Ekner 1990. For the digitalized catalogue of the Gunnar Ekelöf Collection, see ALVIN, n.d.   9. In Swedish: ‘kanske beror på att han anar en kvinnokonspiration’. 10. In Swedish: ‘Texten är författaren’; ‘avskaffandet av författaren’. 11. In Swedish: ‘bär fram levande liv hellre än slutsatser!’ 12. In Swedish: ‘hittade jag ditt brev om Rumi som verkligen till allvar förvandlar Haralds [makens] skämt att vi borde som omväxling ge ut vår korrespondens, dvs din del av den’.

References The correspondence of Ingrid Ekelöf and Brita Wigforss is quoted from the letters in Ingrid Ekelöf ’s section of the Home Archive, stored in the Gunnar Ekelöf Room at the Sigtuna Foundation. Aarbakke, T. 2019. ‘Forfattermuseumsfunksjonene. Musealiserte relasjoner mellom liv og litteratur. En studie av Hamsunsenteret, Bjerkebæk – Sigrid Undsets hjem og Hauge-senteret’. PhD dissertation, University of Oslo. Akademie der Künste. n.d. ‘Brecht-Weigel Museum’. Berlin: Akademie der Künste. Retrieved on 15 February 2020 from https://www.adk.de/en/archives/museums/ brecht-weigel-museum/index.htm. Alström, B., and A. Linder. 2010. ‘Bokskåp, ikoner och Olivetti. Om Gunnar Ekelöf-rummet på Sigtunastiftelsen’, Parnass 4: 4–6. ALVIN (Platform for digital collections and digitized cultural heritage). n.d. ‘Gunnar Ekelöfs samling’. Uppsala: Uppsala University Library. Retreived on 15 February 2020 from http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:alvin:portal:record-9401. Assmann, A. 2008. ‘Canon and Archive’, in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 97–107. Benjamin, W. (1923) 1991. ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, in R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser (eds), Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 9–21. Bloom, H. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace. Bodin, H. 2009. ‘Byzantine Literature for Europe? From Karelia to Istanbul with the Swedish Modernist Poet Gunnar Ekelöf ’, in Th. D’haen and I. Goerlandt (eds), Literature for Europe? Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 363–85. . 2011. Bruken av Bysans: Studier i svenskspråkig litteratur och kultur 1948–71. Skellefteå: Norma. . 2013. Ikon och ekfras: Studier i modern svensk litteratur och bysantinsk estetik. Skellefteå: Artos. . 2014. ‘“Allt vad vi önskat”: På resa i Turkiet i Gunnar Ekelöfs fotspår’, Dragomanen 16: 13–18. . 2018/19. ‘Gunnar Ekelöfs brevväxling med Brita Wigforss – “för mig är du en Fatumeh”’, ekelöf ’et 47: 59–75.

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———. 2019. ‘Ingrid Ekelöf och Brita Wigforss som minnesförmedlare’, Signum 1: 21–28. Can, M. 2004. ‘Ekelöfs själ flyter i floden Paktalos’, Dagens Nyheter, 8 August. Dever, M. 2014. ‘Photographs and Manuscripts: Working in the Archive’, Archives and Manuscripts 42(3): 282–94. Douglas, J., and H. MacNeil. 2009. ‘Arranging the Self: Literary and Archival Perspectives on Writers’ Archives’, Archivaria 67: 25–39. Ekelöf, G. 1956. ‘Om graven’, Vi 43(40): 20. . 1960. En Mölna-elegi: Metamorfoser. Stockholm: Bonniers. . 1962. Sent på jorden med Appendix 1962: En natt vid horisonten 1930–1932. Stockholm: Bonniers. . 1965a. Dikter. Stockholm: Bonniers. . 1965b. Diwan över Fursten av Emgión. Stockholm: Bonniers. . 1966. Sagan om Fatumeh. Stockholm: Bonniers. . 1967. Vägvisare till underjorden. Stockholm: Bonniers. . 1969. Partitur: ett urval efterlämnade dikter. Selection and ed. I. Ekelöf. Stockholm: Bonniers. . 1971. En självbiografi: Efterlämnade brev och anteckningar. Ed. and Introduction I. Ekelöf. Stockholm: Bonniers. . 1973. En röst: Efterlämnade dikter och anteckningar. Selection and ed. I. Ekelöf. Stockholm: Bonniers. . 1989. Brev 1916–1968. Ed. C.O. Sommar. Stockholm: Bonniers. Ekner, R. 1984. ‘Åter till elementen: en berättelse om begravningen’, Allt om böcker 3: 8–10. . 1990. ‘Ekelöfsamlingen i Uppsala universitetsbibliotek: Historik och katalogisering’, Nordisk tidskrift för bok- och biblioteksväsen 77: 33–49. Erll, A. 2011. Memory in Culture, trans. S.B. Young. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Genette, G. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J.E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goscilo, H. 2006. ‘Widowhood as Genre and Profession à la Russe: Nation, Shadow, Curator, and Publicity Agent’, in H. Goscilo and A. Lanoux (eds), Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, pp. 55–74. Gunnar Ekelöf-sällskapet. n.d. ‘Ekelöfrummet’. Stockholm: Gunnar Ekelöf-sällskapet. Retrieved on 15 February 2020 from http://www.gunnarekelof.se/styrelse/ om-sallskapet/ekelofrummet/. Hendrix, H. 2008a. ‘Writers’ Houses as Media of Expression and Remembrance: From Self-Fashioning to Cultural Memory’, in H. Hendrix (ed.), Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–14. . 2008b. ‘Epilogue: The Appeal of Writers’ Houses’, in H. Hendrix (ed.), Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 235–44. Hurdley, R. 2013. Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging: Keeping Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaplan, A.Y. 1990. ‘Working in the Archives’, Yale French Studies 77: 103–16. Lagercrantz, O. 1994. Jag bor i en annan värld, men du bor ju i samma: Gunnar Ekelöf betraktad av Olof Lagercrantz. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand.

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Lotman, Y.M. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman. London: Tauris. Lyon, P. 2010. ‘Guiden har ordet’, Parnass 4: 7. . n.d. ‘Om Ingrid Ekelöf-arkivet i Gunnar Ekelöf-rummet. En presentation vid Arkivens dag på Sigtunastiftelsen, 11 November 2017’. Unpublished brochure. . n.d. ‘Att arbeta i Gunnar Ekelöf-rummet på Sigtunastiftelsen’. Unpublished brochure. Malmsten, B. 2015. Det här är hjärtat: Dikt. Stockholm: Rönnells antikvariat, Bonniers. Mosskin, P. 2010. ‘Resan till den sista strömmen: Om en resa till Turkiet sommaren 1968’, Parnass 4: 8–9. . 2017. Systrarna. Stockholm: Atlas. Popoff, A. 2012. The Wives: The Women behind Literary Giants. New York: Pegasus Books. SALT Research. n.d. ‘Gunnar Ekelöf Memorial: Construction Project’. Istanbul. Retrieved on 15 February 2020 from https://archives.saltresearch.org/ handle/123456789/191184. Schimanski, J., and S. Wolfe (eds). 2007. Border Poetics De-limited. Hanover: Wehrhahn. Shepherd, E. 2016. ‘Hidden Voices in the Archives: Pioneering Women Archivists in Early 20th-Century England’, in F. Foscanini et al. (eds), Engaging with Records and Archives: Histories and Theories. London: Facet Publishing, pp. 83–103. Sigtunastiftelsen. n.d. ‘Gunnar Ekelöfs hemarkiv’. Sigtuna: Sigtunastiftelsen. Retrieved on 30 April 2021 from https://sigtunastiftelsen.se/kultur-bildning/gunnar-ekelofs-hemarkiv/. Sommar, C.O. 1989. Gunnar Ekelöf: En biografi. Stockholm: Bonniers. Spring, U. 2019. ‘Die Inszenierung von Archivmaterial in musealisierten Dichterwohnungen’, in K. Kastberger, S. Maurer and C. Neuhuber (eds), Schauplatz Archiv: Objekt – Narrativ – Performanz. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 141–56. Stoler, A.L. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Retrieved 24 March 2020 from www. jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rtrg.6. Wigforss, B. 1959. ‘Samothrakes tema’, BLM 28(2): 134–42. . 1963. ‘Ekelöf vid horisonten’, BLM 32(3): 193–201.

Chapter 7

This Is Not a Set of Guidelines – or How (Not) to Exhibit Literature Vanessa Zeissig

Transforming Literary Museums: Introducing Scenography As long as museums do not petrify, they will have to change. Each generation will challenge them with new tasks and demand new services. —A. Lichtwark, Erziehung des Auges1

More than a hundred years ago, the art historian Alfred Lichtwark – the first director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle and ‘one of the key figures of the museum reform’ in Germany (Heesen 2012: 104) – pointed out the necessity of openness and constant change in museum work. Although the museum as a representative institution holds on to the traditions of its predecessors, a remarkable development nevertheless took place during the twentieth century and is continuing today. An influential part in this evolution is the practice of exhibition design, which has shaped (and is still shaping) exhibition presentations and their outcome. The development of scenography, especially in Germany since the 1980s, has permanently changed the process of creating exhibitions: it has given recognition to the creative element in the act of exhibiting as well as to the spatial mediation of content. Gerhard Kilger, one of the pioneers of scenographic development in Germany, states that design is implicit in a museum context. In a lecture held in Bremen in 2014, he described the interdependence of design and museum exhibitions in the sense of Paul Watzlawick’s theoretical communication

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axiom, and he claimed that ‘you cannot not design’.2 According to Kilger (2016: 59; 2012: 18), it makes no difference whether the scenography is clearly visible or so subtle that it is not noticed by the visitors because in any case it is mediation through design. The principle of scenography is to understand the medium of space as the basis to impart and communicate knowledge, information, emotions, messages and actions. Central to this is the ‘spatial image’ (Germ. Raumbild), as Eberhard Schlag (2017: 567) emphasizes. Hence, the medium of space in its physical and social dimension is obligatory for the exhibition, and is characterized and changed by every form of design and/or human intervention. In the German compendium on scenography, Janina Poesch (2020: 26) describes the varied facets of the design discipline, and clarifies that the design and character of the space are also decisive for the legibility of objects presented in an exhibition. Contrary to many reservations, scenography does not compete with exhibits, but influences how an object is interpreted from the way it is exhibited (Spring 2019: 142). This means that the design also determines and changes the reception and outcome of an entire exhibition – or, as Tristan Kobler put it in ‘Shaping Stories’, an essay based on his contribution to the DASA colloquium The Topology of the Intangible: ‘The scenography becomes the means by which the aims and the content of the exhibition are defined, and even precedes selection of the exhibits themselves’ (Kobler 2014). He distinguishes between ‘scenography in exhibitions’ and ‘scenography of exhibitions’, and the quote refers to the latter. Although today the design of exhibitions is mostly acknowledged as the part of the exhibition process with an impact on spatial experience and the information conveyed, the common practice of developing exhibitions is often equated with Kobler’s first category, which understands scenographic design as an additional service that reacts instead of interacts (Kobler 2016: 14), and illustrates a predetermined content. This notion becomes evident in an anthology on the collaboration between museums and designers: the volume’s editor Jan-Christian Warnecke describes the curatorial work as forming ‘the basis for the work steps of the designer’, who in turn provides external support in dealing with the physical body of exhibitions and with the design, planning and production of ‘the exhibition rooms with their fixtures and fittings’. Warnecke states that both sides are dependent on each other as two contracting partners with conflicting interests, such as detailed accuracy and academic reputation as curatorial goals versus optical impression and sensual experience as creative goals. This can give the impression of two opposing positions that inevitably have to work together (Warnecke 2014: 16–19).

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The notion can also be seen in the practice of literary museums as well as in the discussion on exhibiting literature, because expertise in design and exhibition spaces is barely involved in the discussion itself, but only invoked in terms of implementing strategies. The search for new solutions, however, is also a design question and requires a design perspective, especially in literary museums, which are a model for the pursuit of transformational approaches. They represent a specific type of exhibition, complementing historical and factual levels with fictional aspects. The complexity of not only combining representative demands of cultural heritage but also exhibiting fictional and thus intangible aspects of a writer’s works presents museums with a major challenge that goes back to the general museum upheavals of the 1980s. In Germany, the discussion on the intangibility of literature in museums was launched more than three decades ago by Wolfgang Barthel’s hypothesis about the impossibility of exhibiting literature in the course of social and technological upheavals and poststructuralist literary theories (Barthel 1984: 13). This postulate expressed an alleged opposition between common practice in literary museums back then and the intangible nature of the phenomenon ‘literature’. Barthel claimed that the exhibits collected and presented in the museums were unable to reconstruct the process of creation or the literary work as an artistic whole. As the discussion developed, other scholars took counterpositions that focused on possible ways of exhibiting literature. The most common way was to expand the term ‘literature’ and find arguments that, for example, attested relevance to the material witnesses of literary production. Andrea Berger-Fix and Barbara Hähnel-Bökens (1988: 235) developed different categories of literary exhibitions that differentiated the topics, exhibits and purposes of the museum presentations. Hannelore Schlaffer (1990: 365) interpreted the general exhibition of literature as a visualization of the cultural history of poets and readers because it always displays the conditions and consequences of literary works. Hans-Otto Hügel (1991a: 13) refuted the status of substitution of the objects shown in author and literary museums, and granted them an autonomy (Hügel 1991b: 203). Today, the discussion is still present in the theory and practice of literary exhibitions; however, the doubt about the possibility of exhibiting literature has turned into a search for new and innovative methods to impart and stage literature in exhibitions, which dominates the field for Germany. At the same time, most institutions are still dedicated to a certain writer, and represent cultural heritage as literary pilgrimages and tourist attractions, both in the public connotation and the museums’ self-images (Spring 2019: 141).

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As a result, literary museums walk a fine line between change and crisis, both of which originate in the search for new methods. Although the discussion has helped to emancipate the genre of the author museum from a singular existence as a solemn memorial, and has introduced innovative ideas, at the same time it has developed into a rigid quest that no longer lives up to its purpose. The idea of transforming literary museums today is based on a canon of literary questions that does not criticize or change substantial structures, but alters the appearance of the enduring system. Because they deviate from the intangible to exhibitable objects (Zeissig 2017: 224)3 by materializing the literary content through, for example, manuscripts and reconstructions, author and literary museums are limited to a defined framework of possible innovation. Instead of multidimensional ways to interpret the exhibiting act of literature and to focus on the change of media, the discussion only uses academic literary arguments and searches for universally valid methods of contemporarily designed representation. The first problem with this is that the discussion neglects relevant aspects to undergo sustainable criticism and turn it into action (Sternfeld 2018: 25) to change embedded structures. Transformation in museums always has to deal with infrastructural, economic, functional, political and curatorial efforts when it seeks to change the way content is staged and imparted. The second problem is that the discussion focuses on design questions regarding staging and imparting methods without reflecting on them from design perspectives, and simultaneously understanding design only as a tool to choose the wall colour, graphics and shapes of showcases. The strong connection between scenographic design and the development of literary museums and their search for new practical approaches is undeniable. However, it goes beyond implementation: the perspective of scenography and the research and working techniques are a relevant contribution to redefining institutional identity and the complex practice of exhibiting literature to advance actual change. This is precisely the idea of multidimensional engagement with author and literary museums: it aims at the revision of the development process concerning its initial point, medium, authorship, collaboration and techniques, as well as its basic notion of literary exhibitions, and it serves as an impulse for museum work in general.

How to Exhibit Literature: A Departure Point This chapter was inspired by a 2018 workshop on how to exhibit literature held at the interdisciplinary academic conference ‘Literary Exhibitions

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and Author Museums: Pasts, Presents and Futures’.4 The participants were international scholars from various disciplines, with the majority from the literary or cultural field. They were familiar with or even worked in literary museums, and they had already published on this topic. As a professional scenographer, then working as a doctoral research assistant at the literary museum Buddenbrook House (Buddenbrookhaus) | Heinrich and Thomas Mann Centre (Heinrich-und-Thomas-Mann-Zentrum) in Lübeck, Germany, I initiated the workshop and conducted it in cooperation with the codirector of the Hamsun Centre (Hamsunsenteret) in Hamarøy, Norway, Solveig Hirsch, and its conservator and curator, Alvhild Dvergsdal. The Hamsun Centre is a national centre dedicated to the author Knut Hamsun. We divided the introduction into two lectures. First, I presented a new approach to transforming author and literary museums by redefining the design process, and claimed the necessity of starting the development of a literary exhibition with the question ‘Why space?’, which dived right into one possible scenographic contribution to the idea of transformation. I emphasized that the development process should not start with questions such as what the exhibition should look like, what should be shown and how, or how many objects can be exhibited. Instead, I proposed starting every design process for literary exhibitions by asking why the medium of an exhibition is required, why we want to communicate literature in a three-dimensional way, and what additional value this would contribute. In addition, I presented an example of an experimental exhibition of literature from the Buddenbrook House. The literary museum held a series of unconventional literary exhibitions in the course of the conceptual work on its new permanent exhibition to put different methods of imparting and staging literature to the test. The exhibition I presented in my lecture was created in cooperation with experimental design students at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, and it used the design instrument of abstraction to exhibit literature (cf. Heuer 2017: 144). Although the exhibition was well received, some visitors as well as the management of the municipal museum association found the degree of abstraction irritating and considered it an unsuitable method (Wisskirchen 2016: 18), which mirrors the public and scholarly connotations mentioned above. In my opinion, the experiment was one of a few courageous endeavours to redefine the act of exhibiting literature and to interpret it spatially, atmospherically and sensually. The second lecture was given by Solveig Hirsch and Alvhild Dvergsdal. It focused on the redesign of the permanent exhibition at the Hamsun Centre, and presented innovative approaches in a number of museum educational projects. At the same time as showing the well-implemented

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awareness of dealing with a contested author like Knut Hamsun, their main interest concerned the possibilities of creating a spatial experience of literature itself. They sought to find ways to make possible an encounter between visitors and the author’s work, as literature is the main reason that many literary museums exist in the first place. The joint workshop was based on this quest for a spatial literary experience, and it commenced with the examination of my approach to redefining the design process. In order to illustrate the potential of changing perspectives, we invited the participants to change seats before the workshop started. In teams of two, the audience were now asked to discuss the question ‘Why space?’ with their new seat neighbours. Although the seat-changing activity did not necessarily generate enthusiasm, the group work was very well received. After a few minutes, the discussion was opened to the entire conference, with the pairs presenting their arguments. In the course of the discussion, it quickly became obvious that the question ‘why?’ was interpreted in a general way. Instead of focusing on the spatial medium, the answers pointed to mainly cultural, political or pedagogical motivations for exhibiting literature in a public context to provide identity-building remembrance of, and education about, national heritage. The differentiation between the literary work and the author also dissolved quickly, both being seen as part of the cultural duty to publicly mediate canonized authors and the impact and meaning of their literary creation. Many emphasized the cultural and educational relevance of exhibiting literature (and its producers) without reflecting on the relevance of museum space, so that the medium of an exhibition as literary mediation inadvertently degenerated into an arbitrary instrument. Because many of the participants focus on author museums at original sites in their academic research and/or museum work, the places’ auras were the only spatial reference mentioned during the workshop, which in turn reflects the pre-eminence of the authorial genius. I concluded from the contributions to the discussion that the medium of an exhibition is either understood as an accessible conservation or a reconstruction of an authentic site, or that it is used for the mediation of literature, providing a necessary representative shell to the museum collections as material witnesses of cultural heritage. Another aspect that was briefly discussed during the workshop was the multidisciplinarity involved in developing literary exhibitions. Some scholars expressed doubts regarding the cooperation between different disciplines. One participant in the workshop claimed that the question of exhibiting literature in an interdisciplinary context would result in a heterogeneous overabundance of answers, and criticized this diversity. Al-

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though the interdisciplinary process may contain challenges, I disagree with this problematization. Especially with regard to a public institution with an educational mandate that seeks to reach a heterogeneous audience, a diversity of approaches can appeal to a larger group of visitors and draw on their specific and various interests. The workshop at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences’ Sogndal campus was very productive, yet it mirrored the current situation of literary museums that I described above as walking a fine line between change and crisis, between desiring innovation while maintaining tradition. The relevance of publicly accessible cultural heritage and the impact of literature are beyond question. Although the inclusion of contemporary, still-living writers would certainly be beneficial, there is no doubt that the national and international classics should be remembered and communicated. If the field of literary museums strives for transformation, however, it is necessary to detach them from outdated and one-dimensional structures, and to acknowledge the impact of scenography beyond aesthetic and constructional solutions.

Transformation as a Process beyond Visual Appearance The idea of transformation has always advanced as well as challenged cultural sites, and it is again omnipresent today in various museum genres. This phenomenon of constant change that museums face in the sense of Lichtwark’s statement from 1904 was described more than a hundred years later by Gottfried Korff as the ‘contemporaneity’ (Germ. Zeitgenossenschaft) of exhibitions (Korff 2008: 52). The alteration of public attitudes, reception patterns and viewing habits are still forcing cultural institutions to constantly adapt. These necessary transformation processes always have to be thought of together with design questions and solutions, because they influence mediation and reception as well as how the institutions are perceived and frequented by the public. This does not just concern the alteration in terms of content, appearance or technical equipment. In reference to the principle of the discipline of scenography and its centred ‘spatial image’, this means that the search for new approaches to exhibit something is not only linked to the medium of space but has to be based on it. This initial point, however, is not well represented in the discussion on how to exhibit literature, as the reactions to the question ‘Why space?’ showed in the course of the workshop. Even though the question of how to exhibit literature is clearly not only a conceptual one but also a spatial

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and creative one, the methods of imparting and staging literature have primarily been explored from a literary and cultural-academic point of view. The design is only involved as a technical instrument to try out new approaches, and not as an autonomous discipline that is capable of debating the issue and introducing innovative views and sources. As a result, a canon of questions has developed that is constantly repeated when speaking about literary exhibitions. On the one hand, this canon imposes the necessity of new and innovative approaches to exhibiting literature about the museum field in order to keep up with the public and technical changes. On the other hand, it is bound to the academic literary canon and the representative features of the museum as an institution. A sustainable transformation is, hence, difficult to implement. The one-dimensional canon of questions excludes the examination of aspects beyond the imperatives of representation and innovation, whereas innovation is a matter of definition: in the discussion, the term ‘new’, for example, merely refers to different colours, graphics and shapes because such alteration does not tend to profane complex issues or even the cultural institution itself. Although these changes may mean a major achievement for some literary museums, they are not actual innovations but tokenistic interventions, and are often limited to wrapping the auratized author museums in a modern guise. Heike Gfrereis compares these approaches to the appearances of people: when a person changes their outfit, it is only an alteration of their look; they need to change movements, behaviour and thinking as well (Gfrereis and Grisko 2005: 233). In conclusion, the question of how to exhibit literature only focuses on how literary studies legitimize the act of exhibiting in the first place, and how the modern outfit might try to settle between the imperatives of representation and innovation without dealing with basic issues that could change their structures of thinking and producing knowledge. Although the scenography of exhibitions is able to question these basic issues before creating the space, the discipline is not consulted for the entire process, but only used for the implementation. The three-dimensionality of space is not considered the initial point for the transfer of literature into the museum, but as a means to an end. Designing the museum space remains an aesthetic addition that helps to ‘put [the content and objects] in the right setting’ (Kobler 2016: 14). In order to be able to detach the process of exhibiting literature from the theoretical canon of questions, the discipline of scenography must serve as a bridge between literary studies, or rather literature, and museums. Although scenography may make the transformation possible in the first place because it performs the shift of media, the aim is not to develop an ideal literary exhibition that will become the model for all fu-

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ture literary exhibitions. There are no universal guidelines for designing (literary) exhibitions. Instead, the developing process and the outcome of an exhibition always have to be considered individually, thus categorically rejecting the idea of universal guidelines. Every exhibition is different, and every approach varies depending on the circumstances, environment, team, hegemony, goal and content. Even if there were instructions, they would fall victim to ‘contemporaneity’ at some point. Given the fact that exhibitions always involve a strong temporality, the exclusive search for implementation possibilities can only generate shortterm results that put literary exhibitions into a new yet fading guise. What might today be an appropriate transfer from literature in a book to literature in a museum can, and will, be obsolete tomorrow. Kobler (2016: 14–15) explains that the idea of longevity and timelessness of (permanent) exhibitions is a fallacy, and their ageing can be read ‘in their design, in their choice of subject, and their form of presentation.’ Formulating guidelines on how to present content in an expository context would thus have to take into account countless eventualities, which consist of too many subjunctives, and would still not actually transform the institution. What can be formulated instead are thought-provoking impulses serving to redefine the general process and create alternative questions in order to support or even form the foundation for the transformation of author and literary exhibitions. In conclusion, the question of how to exhibit literature should not be asked to find allegedly final solutions, but it should be considered as a process of progress that has to start with a profound examination of issues that go beyond visual appearance.

Challenging the Transformation Process – Five Impulses on How (Not) to Exhibit Literature As already stated, actual guidelines would be counterproductive for exhibiting literature or for transforming author and literary museums. Exhibitions are meant to dismantle borders, and to inspire, stimulate and even provoke, whereas a textbook-example exhibition would only build barriers, putting the freedom of visual and spatial expression as well as its reception into predefined frames. Therefore, although the following list is deliberately structured as one, it is not a set of guidelines. It does not follow an order, and nor does it claim to be complete. Instead, it recommends aspects and impulses for a thoughtful, sustainable and constructive working process in order to challenge new ways of thinking.

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The Question ‘Why?’, or How to Redefine the Design Process One initial step would be to take a step back from the discussion around suitable methods for imparting and staging literature. The process and act of designing does not begin with the question of what something will look like or with an idea of implementation. Everything is designed and built on many aspects other than aesthetic factors. Hence, it is necessary to question the common practices of museum and exhibition work to examine actual transformation potential. Redefining the conception and design process itself, as introduced in the 2018 workshop, is one part of it. Nora Sternfeld (2018: 37) juxtaposes the established museum tasks and counterpractices in her concept of the radical democratic museum, and, as one example, contrasts the field of research with the production of alternative knowledge, or suggests challenging the archive instead of proceeding to collect in a traditional way. In a lecture held in Vienna in 2020, Susan Kamel questioned the general initial point in terms of transformation ideas such as counterdefinitions, and considered a deconstructive approach of abandoning the concept of collecting in general. Such radical thoughts are productive in order to not only revise the way a task is performed but to revise the task itself. With regard to the redefinition of the design process, Jesko Fezer (2013) offers a demonstrative example from the discipline of product design. He states that, after receiving a request to design a chair, the first concern should not be what the chair will look like, but issues such as social connotations, health and scrutiny: why we sit, whether sitting is healthy and whether there are other solutions to the problem. The idea is to consider every design process as an individual artistic creation that focuses on issues instead of solutions, and therefore puts an intense preoccupation with the product itself before considering the design of its appearance. Against this background, it becomes evident that the involvement of scenography and design not only implements transformation ideas but rethinks the process of transformation itself. Based on this understanding, I propose a new shift in the theoretical discussion, as introduced in my 2018 lecture: whereas the first shift was from if we can exhibit literature to how we can exhibit it (Schütz 2011: 72), the question from a scenographic perspective is why literature is or should be exhibited. However, this does not imply a search for cultural, political or pedagogical reasons for exhibiting literature as it was construed in the workshop in Sogndal. This would quickly lead to imperatives concerning didactics, education and collective memory. Instead, the question aims at the medium of space in its complex original form: Why an exhibition? Is space the right me-

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dium for the project? Why communicate literature in a three-dimensional way? What is the purpose and the goal of the staging? What does space do with literature in the act of exhibiting, as well as in the status of being exhibited? What can arise from thinking literature through space? What is the additional value of doing so? The credo or core issue ‘Why space?’ in the sense of a critical discussion of exhibiting literature represents a possibility of dissolving the current canons of questions in order to generate new questions and illuminate the problem through multiple perspectives. In contrast to the claims made during the workshop, I argue for the considerable potential of new and different perspectives and their variety.

The Diversity of Literature, or How to Embrace Multidimensionality At the beginning of the German discussion on exhibiting literature, when the question was still whether literature can or cannot be exhibited, the impossibility of staging literature was often justified with the lack of wholeness. The literary whole was meant to be, but could not be, brought into space; Lange-Greve (1995: 94) and Wehnert (2002: 74) described this argument. In the late 1990s, discussions moved into a more open direction, towards an understanding that literary exhibitions should not be seen as failed representations, and that aspects of the act of exhibiting itself should be exhibited (Lange-Greve 1995: 111). This turnaround was decisive for the recognition of the change of media, as well as for moving away from the traditional reception process (Hochkirchen and Kollar 2015: 11). It has not yet, however, been generally accepted well into the new millennium (Wehnert 2002: 73). Nonetheless, accepting the fact that the way literature is consumed changes in exhibitions does not imply that it is therefore thought of in a different manner. In other words, changing the process of reception – for example, from one of reading to one of listening – is not sufficient as long as the status of literature (Régnier 2015: 5) remains the same. The postulate of the universal validity of the change of media will still be present as long as literary exhibitions are seen as a substitute action whose main purpose is to stimulate reading (cf. Lange-Greve 1995: 87–89). Like all objects exhibited in museums, musealized literature is deprived of its actual function. It is no longer used, no longer perceived and no longer consumed as before. Exhibited literature is not read or written literature (Käuser 2009: 35), and nor does exhibiting literature imply the mere rendition as a text, an audio station or an illustrative reconstruction.

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An actual transformation means that the essence and thus the basic approach to literature changes. Literature to be shown in an exhibition has to be treated as the exhibition’s new essence and approach before actually exhibiting it, and not when it is already musealized. Exhibiting literature means to extract literature from its natural environment, from its comfort zone and from its original status. It means to cede (academic) control, to diversify both interpretation and the interpreting subjects, and to think literature in terms of space. If transforming author and literary museums seeks to change them, scenography allows a spatial approach to change – one that does not understand literature as the literature that is read. Scenography internalizes the shift of media and thinks literature as space, which would not be possible if the design discipline only operated in terms of colours, graphics and shapes. Hence, scenography as a doctrine of spatial staging does not simply serve as an instrument to help to translate literature into the museum space; instead, scenography makes the transition possible in the first place. This does not mean that the staging stands above literature, but that literary exhibitions represent an independent form of expression because literature is not bound to a specific material or medium. It is realized through its reception form (Lange-Greve 1995: 111), which in this case is museum space. Exhibiting literature means releasing literature from its usual patterns and its usual interpreters, and embracing the multidimensionality that the medium of space provides, because nothing is inconceivable.

The ‘I’ in the Team, or How to Work Interdisciplinarily In common practice, exhibitions are at best planned by numerous people from different disciplines, who can complement each other with their various skill sets and who carry out tasks that fall inside their own sphere of expertise. Responsibilities are clearly defined, and the requirements of time, content and finances are adhered to. Processes typically start with an elaboration of the curatorial concept, to which the staging is added decoratively (mostly at a later point). As described above with Kobler’s category of ‘scenography in exhibitions’, this practice separates the form from the content (Kobler 2016: 14). Therefore, interdisciplinary work is required in order to generate an innovative result that appeals to a broad mass of people and does not bluntly convey knowledge that had been produced elsewhere (Derrida 2004: 107, cited in Tyradellis 2014: 239). For this reason, it is necessary

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to expand the notion of scenography beyond an executive service and to diversify the authorship of who is speaking in literary museums (cf. Gfrereis 2019: 31), as stated above. All professional participants in the process have to be able and willing to change their own perspectives and to look at the issues from a new angle. Especially in terms of literary museums, the team has to reach a preliminary consensus on how to define exhibited literature as well as to define the function and purpose of the exhibition. The interdisciplinary work allows the combination of different ideas and approaches, and strengthens the team in idea generation and innovation. The team members are not opponents who could threaten each other’s interests and work. For this understanding, it is important to abandon the definition of their collaboration as ‘dependent’. Certainly, their respective expertise depends on the others, but it is more productive if the collaboration is defined as an equal project that is stimulated and enriched by multidimensionality as a mixture of expertise, and if changes in perspectives open up previously unnoticed contexts and develop completely new perspectives and insights. In a process like this, scenography is an ‘integral part of the overall concept of the exhibition’, and has to be developed together with the curatorial concept from the start because it provides definitions of the exhibition’s goal and focus (Kobler 2016: 14). The power of interdisciplinary work and perspectives also helps to take more parameters into account than only those concerning aesthetics and functionality. Although museums are already tied to political, economic and commemorative cultural provisions that dictate the selection of topics and objects worthy of exhibition, this cycle can be broken by interdisciplinary work and changing perspectives. Sharing the authorship of an exhibition between multiple expert disciplines includes and varies political, social and iconic factors, among others. Authorship represents the subjectivity of an exhibition, and deconstructs the dominance of the institution (Simon 2014: 122).

The Art of Abstraction, or How to Inspire Thinking Traditionally, museums are hegemonic knowledge structures, and they enjoy a special public role as the public believes the content of their presentations to be true. However, museum presentations do not reflect reality: they are designed narratives (Heinemann 2011: 213) without any claim to completeness due to their subjective moment (Schärer, cited in Ritter-Lutz 2015: 24). In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the subjectivity of museum exhibitions (cf. Baur 2018: 30), as

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manifested in new concepts that involve visitors as active participants and everyday experts (cf. Gesser et al. 2012). However, such concepts are only formed within the framework of existing systems. Literary exhibitions in particular still work within a triangle of: (1) literary studies as the hegemonic authority; (2) curators as the executing instance; and (3) materialized canonized literature as the expository object. The exhibition is thus understood as a target medium that is dependent on the medium that feeds into it. A genuine identity is not granted to the exhibition itself. Other interpretational approaches such as film adaptations have been treated likewise. From the 1920s onwards, it was typical to understand faithfulness to the original as a quality feature of a film. The introduction of the term ‘adaptation’ by André Malraux helped the film medium to seek autonomy and led to its definition as an independent, media-specific development of literary fiction in the 1980s (von Hagen 2013: 394). Emancipated from the literary source, film adaptations, crossing from the medium of writing to the audiovisual medium of film, typically work within a tension between preserving and modifying the artistic content. However, they possess their own means and definitions (ibid.: 395), as well as a self-sufficient narrative form. In the same way, a change in media – when performed completely as outlined in the second point of this section – takes place when literature is exhibited and allowed to step outside the triangle of literary studies, curatorship and literature. However, the canon of high literature determines the content of literary museums, and frames the means of presenting them. Although film adaptations are accepted as independent forms and can even change narration,5 faithfulness to the original is still a required quality factor in literary museums, apparent in various approaches to exhibiting actual literary content.6 If the triangle were opened, not only would new imparting and staging methods be allowed in, but also alternative conceptions of exhibitions and possibilities for interpretation and free expression. According to Martin R. Schärer (2003: 127), an ‘associative’ exhibition language activates the individual thinking of the recipients by using uncommon combinations and disruptions. One design instrument that can support this is that of abstraction. Usually, abstraction is understood to create a distance – in scenographically designed exhibitions, however, it can be used precisely to enable access to literature in a sensual, affective way and to interpret it spatially. This technique counteracts a design practice based on the illustration of content, and supports an independent interpretive approach by abstracting and alienating content through ‘spatial images’. It is not about conformance and favour, or affection, like the experimental exhibi-

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tion of the Buddenbrook House in 2015 was evaluated on, but about the impulses that exhibitions can trigger. In this way, design can exaggerate major themes, leave things out, provoke the audience, and inspire them to think and to criticize. Much like the alienation effect (Germ. Verfremdungseffekt) of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, this technique allows an investigating, critical stance on the content exhibited (ibid.: 128).

Genuine Artwork, or How to Exhibit Literature At the beginning of the twentieth century, the museum ideally had to serve two different purposes: on the one hand, it was supposed to fulfil the tasks of collecting and preserving, and on the other hand it had to focus on current topics and complement social life (Heesen 2012: 105–6). More than a hundred years later, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) is in the process of revising its definition of museums due to all the radical transformations over the past decades. The new definition proposed in 2019, however, was quickly criticized for its omission of traditional values and the addition of a political purpose. In the proposal, attributes were granted to the museum like democratizing, inclusive, polyphonic, a place of critical dialogue, egalitarian, participatory, transparent, interpretative and respecting human dignity (ICOM 2019). Owing to oppositions to this draft,7 ICOM will rework the proposal again. From a scenographer’s point of view, it is to be hoped that the definition will retain its political approach and emphasize the exhibition practices more strongly. Designing exhibitions is the art of combining the provision of knowledge and stimulation with the third and fourth dimensions. The goal is to interpret a topic (or to offer various interpretative possibilities) on a spatial basis and to add new elements and design forms. The exhibition as a social and participatory event involves the viewer as part of the exhibition. It is therefore not to be understood as a closed work but, in Roland Barthes’ sense, as an open structure (cf. Kölle 2005: 101). Just as the objective of literature and fine arts is not to make unambiguous statements, so literary exhibitions should not be bound by solid wholes or identities (Lange-Greve 1995: 72). Christian Metz (2011: 97) asks why an exhibition should not be told as artfully as a novel, but he concedes a special form of expression, rhetoric and grammar to literary exhibitions, and recommends breaking away from a strict documentary style. Instead of reproducing the literary content in a room, scenographically designed exhibitions should generate individual performances that are provocative and bear the freedom of meaning, just as literature does. Thus, the concept of literary exhibitions as well as the search for transformation

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possibilities would go beyond the aesthetic level of imparting knowledge, and see literary exhibitions as genuine artworks in themselves.

Transforming Literary Museums: Concluding from a Scenographer’s Point of View Transformation is as much part of the museum institutions as their collections, and it has always been contested because it implies that the way something was done before was wrong. From the opening of the museum in the sense of a shift from privilege to right of access (Sheehan, cited in Wehnert 2002: 13), to the ‘literarization’ (Germ. Literarisierung) of exhibitions for more context (Müller and Möhlmann 2014: 14), to the hands-on exhibits of the 1990s, stage-set productions, participation, digitalization and up to immersive, multisensory experiences: every change in the museum field received massive criticism from some and enthusiastic approval from others. None of these shifts or processes developed overnight, but they have changed the museum field from the ground up. Already by the 1960s, the urgent need for reforms of museums lay in the threat of their dwindling relevance in a public context (here and below, see Heesen and Schulze 2015: 9). Even then, reform movements were demanding more available accesses, more heterogeneous audiences and more participation. The ideas for the future of museums were already balancing between innovative utopias and reflections of traditions. In view of the retrospection, Nora Sternfeld (2018: 14) states that ‘the plea for radical renewal may seem a little dusty itself to us today’. It is precisely because of the previous reforms that we now have the privilege of questioning everything that constitutes the museum (ibid.: 15). We should make use of this. If the knowledge produced in museums and imparted in exhibitions is subjective, so is the transformation of museums themselves. Against this background, the transformation process must be revised, especially with regard to its actors: Who is involved in the discussion on changing museums and who is not? How can those involved prevent the exclusion of others? Are the current actors able to question their habitual strategies of thinking and working, and are they willing to give up control? I have worked on both the museum side and the designer side, and I will not deny that it is still a long road. As earlier, I propose starting with the question ‘why?’ – even before involving one side or the other – that goes beyond new technological possibilities and economically demanded visitor numbers: why is there a need to transform author museums and literary exhibitions?

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Vanessa Zeissig is a professional scenographer. She holds an MA in scenography and exhibition design, and is working towards her doctorate in the same subject at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, Germany, with a special focus on literary exhibitions. In the course of a doctoral scholarship (2015–19) she was a doctoral research assistant at the literary museum Buddenbrook House (Buddenbrookhaus) in Lübeck, Germany. Zeissig works as a scenographer and gives lectures at conferences and universities. Her main research focus is exhibition theory and practice, as well as critical and experimental scenography.

Notes  1. ‘So lange die Museen nicht versteinern, werden sie sich wandeln müssen. Jede Generation wird ihnen neue Aufgaben bieten und neue Leistungen abverlangern’ (Lichtwark [1904] 1991: 47; also quoted in Heesen 2012: 104).  2. The Austrian communication theorist, psychologist and philosopher Paul Watzlawick (1921–2007) developed five metacommunicative axioms together with two other psychologists, Janet H. Beavin and Don D. Jackson. The first axiom states ‘One cannot not communicate’, which implies that every behaviour is a form of communication, and so it is impossible not to communicate.  3. German: ‘Ausweichen auf Ausstellbares’.  4. The conference was arranged by the Research Council of Norway research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums – at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Sogndal, in cooperation with the University of Oslo, on 6–7 September 2018.  5. See, for example, the drama film Effi Briest, based on the 1896 novel by the German writer Theodor Fontane, which was directed by Hermine Huntgeburth in 2009. Unlike the novel, the film does not end with Effi’s death, but lets her live on as a liberated woman in a vivid city.  6. Various museums have exhibited the content of literary works, such as the Kleist Museum in Frankfurt (Oder) in its permanent exhibition, and the Buddenbrook House in Lübeck, Germany, in its experimental series of temporary exhibitions (2015–19). Although these examples possess a high degree of curatorial and creative innovation, they rely on the original or its academically recognized interpretation.  7. Beate Reifenscheid, president of the German National Committee of the International Council of Museums, lists arguments in favour of and against the proposal for a new museum definition in her article on the platform Wissenschaftskommunikation (Reifenscheid 2019). Other national committees also criticized the new proposal from Kyoto (e.g. the Austria committee; see ICOM Österreich [undated]), which led to a postponement of the vote in order to continue the discussion about a new museum definition.

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References Barthel, W. 1984. ‘Literaturausstellungen im Visier: Zu den ständigen Ausstellungen im Reuter-Literaturmuseum Stavenhagen, in der Reuter-Gedenkstätte Neubrandenburg und zur Herder-Ausstellung im Kirms-Krackow-Haus Weimar’, Neue Museumskunde: Theorie und Praxis der Museumsarbeit 27(1): 4–13. Baur, J. 2018. ‘Krise der Repräsentationskritik? Über Deutungsmacht im postfaktischen Museum’, in R. Falkenberg and T. Jander (eds), Assessment of Significance: Deuten – Bedeuten – Umdeuten. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, pp. 27–31. Berger-Fix, A., and B. Hähnel-Bökens. 1988. ‘Die Präsentation einer Literaturausstellung. Ihre grafische und optische Gestaltung’, Bibliothek Forschung und Praxis 12(3): 235–40. Derrida, J. 2004. ‘Popularitäten: Vom Recht auf die Philosophie des Rechts’, in J. Derrida (ed.), Mochlos oder Das Auge der Universität: Vom Recht auf Philosophie II. Vienna: Passagen-Verlag, pp. 101–12. Fezer, J. 2013. ‘Gutes Design ist soziales Design’, Fab Lab Fabulous St. Pauli e.V. Hamburg. Retrieved 12 October 2019 from http://www.fablab-hamburg.org/ ein-fab-lab-fuer-stpauli/interview-jesko-fezer/. Gesser, S., et al. 2012. Das partizipative Museum: Zwischen Teilhabe und User Generated Content: Neue Anforderungen an kulturhistorische Ausstellungen. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Gfrereis, H. 2019. ‘Wer spricht in einer Literaturausstellung? Überlegungen zum dialogischen Möglichkeitsraum einer Gattung, angestoßen von Helmut Neundlinger’, in K. Kastberger, S. Maurer and C. Neuhuber (eds), Schauplatz Archiv. Objekt – Narrativ – Performanz. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 31–39. Gfrereis, H., and M. Grisko. 2005. ‘“Über Traditionen und Moderne in der Marbacher Museums- und Ausstellungskonzeption, über neue Medien, Architektur und Besuchererwartungen”, Heike Gfrereis im Interview mit Michael Grisko’, in S. Autsch, M. Grisko and P. Seibert (eds), Atelier und Dichterzimmer in neuen Medienwelten. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 229–38. Hagen, K. von. 2013. ‘Literaturverfilmung’, in N. Binczek, T. Dembeck and J. Schäfer (eds), Handbuch Medien der Literatur. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 394–403. Heesen, A.t. 2012. Theorien des Museums zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag. Heesen, A.t., and M. Schulze. 2015. ‘Einleitung’, in M. Schulze, A. t. Heesen and V. Dold (eds), Museumskrise und Ausstellungserfolg. Die Entwicklung der Geschichtsausstellung in den Siebzigern. Berlin: Editors and Humboldt University Berlin, pp. 7–17. Heinemann, M. 2011. ‘Emotionalisierungsstrategien in historischen Ausstellungen am Beispiel ausgewählter Warschauer Museen’, in M. Heinemann et al. (eds), Medien zwischen Fiction-Making und Realitätsanspruch – Konstruktionen historischer Erinnerungen. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, pp. 213–36. Heuer, C. 2017. ‘Ein Text ist eine Insel? Oder: Praxisbericht. Literatur ausstellen als Experiment’, in L. Hansen, J. Schoene and L. Tessmann (eds), Das Immaterielle ausstellen: Zur Musealisierung von Literatur und performativer Kunst. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 141–60. Hochkirchen, B., and E. Kollar. 2015. ‘Einleitung’, in B. Hochkirchen and E. Kollar (eds), Zwischen Materialität und Ereignis. Literaturvermittlung in Ausstellungen, Museen und Archiven. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 7–21.

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Hügel, H.-O. 1991a. ‘Einleitung. Die Literaturausstellung zwischen Zimelienschau und didaktischer Dokumentation: Problemaufriß – Literaturbericht’, in S. Ebeling, H.-O. Hügel and R. Lubnow (eds), Literarische Ausstellungen von 1949 bis 1985. Bundesrepublik Deutschland – Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Diskussion, Dokumentation, Bibliographie. Munich: K.G. Saur, pp. 7–38. . 1991b. ‘Inszenierungsstile von Literaturausstellungen’, in S. Ebeling, H.-O. Hügel and R. Lubnow (eds), Literarische Ausstellungen von 1949 bis 1985. Bundesrepublik Deutschland – Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Diskussion, Dokumentation, Bibliographie. Munich: K.G. Saur, pp. 203–18. ICOM. 2019. ‘ICOM Announces the Alternative Museum Definition That Will Be Subject to a Vote’. Retrieved 14 April 2021 from https://icom.museum/en/news/ icom-announces-the-alternative-museum-definition-that-will-be-subject-to-a-vote/. ICOM Österreich. n.d. ‘ICOM Museumsdefinition – Ein Update’. Retrieved 15 April 2020 from http://icom-oesterreich.at/page/icom-museumsdefinition-ein-update. Käuser, A. 2009. ‘Ist Literatur ausstellbar? Das Literaturmuseum der Moderne: Anmerkungen zur Konzeption und Diskussion’, Der Deutschunterricht 61(2): 30–37. Kilger, G. 2012. ‘Was ist Szenografie’, Magazin Museum.de 11: 14–21. . 2016. ‘Szenographie – Entwicklungen seit den 1970er Jahren’, in Institut für Museumsforschung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz (ed.), Museen zwischen Qualität und Relevanz. Denkschrift zur Lage der Museen. Kurzfassungen (= Berliner Schriftenreihe zur Museumsforschung 30). Berlin: Holy Verlag, pp. 59–60. Kobler, T. 2014. ‘Shaping Stories’. Retrieved 19 October 2020 from https://holzerkobler. com/process/shaping-stories. . 2016. ‘Geschichten formen’, in G. Isenbort and DASA (eds), Szenografie in Ausstellungen und Museen VII: Zur Topologie des Immateriellen: Formen der Wahrnehmung. Essen: Klartext Verlag, pp. 14–23. Kölle, B. 2005. ‘Die Kunst des Ausstellens: Untersuchungen zum Werk des Künstlers und Kunstvermittlers Konrad Lueg/Fischer (1939–1996)’. Inaugural doctoral dissertation, University of Hildesheim. Korff, G. 2008. ‘Die Rückgewinnung des Dings: Tendenzen des Ausstellens im 21. Jh.: Ein Gespräch mit Gottfried Korff’, interview in U.J. Reinhardt and P. Teufel (eds), Neue Ausstellungsgestaltung 01: New Exhibition Design 01. Ludwigsburg: av edition, pp. 26–55. Lange-Greve, S. 1995. Die kulturelle Bedeutung von Literaturausstellungen: Konzepte, Analysen und Wirkungen literaturmusealer Präsentation: Mit einem Anhang zum wirtschaftlichen Wert von Literaturmuseen. Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann. Lichtwark, A. (1904) 1991. ‘Museen als Bildungsstätten: Einleitung zum Mannheimer Museumstag’, in A. Lichtwark, Erziehung des Auges: Ausgewählte Schriften (ed. E. Schaar). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 43–49. Metz, C. 2011. ‘Lustvolle Lektüre: Zur Semiologie und Narratologie der Literaturausstellung’, in A. Bohnenkamp and S. Vandenrath (eds), Wort-Räume, Zeichen-Wechsel, Augen-Poesie: Zur Theorie und Praxis von Literaturausstellungen. Göttingen: Wallstein, pp. 87–99. Müller, A., and F. Möhlmann. 2014. Neue Ausstellungsgestaltung 1900–2000. Stuttgart: av edition.

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Poesch, J. 2020. ‘Szenografie ist … Ein Rückblick von Janina Poesch, PLOT’, in P. Kiedaisch, S. Marinescu and J. Poesch (eds), Szenografie. Kompendium zur vernetzten Gestaltungsdisziplin. Stuttgart: av edition, pp. 18–33. Régnier, M.-C. 2015. ‘Ce que le musée fait à la littérature. Muséalisation et exposition du littéraire’, Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties 16: 7–20. Retrieved 24 August 2020 from http://interferenceslitteraires.be/index.php/illi/article/view/870. Reifenscheid, B. 2019. ‘Gegen Unverbindlichkeit und Politisierung: Zur Neudefinition der Museen’. Wissenschaftskommunikation.de. Retrieved 15 April 2020 from https:// www.wissenschaftskommunikation.de/gegen-unverbindlichkeit-und-politisierungzur-neudefinition-der-museen-32389/. Ritter-Lutz, S. 2015. ‘Das originale Objekt – Mittelpunkt jeder Ausstellung?’, museums. ch 10: 20–27. Schärer, M.R. 2003. Die Ausstellung: Theorie und Exempel. Munich: Verlag Müller-Straten. Schlaffer, H. 1990. ‘Die Schauseite der Poesie. Über literarische Ausstellungen und den literarhistorischen Fernsehfilm’, in H. Eggert et al. (eds), Geschichte als Literatur. Formen und Grenzen der Repräsentation von Vergangenheit. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, SpringerVerlag, pp. 365–71. Schlag, E. 2017. ‘Mediale Vermittlungsstrategien in der Szenografie’, in M. Eibl and M. Gaedke (eds), INFORMATIK 2017. Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI). Chemnitz: Gesellschaft für Informatik, pp. 567–75. Schütz, E. 2011. ‘Literatur. Ausstellung. Betrieb’, in A. Bohnenkamp and S. Vandenrath (eds), Wort-Räume, Zeichen-Wechsel, Augen-Poesie: Zur Theorie und Praxis von Literaturausstellungen. Göttingen: Wallstein, pp. 65–75. Simon, C. 2014. ‘Wer schreibt die Geschichte? Positionen zu Rollenverteilung und Autorschaft in der Ausstellungsarbeit’, in L. Stapferhaus Lenzburg et al. (eds), Dramaturgie in der Ausstellung: Begriffe und Konzepte für die Praxis. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 118–23. Spring, U. 2019. ‘Die Inszenierung von Archivmaterial in musealisierten Dichterwohnungen’, in K. Kastberger, S. Maurer and C. Neuhuber (eds), Schauplatz Archiv. Objekt – Narrativ – Performanz. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 141–55. Sternfeld, N. 2018. Das radikaldemokratische Museum. Berlin: De Gruyter. Tyradellis, D. 2014. Müde Museen: Oder: Wie Ausstellungen unser Denken verändern können. Hamburg: Edition Körber-Stiftung. Warnecke, J.-C. 2014. ‘Pas de deux. It takes two to tango’, in J.-C. Warnecke (ed.), Ausstellungsgestaltung. Zur Zusammenarbeit zwischen Museum und Gestalter / Exhibition Planning: Collaboration between Museum and Designer. Stuttgart: av edition, pp. 14–25. Wehnert, S. 2002. Literaturmuseen im Zeitalter der neuen Medien. Leseumfeld – Aufgaben – Didaktische Konzepte. Kiel: Verlag Ludwig. Wisskirchen, H. 2016. ‘Auf der Suche nach der idealen Ausstellung’, in B. Lipinski and A.-L. Markus (eds), Fremde Heimat. Flucht und Exil der Familie Mann. Lübeck: Kulturstiftung der Hansestadt Lübeck, pp. 16–22. Zeissig, V. 2017. ‘Zur inszenatorischen Immaterialisierung von Literatur als musealem Objekt’, in L. Hansen, J. Schoene and L. Tessmann (eds), Das Immaterielle ausstellen: Zur Musealisierung von Literatur und performativer Kunst. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, pp. 223–37.

Part II

Politics

Chapter 8

New Sites of Worship Sovietization and Literary Museums in Western Borderlands, 1940–1979 Anastasia Felcher

Introduction This chapter seeks to analyse the veneration of authors through the opening of new literary museums, assessing this phenomenon as both a form of political action implemented ‘from above’ by central authorities, as well as one supported ‘from below’ through local initiatives. The period under consideration begins in 1940, with the signing of the first decree regarding the opening of new author museums after the USSR began to expand westwards. It finishes in 1979, with the end of the statistical data provided by the sources upon which this research is based (Vanslova 1981). After the Second World War, new territories were decisively incorporated into the Soviet Union: Finnish Karelia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, eastern regions of Poland, Carpatho-Ruthenia, and Eastern Romania (Bukovina and Bessarabia). The USSR’s leadership invested significant energies in ensuring the transition of these territories into Soviet life. Along with the adoption of the Soviet political system and institutions, these new Soviet republics would eventually adopt the Soviet mentality also. Culture and cultural institutions, including literary museums, were assigned a pivotal role in this endeavour. Below I discuss the new literary museums that were opened in the USSR’s western borderlands during this period. Bringing together examples on the micro- and macrolevel, this chapter illustrates how biographies of separate writers and poets, together with the concept of ethno-territorial literature, were reinvented, remembered

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and exhibited in Soviet western borderlands from 1940 to 1979. By discussing numerous literary museums opened for political ends, I address the following questions: Which authors get to have museums in their honour, and why? How do author museums function as both state instruments and places of dissent in an authoritarian society? How do literary museums and author museums change vis-à-vis the transformation of the political system? In his book on the social functions of literature, Andrew Wachtel (2006) emphasized the important role played by national writers and poets in East European cultural life. Wachtel noticed that in comparison to the West European tradition, in Eastern Europe, defined as the area ‘from Russia to Hungary, from Croatia to Estonia’, high-brow literature and those who produced it were traditionally considered cultural saints (ibid.: 219). Although William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe decidedly dominate English, Italian and German literary traditions respectively (Dović and Helgason 2016: 71–96), these authors did not play a crucial role in the making of the modern state for the nations they represent, unlike literary figures such as Adam Mickewicz, Taras Shevchenko, Hristo Botev, Sándor Petőfi and Mihai Eminescu (Neubauer 2010: 11–18; Helgason and Dović 2019). Owing to the ‘national revivals’ of the second-half of the nineteenth century, writers and poets in Eastern Europe were credited, mostly posthumously, with being the founding fathers of literary languages. In this regard, Russia differed from other East European countries. For Russia, a literary-centred cultural orientation became prominent in the nineteenth century through the appropriation of a Russian literary language developed in the writings of Alexander Pushkin. Even if Pushkin was not active in the national revival, his writings earned him the status of a national poet. By the end of the nineteenth century, a specific form of commemorating him became prominent: memorializing the houses where the poet had resided (first by private initiative, then by the government), and turning them into museums. The same is true for all key writers across Eastern Europe as, by the turn of the twentieth century, houses once inhabited by Mickewicz, Shevchenko, Botev, Petőfi and Eminescu had gained an aura of objective importance, which, if not ‘sacred’, was at least undeniably worthy of memorialization. During the twentieth century, political regimes gave greater attention to the symbolic appropriation of regional cultural icons in Eastern Europe. The abrupt political changes, repressive policies, property spoliation, and ethnic cleansing in the region meant that these acts of appropriation occurred within specific contexts. For the communist regime,

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present in the region since 1917 and expanding unprecedentedly after the Second World War, high-brow literature and those who produced it were vitally important, both as a factor of legitimization and, as Olga Voronina (2017: 79–80) has argued, as an alternative to religion in a society marked by an aggressive, state-sponsored atheism. For the USSR, and to a lesser degree for post-Second World War countries of the Eastern bloc, memorialized houses of writers and poets, the majority of which were eventually turned into literary museums, served not only as repositories of memory, but as quasi-sacred places of organized worship. Commemorating authors of local origin had its roots in Soviet nationality policies, which aimed to appropriate local cultures in the hopes of forging national republics that would be ‘socialist in content’ while ‘national in form’ (Gorenburg 2006: 273–77). As worshipping the written word became a ritual, a vast network of literary museums used former residencies as a focus for the emotional and personal appeal attributed to authors. Many researchers confirm the quasi-sacred status of writers and poets in Russia and beyond. For instance, primary sources on literary tourism in the late USSR refer to the Christian connotations surrounding visits to Pushkin-related sites, at which one is instructed ‘to bow’, ‘to receive communion’ and even ‘to become purer’ (Lebedeva 1996: 51). However, little research is available on literary museums in the periphery of the USSR, or on the quasi-sacred status of non-Russian poets and writers. In the Soviet western borderlands, literary museums dedicated to Russian authors naturally held an ideological significance in the immediate years following the Second World War. In the post-Stalinist years, an increasing number of museums were dedicated to authors of local origin. The opening of these museums took place by central decrees, but also occurred through local initiative and agency. I analyse several dozen author museums in the Soviet western borderlands and their exhibition content through the lens of Sovietization efforts and the use of soft power. Exhibitions often entailed the rewriting of author biographies. These museums were an important contribution to what Maxim Waldstein called ‘Soviet ethnophilia’ – that is, the long-standing commitment of the Soviet authorities to promoting ethno-territorial identities and ‘developing national cultures focused on “the (ordinary) people”’ (Waldstein 2007: 562; see also Slezkine 1994: 414–52). Such efforts encompassed the need to institutionalize cultural heritage, including literature, relevant for the western borderlands. As would be expected, this cultural heritage was reinterpreted through a specific ideological narrative of Sovietization and the formation of a common Soviet culture. In order to attain this relevance, museums commemorated either separate authors of local origin,

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or those who lived and wrote in the area. Commemorated authors were known for embracing the Socialist Realist canon in their style of writing, and were generally loyal to the regime. Otherwise, biographies of authors from previous decades were carefully tailored for public consumption. The politics of selecting writers and poets for a museum marginalized authors of ethnic groups not considered (or promoted) as ‘titular’ in postwar western borderlands. For examples, authors of Polish and Jewish origin – especially relevant for Lithuania and Western Ukraine – were often systematically overlooked. As a result of the cultural liberalization of Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ (the early 1950s to the early 1960s), and continuing with the epoch of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule known as ‘stagnation’ (from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s), a narrow window of possibility opened for reading the history of ethno-territorial literature exhibited in museums through a different lens. Signs of cultural dissent formulated by contemporary, nationally minded intellectuals found their way into a gradual rereading of the classics. In some Soviet republics, understandings of a national literature’s historical continuity matured to varying degrees with the help of literary museums, in many instances contradicting the principle of ‘national in form, socialist in content’ promoted by the Communist Party. In later years, national mobilization under Perestroika (1985–91) sought inspiration in cultural heritage. In a significant way, this rediscovery of the national grew out of Soviet modernization and nationality policy.

Literary Museums in the USSR: An Overview The history of literary museums in Russia is closely related to the rise of the cult of Alexander Pushkin as a Russian national poet. The Biblioteka Pushkiniana, opened in 1879, is considered to be the first literary museum in Russia (Nekrasov 2000: 63–77). The third literary museum in Imperial Russia was also related to Pushkin: a small-scale museum solely dedicated to the poet that opened in 1908 on the Mikhailovskoye family estate in the Pskov region. The state purchased the land from the Pushkin family following the 1899 centenary of the poet’s birth, with officials hoping to publicize the alleged historical connection between Pushkin and Nicholas I (Levitt 1992: 183–203; Nekrasov 2000: 14–25). This initiative not only laid the foundation for the sporadic spread of singular author museums throughout the Romanov Empire,1 but also encouraged the development of a network of Pushkin museums, which subsequently flourished under Soviet rule. Prior to 1917, literary museums were rather marginal and far

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from the leading form of author veneration. According to a 1981 reference book on literary museums in the USSR (Vanslova 1981), prior to 1917 a total of only seven literary museums existed throughout the entire Russian Empire.2 The newly formed multi-ethnic Bolshevik state, officially established as the USSR in 1922, was the first of the European states to take measures confront the rising tide of Russian nationalism and encourage the self-determination of non-Russian nations promoted by the Soviet state. Although this principle proved to encourage local nationalisms, leading to an abrupt demise of the so-called ‘affirmative action’ policies enforced in the 1920s and early 1930s, it was thought initially that such policies would contribute to combating the growth of nationalism within Soviet borders (Martin 2002: 67–89; Blitstein 2006: 273–93). Attacking socalled ‘Great Russian chauvinism’, Vladimir Lenin claimed that only the right of self-determination could overcome the distrust towards Russians inherited from the imperial period. The logical consequence drawn from this was that since ‘great Russian chauvinism’ would incur the suspicion of national minorities, self-determination should be supported as long as it did not compromise the goals of the international proletariat (Vujacic 2007: 159). During the korenizatsia (indigenization) campaign of the 1920s, the state ascribed a special task to ethnic Russians, claiming they had a duty to assist non-titular nations in overcoming their ‘backwardness’ (Martin 2002: 74). This mindset led to an active strategy of promoting non-Russian nation-building. Authorities institutionalized ethnicity through the creation of autonomous republics, giving titular nationalities preferential treatment that included support for local elites, the proliferation and codification of local languages, and the creation of native educational institutions. Between 1918 and 1923, over 270 new museums were founded in the Soviet Union, with local history museums experiencing a true ‘boom’. Literary and art museums were the second largest group among the new Soviet museums, after museums focusing on the history of the revolution, museums dedicated to military history, and local history museums (Makhotina 2017: 128). However, under the indigenization campaign, the literary museum did not become a major or widespread phenomenon in the USSR, partly due to the relatively short period of the campaign and the scarcity of resources available. From 1917 to 1922, twenty-one new literary museums opened, with the lion’s share of those located in Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine. The ‘affirmative action’ empire persisted for a mere decade. Fundamental revisions to Soviet nationality policies by the 1930s following the

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seizure of power by Stalin marked a shift from the original korenizatsiia policies. This shift signalled an ideological readjustment that emphasized the Russian elements of Soviet culture, and with it, aspects of Russian culture and nationalism as part of the official ideology (Vujacic 2007: 161, 178; Hoffmann 2004: 651–74). With a shift away from and the repression of futurism and other facets of avant-garde culture, which had repudiated the legacy of classic Russian writers from the nineteenth-century canon, a fundamental ‘return of Pushkin’ had taken place by the mid1930s. Stephanie Sandler (2004: 107–19) interprets Pushkin’s ability to see himself as Russian as one of the crucial factors in why he was finally selected to promote Russianness in the Soviet Union (see also Bethea and Davidov 2006: 11–25). This shift had direct consequences for literary museums. Russian classics re-entered the Soviet canon, and by the late 1930s the concept of the history of Russian literature was musealized (Mastenitsa 2017: 109). In bringing the written word to the masses, literary museums operated in conjunction with other forms of cultural production, including the publication of mass editions of Russian classics and down-to-earth literary criticism. Countrywide festivities dedicated to celebrating authors were also popular, with the 1937 centenary of Pushkin’s death marking the peak of these festive politics (Sandler 2005: 193–214). Between 1930 and 1940, twenty-three new literary museums opened across the country, with 60 per cent in Soviet Russia and Ukraine. Half of these museums commemorated authors at the top of the cultural pantheon, with classics such as Shevchenko, Pushkin and Maxim Gorky taking pride of place. Starting from about the early 1940s, and especially in the late Stalinist years from the end of the Second World War until 1953, the number of literary museums in the USSR grew steadily, with sixty-two new ones being opened. The protracted military occupation by the Axis powers from 1941 to 1944 devastated territories on the Eastern Front. After the Red Army’s 1944 military offensive, which gave the Soviet government control of the territory, cultural heritage received a new symbolic import linked to defeating the enemy and normalizing everyday life (Maddox 2014: 68–114). Leningrad city and region were given high priority in this regard because of the accumulation of imperial palaces and parks that had been turned into museums and public recreation spaces after 1917 (ibid.: 115–44). Pushkin-related memorial sites, as well as his grave, were located in this area. Liberating and restoring these places, now labelled as ‘sacred’, was fuelled with a new rhetoric of faith and vengeance (Figure 8.1).

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From 1940 to 1953, the number of literary museums more than doubled in comparison to the previous decade. This impressive increase was a direct consequence of the USSR’s territorial expansion and incorporation of the western borderlands – territories that previously were, or made up part of, interwar nation-states: Finland, the Baltic states, Poland and Romania. Prior to the war, the region was distinguished by its multi-ethnic citizenry. This feature was irreversibly lost after the war due to genocide, military losses and population transfers. Sovietization also reshaped the area in the wake of the conflict, with the regime engaging in forced population transfers and encouraging an influx of Soviet citizens from other distant areas of Russia (Blacker 2019: 3). Parallel to this, reshaping architectural and cultural landscapes made the area look and feel Soviet. New literary museums in the western borderlands made up more than a third of all new literary museums opened in the USSR during this decade. For Soviet rule, museums were fundamental in efforts to reshape the cultural atmosphere of the region and reinvent its image. Prior to Soviet rule, the whole area had only three literary museums – one in Latvia, one in Lithuania and one in eastern Poland. Twenty-three new literary museums opened in the western borderlands between 1940 and

Figure 8.1. Soviet military unit passes under the arch erected by the Red Army on formerly Nazi-occupied territory near Pushkin Hills in the Pskov region of Russia (RSFSR), 1944. The slogan on the banner states ‘Let us avenge Germans for our Pushkin!’ © Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive in Moscow (RGAKFD).

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1953, commemorating authors either native to the territories or who had lived there for a certain time. New exhibitions either adjusted an author’s biography and creative legacy to transform them into appropriate heritage sites befitting socialist culture, or they commemorated ideologically suitable second-rank authors. The vast extent of the post-1940 literary museum network posed multiple challenges that museum employees had to face while running new museums, despite the high ideological importance of their work. Steady expansion of the literary museums’ network reached its peak under the ‘museum boom’ of the 1960s to the 1980s (Geering 2019: 153–70). In these years the number of literary museums in the USSR grew unprecedentedly, with sixty-eight new ones opened in the 1960s and ninety in the 1970s. This had several reasons specific to the region. Firstly, the cultural liberalization from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, and Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, weakened ideological control over arts and culture, leading to a revival of exhibition activities across various types of museum. New literary museums could thus potentially celebrate authors ideologically impermissible under Stalinism. The increase in internal cultural tourism, concerns regarding heritage preservation among professionals and the general public, and the revival of state-sponsored kraevedenie were also used to mobilize full-scale popular support for Khruschev’s de-Stalinization programme (Donovan 2015: 464–83). Under these conditions, interaction and cooperation between the state and multiple public organizations related to heritage and culture became more visible and productive. The opening of the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Monuments (VOOPliK) in 1966 was a milestone in this regard. Accordingly, with the dramatic increase of public involvement in heritage-related activities, and increases in government funding for cultural affairs institutions and museums, including literary museums, were given a high priority within Soviet cultural policies. Literary museums were viewed as examples of heritage preservation, spaces of state-sponsored public encouragement, and destinations for leisure activities. Under Brezhnev, these tendencies persisted, and the network of literary museums throughout the USSR continued to grow. In the 1970s, some literary museums became ‘museum-reserves’. The museum-reserve marked a shift from a model favouring a single residence where an author lived or worked to one encompassing an entire area in which the site was located, transforming it into a locus of memorialization akin to a ‘literary landscape’. This shift promoted growth in the size and number of preservation sites, with natural landscapes merging with cultural ones. The cultural reimagining of authors’ biographies was expanded to parks

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and former estates. The number of tourists visiting museums, including literary museum-reserves, increased significantly, as did the number of employees. In the 1970s, the number of literary museums grew throughout the USSR. The western borderlands hosted eleven new literary museums out of the above-mentioned ninety throughout the country. From 1940 to 1979, western borderlands hosted fifty-three literary museums, comprising around 22 per cent of the entire number of literary museums opened in the USSR in these years.

Literary Museums in Western Borderlands in Wartime and Late Stalinism, 1940–53 The area under study experienced Soviet rule twice. Starting with the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, different areas that were to become Soviet western borderlands were grouped under ‘the first Soviets’ in 1939 and 1940. The Red Army retreat from these territories in 1941 was dictated by Nazi Germany’s attack, which marked the beginning of the Soviet–German war on 22 June 1941. The brutality of the war and the 1941–44 Axis occupation devastated Finnish Karelia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, eastern regions of Poland, Carpatho-Ruthenia and eastern Romania. In 1944, after the series of successful military offensives on the Eastern Front, the Red Army re-annexed these areas and established control, known as ‘the second Soviets’. With a major proportion of the multi-ethnic population killed in the Holocaust, and war losses and forced population exchanges drastically impacting the region, Soviet authorities sought to formulate an image of ethnically homogeneous nations of Soviet Karelia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, (western) Belarus, (western) Ukraine and Moldavia. This plan was consistent with desires to make these areas an integral part of the ‘family of fraternal peoples’. Throughout the western borderlands, Soviet authorities sponsored and implemented a special social engineering programme. By sponsoring population transfers, undertaking monumental forms of propaganda and reformulating commemoration canons, the regime endeavoured to consciously neglect the region’s multi-ethnic past in order to promote an image of culturally uniform territories. Literary museums contributed to transforming the area from a compilation of multi-ethnic borderland nations to an area in which the communist aesthetic dominated the everyday life of various modernized urban and rural communities. Literary museums propagated communist political values, and sometimes even cited Stalin. Not only did the number

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of museums testify to the political connotations of these efforts; the exhibition content did as well. When it came to the political function of opening these museums, the logic behind it varied. During the period of the ‘first Soviets’ (1940–41), four literary museums were inaugurated in Tallinn, Riga, L’viv and to the south of L’viv. The Estonian and Latvian museums were devoted to the literary history of these regions, while the museums in L’viv and in the rural area south of the city commemorated Ukrainian modernist writers and political activists. In 1940, a decree on opening a literary museum in Vilnius was signed. This museum, by contrast, was supposed to commemorate the Russian heritage of the city. After 1944, new literary museums flourished across the western borderlands. From 1944 to 1953, eighteen new literary museums opened, all of them addressing authors of local origin. The strikingly uneven distribution of literary museums across the region, from 1940 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1953, suggests that although the recognition of a museum as an efficient indoctrination tool and the ideological suitability of an author were important factors for taking a decision on the museum, even these reasons might not have been sufficient to launch the opening. In conditions of postwar devastation and the scarcity of funding and exhibits – both in pre-war and postwar years – agency on the ground played an important role in opening a literary museum, with local actors communicating their desires to the centre. However, once the museums had been inaugurated, the importance of relations to established literary museums and research centres in Leningrad and Moscow played a crucial role in determining what artefacts should be displayed in peripheral museums, the design of exhibitions, and decisions regarding what was considered ideologically admissible to present to the public. On the one hand, in the early years the biographies and creative legacies of authors were either deemed compatible with the regime’s political objectives and aesthetic aspirations or were noticeably adjusted to fit these. On the other hand, especially from 1953 to 1979, the growing network of literary museums incorporated authors whose biography and creative legacy was more diverse, and from time to time even nationally minded. In 1923, the territory known as Russian Karelia was officially recognized as the Karelian ASSR. In the 1920s, as part of the korenizatsia campaign, the authorities were heavily promoting Karelian language and culture, which, according to Paul M. Austin (1992: 16–35), was in reality a Finnicization campaign in that period. However, by the late 1930s, mistrust towards Finnish language and culture rose, and Finnish became strongly associated with greater-Finnish nationalists and bourgeois capitalist Finland across the border. Therefore, in early 1938, the Soviet au-

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thorities reformulated the ‘affirmative action’ campaign to the promotion of actual Karelian and the purge of Finnish from educational institutions and the public domain. Thus, until 1940, the need for ideologically appropriate language dictated multiple efforts invested by the regime to produce a ‘proper’ Karelian language, which at that point contained a large number of Russian words and was written in Cyrillic letters (ibid.). With this rapidly changing cultural politics, no new literary museums were opened. Not a single Karelian author, be it within a Finnicization or a Karelization campaign, was commemorated with a museum. Soon afterwards, Soviet territorial expansion resulting from a threemonth military conflict known as the Winter War (November 1939 – March 1940) led to another turn in cultural policies. Most of Finnish Karelia was handed to the Soviet Union, creating the Karelo-Finnish SSR (known also as Soviet Karelia or KFSSR) that contained territories of the former Finnish Karelia and Russian Karelia. The experiment with the Karelian language ended abruptly, and Finnish was restored as the KFSSR’s official language, together with Russian (Austin 1992: 16–35). In support of this turn in cultural policies, in December 1940 the first congress of KFSSR writers took place, at which the need to develop authentic Soviet literature that would originate from the area was discussed. Again, no literary museums were called for in support of these policies, bar one. Back in October 1940, as reported by the Russian News Agency TASS, a Maxim Gorky museum-dacha opened on the Karelian Isthmus, in the village of Kirjavala in the Mustamäki region.3 In the early twentieth century, in the Finnish village of Kirjavala there used to be several country houses owned by Russian officials. Back in 1913, Gorky had spent leisure time in the region at one such dacha (continuously returning to the area, 1914–17), and the building eventually became a museum in 1940. This museum only existed for nine months, as between June 1941 and September 1944 most of Karelia was occupied by Finnish forces, through German assistance, during the military campaigns on the Soviet–Finnish front. Greater Finland used the period to carry out a national Finnicization campaign. When the territory became Soviet once again after the 1944 Vyborg-Petrozavodsk offensive, the Karelo-Finnish SSR was restored. As for the Gorky museum, Kirjavala village remained relatively intact after the war, yet the 1981 reference book (Vanslova 1981) did not mention any author museums in the area. It can be assumed that the museum ceased functioning, but Gorky’s legacy was subsequently preserved after 1948 with the renaming of the village and the nearby train station as Gor’kovskoye.4

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In Estonia, another region that eventually became part of the USSR after the Second World War, the number of literary museums opened by the regime between 1940 and 1953 significantly exceeded the Karelian case. Between August 1940, when Estonia was annexed by the USSR and subsequently merged into the Estonian SSR, and October 1941, when German forces completed capturing mainland Estonia and the islands, two literary museums opened. Both were dedicated to Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, a nineteenth-century Estonian writer of moralistic folk books translated from German, and of the national epic Kalevipoeg. Kreutzwald is considered to be the father of Estonian literature, and thus commemorating him with museums was consistent with the logic of providing each republic with an institutionalized cultural heritage. These gestures underscored the message that, in contrast to the cultural policies of imperial Russia, communist rule would accommodate and even promote public access to this heritage. The first museum, opened in Tartu in 1940, was a literary museum housed in the Estonian Academy of Sciences named after Kreutzwald. Among other things, the museum contained a manuscript department together with a department of folk art, which was consistent with the areas central to Kreutzwald’s work. The second museum was a Friedrich Kreutzwald memorial museum opened the following year in Võru, this time in the house where the writer had lived. In 1944, with significant population and territorial losses, the Estonian SSR was re-established after German military forces retreated from the area that November. Between 1944 and 1953, four new literary museums opened, including two in the capital. In 1945, in the coastal town of Pärnu located in the south-west of the republic, a museum dedicated to the Estonian poet and a playwright known by her pen name Lydia Koidula opened. In 1946 in Tallin, a memorial museum dedicated to Eduard Vilde, a pioneer of critical realism in Estonian literature, was inaugurated. That same year an Anton Hansen Tammsaare apartment-museum opened in the apartment where the realist writer had spent the last years of his life. Finally, in 1948, the farm museum of Carl Robert Jakobson, writer, political activist and leader of the radical wing in the Governorate of Livonia, opened on the family estate in Kurgja village in Pärnu county, in the western-central part of the ESSR. The dynamics of opening literary museums in Latvia between 1940 and 1953 resembled the Estonian case. Prior to 1953, only four literary museums opened in LSSR. All these museums commemorated authors known for taking an active part in the nineteenth-century national Latvian movement. Also, as in the Estonian SSR, a literary history museum opened; its exhibitions encouraged an idea of continuity across Latvian

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literature, albeit through the Soviet prism. Prior to the Soviet–German war, Latvia had possessed a single literary museum: a literary and art history museum opened in 1940 and named after Janis Rainis, in Riga. Rainis’s work is celebrated for its ethnic symbolism, and is of crucial importance for Latvian nationalism. After the re-establishment of the Latvian SSR in 1944/45, three more literary museums were inaugurated. In 1946, in the seaside resort of Jurmala, another museum was established in a former summerhouse, and which celebrated Rainis. In 1948, author Anna Brigadere was commemorated with a memorial museum in her summer cottage in Tērvete municipality in the southern part of the republic. Finally, in 1952, an Andrejs Upīts museum-estate opened in Skrīveri village. To the south of Latvia, another region subjected to consecutive regime changes and the brutal political divisions they encouraged, had its literary museums witnessing a significant expansion. On 17 September 1939 the Red Army invaded Poland, and within days had established control over its eastern provinces, also known as Kresy. The area under Soviet control included the city of Wilno and its surrounding territories. This area of north-eastern Europe was known for its pre-war national diversity; it included Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Belarusians, and each of these communities had narratives associated with the territory (Snyder 2004: 52–72). During the war, the region was governed by Soviet, Lithuanian and Nazi authorities (Weeks 2015: 155–62). After the war, the Lithuanian SSR included the territories of the interwar Lithuanian state and the contested city of Vilnius and its surrounding region. By 1940/41, the Soviet authorities had already developed a road map for reconstructing and modernizing Lithuanian cities. This project dovetailed with other urban and cultural policies, such as street-renaming, selective public celebrations, and instrumentalized public cultural institutions, like museums. Some of these plans were eventually implemented, while the majority remained on paper. The decision on the Pushkin museum took the second path. The hasty decision to commemorate Pushkin with a museum was undoubtedly dictated by the poet’s ideological appropriation, culminating in the 1937 centenary. Yet the museum – or, rather, the plan of it in 1940 – commemorated the past relevant to local Vilnius history as much as a grand Soviet narrative (Figure 8.2). The 1941–44 German occupation of Lithuania resulted in the devastation of the urban environment, and the physical elimination of a great proportion of the pre-war populations of Vilnius, Kaunas and other localities. With the Red Army reoccupying the region in July 1944, the second period of Soviet rule started. This time, more comprehensive

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cultural and memory policies were implemented, and literary museums reflected this desire more so than ever before. Between 1944 and 1953, three literary museums opened in the Lithuanian SSR. Only one of them was located in the capital – the Alexander Pushkin literary museum in Vilnius, opened in 1948. The museum faced a very specific challenge in that it had little to do with Pushkin, who never actually visited the city. It was housed in a nineteenth-century mansion owned by Pushkin’s son Grigory and his wife Varvara, a native of Vil’na. Given the fact that the mansion had an indirect link to the poet, and the significance of Pushkin as a form of soft power used to Sovietize the new territories under Stalinism, the museum was founded all the same. Pieces of furniture brought by Grigory in 1899 from the Mikhailovskoye family estate were rare items directly associated with the poet and so were out on display (Figure 8.3). Yet the rest of the museum had little to offer on the poet, with six memorial rooms informing visitors about the everyday lives of Grigory and Varvara. The exhibition contained a Pushkin memorial corner, and celebrated the tribute paid to the poet in pre-1940 Vi’lna (and Wilno).

Figure 8.2. The Markučiai estate in Vilnius, formerly owned by Varvara and Grigory Pushkin; the view of the house prior to the opening of the Alexander Pushkin Museum, 1946. © Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive in Moscow (RGAKFD).

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Figure 8.3. A room at the Markučiai estate of Alexander Pushkin’s son Grigory, in Vilnius, 1940. The coffee table, armchairs and self-woven curtains at the doors are the poet’s room furnishings, brought to Vilnius by Grigory Pushkin from Mikhailovskoye in 1899. © Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive in Moscow (RGAKFD).

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Another literary museum opened in the Lithuanian SSR in the late Stalinist years, located in Kaunas city and Klangių village, commemorating the writer Petras Cvirka. A prose writer, poet and publicist of peasant origin, but also a bureaucrat and Soviet functionary, Cvirka and his literary production enjoyed the highest esteem under the Soviet government. Not only had he been enthusiastic about communism prior to 1940, including in his writings, but he also actively collaborated with the new regime, joining the Communist Party in 1940, and becoming a member of the puppet People’s Parliament that voted for joining the USSR. In 1948, the decree to open the Petras Cvirka house museum in Kaunas was signed, with the museum opening three years later. In 1953, a Petras Cvirka memorial farmstead museum opened at his parent’s house in Klangių village of Jurbarkas municipality, one hour from Kaunas. Owing to a lack of authentic objects related to the writer’s professional career, this museum functioned as an ethnographic exhibition on everyday peasant life, also hinting at Cvirka’s peasant origin, and, therefore, the ‘authentic affinity’ of his work to ‘ordinary people’. Another territory formerly ruled by the interwar Polish state and occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939 is Western Belarus (Iwanow 1991: 253–67). Surprisingly, only two literary museums were available to the public in this vast area during the Soviet rule, and both were dedicated to Polish authors. In comparison to other former Polish eastern borderlands, where the Soviet government sponsored literary museums that celebrated authors of an ethnicity that became titular due to the calamities of the Second World War and population transfers, in Western Belarus literary museums celebrated Polish poets in order to Sovietize Polish-speaking Catholics that remained in the area (Huzhalouski 2019: 39). Back in 1938 an Adam Mickiewicz memorial museum was launched in a house in Nowogródek where the most celebrated Polish poet and patriot had lived in his youth. In 1940 this museum reopened as a museum in Navahrudak. Unfortunately, the house burned down in the early days of the Second World War but was restored in 1955 with a refurbished exhibition (ibid.: 38). Another interwar author museum appropriated by the regime in 1939 was an Eliza Orzeszko house museum in Hrodna, a BSSR city near the Polish–Lithuanian border. This grass-roots museum had been opened back in 1930 in Polish Grodno, and was located in the house where the novelist and Nobel Prize nominee had lived, worked, and spent her last days. In early 1941, the BSSR People’s Commissariat of Education was developing a new exhibition for this museum (Huzhalouski 2019), but these plans were interrupted by the war. No literary museums were inaugurated in the western part of BSSR between 1944 and 1953,

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but an author museum opened in 1951 in the capital, Minsk – a house museum dedicated to the poet Ivan Lutsevich, who was better known under his pen name Yanka Kupala – making it the first literary museum dedicated to a Belarusian author. To the south of Belarus, the region currently known as Western Ukraine comprised the territories formerly ruled by interwar Polish (eastern provinces Galicia and Volhynia), Hungarian (Carpatho-Ruthenia) and Romanian (Bukovina) nation-states (Himka 1994: 347–63). In Galicia, literary commemoration played a significant role in Soviet cultural policies prior to the war. Two author museums and a major literary anniversary were celebrated there in 1940. Given that these areas were urbanized and still had significant numbers of Poles in cities such as L’viv, public celebrations of Adam Mickiewicz, like the one that took place in L’viv in 1940, was a similar ‘affirmative action’ style policy, as was his museum in Navahrudak in Belarus (Inglot 1991: 131–48). Several scholars argued that the politics of Ukrainization that the Soviet authorities heavily promoted in the region in defiance of other ethnic groups (primarily Poles and Jews) paradoxically eventually brought about a very strong anti-communist attitude in Western Ukraine (Risch 2011: 27–52; Amar 2015: 143–85). Opening a 1940 Ivan Franko memorial museum in L’viv was indicative of this Ukrainizing effort in the area. Franko was a modernist poet, writer, ethnographer and a literary critic. A native of the region, his impact on modern political thought and action in Ukraine is profound and well known. The major challenge for curators of the newly established museum was to praise Franko’s political activism regarding his contribution to the socialist movement in the region, while carefully downgrading his deep support for the nationalist Ukrainian movement. The museum also used the exhibition space to publicize the positive transformations brought to Galicia under Soviet rule. That same year in Rusiv, a village located in the Stanyslaviv region south-east of L’viv, a museum celebrated another modernist writer and political activist, Vasyl Stefanyk. After the war, once Western Ukraine in general and Galicia in particular was re-established as part of the Ukrainian SSR, three new museums were inaugurated, with two of them dedicated to Ivan Franko, including a 1946 Franko museum in the village of Nahuievychi in the Drohobych area of the L’viv region. In 1949, a literary museum in Sniatyn, a town not far from Chernivtsi, was inaugurated to commemorate Marko Cheremshyna, a Ukrainian writer of Hutsul background. Finally, in 1953 another Franko museum opened in Krivorivnya village on the border with Carpatho-Ruthenia. Thus, by 1953, the region had three Franko museums, which sig-

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nifies the extent to which the regime invested in this particular author, placing him at the centre of memorial culture in the region, and encouraging veneration for his work and his legacy of political activism. Sovietizing Bukovina, another region in Soviet Western Ukraine, possessed its own challenge. How could the government promote an image of ethnic homogeneity in an area that had traditionally been multi-ethnic and which held importance for Romanian, Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish and German national imaginaries? In seeking to resolve this conundrum in 1940, the city of Cernăuți was rebranded as Chernivtsi and made part of the Ukrainian SSR (Frunchak 2014: 98–115). The war and the 1941–44 Axis occupation carried out under the Romanian army had been lethal for the majority of Chernivtsi Jews (ibid.: 250–308), and after a series of forced population transfers that occurred both prior to and immediately after the war, the city and the region became predominantly Ukrainian. Two museums are known to have been inaugurated in Ukrainian Bukovina, both in Chernivtsi, in 1944 and 1947. These were the only literary museums opened in the region prior to 1979. In 1944 a museum dedicated to Olha Kobylianska, who had died two years before, opened in Chernivtsi in a house where the poet had lived for more than fifty years. According to Svitlana Frunchak (2014: 379–83), this museum spoke about recent events in the region as much as about the poet and her creative legacy. The museum adjusted Kobylianska’s biography for public use, and the exhibition emphasized the poet’s enthusiasm for the Soviet troops entering the region in 1940/41, as well as her fascination with Ukrainian folklore. Kobylianska’s effort to institutionalize the feminist movement in the region and her homo-erotic affection towards another iconic Ukrainian poet, known as Lesya Ukrainka, were completely ignored and relegated to oblivion. In 1947, a Yuriy Fedkovych memorial museum opened in the former Residence of Orthodox Metropolitans was turned into a museum of local lore. The Fedkovych museum presented the life and work of this writer, poet, folklorist and translator in a light that favoured and exaggerated his role in the development of progressive Ukrainian literature (ibid.: 389). In Bessarabia, a territory ruled by Romania in the interwar years, the late Stalinist years were marked by the opening of a single museum. The significance of a miniature house in Kishinev turned into a museum had a direct connection to Pushkin. Another valuable characteristic of this museum was its authenticity and integrity – an exceptional rarity for a city where more than 70 per cent of housing had been destroyed during the war. For the Soviet narrative, the history of Pushkin’s presence in the region, dating back to the early nineteenth century, was often interpreted

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as the manifestation of cultural and spiritual ties between the Russian and Moldovan people. After the Red Army troops entered Bessarabia in 1940 and an already existing Moldovan Autonomous SSR was merged with Bessarabia in the newly created Moldovan SSR, the memory of Pushkin became usable as the past adapted to new realities. The Kishinev Pushkin house museum that opened its doors to the public in 1948 had benefited from Leningrad sponsorship in terms of exhibition design and the procurement of artefacts. Prior to 1953, Soviet authorities had remained highly suspicious of nineteenth-century writers from the Romanian cultural canon, and found them unfit for inclusion in the cultural heritage projects intended for Soviet Moldavia. Thus, by the late 1950s, literary journals and media had published multiple articles on writers from the Russian cultural pantheon, but kept quiet regarding literary heritage of local or Romanian origin (Van Meurs 1994: 281–82; Negură 2014: 274–83).

De-Stalinization and the Literary Museums’ Network Expansion, 1953–1979 In the western borderlands during this period, a number of new literary museums commemorated authors associated with socialist aesthetics, or at least those authors whose legacy could be adjusted to it. In parallel with this trend, certain new literary museums would also become places where cultural dissent could be found. The dissent came in various forms. While the Soviet authorities sought to use the ‘museum boom’, increased internal tourism and the rise of regional studies in order to promote the building of communism and an imagined Soviet community more generally, certain developments ran counter to expectations. Heritage work, of which literary museums were a part, bolstered the gradual growth of national sentiments and activities. The regionalization of literary museums across the western borderlands from 1953 to 1979 – albeit to different degrees, depending on the republic concerned – reflected a multilevel form of agency that came to both characterize and define cultural politics in the peripheries, as the thirty-four new literary museums opened in the western borderland at this time would reveal. In 1956, the status of the Karelo-Finnish SSR as a separate republic was revised, its autonomy abruptly reduced as the state incorporated it into the RSFSR as a new Karelian ASSR. Together with these territorial changes, the use of Finnish was significantly reduced, with the expectation that Finns and Karelians living in the area would be assimilated. In

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line with these changes, no literary or author museums opened in this area before the 1980s. In the Estonian SSR, four literary museums were inaugurated between 1953 and 1979. The first opened in 1962 in Tartu and was dedicated to Oskar Luts, a celebrated writer and playwright who was awarded the title of People’s Writer of the Estonian SSR in 1945. The other three museums celebrated Estonian writers active during the twentieth century, such as the highly acclaimed Soviet Estonian writers Juhan Smuul, Friedebert Tuglas and Anton Hansen Tammsaare. Compared with Estonia, in these years the Latvian SSR inaugurated twice as many author museums dedicated to celebrated writers and poets active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The diversity of genres and literary styles celebrated by the museums matched with the decision to commemorate creative personas exclusively of Latvian descent indicates that literary merit, the availability of houses to memorialize, and careful reworking with biographies remained core criteria for these museums. Museums were opened celebrating the poet Eduards Veidenbaums, composer Emīls Dārziņš, and writer, translator and librarian Ernests Birznieks-Upītis. Museums in Riga emphasized the atmosphere of creative writing, exhibiting writers’ desks and recreating study rooms that were intended to reproduce the working environments of the authors. These curatorial aspects were clearly evident in the museums dedicated to the painter Janis Rozentāls and the realist writer Rūdolfs Blaumanis, as well as in the 1974 Andrejs Upīts memorial museum in Riga. As claimed by Theodor Weeks (2015: 189–92), starting in the 1950s in the LSSR in general and in Vilnius in particular, a programme of demographic and cultural Lithuanization with a distinct Soviet accent was undertaken. An unprecedented number of author museums – as many as fifteen – opened in the LSSR between 1953 and 1979. During these decades, the Alexander Pushkin museum’s literary exhibition went beyond the poet’s biography and creative legacy. Exhibitions informed the public of the close ties with Vilnius and Lithuania of other writers and poets widely celebrated in the USSR. For example, Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, Latvian poet Jānis Rainis, and Belarusian poets and writers Yanka Kupala and Yakub Kolas were all spotlighted at different times. A second strategy to legitimize Soviet claims on Lithuania centred on the alleged historical friendship between Russia and Lithuania. According to Ekaterina Makhotina (2017: 99), the cordial relations that supposedly existed between Pushkin and Mickievičius (Adam Mickiewicz) were held up as a microcosm of the larger Russian–Lithuanian relationship, flagrantly ignoring the fact that most claimed Mickiewicz was Polish, not Lithuanian.

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From 1953 to 1969, ten museums were inaugurated across the Lithuanian SSR, none of them in the capital. Three were located in Kaunas, but the majority were located in rural areas. Salomėja Nėris was a poet known for elegant rhymes and revolutionary motifs. By commemorating Nėris with a museum in Kaunas in 1961, the regime emphasized her importance beyond literary achievements, highlighting in particular her political loyalty. The same was true for the museum dedicated Balys Sruoga in 1966, who was depicted as both an important literary figure and a committed communist. The Kaunas-based Lithuanian SSR Republican Museum of Literature was not created from scratch, but grew out of the previous memorial museum that had been established there in 1936. The building that housed this museum – a mansion where one of the most famous Lithuanian poets Jonas Mačiulis (known as Maironis) had lived and worked – was itself a memorial. The 1965 museum commemorated Maironis by dedicating three memorial rooms to him. This added authenticity to the museum, yet curators had an uneasy task of incorporating him and his creative legacy into a harmonious picture of Lithuanian literary history read through the Soviet prism. Maironis was not only a Catholic priest and educator, but an active member of the late nineteenth-century Lithuanian national movement. Glossing over these facts, the museum’s permanent exhibition was devoted to the continuity of the Lithuanian literary canon, emphasizing Soviet Lithuanian literature. As for the author museums outside the larger cities, all save one commemorated authors of Lithuanian origin. The museums were evenly dispersed throughout the republic. Antanas Baranauskas and Antanas Žukauskas-Vienuolis memorial museum in Anykščiai, a famous resort not far from Vilnius, boasted the tomb of the latter, and was opened in 1957, the year of the writer’s death. The Jonas Biliūnas homestead in the same region was turned into a memorial museum in 1960, exhibiting items from the Biliūnai family and the writer’s private belongings. A prose writer and editor known for vivid descriptions of peasant life, Yulia Beniuševičiūtė, known as Žemaitė, was memorialized with a museum in her birth-house in Plungė community in 1965. The following year, a fellow woman writer with the pen name Lazdynų Pelėda was commemorated with a museum in the Akmenė district. Famed authors and Lithuanian book smugglers Liudvika and Stanislovas Didžiuliai were also celebrated with a memorial house-museum in Anykščiai in 1967, while the next year two other literary museums were opened. The first was dedicated to Vincas Krėvė (Mickevičius), a writer, poet and novelist who was also the first president of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. He was commemorated with a museum in his birth-house in the Varėna district, located in

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the south-east of the republic. A museum dedicated to a non-Lithuanian author, Thomas Mann, opened the same year on a hilltop in the seaside resort of Nida, in the villa that Mann had briefly visited between 1930 and 1932. The last literary museum of this decade (opened in 1969) commemorated the writer, historian and Catholic bishop Motiejus Valančius in his birth-house in the Kretinga district in the west of the republic. Commemorating foreign, pre-Soviet nationalist and religious figures as authors posed a challenge to state ideology, and in some cases was a form of de-Stalinization. The next decade saw the opening of six literary museums, with two of them located in cities, this time in the capital and in the fifth largest city in Lithuania, Panevėžys. A Vilnius writers’ memorial museum was inaugurated in the capital in 1972 and commemorated ten contemporary writers who originated and/or built their careers in Vilnius. In Panevėžys, a memorial exhibition dedicated to Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė, a realist writer known for his political activism in addition to depicting social inequality, opened in 1970. An additional four museums were located in the rural areas, dispersed throughout the republic in the houses where the writers had been born, including museums dedicated to Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, Teofilis Tilvytis, Kazimieras Būga and Šatrijos Ragana. A significant number of literary museums opened in Lithuania between 1953 and 1979, included museums dedicated to Lithuanian authors loyal to the socialist agenda and authors of core importance for the Lithuanian national canon. Although noted for their literary creativity, the authors from the latter category were also praised for their struggles against oppression experienced under the tsarist regime. Thus, national motives clearly present in these authors’ oeuvres were interpreted through the prism of class struggle, and emphasized their efforts to give a voice to the peasantry. This trend in literary commemoration and memorialization taking place in the western borderlands did not impact Western Belarus. Between 1953 and 1979, no literary museums were inaugurated in the western part of the BSSR, in spite of active literary museification in its eastern part, in the ‘original’ Belarusian Soviet territories. In Minsk, the capital of the BSSR, a Yakub Kolas literary-memorial museum was inaugurated in 1957. Another core author of the Belarusian literary canon of the time, Yanka Kupala, was memorialized in 1966 with a preserve in the Vitebsk region east of Minsk. In 1972 another literary preserve was organized in the Minsk region in the Stolbtsy area, this time dedicated to Kolas. Museification with regard to the Belarusian literary canon in these years was as selective and limited as elsewhere. The politics of oblivion con-

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cerned silencing the memory of hundreds of Belarusian authors repressed or physically eliminated under the Soviet rule in the 1930s (Huzhalouski 2019: 36–43). Just as in Belarus, in Western Ukraine the post-Stalinist decades did not trigger active memorialization of writers via museums. Only three museums were inaugurated in the period 1953–79, two of them in L’viv and one in the Ivano-Frankivsk region. The museum in L’viv opened in 1960 and commemorated the life and work of Yaroslav Galan, a political writer. Galan had sympathized with Soviet rule prior to 1939, authored multiple texts compatible with the socialist realist aesthetic, and was assassinated by an activist from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). His violent death added justification to the decision to memorialize the house that Galan had lived and worked in, with a literary-memorial museum opened several months after the assault in 1960. Another two museums celebrated the daily life of the Galician peasantry, and traced the historical development of book publishing in the area since the seventeenth century. In Besarabia, a part of the MSSR, the late 1950s were marked by the rehabilitation of certain classics from the Romanian literary canon, which were carefully adapted in order to make their cultural legacy relevant to Soviet Moldavia. Researchers name several reasons for this turn. First, with the annexation of Bessarabia and the consolidation of Soviet rule in the area during the 1940s, the urge to develop a Moldovan identity independent of Romanian cultural influences faded significantly. With Romania becoming part of a Soviet-aligned Eastern bloc in 1947, the USSR was willing to revise its former suspicion of Romanian nationalism. Accompanying the Khrushchev ‘thaw’, various unofficial channels of communication between Romania and Soviet Moldavia opened, enabling the so-called ‘quiet Romanization’ of Soviet Moldovan cultural elites (King 2000: 106–12). Rehabilitating the classics was part of this process, and was given further force through changes in the MSSR union of writers (Negură 2014: 283–84). Moldovan literary heritage took shape largely through a compromise that effectively presented a ‘sanitized’ version of Romanian authors from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century canon (Heitmann 1998: 167–85). The majority of writers and poets slated for commemoration, however, had been born on the territory of Romania, and had lived and died there, which prognosticated a crisis for the MSSR when it came to the author houses that could officially be memorialized and turned into museums. Between 1953 and 1979, four literary museums opened in the MSSR. One of them, opened in 1964, was, again, dedicated to Alexander

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Pushkin. The Russian poet, who had been exiled to Bessarabia during his life, remained a major cultural attraction. This Pushkin-related topography was closely linked to commemorating authors of local origin. The 1964 museum was located in a reconstructed villa that had formerly belonged to a Ralli family not far from the capital. Pushkin had allegedly spent leisure time in the area in 1821, and had been inspired by local impressions and encounters to author the poem ‘The Gypsies’. The museum provided visitors with an exhibition consisting of pieces of furniture and art from the period, and a literary exhibition which only marginally referred to the former owners of the villa (Felcher 2019: 406). A milestone in the memorialization of MSSR literary heritage occurred in 1965 with the opening of a Republican Museum of Literature. The museum was established on the premises of the MSSR union of writers, and officially made part of the organization. The exhibitions mentioned above were, in many instances, part of a generational shift that was occurring in the union at the time. Six exhibition halls showcased the development of Moldovan literature from ‘the earlier days till our time’, carefully mediating sensitive subjects to ensure they fit with the official narrative. The year of the museum’s opening coincided with a notorious third session of the MSSR union of writers, in which certain representatives controversially called for language reforms in the republic and for the use of the Moldovan language (Shevchenko 2016: 197). Given the mood arising in such bodies, the party made certain to exercise strict influence and control over writers, and this shift was reflected in the content of exhibitions featured in literary museums. Only with Perestroika would an openly pan-Romanian discourse enter public discourse and museum showcases. The paucity of literary museums opened in the republic since then (only three more would open by 1991) signalled that the MSSR Republican Museum of Literature did not stimulate the flourishing of literary commemoration and author museums in the republic seen elsewhere. In 1976 an Alexandru (Alecu) Donici memorial museum opened in a village of the same name in the Orhei region to the north of Kishinev. Donici, a nineteenth-century poet and translator of boyar origin and a native of Bessarabia, had been a civil servant in Kishinev, and later resettled in Iaşi where he pursued his literary career. His major work, a two-volume book of fables, had been strongly influenced by Ivan Krylov, a major Russian fabulist. The museum contained several memorial rooms, with literary exhibitions showcasing the everyday life of the Bessarabian nobility, Donici’s works, and his translations of Pushkin’s works.

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Conclusion This chapter has analysed the opening of new literary museums in the USSR’s western borderlands, emphasizing that they had been tied to the cultural politics of the period. The direction of Russian cultural nationalism during the 1930s and 1940s established the context in which Pushkin museums would be opened right across the new republics. The regime placed a premium on Pushkin as a symbol of both soft cultural power and a common Soviet culture. The growth of author museums was part of a broader effort on the part of the regime to recast intellectual activities, and ensure they conformed to an ideologically safe and controlled environment (Ristolainen 2008). Overall, from 1940 to 1979 in the USSR’s western borderlands, fifty-two literary museums opened, making up 22 per cent of all literary museums opened in the USSR overall. The opening of literary museums in the areas annexed by the USSR prior to and immediately after the Second World War was consistent with the steady growth of museums throughout the region during this time, and a considerable expansion of museum networks witnessed between 1953 and 1979. The growth and distribution of museums within the specific time periods (1940–41, 1941–53 and 1953–79) is telling regarding the overall development of cultural politics in the area. Yet more specifically, a detailed look at the biographies of authors who were memorialized and musealized in these years possesses an importance for the local histories of these areas. In the late Stalinist years, 1940–41 and 1944–53, the restrictive and repressive policies of the Communist Party, matched with the overall distrust towards local personnel and especially elites, coincided with a very narrow selection of authors commemorated in museums. In these years, those commemorated were either Russian authors who happened to live in the western borderlands or had a relation to the area, or authors of local origin who were known for embracing the socialist realist canon in their creative writings. In the latter case, preference for authors of local origin had to coincide with the ‘correct’ ethnic origin of writers and poets. In short, it was imperative that selective writers accorded with the culturally homogenized geographic imaginaries that gave substance to Soviet nationality policies and, ultimately, to the very idea of the USSR. This was especially noticeable in Lithuania and Western Ukraine. However, in some areas, specific political objectives and existing preconditions dictated the need for non-orthodox solutions, such as commemorating Polish national poets in Western Belarus.

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From 1953 to 1979, with the significant expansion of the literary museum network, a more relaxed treatment of author memorialization appeared to take place. Although the core principle of adjusting the authors’ biographies to the idea of class struggle remained consistent, museums clearly gained more autonomy during these years. Many authors considered central to the national canon did receive praise, albeit within the context of formulating and pursuing a specific Soviet Karelian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian or Moldovan cultural canon. The overall landscape of literary museums, and its very existence within the given time frame considered, was a direct consequence of the brutal and radical postwar political transformations that occurred, as well as the subsequent regional development that took place under Soviet rule. Soviet nationality policies had a direct impact on the network of literary museums in the area. In this respect, literary museums and their exhibition content must be seen as part of the multifaceted and pervasive social engineering that the Soviet regime pursued, and to which local actors responded. This response, however, was not a unitary one, either in terms of its geographic or its temporal scope. This feature explains the uneven distribution of literary museums within different decades and within the different Soviet republics discussed in this chapter. Many factors contributed to the varied plans and responses evident in this process. Yet arguably the political situation in each republic, and the extent to which it influenced the relative decision-making and autonomy available to local actors, was a determining one. Apart from ideological importance, multiple other factors – including financial, administrative and agency-related causes – shaped the emergence and development of a network that consisted of highly diverse new sites of ‘literary veneration’.

Acknowledgements This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation under Grant no. 17-18-01589 and by the Gerda Henkel Fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Studies Sofia (October 2019 to February 2020). Anastasia Felcher specializes in the cultural history of East European borderlands. She holds a PhD in Cultural Heritage Management and Development from the Scuola IMT Alti Studii Lucca (2016). She has received fellowships at the Blinken OSA in Budapest (2016), German Historical Institute in Moscow (2017), the Leibniz Institute for History and Culture

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of Eastern Europe in Leipzig (2019), and the Centre for Advanced Studies in Sofia (2019–20). In addition, she has worked as a country expert for the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (2018–19). Currently she is employed as the Archivist for the Slavic collection at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at Central European University in Budapest. She has published on the heritage of minorities in pluralistic societies, dilemmas of Jewish heritage in the post-Holocaust age, and literature and politics in Eastern Europe.

Notes  1. Author museums are part of a network of literary museums. While author museums are dedicated to specific authors (their biography and creative legacy), other literary museums could be devoted specifically to the history of national/regional literature.  2. The number of literary museums that I refer to in the current chapter relies on a calculation of data provided by Vanslova’s reference book, and updated by my own observations. Vanslova’s book was one of the first attempts to summarize information on literary museums throughout the USSR, and thus might occasionally be incomplete.  3. The same note by the TASS news agency was published in the Chkalov (Orenburg)-based newspaper Chkalovskaya kommuna [Chkalov commune] on 21 March 1941 (no. 67/4246: 1), the Kaunas-based Trujenik [Hard worker] on 22 March 1941 (no. 68/222: 4), and in a number of other newspapers.  4. Commemoration of Gorky in the region went even further. In 1948 the village of Kirjavala together with the neighbouring Neuvola were united in one locality under a new name, Peshkovo – this referred to Maxim Gorky’s real name, Alexey Peshkov. Later the same year, according to the decree of the Presidium of the RSFSR Supreme Council, Peshkovo was renamed Gor’kovskoye (this time, referring to the writer’s pen surname – Gorky). Mustamäki train station was also renamed Gor’kovskoye.

References Amar, T. 2015. The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Austin, P.M. 1992. ‘Soviet Karelian: The Language that Failed’, Slavic Review 51(1): 16–35. Bethea, D., and S. Davidov. 2006. ‘Pushkin’s Life’, in A. Kahn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–25.

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Blacker, U. 2019. Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe: The Ghosts of Others. New York: Routledge. Blitstein, P. 2006. ‘Cultural Diversity and the Interwar Conjuncture: Soviet Nationality Policy in Its Comparative Context’, Slavic Review 65(2): 273–93. Donovan, V. 2015. ‘“How Well Do You Know Your Krai?”: The Kraevedenie Revival and Patriotic Politics in Late Khrushchev-Era Russia’, Slavic Review 74(3): 464–83. Dović, M., and J.K. Helgason. 2016. National Poets, Cultural Saints: Canonization and Commemorative Cults of Writers in Europe. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Felcher, A. 2019. ‘Alexander Pushkin in Bessarabia: Literature and Identity Politics in the Periphery’, National Identities 21(4): 395–415. Frunchak, S. 2014. ‘The Making of Soviet Chernivtsi: National “Re-unification”, World War II, and the Fate of Jewish Czernowitz in Postwar Ukraine’. PhD dissertation. University of Toronto. Geering, C. 2019. Building a Common Past: World Heritage in Russia under Transformation, 1965–2000. Göttingen: V&R Unipress. Gorenburg, D. 2006. ‘Soviet Nationalities Policy and Assimilation’, in D. Arel and B.A. Ruble (eds), Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, pp. 273–303. Heitmann, K. 1998. Limbă şi politică ın Republica Moldova. Chişinău: Editura Arc. Helgason, J.K., and M. Dović (eds). 2019. Great Immortality: Studies on European Cultural Sainthood. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Himka, J.-P. 1994. ‘Western Ukraine in the Interwar Period’, Nationalities Papers 22(2): 347–63. Hoffmann, D.L. 2004. ‘Was There a “Great Retreat” from Soviet Socialism? Stalinist Culture Reconsidered’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5(4): 651–74. Huzhalouski, A. 2019. ‘Stanovleniye seti literaturnykh muzeyev sovetskoy Belorussii 1939–1991’ [Formation of literary museums network in Soviet Belarus, 1939–1991], in D. Bak and E. Vorontsova (eds), Literaturnyye muzei v kontekste istorii i kul’tury [Literary museums in the context of history and culture]. Moscow: Museum of Literature, pp. 36–43. Inglot, M. 1991. ‘The Socio-political Role of the Polish Literary Tradition in the Cultural Life of Lwów: The Example of Adam Mickiewicz’s Work’, in K. Sword (ed.), The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–41. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 131–48. Iwanow, M. 1991. ‘The Byelorussians of Eastern Poland under Soviet Occupation, 1939– 41’, in K. Sword (ed.), The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–41. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 253–67. King, C. 2000. The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lebedeva, E. 1996. ‘Mif o Pushkine v muzejnom voploshchenii’ [A. Pushkin’s myth in museum implementation], Khristianskaya kul’tura: Pushkinskaja epocha (po materialam tradicionnych christianskich pushkinskich chtenij) 10: 56–63. Levitt, M. 1992. ‘Pushkin in 1899’, in B. Gasparov, R.P. Hughes and I. Paperno (eds), Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 183–203.

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Maddox, S. 2014. Saving Stalin’s Imperial City: Historic Preservation in Leningrad, 1930– 1950. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Makhotina, E. 2017. Erinnerungen an den Krieg – Krieg der Erinnerungen: Litauen und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Martin, T. 2002. ‘An Affirmative Action Empire: The Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism’, in R. Grigor Suny and T. Martin (eds), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 67–89. Mastenitsa, E. 2017. ‘Literaturnyye muzei Rossii: genezis i evolyutsiya’ [Literary museums in Russia: Genesis and evolution], Journal of the St Petersburg State Institute of Culture 2(31): 108–11. Negură, P. 2014. Nici eroi, nici trădători: Scriitorii moldoveni şi puterea Sovietică în epoca stalinistă [Neither heroes nor traitors: Moldovan writers and Soviet power in the era of Stalin]. Chişinău: Cartier. Nekrasov, S. 2000. ‘Pushkinskiye muzei v kul’ture Rossii’ [Pushkin museums in Russian culture]. PhD hab. dissertation. St Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts. Neubauer, J. 2010. ‘Introduction’, in M. Cornis-Pope and J. Neubauer (eds), History of the Literary Culture of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Volume IV: Types and Stereotypes. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 11–18. Risch, W.J. 2011. The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. Ristolainen, Mari. 2008. Preferred Realities: Soviet and Post-Soviet Amateur Art in Novorzhev. Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute. Sandler, S. 2004. Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 2005. ‘The 1937 Pushkin Jubilee as Epic Trauma’, in K.M.F. Platt and D. Brandenberger (eds), Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 193–214. Shevchenko, R. 2016. ‘Kontrol partii nad Soyuzom pisatelei Moldovy (1963–1987)’ [Party control over the Union of Writers of Moldova, 1963–1987], Teoretichna i didaktychna filologia (23): 194–206. Slezkine, Y. 1994. ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, Slavic Review 53(2): 414–52. Snyder, T. 2004. The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569– 1999. Yale: Yale University Press. Van Meurs, Wim P. 1994. The Bessarabian Question in Communist Historiography: Nationalist and Communist Politics and History-writing. New York: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press. Vanslova, E. (ed.). 1981. Literaturnyye muzei SSSR: spravochnik [Literary museums of the USSR: Reference book]. Moscow: Research Institute of Culture. Voronina, O. 2017. ‘From the Altar to the Forum: Post-Soviet Transformation of Russian Literary Museums’, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 31(1–2): 75–122. Vujacic, V. 2007. ‘Stalinism and Russian Nationalism: A Reconceptualization’, Post-Soviet Affairs 23(2): 156–83.

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Wachtel, A.B. 2006. Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Waldstein, M. 2007. ‘Russifying Estonia? Iurii Lotman and the Politics of Language and Culture in Soviet Estonia’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8(3): 561–96. Weeks, T.R. 2015. Vilnius between Nations, 1795–2000. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

Chapter 9

Exposing the Obscurity of the Chinese Literary Establishment The Destabilizing Power of Author Museums Emily Graf

At first glance, author museums appear part and parcel of what could be termed the ‘literary establishment’, which stands for the institutions and structures that construct, stabilize and solidify literary value, operating through processes that often remain obscure to the outside observer. Be it the habitus of a literary critic, the currency of a literary prize or the aura of a literary site, powers neither visible nor measurable appear to be at work. Especially when scholars analyse museums in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where the state remains the main actor in the museum world (Varutti 2014: 43), it is usually the museums’ stabilizing powers that strike them the most. A museum is seen as a tool or device. In the process of nation-building, for example, it facilitates collective commemoration and creates national literary heroes. Researchers focusing primarily on the museum’s instrumental function often assign the museum a largely passive role, or at the very least assume there to be a rational actor (a human with some form of intent) behind the scenes, whose actions can be exposed as being interested (i.e. not disinterested). This interest can be economic, political, ideological or personal. The kind of interest can, of course, change over time. Kirk Denton’s analysis of museums in the PRC, for example, reveals the shift that took place in museums from the Mao era to the (far more market-driven) post-Maoist era (Denton 2014). But while ideological shifts are shown to occur, the fact that museums are seen as serving past or present ideologies does not change. They are stable and stabilizing insofar

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as that they serve an interest. Intent is crucial. Another critical view is to see the museum as a product of a larger network of power relations, be it the political or the canonical, arguing that what is being valorized in the museum is that which has always, and thus already, been deemed valuable. The great writer is made to remain great. Such a process of further stabilizing already canonized writers can be found in David Damrosch’s understanding of the hypercanon (Damrosch 2006). The hypercanon does not rule out change. A number of works can come to ‘newly arrive’ in the canon of world literature as part of a countercanon, such as those by subaltern authors from minor literatures less commonly taught, while works by other formerly canonized writers can gradually fall into oblivion as they are no longer the focus of academic inquiry and literary critique, and thus become part of the shadow canon. However, a group of already established writers not only remains in the canon but receives ever-increasing attention from literary studies around the globe, forming the core hypercanon. Underlying this is, among other things, the importance of working with hypercanonical writers for the academic career of young literature scholars. Teaching hypercanonical writers in combination with other lesser-known writers can increase the interest of literature students for authors outside of the hypercanon, as Damrosch (ibid.) explains, but also simultaneously reinforces it. Literary scholars working on authors of the hypercanon engage in a self-perpetuating reinforcement of cultural capital in the literary field, solidifying their own positions of power. The status quo is reinforced. And it is a status quo in which the literary (and/ or political) elite remain in power. Both the interest of those involved in a museum’s establishment and the affirmative power of the hypercanon shape the landscape of author museums. While informed by both of these critical approaches, this chapter aims to go beyond them and proposes a different angle from which to approach author museums as an object of study, inquiring instead: Can author museums – intentionally or not – come to act as a destabilizing power? And if so, in which ways and to what effect? By showing how author museums expose the obscurity of the Chinese literary establishment, I argue that they actually can challenge, or even defy, the literary establishment. This chapter does not try to construct an image of one sole ‘literary establishment’ that, for example, is a homogeneous actor and an instrument of the party-state. In this study, the term ‘establishment’ refers to the institution as it is used in theories of new institutionalism, describing that which is powerful and whose workings remain – to a degree – obscure. In new institutionalism, institutions are the product of human activity in a similar way as in past theories of institutionalism, but the reproduction of such

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institutions and structures is no longer restricted to deliberate or purposeful human action. The theory does not restrict itself to explaining human motives and intentions, but instead aims to shed light onto the social phenomena and processes that we take for granted, but that create our understanding of what action is possible and intelligible to us (DiMaggio and Powell 1991: 7–11), thus working behind the scenes of the conscious and intentional. Many obscure workings are in play in the field of world literature. Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘literary field’ (Bourdieu and Johnson 1993) is one way of showing something that at first seems invisible, but when mapped out, becomes a comprehensible force field in which we can trace the various powers at play when literary value is being constructed. The fascinating thing about museums and their displays is that they have a tendency – for better or worse – to make the obscure visible. Author museums materialize the otherwise evasive authority that is ‘the author’, materialize immaterial literature, or better, materialize that which society considers worthy to be called ‘literature’. In a spatial sense, the act of valorization in museums is even more prominent than in other literary institutional structures, such as publishing houses or bookstores. Through the singularization of objects, museums create a distance between the literary and the everyday (Kopytoff 2011). This chapter argues that it is important to see objects, images and spaces, in addition to texts and authors, as having an agency of their own. Defining agency as the capability to act, I pay equal attention to the object on display – be it a medal, a photograph or a wooden sculpture – as to the director or curator who had a say in placing it in the exhibition. Taking the agency of objects into account does not mean claiming, as Bruno Latour clarifies, that ‘objects do things “instead” of human actors’ (Latour 2005: 71). It rather accepts that ‘no science of the social can even begin if the question of who and what participates in the action is not first of all thoroughly explored, even though it might mean letting elements in which [sic], for lack of a better term, we would call non-humans’ (ibid.: 71–72). Regarding images as actors (or actants) of their own accord goes beyond anthropomorphizing images as a rhetorical device. Doing so has changed our approaches to images, no longer reading them as text or signs, but inquiring about images’ desires (Mitchell 2005) as well as about their indifference, allowing, as W.J.T. Mitchell puts it, that they might want nothing at all (ibid.: 48), and liberating images from anthropocentrism as ‘they may not be about us’ (Morgan 2018: 50). The following analyses the museum displays of four individual writers from the PRC and Taiwan, and the corresponding systems of valorization that underlie them – the prize system, the system of administrative

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ranking, the system of national canons as clashing establishments, and the system of rehabilitation. Each system has played a prominent role in the Chinese literary field but are by no means exclusive to it. They can be found, to varying degree, in literary museums around the globe.

Mo Yan and the Prize System Guan Moye 管謨業 (b. 1955),1 better known by his pen name Mo Yan 莫言, is a contemporary Chinese writer who is best known for receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012. The Swedish Academy described him as a writer ‘who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary’ (Nobel Prize in Literature 2012). Mo Yan started to publish in 1981, and his works feature a wide range of literary styles, ranging from social realism to magical realism. Many scholars have ceased their efforts to ascribe his writing to a particular style or movement, yet a common theme is his inclination to the bizarre and the grotesque (Riemenschnitter 2013: 181). Among Mo Yan’s most prominent works are his novels Hong gaoliang jiazu 紅高粱家族 [Red sorghum clan] (1987), Tiantang suantai zhi ge 天堂蒜薹之歌 [The garlic ballads] (1988) and Shengsi pilao 生死疲勞 [Life and death are wearing me out] (2006). In July 2008, the Mo Yan Research Society 莫言研究會 in Gaomi, Shandong Province, a city near the village of Ping’anzhuang where Mo Yan was born, established a literary museum in his name. Gaomi plays a special role in his literary oeuvre, as it is the fictional geographical setting not only of the aforementioned three novels, but features as a fictional place in many of his works, including his Feng ru fei tun 丰乳肥臀 [Big breasts and wide hips] (1995), Tanxiang xing 檀香刑 [Sandalwood death] (2001), Sishiyi pao 四十一炮 [Pow!] (2003) and Wa 蛙 [Frog] (2009), turning the ‘North-east Gaomi Township 高密東北鄉’ into a literary geographical concept similar to Gabriel García Márquez’ Macondo or Lu Xun’s Lu Village 魯鎮 (Riemenschnitter 2013: 182). The Mo Yan Literature Museum 莫言文學館 is located on the grounds of Gaomi No. 1 Middle School 高密第一中學. There is no direct biographical connection between the building and the author, as it is neither his former residence nor his former school. In fact, an introductory passage on a sign at the entrance mentions that Mo Yan ‘stopped going to school’2 when he was in fifth grade of primary school. That this was in 1966, when the Cultural Revolution broke out, goes unmentioned, which is not unusual in curatorial practice in the PRC. Mo Yan came from a moderately well-off landowning family, and was not considered qualified to pursue

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further education in 1966. The sign continues to describe his ascent to national and international literary renown. The building does not have an indexical function but offers a free space in which the author is exhibited through photographs, documents, editions of his works, literary prizes and numerous posters introducing his life and work. Yet the display tries to convey the atmosphere of an author’s former residence by reproducing the rooms in which Mo Yan wrote. One room in the museum presents a partial reconstruction of Mo Yan’s study in Beijing in Ping’anli 平安裡, where he lived when he took up permanent residence in Beijing in 1995. More attention, however, is paid to the reconstruction of his earlier study from when he lived in Gaomi. It features a photograph of Mo Yan sitting at his desk while writing in 1991. His former residence in Gaomi was on Xiancheng nanguan tiantan Street 縣城南關天壇路 No. 26, where he also resided in the period between 1988 and 1995, when he was already studying at the Lu Xun Literature Academy at Beijing Normal University. A piece of calligraphy, a gift from the famous contemporary calligrapher Shen Peng 沈鵬 (1931–), is added to the wall of the reconstruction and reads ‘One Dou of a Room 一斗 閣’. It is the name Mo Yan gave to his study, drawing on a long tradition of scholars and literati in China who name their studios and dedicate their notes and essays to these literary spaces. Mo Yan’s choice echoes the fictional Liao Studio to which Pu Songling 蒲松齡 (1640–1715) dedicated his Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異 [Strange stories from the Liao Studio] (Pu Songling 1978). The naming of one’s studio (zhai 齋), as well as the decoding and interpreting of the studio’s name, is central to the literary persona of a writer in China and has great symbolical power in Chinese literary heritage (Minford and Roberts 2008). Dou is a historical measurement, and its capacity varied in different dynasties and across geographical regions. During the Western Han Dynasty (202 bce –9 ce), for example, one dou encompassed a volume just shy of two litres (Loewe 2016: 166). While Mo Yan was cited to have picked the name because the shape of his attic room resembled the historical vessel of measure (The Writers Union 2018), the name also implies the modesty of a small study and possibly a humble and humorous reference, echoing the saying ‘eight dou of talent 才高八斗’3 to describe great talent, implying that but one dou of talent was at work in this study. By naming his recently published short prose sketches ‘Notes from One Dou of a Room 一斗閣 筆記’, which were published in the first issue of Shanghai Literature 上海 文學 (Mo Yan 2019), Mo Yan himself continues to build on the tradition of Chinese writers naming their studios. Next to the photograph of Mo Yan in his study and below Shen Peng’s calligraphy, his study is recreated

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through the display of furniture, including his desk and desk lamp. The display conveys a spatial distance, because it is roped off with golden brass poles and red velvet rope. It also conveys a temporal distance, for displayed next to the writer’s desk is the computer that Mo Yan used in the early 1990s, a 286-model computer with floppy disks and a screen that is deeper than it is wide. The fast-ageing technology can be argued to paradoxically highlight the distance between the moment of writing and the present, even more than the display of a pen or writing brush. Having come all the way to the remote city of Gaomi, visitor expectations seem to require the display to contain a writer’s studio, a standard curatorial element found in most literary museums in the PRC, in which an author-focused reading remains firmly established in the literary field. While one might consider the establishment of the literary museum to have originated from the demands of readers, the incentive to establish this museum was considerably more top-down. The Mo Yan Literature Museum is financed by the Communist Party of China (CPC) Municipal Committee of Gaomi and the Gaomi Municipal Government 高密市 委市政府 (Mao Weijie 2011). Mo Yan’s older brother Guan Moxian 管 謨賢 (b. 1943) described how Mo Yan was ‘naturally opposed’4 to the establishment of a museum (Guan Moxian 2011: 202). He explained that he too was reluctant, but after the insistence of Sun Huibin 孙惠 斌, former director of the Gaomi County Propaganda Department 高 密縣委宣傳部 and head of the Mo Yan Research Society which Sun had established in 2006 (Mao Weijie 2011: 207), Guan Moxian came to support the plans. Guan explained that ‘I told [Mo Yan] that it is not us ourselves who establish the museum, it is the action (xingwei) of the government’5 (Guan Moxian 2011: 201).6 Besides persuading his brother to support the establishment, Guan had been the deputy director of No. 1 Middle School until 2003 – so before the museum’s establishment in 2009 – which gives further context for the director of the school offering to house the Mo Yan Literature Museum. In the end, Mo Yan complied and provided the research society with materials for the display. As for the design, Guan explained that he visited the renowned Beijing Lu Xun Museum to gain an idea of curatorial practices. He also was the one who visited Mo Yan in Beijing to pick up materials for the display (including books, letters and furniture), pre-empting the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (NMMCL) in Beijing, which had also expressed interest in acquiring Mo Yan’s literary estate for their exhibition (Guan Moxian 2011: 203). So far, the establishment of the Mo Yan Literature Museum invites an approach that critically views the self-interest of the actors involved, be

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it the local cultural-political elite or family members. Such an approach implies that the localizing and materializing of a literary space into a thisworldly ‘historical’ indexical space encourages an author-focused reading, and thereby promotes a cult of personality around a local writer so as to boost local literary tourism to the remote city of Gaomi. Such an approach would explain the ‘action of the government’ in establishing writer museums, to use Guan Moxian’s words from above, as an instrumentalization of the writer for CPC ‘propaganda’. While this can be an insightful approach, I would like to direct the reader’s attention to something that distinguishes this author museum from others in the PRC. The case of the Mo Yan Literature Museum is unusual, because if one takes a closer look at the exhibition, it is not so much the individual writer, but the literary establishment in the form of the literary prize system that is on display. The exhibition extends over two floors, and relies heavily on the display of literary prizes in the form of plaques, medals and certificates, which are reproduced, printed out on paper, and placed in glass showcases. These objects and papers extend through numerous exhibition rooms, with an entire section of the exhibition dedicated solely to Mo Yan’s ‘literary achievements’.7 A large-scale poster above a glass showcase further features a list of the various prizes that Mo Yan was awarded.8 The exhibition presents national literary prizes, such as the Mao Dun Literature Prize (Figure 9.1), which he received for this novel Wa 蛙[Frog] in

Figure 9.1. The Mao Dun Literature Prize on display, Gaomi, in 2014. Photograph by Emily Graf. Courtesy of the Mo Yan Literature Museum.

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2011, as well as innumerable photographs of the 2012 ceremony during which Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and which take up most of the second floor as a curatorial crescendo. The Mo Yan Literature Museum features the first distinct form of destabilizing the ‘establishment’ addressed here. It unintentionally exposes the literary prize as the main currency in today’s literary field. The display leaves no more space for obscurity. The relentless listing of the prizes, the lining up of the certificates, argues that a great writer is a prizewinning writer. The list begins with 1985, when Mo Yan was awarded the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Prize for Outstanding Literature and Art 解放軍文藝優秀作品獎 for his short story ‘Hei shatan 黑沙灘’ [Black beach] (1984). The list counts twenty-nine prizes up to the year 2007 alone. While the prizes might be intended to convince visitors about the literary success of the writer, the relentlessness and bluntness of ‘prizing’ pushes itself to the fore. When looking closely at the awarding institutions and individuals, the visitor further sees that they include both the political and intellectual elite – for example, a cultural officer of the PLA, a literary journal, a university professor and a literature association.9 What is revealed when browsing these prizes is that it is the prize that makes the author, not the author who achieves the prize. In his The Economy of Prestige (English 2005), James English has argued that prizes are a form of institutional control. They control the distribution of esteem. In the PRC many of these prizes are awarded by state-owned institutions. In addition, the arrangement of the prizes, climaxing with the Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2011 – arguably the most renowned literary prize in the PRC, and awarded by the Chinese Writers’ Association – and the Nobel Prize in 2012, also hints at the inequality in the world literary field. The arrangement of the national and international prizes can be read in two ways. On the one hand, the museum could be seen as fully acknowledging the supremacy of the Nobel Prize, including its claim to being able to recognize universal literary value, a viewpoint that led to what China scholars long considered an obsession – or ‘Nobel complex’ (Lovell 2006). In the museum, Mo Yan is described as the first ‘Chinese local’10 to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, avoiding mentioning the award of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature to Gao Xingjian 高行 健 (b. 1940), who was born in China, but became a French citizen in 1998. On the other hand, it could be pointing the visitor to all the local and national Chinese prizes in an attempt to flag that China successfully spotted the writer’s talent long ahead of the international community. In this reading, the national prizes had accurately recognized the value of his

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writing early on, arguably doing the crucial work of spotting talent and ushering the writer into the establishment. Scholars have argued, however, that by the 2000s the Nobel Prize no longer represented a ‘unified world standard’ among Chinese writers, and that they have become increasingly suspicious and critical of any ‘single authoritative value system’ (Lovell 2006: 155). If in the 1980s the prize still represented a unified world standard to Chinese writers, by the end of the decade they were increasingly expressing doubts about it. They were becoming evermore selective about what they took from abroad, with translations losing the absolute pre-eminence they had enjoyed in the 1980s. Established authors such as Mo Yan instead turned increasingly to popular Chinese literary forms from the past (ibid.). At the same time, the possibility of winning it, in their view, no longer guaranteed an entrance into a fixed canon of world literature. Mo Yan expressed in 2000 that ‘even if we win the prize … it doesn’t mean we’ve “marched towards the world”. The issue of the Nobel Prize should be separated from Chinese literature. The burden is too big’ (ibid.: 154). In this regard, the ‘world order’ of literature has been challenged as authors start withdrawing from its field of power, seeking literary language elsewhere. While the monetary value of the prizes continues to show a strong discrepancy,11 the symbolical currency of national prizes could be argued to have increased in the last decade. In any case, the bureaucratic aspect of the prizes, both national and international (with each of them signed and sealed), as well as them being displayed at such a high frequency, encompasses a destabilizing visibility as well. The establishment that lies behind the creation of a writer is visibly on display, and disrupts as well as deconstructs the imagined immediacy of a connection between visitor and author.

Lu Xun and the System of Administrative Ranking Lu Xun 魯迅, pen name of Zhou Shuren 周樹人 (1881–1936), is recognized as one of the most canonical Chinese writers, not only within the Chinese literary field but also abroad. Three of today’s state-run Lu Xun museums, in Beijing, Shanghai and in his hometown of Shaoxing, were established in the early and mid-1950s, following the establishment of the People’s Republic by Mao Zedong in 1949. The historical context of their establishment greatly influenced how Lu Xun was put on display and which of his writings were emphasized. In the 1950s, Lu Xun was retrospectively presented as a great left-wing Marxist writer, revolution-

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izing the literary field by writing in Chinese vernacular, the language of the masses. Mao Zedong’s evaluation of Lu Xun from 1940 was a key component for any exhibition on Lu Xun, claiming that he was ‘not only a great man of letters but a great thinker and revolutionary’, and that ‘on the cultural front, he represented the great majority of the nation’ as it was there that he was ‘the bravest and most correct, the firmest, the most loyal and the most ardent national hero’ (Mao Zedong 2005: 360).12 Mao Zedong’s full or abridged quotation featured in nearly all museum displays, and presented Lu Xun as giving a voice to the revolutionary masses and the nation as a whole. Lu Xun’s literary oeuvre actually covers a broad spectrum of writings, ranging from poetry, over prose, to literary history; from cultural criticism to polemical political essays, writings in literary Chinese (wenyanwen 文 言文), in the vernacular Chinese of his times (baihuawen 白話文), and – above all – in a strange mix of both. His educational upbringing was very diverse. Growing up during the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), he was first tutored in Confucian classics, aiming at gaining an office in the civil service of the imperial system. However, he later continued his studies in other fields that were then considered foreign sciences (yangwu 洋務), graduating from the School of Mining and Railroads and studying medicine in Japan, before increasingly dedicating himself to literature. He started publishing essays in 1908 and, after the dynastic rule in China came to an end in 1911, he wrote short stories in Chinese vernacular, starting with the publication in 1918 of ‘Kuangren riji 狂人日記’ [Diary of a madman] (Lu Xun 2005a), which was widely read as denouncing the hypocrisy of Confucian ethics. Witnessing the establishment of the Republic of China (1911–49), he became an outspoken public intellectual, harshly criticizing the warlord government in the 1920s when he lived in Beijing, and the Nationalist government in the 1930s when he lived in Shanghai, where he also organized a League of Left-Wing Writers. Owing to these and similar efforts, it is not surprizing that he was considered a writer worthy of posthumous institutionalization by the newly established People’s Republic of China (1949–). Unlike Mo Yan, Lu Xun did not live to witness his institutionalization by the state. Nor, of course, would he be able to observe the many different ways in which he would come to be displayed in these museums over the seven decades to follow. The state-run museums dedicated to Lu Xun have long been regarded critically by Lu Xun scholars outside the PRC as part of, or even the embodiment of, a Chinese literary establishment that propagates an image of Lu Xun tailored to fit the cultural-political line

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of the CPC. From the perspective of some literary scholars, the museums have therefore not been helpful for their research (Li Oufan 2015). What a critical approach to these spaces overlooks, however, is that the Lu Xun museums show how author museums can destabilize the literary establishment from within. It is true that the hierarchical order in which the CPC is organized throughout the political landscape can also be detected in the museum landscape of the PRC. What makes the Lu Xun museums especially worthy of our attention is that there are museums dedicated to this one individual writer at every administrative level of the so-called jibie system, with a museum at the section (keji 科 級), division (chuji 處級) and bureau level (juji 局級). When dealing with administration in questions of territorial and urban organization by the party-state, there are usually three levels, according to the Chinese System of Administrative Divisions 行政區劃體系, namely the county (xian 县), the prefecture (di 地) and the provincial level (sheng 省) (Cartier 2015: 4). The above-mentioned levels used for the ranking of museums roughly correspond to them, with the county/section, the prefecture/ division and the provincial/bureau levels referring to equivalent levels. At first glance this system seems coherent, and it appears as if the image that is produced in these state institutions would be highly regulated and disseminated top-down. My research, however, has shown the complexity behind this structure,13 revealing that a museum can become a place of contestation within the establishment, with museums on higher or lower levels of the administrative ranking system using their position to propagate an image of Lu Xun that diverges from the official interpretation or conventional presentations. While museums of higher ranking have powerful directors with the leverage to assert themselves in curatorial questions, possibly challenging, to some degree, directives by the propaganda department or other party or state institutions, museums of lower ranking can at times make use of their inconspicuousness to introduce unconventional elements into their exhibition that are only able to remain unnoticed or tolerated because of the comparatively low profile of the institution. The Lu Xun museum in his hometown of Shaoxing is on the lower administrative ranking level, a section-level (keji) museum, and falls in line with the conventional presentations of the writer. One image of Lu Xun presented there, for example, is a monumental 6.5-ton white marble bust, 2.2 m in height, towering over the visitor at the end of the exhibition (Shaoxing Lu Xun Museum 2003: 192). The Lu Xun museum in Xiamen, where he had taught at university for a few months in 1926, however, plays a special role. While the Shaoxing museum considers it-

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self not to have the ‘authority’14 to engage directly with higher literary institutions but instead relies strongly on the Shaoxing municipal government (Xu Dongbo 2014), the Xiamen museum does not in the stricter sense have an administrative rank, as it is affiliated with Xiamen University. Su Yongyuan 蘇永延, director of the Xiamen Lu Xun Museum since 2012, chose a very different form of visualizing Lu Xun, arguably seeing a form of power in the powerlessness of low-level or no-level institutions in this network. In Xiamen, Lu Xun is presented by a slightly larger than life-size wooden bust, placed at eye-level with the visitor (Figure 9.2). More importantly, it is a bust that had once been removed from the display in the past. Two forms of agency can be revealed for the Xiamen case. On the one hand, it is the director who challenges the ‘conventional’ representation, for example in form of monumental images of Lu Xun chiselled in marble; on the other, the object itself gains agency over Lu Xun’s image. When I interviewed Su Yongyuan, and asked if he had made any changes, he explained the following: I didn’t change much. But I placed this piece here that people had given us as a gift in the past. … It had been put away into storage. I thought it was a shame. … [So] I just placed it here. Some said it didn’t look like him. [But] why would they not want to display it? … I thought this … is new, and if you look at it from the wood as a material, it must be a very special kind of wood, … I didn’t fully understand it, so once I asked someone from the Shanghai and Beijing Lu Xun museums, because there they have some specialists on ancient artefacts (gudai wenwu). [They explained that,] generally, if the wood turns dark that [shows] that it isn’t an average kind of wood. And it starts to turn dark from here. The reason they didn’t want to display it was because the face was both Yin and Yang – this is dark, this is light, they are different [i.e. a half-dark, half-light face, also implying two-faced or Janus-faced]. … But I thought, eventually it will all turn dark, it will gradually oxidize. … If you put it here for a long time, it will on its own become an artefact (wenwu). (Su Yongyan 2015)15

While museums seem to be a part of the ‘literary establishment’, director Su Yongyan decided to retrieve this wooden bust from storage, even though it was deemed not appropriate for the visualization of Lu Xun by the authorities, which shows that there are countervoices within

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Figure 9.2. Lu Xun bust on display, Xiamen, in 2014. Photograph by Emily Graf. Courtesy of the Xiamen Lu Xun Museum.

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the literary establishment as well. Furthermore, some forms of agency go beyond the human, as this example shows. For it is the wood itself that changes the image of Lu Xun, and according to the changes it can conform or clash with conventional ways of visualizing him. It goes without saying that the bust did not put itself on display. When Latour considers objects as actants, this does not mean that ‘these participants “determine” the action, … that hammers “impose” the hitting of the nail’ (Latour 2005: 71). Instead, ‘anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor’ (ibid.). The bust makes a difference in shaping Lu Xun. Seeing the museum as a pure instrument of one ‘literary establishment’ is oversimplifying processes of negotiation between the different institutions, as they are not one homogeneous unit. Nor is the bust a tool used by the museum director in order to propose a counternarrative. Instead, the bust is part of a network and in dialogue with the director, whose understanding of ‘artefact’ (wenwu 文物) is modified by the bust, allowing for a fluidity in a term that in other, more essentialist, discourses and museum practices of categorization remains divided into ‘appropriate’/‘inappropriate’ and ‘artefact’/ ‘not artefact’.16 As Lu Xun was praised by Mao Zedong as a national hero in fivefold superlative form, a visualization that allowed for an interpretation that would communicate Lu Xun as Janus-faced was considered unacceptable by the authorities. However, being a lower-ranking institution in the administrative system can also mean that you are ‘under the radar’ and that you can arguably get away with more unconventional forms of display.

Lai He: Clashing Literary Establishments In the case of the Taiwanese writer Lai He 賴和 (1894–1943), two ‘national’ literary canons can be argued to coexist and even overlap. This kind of conflict, however, is only revealed by a travelling visitor. Past studies have discussed the role of the literary tourist in the creation of literary sites and museums. Nicola Watson, for example, has argued that the main agency can be found within the text. The text creates sites of tourism by calling into being its visitors through an implied literary tourist as reader (Watson 2006: 12), and ‘[t]exts solicit readers to locate and re-experience them within the specificities of place’ (ibid.: 15). In contemporary literature this practice continues to exist, as the above example of Mo Yan naming his study in his writings suggests. One can argue that the physical materialization of the literary study in the display curated by the Mo Yan Research Society is justified in part by

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an anticipation of the implied literary tourist. For Watson, it is the text that creates the tourist and the tourist who creates the site. If one looks beyond nineteenth-century Britain and takes into consideration the establishment of state-run national museums of literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this dynamic is transformed in meaningful ways. On the one hand, one has to take into account the structural and institutional forces that boost literary tourism. On the other, it is also within this context that the visitor can acquire a new level of agency. Visitors can come to encompass a destabilizing power when they move across linguistic and national borders, and therefore between different literary establishments, revealing inconsistencies and ultimately their constructedness. A visitor, for example, will not only find a small-scale literature museum in Lai He’s hometown Zhanghua 彰化 in southern Taiwan,17 but will furthermore encounter him in not only one, but two national museums of literature. Both the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (NMMCL) in Beijing and the National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL) in Tainan include Lai He in their display. The presentation and the narrative in which Lai He is placed, however, differ considerably. In order to understand the spatial dilemma Lai He creates, it is necessary to view him in the relatively recent institutionalization of Taiwan literature. Taiwan has a very complex history, as it was under Japanese colonial rule for fifty years up until the end of the Second World War (1895–1945), and was ruled thereafter by the Nationalist Party of China (Guomindang or GMD) after the party retreated to the island from Mainland China, having lost the civil war against the CPC. The GMD ruled Taiwan as the sole political party under martial law (1949–87), enforcing language policies to reintroduce Mandarin Chinese as the official language in a manner reminiscent of the restrictive language policies of the Japanese (Huang Xuanfan 1994: 118–20). Some of Lu Xun’s contemporaries who had been writing in the 1920s and 1930s, but had left Mainland China to live in Taiwan or the United States – as, for example, Lin Yutang had (discussed further below) – were institutionalized in museum spaces in Taiwan and considered worthy of commemoration. Local writers such as Lai He, however, were not considered as valuable by literary institutions during the reign of the GMD. Correlating with the establishment in 1986 of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP, an opposition party inclined to back an eventual independence of Taiwan from ‘China’), local or so-called nativist Taiwan literature (xiangtu wenxue 鄉土文學) increasingly moved into the spotlight of the literary field and became institutionalized as ‘Taiwan litera-

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ture’ in literary circles in the early 1980s, and in the academic realm in the late 1980s (Ye Shitao 2008: 191). In 2003, Taiwan literature was finally institutionalized in a national museum, during a period in which the DPP became the ruling party for the first time (2000–2008). The establishment of literary museums can thus be seen in the context of a broader development in which Taiwanese was introduced into school curricula, and Chinese street and place names associated with Mainland China were exchanged for street names in Taiwanese and indigenous languages (Yeh 2010: 674), fundamentally changing educational institutions and sites of cultural memory in Taiwan. In the NMTL in Tainan, Lai He is displayed as the ‘Father of New Taiwan Literature’.18 Similar to Lu Xun, who had included the Chinese vernacular into his writings, Lai He was one of the first writers born in Taiwan to attempt to include Taiwanese vernacular into his writings. The literary establishment during Lai He’s lifetime was in Japan, with writers from the Taiwanese colony encouraged, and finally required, to write in Japanese, and no longer in literary Chinese (wenyanwen). Lai He, reading Lu Xun’s call for the use of a Chinese vernacular (baihua), not only refused to write in Japanese (resisting the literary establishment of his times), but even wanted to introduce the vernacular of his environment and time into his writings. For example, he attempted to include vernacular terms in his short story ‘Yi gan chengzi 一桿稱仔’ [The steelyard], which he published in 1926 (Lai He 2000). After a first draft in literary Chinese (wenyanwen), Lai He would translate his writing into what he considered to be a Taiwanese vernacular, namely Chinese written vernacular (baihuawen 白話文), mixed with terms of Taiwanese Minnan spoken in Taiwan (Haddon 2007: 74). At the NMMCL in Beijing, however, Lai He is on display as a Chinese writer, and as one who lived in Chinese territory occupied by Japan. This territory is described on labels as ‘literature baptized by the fire of war’ and ‘literature of the occupied territory’ from the ‘Taiwan region’.19 For material emphasis, barbed wire is wrapped around the wall posters in the exhibition. The presentation aims to show how Lai He, as a Chinese writer, lived in the territory of the ‘Chinese nation’,20 arguing that Taiwan showed similar traits to the ‘literature of the liberated zone’,21 the areas in which the communists used literature to fight Japanese aggression. Walking through the literary museums in Beijing and Tainan, a travelling literary tourist will encounter Lai He’s portrait in two conflicting literary canons, presented as part of a Chinese and a Taiwanese literary canon, both raising claims on the same writer, but neither accepting the legitimacy of the narrative of the other.

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Lin Yutang: The System of Rehabilitation The case of Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–1976), a contemporary of Lu Xun, allows insights into yet another system of valorizing authors, especially those who were previously criticized, disqualified, or removed from the literary canon. Lin Yutang wrote both in Chinese and later in English. He left China before the beginning of the Second World War, in 1935, and is well known for his novels My Country and My People (1935) and The Importance of Living (1937), as well as for his non-fictional works, such as his anti-communist The Vigil of a Nation (1945), which became best-sellers in the United States, contributing significantly to the American popular image of China in the 1930s (Ramsdell 1983: 10–12). After leaving Mainland China, Lin lived in the US and Singapore, and in his later years resided in Taiwan and Hong Kong. When it comes to material forms of display, his is an example of how the mediality of literary heritage can be misleading, especially in the case of the photograph as a crucial medium for curating the author. Before 2001, no literary museum was dedicated to Lin Yutang in the PRC. On the contrary, literary museums dedicated to other writers would actively remove him from materials featured in their display. Most prominent are black-and-white photographs featuring him together with Lu Xun, which were altered for past displays, removing Lin Yutang from the image. While Lu Xun is known to have had disagreements with many of his contemporary writers, the rhetorical attacks exchanged between him and Lin Yutang are among the most well-known. Over the years, Lu Xun and Lin Yutang would disagree on many issues, with frequent rhetorical attacks in 1925–26 (Lu Xun 2005b) and again in 1935–36 (Lu Xun 2005c: 348), ranging from their understanding of what role humour was to play in literature, to their different approaches to translation, and to the very fundamental issue of what function literature and the writer was to serve in society more generally. But they stayed in contact nevertheless, collaborating in certain projects and continuing to refer to each other’s works in the literary field. Starting from the early 1950s and up to the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), Lin Yutang was removed from Lu Xun images featured in literary journals, newspapers and pictorial biographies published by the Beijing Lu Xun Museum (Beijing Lu Xun Museum 1976: 42).22 Lin Yutang, along with other contemporaries, vanished from the reproductions of photographic material, leaving behind inanimate objects serving as background in his stead, such as a fence, a curtain, or stones lying in the grass. Raoul Findeisen argues that the reason for removing Lin Yutang

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and other intellectuals was their promotion of an apolitical literature, or a political abstinence in literature and art, which resulted in them being ‘politically and ideologically unpopular figures’ in the PRC.23 As to the role of the museum, it is difficult to pinpoint who or which institution was responsible for these alterations, or what exactly the motivations behind these methods were. The conclusion that can be drawn is that the Beijing Lu Xun Museum played a crucial role in circulating these altered or ‘cleansed’ images in publications of the museum publishing house, in the form of moving exhibitions, and by reaching a large number of visitors who saw these photographs on display during their museum visits. The literary museums thus contributed to ‘punitive forgetting’, to borrow Aleida Assmann’s term (Assmann 2016: 49–53). In the recent display of the museum from 2014, Lin Yutang is again visible on photographs, which is a result of Lin Yutang’s return to Lu Xun’s museum space in the early 1980s in the PRC, when he was ‘rehabilitated’ and reintroduced into the literary canon. Not surprisingly, the first literary institution dedicated to Lin Yutang was not established in the PRC, but in Taiwan. It was a library, the Lin Yutang Memorial Library 林語堂紀念圖書館, established in 1985 in his former residence on Mt Yangmin near Taibei, where he had lived on and off during the last ten years of life until his death in 1976.24 In its

Figure 9.3. Signatures on Lin Yutang’s collected books, Taibei, in 2015. Photograph by Emily Graf. Courtesy of the Lin Yutang Former Residence.

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early stages, this institution provided a function similar to Sigrid Undset’s (1882–1949) former house Bjerkebæk, in Norway (discussed by Thea Aarbakke, this volume).25 The library allowed visitors or readers to access the books from Lin Yutang’s collection, including to borrow and take them home to read. Traces of this practice are still visible through the fact that the collected books of Lin Yutang on display at the museum today feature signatures (Figure 9.3). Only after many books had gone missing did the library stop lending out books and adopted the method of other memorial museums of writers, which was to put the books on display but within cordoned-off spaces (Tour Guide at Lin Yutang House 2014). In later years, the Taipei Municipal Administration for Cultural Heritage changed the status of the library into a former residence of famous people (mingren guju 名人故居), renaming it the Lin Yutang House 林語堂故居 in 2005, and delegating the management of the memorial museum to the privately run Soochow University 東吳大學 in Taibei. Lin Yutang’s rehabilitation in the PRC is an especially salient case, because even though he had been subject to being blanked out from memory and literally erased from Lu Xun’s side, Lin was not only institutionalized across the Taiwan strait and ‘restored’ within the spaces of Lu Xun’s memorial museums in the PRC. In 2001 he was also granted his own state-owned memorial museum on the mainland, in his home town Zhangzhou 漳州 in Fujian Province (CCLM 2012: 113). How then is such a change in literary fortune explained in the official discourse of the literary establishment in the PRC? When giving an opening speech at an academic conference in 2013, Duan Yong 段勇, head of the Department of Museums and Social Artefacts of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage 國家文物局博物館與社會文物司, pointed out a museum’s responsibility towards the person displayed, a person ‘belonging to history’,26 meaning that one must respect his or her ‘originality, individuality and complexity’.27 This must be respected, he emphasized, no matter if it is a ‘positive figure’ [literally, ‘person on the correct side’],28 or a ‘negative figure’ [literally, ‘person on the opposite side’]29 (Duan Yong 2013: 2). Despite his willingness to point out the issues that museums face when displaying a historical figure, no methods are proposed as to how this complexity ought to be addressed, and Duan does not go beyond the separation of historical figures into binary groups of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. The problem the case of Lin Yutang reveals is actually inherent in the very concept of rehabilitation, for rehabilitation is a concept that allows for individual historical figures to cross boundaries, but does not touch on the integrity of the boundaries. Looking back at Lin Yutang as having been radically removed from museum space, only to

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be reintroduced after his rehabilitation, has in itself a destabilizing effect as it reveals the very active role museums play in the remembering and forgetting of writers.

Conclusion Literary museums, be they former residences of writers, memorial museums or large-scale national museums, can undoubtedly be regarded as playing an active role in the institutionalization and regulated valorization of writers, not only but especially in the museum landscape of the PRC. However, when taking a closer look, the very same institutions that contribute to the making of writers can come to destabilize and subvert the very same system that creates them. The above examples raise no claim to completeness, but instead point to the very different processes inherent in literary museums, processes which go unnoticed if literary museums are brushed aside by critical approaches that assume that these spaces are free of contestation. Mo Yan’s example visually exposes the literary prize as the main literary currency in contemporary literature today. Lu Xun’s example reveals the conflicts between the administrative levels of museums, and shows how museums can come to create counternarratives and counterimages from within. The twofold display of Lai He in Beijing and Tainan shows how literary museums bring to the foreground the conflicts and overlapping claims of national literary canons over writers, and thereby reveal the constructedness of, and tension within, immaterial literary canons. And finally, the example of Lin Yutang reveals literary museums as Janus-faced when viewed diachronically across time, as they can play as active a role in forgetting a writer as they can in his or her commemoration. The four writers stand for the destabilizing power that author museums yield over the literary establishment, as they highlight its greatest weakness – or better, point of vulnerability – not just in China but globally: namely, that literary museums do not detect but construct literary value. Emily Graf is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. She received her PhD in 2018 in Sinology and Transcultural Studies from Heidelberg University. A Visiting PhD Fellowship at Renmin University of China, Beijing in 2013–14 enabled her to visit author museums across China and Taiwan, interviewing museum directors, staff and visitors.

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Notes   1. All Chinese references and names are provided in traditional characters unless they are direct quotations published in simplified characters.  2. 辍学. Alternative translation on the English sign at the museum reads that Mo Yan ‘had to drop out of school’. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.   3. I would like to thank Xu Chun for pointing me to this saying.  4. 自然不赞成.  5. 告诉他建文学馆不是我们的自建是政府行为.   6. The building on the school campus was offered to the Mo Yan Research Society by the school director Hou Zongkai 侯宗凯 (Mao Weijie 2011: 210). In the years between 2006 and 2009, Guan Moxian and the secretary of the Mo Yan Research Society Mao Weijie frequently visited Mo Yan in Beijing (Guan Moxian 2011: 202–3). When Mo Yan returned to Gaomi he had numerous meetings with the director of the Mo Yan Research Society Sun Huibin, with the party secretary of Gaomi Municipality Wu Jianmin 吳建 民 and others before he finally agreed to the establishment of the museum (Mao Weijie 2011: 211).  7. 文学成就.   8. For the list of the prizes that Mo Yan received up to 2011 and which are on display in the museum, see Wei Xiuliang and Mao Weijie 2011: 171–78.   9. Zhu Xiangqian 朱向前 (b. 1954), deputy dean of the Art Academy of the PLA, for example, is featured next to literary critics from the academic world, such as Chen Xiaoming 陳曉明 (b. 1959), professor at the Chinese Department at Beijing University, both of whom praise Mo Yan’s writing. The certificates, to provide one example for each, are awarded by the PLA, including one from 1992 for this short story ‘Yi ye fengliu 一夜風流’ [A night unrestrained]. Additional certificates and prizes were awarded by journals, such as 21st Century 21 世紀 and People’s Literature Magazine 人民文 學雜誌社. The prominent example for an association is the Chinese Writers’ Association (CWA), which awards the Mao Dun Literature Prize. 10. 中国本土人. 11. The Mao Dun Literature Prize awards 500,000 yuan (approx. 70,500 US dollars) in comparison to Nobel’s 8 million Swedish krona (approx. 1.1 million US dollars). 12. Translation by Stuart R. Schramm. 不但是伟大的文学家，而且是伟大 的思想家与伟大的革命家。… 鲁迅是在文化战线上，代表全民族的 大多数，… 最正确、最勇敢、最坚决、最忠实、最热忱的空前的民 族英雄 (Mao Zedong 1970: 191–92). 13. My doctoral work discusses the administrative ranking of Lu Xun’s museums in the subchapter titled ‘Beyond a Critical Approach: Understanding the SACH and guan as Invisible Actors’ (Graf 2018: 404–29). The cases of Lin Yutang and Lai He are more extensively discussed in the subchapters

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‘Reintroducing Lin Yutang into the Display’ (ibid.: 291–307) and ‘Stabilising Lu Xun’s and Lai He’s Charisma’ (ibid.: 619–34). 14. 權限. 15. 我改變的不多。就把以前人送來的東西，我把它拿出來。 … 把它 放在倉庫裡面關起來，我就覺得可惜啊 … 我就把他擺在這裡。有 人說這個不像，為什麼他們不想擺? … 我想這種 … 是新的，而從 木材來看，這個木材應該是很奇特的木材，我搞不清楚，上海和北 京博物館的人來，我曾經問他們，因為裡邊有古代文物的專家。 一般來說，木頭會變黑，就說明他不是一般的，而且他是從這邊開 始黑。他為什麼所不想擺陰陽臉嘛。這個是黑的這個是淡的，不一 樣，但是我想，遲早有一天他會全黑，他慢慢氧化 … 這個放久了 以後，它自身就是文物了。 16. Wenwu is commonly translated as ‘cultural relic’ and increasingly used parallell with yichan 遺產 as ‘heritage’ by cultural institutions in the PRC. I prefer ‘artefact’ to ‘cultural relic’, a translation term rarely used outside of Chinese studies, because artefact emphasizes the object being the result of human intent or (inter)action, unlike ‘relic’ which evokes remains or remnants of something being ‘left behind’ from earlier times (including human remains). Unlike ‘heritage’, which is more abstract, an artefact here is a physical object, emphasizing its three-dimensionality and tangibility. The semantic fields the term wenwu refers to have changed considerably compared to its usage in ancient texts. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did the term include objects from the recent past, including the twentieth century, and only in the 1980s did it increasingly include contemporary objects (Liu Yi 2016: 12). Going beyond its use in archaeology, ‘artefact’ allows less emphasis on the object’s historicity. The bust made by a contemporary sculptor can in this case become a wenwu, an object to which cultural value is assigned, for reasons other than its connection to a past, which the term ‘relic’ might suggest. 17. Lai He’s museum, which was established in 1994, was one of the first museums dedicated to a local Taiwanese writer, realized through the private Lai He Foundation 賴和基金會. 18. 台灣新文學之父. 19. 战火洗礼中的文学; 沦陷区文学; 台湾地区. 20. 我国. 21. 解放区文学. 22. These materials are usually discussed in the context of a political instrumentalization of the writer Lu Xun (Benton 1994: 100–101; Findeisen 2001: 309, 375; Ni Moyan 2010: 159, 164; Davies 2013: Image 7). 23. ‘Politisch-ideologisch mißliebige Personen’ (Findeisen 2001: 311). 24. The Mainland China newspaper, the People’s Daily 人民日報, 24 June 1985, p. 3, also informed its readers about the establishment of this memorial library in the article ‘Lin Yutang jinian tushuguan kaifang 林語堂紀念圖書 館開放’ [The Lin Yutang Memorial Library opens].

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25. All books at Bjerkebæk are registered in a public database that makes it possible to borrow them, not only giving people access to Undset’s original belongings, but also transforming the author museum into a private archive or a library. 26. 是历史的. 27. 原征性，獨特性，複雜性. 28. 正面的人物. 29. 所谓的反面的人物.

References Assmann, A. 2016. Formen des Vergessens. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Beijing Lu Xun Museum 北京鲁迅博物馆. 1976. Lu Xun 鲁迅. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe. Benton, G. 1994. ‘Lu Xun, Leon Trotsky, and the Chinese Trotskyists’, East Asian History 7: 93–105. Bourdieu, P., and R. Johnson. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press. Cartier, C. 2015. ‘Territorial Urbanization and the Party-State in China’, Territory, Politics, Governance 3(3): 37–41. CCLM 中国博协文学专委会 (ed.). 2012. ‘Xiangyue wenxue bowuguan: Zhongguo bowuguan xiehui wenxue zhuanyeweiyuanhui chengyuan danwei minglu 相约文学 博物馆:中国博物馆协会文学专业委员会成员单位名录’ [Meeting at the Literature Museum: A list of the institutional members of the Chinese Committee for Literature  Museums (CCLM)]. Internal publication. Shanghai: Shanghai putuoqu wenhuaju / Bajin guju. Damrosch, D. 2006. ‘World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age’, in H. Saussy (ed.), Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 43–53. Davies, G. 2013. Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Denton, K. 2014. Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. DiMaggio, P.J., and W.W. Powell. 1991. ‘Introduction’, in W.W. Powell and P.J. DiMaggio (eds), The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–38. Duan Yong 段勇. 2013. ‘Zai “2013 Zhongguo renwulei bowuguan, jinianguan chenlie yishu xueshu yantaohui” shang de zhici 在 “2013中国人物类博物馆, 纪念馆陈列 艺术学术研讨会”上的致辞’ [The opening speech at the ‘2013 Academic Conference on Art Exhibition in China’s Person Museums and Memorials’], in Zhongguo bowuguan xiehui chenlie yishu weiyuanhui 中国博物馆协会陈列艺术委员会 and Shanghai Lu Xun Jinianguan 上海鲁迅纪念馆 (eds), 2013 nian Zhongguo renwulei bowuguan jinianguan chenlie yishu xueshu yantaohui 2013年中国人物类博物馆纪 念馆陈列艺术学术研讨会 [The 2013 Academic Conference on Exhibition Art in

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Chinese Person Museums and Memorials]. Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, pp. 1–2. English, J.F. 2005. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Findeisen, R.D. 2001. Lu Xun (1881–1936): Texte, Chronik, Bilder, Dokumente. Frankfurt: Stroemfeld Verlag. Graf, E.M. 2018. ‘Lu Xun on Display: Memory, Space and Media in the Making of World Literary Heritage or The Materiality of World Literary Heritage: Memory, Space and Media in the Making of Lu Xun’. PhD dissertation. Heidelberg University. Guan Moxian 管谟贤. 2011. ‘Mo Yan wenxueguan chuangjian huixiang 莫言文学馆 创建回想’ [Remembering the establishment of the Mo Yan Literature Museum], in Mo Yan yanjiuhui 莫言研究会 (ed.), Mo Yan yu Gaomi 莫言与高密 [Mo Yan and Gaomi]. Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, pp. 201–6. Haddon, R. 2007. ‘Lai He’, in T. Moran (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900–1949. New York: Thomson Gale, pp. 73–78. Huang Xuanfan 黃宣範. 1994. Yuyan, shehui yu zuqun yishi: Taiwan yuyan shehuixue de yanjiu 語言、社會與族群意識:臺灣語言社會學的研究 [Language, society and ethnic group consciousness: Sociological research on Taiwanese languages]. Taibei: Wenhe. Kopytoff, I. 2011. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commodization as Process’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–91. Lai He 賴和. (1926) 2000. ‘Yi gan chengzi 一桿稱仔’ [The steelyard], in Lin Ruiming 林瑞明 (ed.), Lai He quanji: Xiaoshuo juan 賴和全集：小說卷 [Lai He collected works: Short story collection]. Taibei: Qianwei, Vol. 1, pp. 43–55. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lin Yutang. 1935. My Country and My People. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. ———. 1937. The Importance of Living. New York: Day. ———. 1945. The Vigil of a Nation. New York: Day. Li Oufan 李歐梵. 2015. Interview by Emily Mae Graf. 8 June. Nürnberg. Liu Yi 刘毅. 2016. ‘“Wenwu” de bianqian “文物” 的变’ [Changes in the term ‘wenwu’], Dongnan wenhua 东南文化 [South-east culture] 1(249): 6–14. Loewe, M. 2016. Problems of Han Administration: Ancestral Rites, Weights and Measures, and the Means of Protest. Boston, MA: Brill. Lovell, J. 2006. The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize of Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Lu Xun 鲁迅. (1918) 2005a. ‘Kuangren riji 狂人日记’ [Diary of a madman], in Lu Xun quanji 鲁迅全集 [The collected works of Lu Xun]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, Vol. 1 [Nahan 呐喊], pp. 444–56. ———. (1926) 2005b. ‘Lun “Fei’ebolai” yinggai huanxing 论“费厄泼赖”应该缓行’ [On deferring ‘fair play’], in Lu Xun quanji 鲁迅全集 [The collected works of Lu Xun]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, Vol. 1 [Fen 坟], pp. 286–97. ———. (1935) 2005c. ‘Zai lun “wenren xiangqing” 再论“文人相轻”’ [Another discussion on ‘scholars scorning each other’], in Lu Xun quanji 鲁迅全集 [The collected works of Lu Xun]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, Vol. 6 [Qiejieting zawen erji 且介亭杂文二集], pp. 347–49.

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Mao Weijie 毛维杰. 2011. ‘Xie zai Mo Yan wenxueguan kaiguan zhishi 写在莫言文学 馆开馆之时’ [Written around the time of the opening of the Mo Yan Literature Museum], in Mo Yan yanjiuhui 莫言研究会 (ed.), Mo Yan yu Gaomi 莫言与高密 [Mo Yan and Gaomi]. Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, pp. 207–16. Mao Zedong 毛泽东. (1940) 1970. ‘Xin minzhu zhuyilun 新民主主义论’ [On new democracy], in T. Minoru 竹内実 (ed.), Mao Zedong ji 毛泽东集 [Collected writings of Mao Tse-Tung]. Tokyo: Hokubûsha, Vol. 7, pp. 147–206. ———. (1940) 2005. ‘On New Democracy’, in S.R. Schram (ed.), Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949, New Democracy 1939–1941. London: M.E. Sharpe, Vol. 7, pp. 330–69. Minford, J., and C. Roberts. 2008. ‘Zhai, the Scholar’s Studio’, China Quarterly Heritage 13. Retrieved 11 November 2019 from http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/editorial.php?issue=013. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morgan, D. 2018. Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mo Yan 莫言. 1984. ‘Hei shatan 黑沙滩’ [Black beach], Jiefang jun wenyi 解放军文艺 [Liberation Army literature and arts] 7. Retrieved 28 January 2019 from http://www. cngdwx.com/jinxiandai/moyanzhongduanpianxiaoshuosanwenxuan/317091.html. ———. 1987. Hong gaoliang jiazu 红高粱家族 [Red sorghum clan]. Beijing: Jiefangjun wenyi chubanshe. ———. 1988. Tiantang suantai zhi ge 天堂蒜苔之歌 [The garlic ballads]. Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe. ———. 1995. Feng ru fei tun 丰乳肥臀 [Big breasts and wide hips]. Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe. ———. 2001. Tanxiang xing 檀香刑 [Sandalwood death]. Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe. ———. 2003. Sishiyi pao 四十一炮 [Pow!]. Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe. ———. 2006. Shengsi pilao 生死疲劳 [Life and death are wearing me out]. Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe. ———. 2009. Wa 蛙 [Frog]. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe. ———. 2019. ‘Yi dou ge biji 一斗阁笔记’ [Notes from one dou of a room], Shanghai wenxue 上海文学 [Shanghai Literature] 1: 6–9. Ni Moyan 倪墨炎. 2010. Zhen jia Lu Xun bian 真假鲁迅辩 [A debate on the real and distorted Lu Xun]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chuban. Nobel Prize in Literature. 2012. ‘Prize Announcement’. Retrieved 24 October 2019 from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2012/summary/. Pu Songling 蒲松齡. (1962) 1978. Liaozhai zhiyi: Huijiao huizhu huiping ben 聊齋誌 異：會校會注會評本 [Strange stories from the Liao Studio: A Variorum edition with collected variants of the text, annotations and critiques], ed. Zhang Youhe 張友 鶴. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Ramsdell, D.B. 1983. ‘Asia Askew: U.S. Best-Sellers on Asia, 1931–1980’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 15(4): 2–25. Riemenschnitter, A. 2013. ‘Mo Yan’, in T. Moran and Y.(D.) Xu (eds), Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Fiction Writers 1950–2000. Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning, pp. 179–94.

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Shaoxing Lu Xun Museum 绍兴鲁迅纪念馆. 2003. Shaoxing Lu Xun jinianguan dashiji 绍兴鲁迅纪念馆大事记 [A chronicle of events at the Shaoxing Lu Xun Museum]. Shaoxing: Shaoxing Lu Xun Jinianguan. Su Yongyan 蘇永延. 2015. Interview by Emily Mae Graf. 11 March. Xiamen. The Writers’ Union 作家联盟. 2018. ‘Shen Peng: Mo Yan de maobizi daqi you zhenqu, zizai youwo 沈鹏：莫言的毛笔字大气有真趣，自在有我’ [Shen Peng: Mo Yan’s calligraphy is strong and interesting, unrestrained and assertive]. Retrieved 20 November 2020 from https://m.sohu.com/a/257260070_100015028/. Tour Guide at Lin Yutang House. 2014. Interview by Emily Mae Graf. 23 August. Taibei. Varutti, M. 2014. Museums in China: The Politics of Representation after Mao. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. Watson, N.J. 2006. The Literary Tourist. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wei Xiuliang 魏修良 and Mao Weijie 毛维杰. 2011. ‘Mo Yan wenxueguan xunli 莫言 文学馆巡礼’ [A tour through the Mo Yan Museum], in Mo Yan yanjiuhui 莫言研 究会 (ed.), Mo Yan yu Gaomi 莫言与高密 [Mo Yan and Gaomi]. Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, pp. 169–99. Xu Dongbo 徐東波. 2014. Interview by Emily Mae Graf. 16 September. Shaoxing. Yeh, M. 2010. ‘Chinese Literature from 1937 to the Present’, in K.S. Chang and S. Owen (eds), The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 565–696. Ye Shitao 葉石濤. (1987) 2008. ‘Taiwan wenxue shigang 台灣文學史綱’ [An outline of Taiwan literature], in Yeshitao quanji 葉石濤全集 [The collected works of Ye Shitao]. Gaoxiong: Gaoxiongshi wenhuaju, Vol. 17, pp. 1–198.

Chapter 10

South African Literature, Author Museums and Narrative Expansion The Olive Schreiner House Dana Ryan Lande

South African Author Museums: Meeting Points for Local and National Narratives Since the first democratic elections in 1994, South Africa has undergone a profound change from the apartheid era, which had stifled every aspect of society, including the realm of cultural heritage. With Mandela’s release from prison, and the creation of a new democratic government and a new constitution, museums and other cultural institutions needed to quickly understand their changed roles according to the new political parameters and social realities, drawing in new communities to enable necessary transformation (Rankin and Hamilton 1998: 7). While there has been important work done in the effort to understand South African museums and heritage spaces in the new postapartheid and post-transitional decades, little to none of this work has focused on the historic homes of authors that function as museums. This chapter aims to investigate the evolution that South African literary heritage spaces have undergone in the postapartheid era through a discussion of Olive Schreiner’s author museum in Cradock, South Africa. As this author museum is a historic home operated and curated by the

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Amazwi South African Museum of Literature (formerly known as the National English Literary Museum), a brief look at Amazwi’s evolution and its role in literary tourism in South Africa is necessary. Using analysis grounded in narrative study, the texts and displays in the Olive Schreiner House and its additional space, Ikhamanga Hall, help to explore the narrative expansion that has occurred in the postapartheid evolution of some museums and cultural heritage spaces. Finally, this chapter hopes to highlight and define the larger role that author museums may play in the future of South African literary landscapes. Narrative analysis may not be the first method of study to come to mind when assessing museums or sites of cultural heritage, yet the practice of reading the rhetoric of a space through its textual features is not dissimilar from other types of cultural analysis. This chapter’s theory and method of narrative analysis is rooted in a postclassical understanding of narrative as communicative experience with rhetorical and ethical elements, as developed by James Phelan in his numerous works developing the rhetorical theory of narrative. When a visitor to a museum reads a description of an event, a person or a piece of literature, they are engaging with a narrative describing something for a specific purpose.1 It follows that the term ‘narrative’ is understood as ‘somebody telling somebody something else for some purpose’ (Phelan 2017: 4), and is used in reference to textual matter and its presentation. This chapter thus assesses the exhibition’s textual discourse as a narrative told by the museum producers, and its (the exhibition’s) relation to underlying South African national narratives. Before any discussion of South African museums – literary or otherwise – may be had, it is vital to acknowledge the complicated and intricate navigation, negotiation and representation of history that is required in these spaces. South African author Ivan Vladislavić’s short story, ‘The WHITES ONLY Bench’ (Vladislavić 1996), is narrated by a man working in a soon-to-be-opened museum, the function of which is to present the public with a historical display of the apartheid era. The bench referred to in the title of the story is meant to be placed on exhibit in the new museum in a room bearing the title ‘Petty Apartheid’. The problem faced by the industrious employees of the new museum is that they are unable to locate one of these benches. Not to be deterred, Charmaine, a woman of true artistic capability if we believe the narrator’s report, faithfully begins to recreate a ‘Whites Only Bench’. This seems to be a working solution until the new director of the museum arrives and manages to locate an actual bench from the bygone era. Charmaine, at this point, has put a fair amount of time into her own bench, and refers to the historically

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sourced bench as ‘the impostor’ (65). Ultimately, Charmaine’s bench is smuggled outside to a space under a tree, and can claim Mrs Coretta Scott King (wife of the late Dr Martin Luther King) as one of its visitors. The historically accurate bench, which has survived decades of use and abuse, has a neat placard strung across it stating that it is not for sitting on. The tangible evidence of apartheid is put on display as a cautionary tale, and at the same time, its replica overlooks a courtyard and is used freely by the public. Ironically, almost no one can tell the difference between the two benches. Interpretation and representation of artefacts (including texts) from the apartheid era are central elements of the hard work that was and continues to be necessary in museums struggling to represent a volatile and violent past. The South African Department of Arts and Culture explicitly defines South African museums as ‘a formally constituted institution that promotes the development of society through research, collection, conservation, communication and exhibition of natural and cultural heritage in ways that reflect the diversity and values of a democratic society’ (Department of Arts and Culture 2014: 19). If we consider these issues in relation to author museums, how are these historic homes being recalibrated or even replicated for a new democratic era? Are museums guarding their authors like a delicate historical bench, or are authors being repurposed for modern visitors? Put another way, how will museums tackle the need to represent historical texts in a manner that acknowledges the new context in which they are being read? The roles that historic house museums, in particular author museums, may play in South Africa are currently undefined. It is uncertain if they function more as spaces dedicated to biography, history, memory or community for the heritage sector. The lack of research dedicated to this smaller genre of museums is not particularly surprising, as internationally ‘house museums … are under-theorised as engines of heritage and the power struggles that heritage both reproduces and critiques’ (Hodge and Beranek 2011: 99). That is not to say that the roles these museums play as tourist destinations have gone without notice. In the introduction to The Literary Tourist, Nicola Watson inquires ‘how far literary tourism emerged as a side effect of cultural nationalism’ as she discusses numerous author museums serving as tourist destinations (Watson 2006: 14). This is an important question but – unlike the British examples in Watson’s text, which do suggest a nod of agreement – it is not a question that is possible to answer in a South African context just yet. One reason for this is the problematic nature of what cultural nationalism would look like in a South African setting with eleven national languages and a citizenry com-

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posed of a multitude of ethnic groups. That said, there is an underlying thread of nationalism in South Africa suggested in the ideals promoted by Archbishop Desmond Tutu when he renamed the country the Rainbow Nation in 1994. Given the developments of the last two and half decades, the amount of research focused on other types of heritage spaces and museums in South Africa has grown in the wake of the transitional era. Topics of discussion have moved from the new roles of museums and the ways in which they should begin to address the problematic historical past (Hall 1995; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006) while negotiating the memories that heritage spaces invoke and represent (Nuttall and Coetzee 1998), onward to policy and legislation for both historical and new forms of heritage (Corsane 2004). Additionally, discussion of the specific complications of museums for communities removed from their homes and identities (Rassool 2006; McEachern 2007), the acknowledgement of the processes of reconfiguration of cultural capital (Rankin 2013), and suggestions that discourses of nostalgia in museum exhibitions have evolved into discourses of reconstruction or reimagination (Soudien 2012), have all contributed to an industry-wide focus on memory, representation and sociopolitical evolution. Yet complications remain. The legacies of the apartheid era, which stretched from the late 1940s until the early 1990s, are deep and long lasting. Leonard Thompson summarizes the system of apartheid in four ideas. First, the population of South Africa comprised four ‘racial groups’ – White, Coloured, Indian and African – each with its own inherent culture. Second, Whites, as the civilized race, were entitled to have absolute control over the state. Third, white interests should prevail over black interests; the state was not obliged to provide equal facilities for the subordinate races. Fourth, the white racial group formed a single nation, with Afrikaans- and English-speaking components, while Africans belonged to several (eventually ten) distinct nations or potential nations – a formula that made the white nation the largest in the country. (Thompson 2000: 190)

Because of the length of time during which these ideas pervaded the national conscience, and the extremely thorough nature of the apartheid system, no element of heritage or culture was left untouched. Since the end of the apartheid era, museums in South Africa have been referred to as ‘mirrors of power’ (Davidon 1998: 145). When such power has been in service to an unethical and violent set of ideas, it becomes necessary to recreate cultural spaces where an emancipated population may exercise power over the stories of heritage shared within. Put simply, communities

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need new mirrors after great shifts in the sociopolitical landscape. When Davidon notes that ‘culture is a resource that people draw on in relation to ever-changing circumstances and shifting identities’ (ibid.: 153), she acknowledges the concurrent project of communities constructing new futures while reconciling with difficult pasts in the context of construction or remodelling of new cultural sites. In a study of postapartheid tourist routes, Leslie Witz found that both older and newer museums are challenged, as ‘striving to establish themselves as community spaces, [they] respond to constant demands on them from the tourist industry to present a romanticized vision that reflects a supposedly authentic African experience’ (Witz 2006: 110). Questions of community need versus industry demand are relevant in the case of literary tourism and of author homes that might serve as museums. The use of literary landscapes found in fictional texts and promoted by regional heritage tourism boards are not unproblematic if the local community where a literary site is situated has not yet been provided with basic service requirements such as electricity, water, and waste disposal. Lindy Stiebel uses Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country as an example, and warns of the consequences of ‘exoticizing’ literary trails in KwaZulu-Natal when she notes that ‘the whole province, is marketed as the “Kingdom of the Zulu” with nostalgic overtones of a glorious warrior-like past … but which completely masks the current impoverished reality of the majority of the province’s population’ (Stiebel 2004: 42–43). Stiebel’s warning reminds us of the balancing act between development, economic growth and actual local needs; museums might not be the most pressing issue for communities who are still waiting for the government to fulfil promises of employment, medical care and housing. Olive Schreiner’s house in Cradock serves as an interesting example of a meeting point between literary tourism and the needs of the local inhabitants because of the subject nature of her writings, the early establishment in the 1980s of the author museum, and the clear evolution of the space in the hands of NELM/Amazwi between 2003 and 2014 (Figure 10.1). Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) was born in Wittebergen in the Eastern Cape into a family of Christian missionaries. Olive’s only formal education began when she moved to Cradock to live with her older brother and sister at the age of twelve or thirteen, having previously only been tutored at home by her British mother. Although Olive travelled extensively as a governess, and later as an author, she continually worked to expand her understanding of religion, spirituality, feminism and human rights. Beginning with the success of The Story of an African Farm (1883), her novels, stories and essays prompted social debates on a wide

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range of topics, concurrently impacting both the literary realm and the political discourse surrounding human rights and free-thinking from the late 1800s to the early 1900s.

The Olive Schreiner House: An Outpost of the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature Both South African literature and literary museums have investments in cultural identity and national memory, rendering them intricately complicated because of the historical implications and lingering legacies of the apartheid era. This results in an environment that demands that any change taking place in a museum, cultural institution or heritage site should be informed by, as well as acknowledging elements of, reconciliation and community-building. Across South Africa, numerous towns and institutions are currently undergoing name changes in order to better reflect their history and populations. Grahamstown officially changed its name on 29 June 2018 to Makhanda, after the Xhosa warrior Makhanda ka Nxele, who is celebrated as a unifying figure in the Xhosa people’s

Figure 10.1. Street view of the Olive Schreiner House, Cradock, in 2017. Photograph by Dana Ryan Lande.

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historic struggle against the British. The National English Literary Museum’s transformation into the current Amazwi South African Museum of Literature in Makhanda is tangible evidence of such a reconciliation, with a changing and expanding mandate also affecting the Olive Schreiner House as their satellite institution in Cradock. Amazwi may be translated from the local Xhosa language to mean ‘words’ or ‘sayings’, continuing the emphasis on the written word, which NELM had promoted from the time of its inception in the 1960s. Amazwi is housed in a new environmentally friendly facility, and was the first museum in the country to achieve a 5-star rating from the Green Building Council of South Africa. While its amphitheatre is used for a wide range of community activities, inside the building there are both permanent and temporary exhibits along with research facilities, spaces for activities for visiting schools and an indoor theatre for additional events. The construction of the new facility in 2014 pursued a strict reduction of energy consumption, pollution and waste generation, which resulted in an environmentally friendly and easily accessible museum for residents and visitors to Makhanda. Architectural changes in South African heritage sites have been studied in the postapartheid context, and Alta Steenkamp found distinct differences in the physical negotiations of museums built after 1994 when she compared the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria from 1949 and the Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth from 2006. The term ‘voortrekker’ translates as ‘pioneer’, as the monument commemorates the Dutch-Afrikaans settlers’ migration from the Cape Colony to settle in other parts of Southern Africa, beginning in the 1830s. The looming, tomb-like structure of the Voortrekker Monument, with its ‘Hall of Heroes’, depicts ‘the ideal and ability of the Voortrekkers to establish a white civilisation in the interior of Africa. To achieve this, they had to tame a cruel and devastating nature, and to conquer equally cruel savages’ (Steenkamp 2006: 250). Suggesting a link between space and power, Steenkamp asks ‘how is the spatiality of democracy different from the spatiality of discrimination?’ (ibid.: 250). In contrast to the Voortrekker Monument, the Red Location Museum, with its multiple possible paths and entryways and its industrial feel, offered no ‘figurative representations … making the building a neutral container for “any”body and “every”body’ (ibid.: 253). In this comparison it seems possible that museums – as places that contain their visitors for only a brief period – may use their space in ways that correspond with their ideological intent. Accessibility, in many ways, becomes synonymous with democracy. Unfortunately, the Red Location Museum is also an example of the disconnect between the needs of local inhabitants and the need to promote cultural heritage. ‘The museum,

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located in the same neighbourhood where the first uMkhonto we Sizwe cell [the armed wing of the African National Congress] was established … houses various memory boxes containing the stories of those who struggled against the apartheid regime, but residents have accused the metro [municipality] of “building a house for dead people” while they have to live in squalor’ (‘Red Location Museum’ 2016). It is no longer open to the public after having to close in 2013 following violent protests related to the lack of basic services (water, sanitation, education) in the surrounding neighbourhood. While the museum was accessible and openly inviting residents, the residents did not want a museum until their primary survival concerns had been addressed. Amazwi capably addressed accessibility issues through the construction of their new open campus in Makhanda – a space that allows more visitors, events and a larger collection of artefacts and texts than the previous offices and the less accessible spaces at Rhodes University. Given the massive effort in the reinventing, constructing and promoting of the new Amazwi building, there is cause to assume that literary heritage is taken seriously in South Africa. The new construction made an important contribution towards the promotion of literary tourism in the Eastern Cape region, enabling numerous events, including literary festivals and conferences, to be held throughout the year and bring needed activity and revenue to both Makhanda and Cradock. In contrast to the new Amazwi museum in Makhanda, the Olive Schreiner House in Cradock remains a historic cottage with its traditional construction. From a layman’s architectural perspective, the addition of Ikhamanga Hall at the rear of the museum has been designed and constructed in a way to complement the existing structure of Schreiner’s house with its large porch or ‘stoep’ and a matching colour scheme (Figure 10.2). Notably, Ikhamanga Hall cannot be seen from the street outside the house museum, and is only accessible after walking through Schreiner’s former home. While there may be environmentally friendly components present in Cradock, they are not as immediately visible as the rainwater harvesting systems or recycled materials being used in Makhanda. If the new Amazwi building is seen as an example, changes undertaken in postapartheid heritage spaces are important at both the physical and the contextual levels – a point that is also applicable to the Schreiner house’s addition of a community space opened in 2003. Ikhamanga Hall was built as an extension of the Olive Schreiner House Museum, accessible via the museum itself and a rear courtyard. In the hall, named after the Order of Ikhamanga – a prize awarded by the President of South Africa for outstanding achievements of a cultural nature, and given to Schreiner

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posthumously in 2003 – there is an exhibition of Cradock titled ‘200,000 Years of History, 200 Years of Cradock, 20 Years of Freedom’. In this exhibition, photographs and illustrations demonstrate how Schreiner and other notable authors’ narratives of South Africa intersect with local and national history, linking the historical past to the sociopolitical present, and personal biography to national discourse.2 Not only does the hall provide additional exhibition space and plentiful room for literary festivals, community events and other gatherings, it also houses Cradock’s only bookshop in a room to the side of the hall’s main exhibit, which links local history to modern human rights discourse. Beginning with a large-scale reprint of the lyrics of the national anthem, the exhibit is an exploration of the archaeological history of stones and fossils in the Cradock region, the colonial development of the region, notable figures both literary and political, and a presentation of the Cradock Four. This final segment concerns four local men who were murdered by the apartheid government in 1985, and is titled ‘Karoo Mourning’. It is there that a quote from Nelson Mandela’s visit to their graves in 1995 is used to highlight the role of the town in the larger national struggle against apartheid. ‘Cradock was the first to render the apartheid organs of government unworkable … The death of these gallant freedom fighters

Figure 10.2. Ikhamanga Hall and the central courtyard with water pump, Cradock, in 2017. Photograph by Dana Ryan Lande.

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marked a turning point in the history of our struggle. No longer could the regime govern in the old way. They were the true heroes of the struggle’ (Olive Schreiner House 2017).3 In this recognition of the importance of the resistance movement in Cradock, the narrative within the community space again contributes to a broader national narrative of Olive Schreiner, Cradock and the struggle for human rights in South Africa. The story told in Ikhamanga Hall frames Cradock as a town that produces citizens resistant to oppression and human rights violations, and thus Cradock is seen as a source of inspiration for political work of national importance. This combination of the narrative of Schreiner as a historical figure and the postapartheid narrative surrounding the young democracy is made explicit in ‘Celebrating Creativity’, a section of the exhibit explaining the Order of Ikhamanga, given to Schreiner posthumously by the politician and former South African president Thabo Mbeki to recognize those who ‘represent the spirit of the new South Africa’ (OS House 2017). This contemporary achievement on the part of an author who lived from 1855 to 1920 is significant because it highlights the larger project of making Schreiner a spokesperson of sorts for the current nation of South Africa, while concurrently situating her in her historical biography in the older house museum. In this way, Schreiner’s historical self as well as her literature is still alive, and is contributing to a project of spiritual representation for the nation. Infusing the deceased author with new ‘spirit’ and presenting new stories in new spaces is not only informative and indicative of a productive effort to reconcile the past with the present, but also to represent Olive Schreiner as a symbol of African promise from an era that divided the country. This rebranding of Schreiner suggests motivations that serve a larger sociopolitical purpose. Linda Young, in her study of house museums in the United Kingdom, states that a writer’s house museum may be ‘powerfully informed by motives of national identity’ (Young 2015: 238). The necessity of reconciling the past in order to construct new, previously unimaginable futures is part and parcel of the shaping of new national identities. South African museums play roles in each of those activities as representations of the past, present and future.

Situating Schreiner in Cradock, Locating Schreiner across the Karoo If national identity is what is at stake in the two sections of this house museum, Ikhamanga Hall is certainly not functioning alone in this capacity. The exhibits within the historic cottage itself display instances of Schrein-

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er’s personal and literary narratives expanding into and contributing to larger national stories and landscapes of heritage. First, texts concerning Schreiner’s relationship to the town of Cradock, and then those describing her emotional connection to the larger geographical area of the Karoo desert, guide a visitor’s interpretation of Schreiner’s relationship to both the town and the expansive swath of desert that cuts through the country as vital players in the unfolding of South African history. The question is not why are these geographical spaces important, but how are Schreiner’s literary texts linked so intimately to these spaces? To what purpose does this connection serve the author museum, geographical literary tourism projects, or evolving national heritage mandates? And finally, in what way does the invocation of a literary landscape benefit the formations of identity for the local community? Thomas Jeffery writes compellingly advocating the creation of literary exhibits in the new Amazwi literary museum, which promote accessibility through their tone and content, thus using the unifying focus of ‘ideas of landscape and literature in their broadest possible sense’ (Jeffery 2012: 109). By involving community members in the creation of exhibits, and ensuring that there were multiple levels of access – academic and non-academic – the aim of Amazwi’s exhibits documenting the surrounding landscapes, and the stories related to them, was meant to ‘evoke the most elemental level of the idea that landscapes can have a powerful impact on writers and their writing’ (ibid.). If we look at the Olive Schreiner House, there is a similar project occurring; landscape and literature are connected, potentially working together in a way that make Schreiner’s work more accessible on multiple levels. Given the emphasis placed on Cradock in the story told of Schreiner and her literary works, it may come as a surprise that Olive Schreiner only lived in the house where the museum is located for two years, from 1868 to 1870. However, she did meet and marry her husband in Cradock, as well as live in various parts of the district at different times throughout her life. Schreiner would eventually purchase land on the top of Buffelskop, near the town, for her burial site, where she was reinterred in August 1921, having been buried originally in a family plot in Maitland near Cape Town. The sarcophagus housing Schreiner, her husband, their infant child and a beloved dog is still present at the top of the hill, though difficult to access owing to current land divisions. In Karel Schoeman’s study of Schreiner’s early life, he describes the Cradock she inhabited as ‘a pioneering country’, and gives a detailed description of the house as ‘a flat-roofed cottage in the typical Karoo style, situated on a corner plot, with four rooms and an added porch room at

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the front. It was simple but surprisingly spacious and sturdy’ (Schoeman 1991: 163–65). The house itself was restored by the insurance company A.A. Mutual Life in the 1980s, and declared a National Monument in 1986. These repairs to the historic home were necessary as the property had fallen into disrepair. The author museum today is now the same floor plan of four rooms, a hallway and a scullery as originally constructed, though no artefacts or furniture previously owned by the Schreiners’ are present. However, there are reproductions of portraits depicting the Schreiner family, and some period furniture in the living/dining area, as well as a kitchen with utensils from the period, such as a butter mould, for students and visitors to learn about. While the original domestic implements belonging to the family are absent, numerous authentic possessions of Olive Schreiner are found with the various manuscripts that are carefully housed in temperature-controlled cases: her medicine bag, pens, frames of pressed flowers from local walks, and her personal library of books. Schreiner moved to Cradock to live with two of her siblings at the impressionable age of twelve or thirteen, and found herself in a ‘difficult situation’ in living with ‘two such convinced and inflexible Christians’ (Schoeman 1991: 168). She attended the school where her elder brother Theo was headmaster, keeping an ambitious timetable in one of her journals, which was later included as one of the few mentions of Cradock in her husband Samuel Cron Cronwright-Schreiner’s biography of his late wife. His observations of her daily schedule are printed in his book alongside a portrait of Olive on her fourteenth birthday, and can be seen as rather indicative of the judgemental tone of the biography as a whole. He writes, ‘I think this timetable is worthless, except as her categorical setting down of what was proposed to be done, and then not doing it, a way she had almost to the last’ (Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 72). Cronwright-Schreiner goes on to offer a number of observations regarding her years in Cradock, and claims that ‘[n]o doubt she was much of her time in the garden (not necessarily working at it, except spasmodically and violently) and on the karoo veld, which, so to say, stretched from the door of the house, absorbed in her thought and happy in her love of solitude and wild nature’ (ibid.: 73). Currently, the author home’s exhibits present no speculations in regard to Olive Schreiner’s behaviour as a child in Cradock. Cronwright-Schreiner was also from the Cradock district, and after their marriage in 1894 the couple went to live at his farm, Kranz Plaats, for a year before moving to Kimberley. The story of the couple’s courtship is presented in the display titled ‘Schreiner in Love’, beginning with a

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letter by a younger Schreiner stating, ‘I shall never marry. I am not a marrying woman’ (OS House 2017). This sentiment changed when she met her husband and the shift in her attitude towards the institution is seen in the panel depicting her reinterment on Buffelskop titled ‘You and I’, as a reference to Schreiner’s request to be buried in the sarcophagus together with her loved ones. The exhibit panel reads, ‘It had always been Schreiner’s wish to be buried on Buffelskop, with its panoramic view of Cradock and the Karoo landscape’ (OS House 2017). The museum thus links the body of Schreiner to the surrounding geography in a very tangible way – through her grave. Naturally, there are numerous author’s homes that are near to or even on the same property as their subject’s final resting place. What makes this particular narrative of Schreiner’s choice interesting is that the sarcophagus is seen as a voyeuristic platform in which the spirit of Schreiner remains. Silently, the spirit of Schreiner is still there, overseeing Cradock and the beginning of the Karoo from above. Schreiner’s own words presented at the museum from the period of time she spent in Cradock are not centred wholly on the town itself, or on her living situation in the house, or on her intended burial site. Instead, using Schreiner’s own texts, the exhibits both link Schreiner to and situate Schreiner within the larger geographical area of the Karoo (of which Cradock sits on the border) through excerpts from her novels and essays, which are superimposed on enlarged photographs of the region. The importance of the Karoo is initially presented in a connection between Schreiner and the geographical region through her best-known novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), in an exhibit segment titled ‘The Story of an African Writer’. As this presentation takes place in the first room of the museum, the introduction a visitor receives is thus wholly informed by the context of the natural setting of the Karoo, and the repetitive presence of it in her texts. The house museum is presenting concurrent narratives in this first space – each linking the national geography of the Karoo to the biography of the author and to the literature she published. To this end, Schreiner’s quote from Thoughts on South Africa is presented before a series of other excerpts related to the Karoo and the countryside surrounding Cradock: ‘There is a certain knowledge of land which is only to be gained by one born in it or brought into long-continued, close, personal contact with it’ (OS House 2017). The quotes that follow underscore the ‘profound connection’ that Schreiner had with the Karoo, both in real life as well as in her writing, and the final excerpt links the country of South Africa to ‘a great fascinating woman … she liberates’ (OS House 2017). Schreiner and her literature are positioned as representing the new free spirit of South Africa – the country itself ‘liberates’ those within it.

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There is also an element of belonging, which is emphasized in this exhibit; Schreiner belongs to the land because not only is South Africa her birthplace, but she also spent a great deal of time and energy in the wild spaces of the Karoo. This ‘certain knowledge’ is thus initially presented in an exclusive manner, but given the situatedness of the museum in Cradock, Schreiner’s relationship with and understanding of the Karoo becomes a replicable experience that a contemporary visitor would be able to pursue and experience, even if they were not originally from the region. This narrative of Schreiner’s unique relationship with the land is an interesting element of the larger story being told in the museum; it grants her historical authority while concurrently linking the author to a larger geographical territory and heritage. Museums in former homes of authors often create possibilities for visitors to put themselves in the position of the author – behind a desk, in a special chair – but the Schreiner house does something else. What space there is for vicarious experience is found in a visitor’s potential visit to the Karoo. It is no accident that Schreiner was one of the few South African novelists to set stories in the Karoo in her literature. Throughout her numerous travels in South Africa, she was forced to witness both its characteristics of beauty and its tendency to evolve into an ‘inhospitable wasteland’ as one ventured further into the interior of the country (Schoeman 1991: 426). Schoeman notes that because Schreiner’s methods of travel were quite tedious and slow moving (carts, ox-wagons, etc.), she became ‘acquainted mainly with the Karoo on these travels, which naturally made her choose that region as a setting when she began writing. … she felt free to do so, and could view it with such intensity that her depiction of it immortalised both herself and the landscape’ (ibid.: 425). Schoeman also claims that the Karoo was not a suitable topic for novels until the publication of The Story of an African Farm in 1883 – a notable observation, which may qualify Schreiner as the first and perhaps final authority of its literary representation (ibid.: 429). There is another aspect of Schreiner’s life which might shed light on her fascination with the dry, desert-like conditions of the Karoo. The air of the Karoo is significantly different from the rest of the country in lacking humidity. From a young age Schreiner suffered from asthma, which rendered her struggling to breathe or unable work at various times in her life. Schreiner wrote often of her health and difficulties, naming her personal medicine bag – which is found on display in the author museum – ‘Tucker’ (OS House 2017). Focusing attention on the Karoo, and its importance to Schreiner’s personal well-being and literature, links the author to the landscape

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through both the textual content as well as the pictures of the Karoo adorning the walls. Along with narratives emphasizing Schreiner’s belonging and unique experience, this in turn creates an atmosphere that gives both the geographic place and the author a heightened importance in the national literary realm and in local cultural heritage. David Bunn refers to some spaces in South Africa as ‘heritage landscapes’, where an atmosphere of memory or cultural significance requires that ‘to understand the changing representation of national memory, we have to go outside the museum, or to the museum outside’ (Bunn 2006: 357–58). Bunn’s analysis of Kruger National Park discusses the deep cultural significance that land and space have for the collective memory of its residents as well as its visitors. In the case of the Karoo and Olive Schreiner, there is a similar project of linking geographic space to a larger national literary heritage, while concurrently encouraging visitors to associate a local woman’s free-thinking ideals to a larger national project of freedom and democracy. Interestingly, the museum’s emphasis on Schreiner’s self-cultivation through her writing and her ambitions for freedom may be seen in parallel to interpretations of The Story of an African Farm as an ‘anti-Bildungsroman’ (Treagus 2014: 108). Both thematically and structurally, the novel may be read as rejecting the usual requirements of the genre. Etsy found ‘an anti-developmental logic that shapes the entire novel’, which could be traced to the instability of ‘the tensions that were always at the core of the bildungsroman: the narratological tension between youth-as-plot and adulthood-as-closure, and the historical tension between modernization processes that never sleep and national discourses that posit origins and ends’ (Etsy 2007: 417, 423). Given the impossibilities faced by the characters in the novel, and the jumps in time that complicate any temporal developments, the usual satisfactory ending – an arrival into maturity – is absent. Two culprits of this destabilization of the genre are the colonial setting and sociopolitical limitations on women’s livelihoods. Treagus goes as far as asking: ‘Does Schreiner leave anything intact at the end of her bleak examination of European narratives in the context of colonial society?’ (Treagus 2014: 100). Both gender and agency are questioned in the fictional colonial context, and the novel does well in representing the anti-democratic structures that made self-development difficult or near impossible for women of the time. The Story of an African Farm thus works well as an integral part of the museum’s presentation of a fictional representation of a colonial system requiring a democratic intervention – one explored later in Ikhamanga Hall. If Schreiner’s best-known text is flipping the narrative of

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personal and social development characteristic of the genre of bildungsroman, while criticizing the colonial spaces that negate such developmental possibilities, the argument for promoting Schreiner as a visionary for a new democracy is strong indeed. In the connection of all four of these elements in the house museum, the narratives of both Olive Schreiner and new democracy are able to expand beyond the literary realm into the South African geographic consciousness, and further into sociopolitical discourse. In the consideration of similar contextual constructions in Israeli house museums, scholars found that ‘national memory atmosphere’ can be developed and provoked when the narratives in a house museum emphasize both local and national sentiments (Dekel and Vinitzy-Seroussi 2017: 350). The question that remains is how a memory atmosphere or a heritage landscape is suggested or presented via narratives in an author museum.

Narrative Expansion: Literature and Heritage Landscapes Because of the specific complications in South African history as both a postcolonial state and a postapartheid democracy, narrative analysis offers a way to look closely at what types of stories are being told, whose stories are being told, how they are being told and in what spatial context they are presented (who has access to these stories). The discussion of narrative in this chapter is additionally encouraged by the literary nature of house museums – spaces that bring to life authors who have penned stories or narratives of significance. Throughout the close-reading of the stories and texts presented in this author museum, I use the phrase ‘narrative expansion’ to suggest a trend in postapartheid museums and their communicative texts. The use of this term is rooted in an acknowledgment that South African museums have added to, subtracted from, and/or redeveloped their exhibitions and spaces. In addition, new museums promoting new democratic narratives have been created to record and share previously untold histories, fulfilling the needs of communities that have previously been unserved; just a few examples of many are the Freedom Park in Pretoria, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, the Mpumalanga Heritage Museum near Durban and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. If we are to understand author museums from a pre-apartheid historical period in the context of the new presentations of previously unshared or suppressed histories, such a study requires a term that acknowledges the change and expansion that is occurring across a multitude of South African cultural arenas. Additionally, there are many

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potential sites beyond those pertaining to historical authors when investigating whether a memory atmosphere or a heritage landscape is suggested or presented via narrative expansion. But are there really so many new or expanding narratives? In the years following the end of apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) played an important role in the shaping of new narratives, both personal and national. Tanya Goodman found in her study, Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Africa, that the TRC ‘set the stage for a new national narrative, and the stories which were heard inside its walls became threads in the social drama of trauma and triumph’ (Goodman 2009: 3). As new stories and narratives were brought to light out of processes like the TRC, the possibility of new social, political, museological and literary narratives within South Africa also formed. But what was to happen to the literary texts that had come from the time before reconciliation? From before the apartheid era? Olive Schreiner’s author museum is an example of a narrative expansion that explains the relevance of the author’s texts within the new South African sociopolitical context, while linking the historical figure of Schreiner to the heritage landscape of the Karoo. While this invocation of landscape as a vital ingredient to an author’s legacy is unique for an author museum in South Africa, there are two examples from the United Kingdom that suggest that expanding narratives to include local as well as national spaces is not uncommon around sites of literary heritage. Haworth Parsonage, where the Brontë sisters wrote their Gothic novels, is a good comparison to the Olive Schreiner House in the sense that the geographical location of Haworth, like Cradock, is also ‘regional and marginal to the nation, … standing in fragile and constricted domestic contradistinction to the wildness of the surrounding moors’ (Watson 2006: 106). If one were to replace ‘moors’ with ‘Karoo’, the description would suit the Schreiner house just as well. Haworth, in fact, does such a good job inserting the Brontë sisters as characters into the surrounding landscape that Watson pointedly observed that ‘[s]uch, it seems, is the condition of female authorship; to be successful as a woman writer is only to be co-opted as a figure subjected to her own fictive landscapes’ (ibid.: 126). Although both of the author museums intimately link their former occupants to the nature surrounding their historic homes and to the natural worlds that they described in their novels, one key difference between the Schreiner house and Haworth is the absence of Schreiner as an inhabitant, still imaginatively living in the former home. While there is staging of period-appropriate furniture, the Schreiner house does not actively recreate the home as it was lived in by Schreiner. Haworth, on

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the other hand, invites visitors to imagine that the Brontës have just stepped out for a moment. Another example of a heritage landscape working together with an expanding narrative surrounding an author museum is found at Beatrix Potter’s former home Hill Top in the Lake District, UK, where the building and attached gardens are now a museum run by the National Trust. Using some of Potter’s best-known stories for children, the author museum encourages visitors to place themselves inside of the story-world created by Potter in the early 1900s. The official website encourages visitors to explore her garden recreated ‘as its creator intended’ in order to see ‘the rhubarb patch where Jemima Puddle-Duck tried to hide her eggs and the view up the slate-flagged garden path, captured in The Tale of Tom Kitten’ (‘Beatrix Potter’s Garden’ 2019). In this way, Potter’s garden is another version of a heritage landscape – though an obviously different sort from that found near the Olive Schreiner House Museum. Watson has observed that Hill Top as an author museum encourages visitors to ‘engage in reading the house as a text rather than as a writer’s or illustrator’s workshop’ (Watson 2006: 203). This encouragement included the gardens staged for fictional interpretations as much as the home itself. In this way, Potter’s texts could be expanded to include the natural surroundings and interpreted in a broader scope than the small books of tales would otherwise have encouraged. While Potter’s author museum may not have the sweeping moors of Haworth or the wide expanse of the Karoo to call upon, the heritage landscape invoked is that of an English garden – a space that is accessible, nostalgic, and easy for visitors to identify with. Curiously, of the two museums set in the historic homes of English-language authors in South Africa, only the Schreiner house actively links the author to a heritage landscape. The other, the Sol Plaatje Museum in Kimberley, demonstrates a different angle of presentation. Plaatje’s former home contains two rooms with educational information regarding the author and his contributions to local and national journalism, as well as a modest research library. There are no staged artefacts or spaces recreating what the home would have looked like during Plaatje’s residence, if a visitor wished to imagine themself into Plaatje’s biography, nor is there much evidence of his success as the first African man to publish a novel, Mhudi, in the English language.4 His gravesite is close by, however, and the museum does well to include that information, linking him closely to the community both in his life and in his death. The Olive Schreiner House takes a different approach from that of Plaatje – one that gives a gentle nod to the scene of Schreiner at home receiving her visitors, with the front room decked out in period-appropri-

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ate furniture, but that neither places the visitor within one of her fictional texts nor encourages ghostly glimpses of Schreiner in the hallway. Instead, narratives in the museum present a literary experience of her biography in a way that places the author in her grave within the historical landscape that she wrote about so passionately, while Ikhamanga Hall brings her ideas to the present day and links them to the contemporary political environment. This is straightforward enough; however, the way in which the museum’s narratives expand Schreiner’s impact on and literary understanding of the geography of the Karoo is an exceptional example of an author museum resituating its subject in a new way. Thinking back to Vladislavić’s story, the visitors can again view the historic bench, sit on the new bench and still have a hard time distinguishing which is which. In many ways, museums in South Africa have followed the evolution coined by Stephen Weil as ‘from being about something to being for somebody’ (Weil 2002: 28). Weil found that what museums were offering the public in the United States between 1970 and 1997 swiftly evolved from ‘mere refreshment (the museum as carbonated beverage) to education (the museum as a site for informal learning) to nothing short of communal empowerment (the museum as an instrument for social change)’ (ibid.: 34). In a presentation of Schreiner that underscores the ‘belonging’ of those who spend time in the Karoo, or Cradock for that matter, the author museum is not only expanding Schreiner’s national literary relevance, it is pointedly including visitors and community members who may not have previously associated themselves with Schreiner. In weaving visitors into the story of Schreiner’s Karoo, as well as incorporating Schreiner’s historical ideas in a new context in Ikhamanga Hall, the Schreiner house is decidedly ‘about’ Schreiner, but the narrative expansion within the home and the communal space is decidedly ‘for’ the community. In this way, literary tourists have their expectations addressed within a heritage space that benefits more than just the one-time visitor. Given the work being done at Amazwi and at the Olive Schreiner House, there is reason to argue that the desire to maintain Schreiner’s author museum as a destination for both literary education as well as tourism has resulted in an example of narrative expansion – an expansion of the historical pre-apartheid literary texts to incorporate the spirit of the new democracy. Schreiner’s writings – both fictional and non-fictional – laid bare the complications of her gender and her place in a colonial society. Yet, Schreiner’s explorations and destabilizations of traditional literary genres and traditional lifestyles lend themselves to the museum’s thoughtful exploration of what democracy can look like for a nation that is still healing. This expansion is seen in the elements of physical addi-

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tion – the building of Ikhamanga Hall – and in the linking of Schreiner as a historical figure to a particular section of South African geography, the Karoo. Additionally, there has been an expansion of a temporal nature: Schreiner is now not only timeless because of her literary relevance for contemporary readers; her gravesite places her body centrally in the day-to-day life of the museum and the Karoo. Through this narrative expansion, the house museum becomes an arrow that points outward to a national heritage landscape instead of inward to a purely biographical space or national memorial of sorts. The Olive Schreiner House balances a careful historical account of Schreiner while locating her within the landscape of South Africa through her relationship with and representation of the Karoo. The literary landscape, in turn, contributes another part in the ongoing project of identity formation for a local community reshaping its future. In that way, the museum becomes a historical place marker for international literary tourists and South African tourists alike. Dana Ryan Lande’s background in literature, narrative theory, and South African heritage resulted in her PhD dissertation, ‘Narrative Ethics in an Evolving Society: The Short Fiction of Nadine Gordimer’. As a postdoctoral research fellow with the TRAUM project at the University of Oslo, Lande focused on the literary heritage and narrative evolutions found in the house museums of Olive Schreiner and Sol Plaatje in South Africa. Lande is currently a research fellow at the Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, exploring provenance and forgery reporting in twentieth- and twenty-first-century media outlets, with a particular focus on the narrative rhetoric, ethical implications and contextual framing of historical artefacts.

Notes  1. James Phelan states that ‘narrative is itself an event – more specifically, a multidimensional purposive communication from a teller to an audience. The concern with purpose informs the analysis of narrative phenomena, including the core elements: how has the teller tried to shape these materials in the service of her larger ends?’ (Phelan 2017: 4).  2. In another article, I discuss the intersections occurring in the Schreiner House between different narratives concerning Schreiner and the postapartheid democracy discussed within the museum (Lande 2020). The present chapter builds upon that work in that it approaches the museum with a larger project of finding where the narratives of Schreiner expand and incor-

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porate the South African geographical landscape as a fundamental element of literary tourism and heritage.  3. All quotes from exhibits in the Olive Schreiner House were documented in 2017 will hereafter be cited as ‘OS House 2017’.  4. I have explored of the nuances of Sol Plaatje’s literary legacy in his author museum in a previous article (Lande 2018).

References ‘Beatrix Potter’s Garden’. 2019. National Trust. Retrieved 10 October 2019 from https:// www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/beatrix-potters-garden. Bunn, D. 2006. ‘The Museum Outdoors: Heritage, Cattle, and Permeable Borders in the Southwestern Kruger National Park’, in I. Karp et al. (eds), Museum Frictions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 357–91. Corsane, G. 2004. ‘Transforming Museums and Heritage in Postcolonial and Post-apartheid South Africa: The Impact of Process of Policy Formulation and New Legislation’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 48(1): 5–15. Cronwright-Schreiner, S.C. 1924. The Life of Olive Schreiner. London: Unwin. Davidon, P. 1998. ‘Museums and the Reshaping of Memory’, in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, pp. 143–60. Dekel, I., and V. Vinitzky-Seroussi. 2017. ‘A Living Place: On the Sociology of Atmosphere in Home Museums’, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 4(3): 336–62. Department of Arts and Culture. 2014. ‘Draft National Museums Policy’. Retrieved 5 October 2019 from http://www.dac.gov.za/content/national-museums-policyconsultative-workshop-programme-14-15-aug-cape-town. Etsy, J. 2007. ‘The Colonial Bildungsroman: “The Story of an African Farm” and the Ghost of Goethe’, Victorian Studies 49(3): 407–30. Goodman, T. 2009. Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Africa. London: Paradigm. Hall, J. 1995. ‘Museums, Myths and Missionaries: Redressing the Past for a New South Africa’, in E. Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), Museum, Media, Message. London: Routledge, pp. 175–85. Hodge, C.J., and C.M. Beranek. 2011. ‘Dwelling: Transforming Narratives at Historic House Museums’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 17(2): 97–101. Jeffery, T. 2012. ‘Creating Common Ground: Transforming the Exhibition Landscape of the National English Literary Museum’, English Studies in Africa 55(1): 107–25. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 2006. ‘Exhibitionary Complexes’, in I. Karp et al. (eds), Museum Frictions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 35–45. Lande, D.R. 2018. ‘Reading Sol Plaatje in Kimberley: A South African Author Museum’, South African Journal of Cultural History 32(2): 47–60. ———. 2020. ‘Narrative Intersections in an Author Museum: The Olive Schreiner House’, Narrative Culture 7(1): 60–78.

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McEachern, C. 2007. ‘Mapping the Memories: Politics, Place and Identity in the District Six Museum, Cape Town’, in S. Watson (ed.), Museums and their Communities. London: Routledge, 457–78. Nuttall, S., and C. Coetzee (eds). 1998. Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Olive Schreiner House (OS House). 2017. [See Note 3 for an explanation]. Phelan, J. 2017. Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Rankin, E. 2013. ‘Creating/Curating Cultural Capital: Monuments and Museums for Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Humanities 2: 72–98. Rankin, E., and C. Hamilton. 1998. ‘Revision, Reaction, Re-vision: The Role of Museums in (a) Transforming South Africa’, Museum Anthropology 22(3): 3–13. Rassool, C. 2006. ‘Community Museums, Memory Politics, and Social Transformation in South Africa: Histories, Possibilities, and Limits’ in I. Karp et al. (eds), Museum Frictions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 286–321. ‘Red Location Museum Held to Ransom’. 2016. Mail & Guardian, 21 April. Retrieved 24 January 2020 from https://mg.co.za/article/2016-04-21-red-location-museumheld-to-ransom/. Schoeman, K. 1991. Olive Schreiner: A Woman in South Africa 1855–1881. Parklands: Jonathan Ball. Schreiner, Olive. 1923. Thoughts on South Africa. Ed. S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner. London: T.F. Unwin. Soudien, C. 2012. ‘Emerging Discourses around Identity in New South African Museums’, in B.M. Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Chichester: Blackwell, pp. 397–405. Steenkamp, A. 2006. ‘Apartheid to Democracy: Representation and Politics in the Voortrekker Monument and Red Location Museum’, Theory 10(3/4): 249–54. Stiebel, L. 2004. ‘Hitting the Hot Spots: Literary Tourism as a Research Field with Particular Reference to KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’, Critical Arts 18(2): 31–44. Thompson, L. 2000. A History of South Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Treagus, M. 2014. Empire Girls: The Colonial Heroine Comes of Age. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. Vladislavić, I. 1996. Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories. Cape Town: David Philip. Watson, N.J. 2006. The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Weil, S.E. 2002. Making Museums Matter. Washington, DC: Smithsonian. Witz, L. 2006. ‘Transforming Museums on Postapartheid Tourist Routes’, in I. Karp et al. (eds), Museum Frictions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 107–34. Young, L. 2015. ‘Literature, Museums, and National Identity; or, Why Are There So Many Writers’ House Museums in Britain?’, Museum History Journal 8(2): 229–46.

Chapter 11

Troublesome Heritage in the Home of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson Marianne Egeland

When Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson died in Paris in 1910, aged seventy-seven, he was perhaps the most famous of all Norwegians. The return of his coffin to Norway appeared as a triumphant procession worthy of a king. Travelling from country to country, the attention the departed received confirmed Bjørnson’s unrivalled position and larger than life identity. Hundreds of thousands paid their respects in Copenhagen. In Kristiania, as the Norwegian capital was called until 1925, the actual monarch, King Haakon, waited for the coffin to arrive, together with the prime minister and a large crowd of mourners. What could possibly be troublesome about a museum dedicated to such a man? After all, the Nobel Prize winner in literature for 1903 was lauded by the Nobel committee for ‘his noble, magnificent and versatile poetry, which has always been distinguished by both the freshness of its inspiration and the rare purity of its spirit’ (The Nobel Prize 2021). He was an advocate for all worthy causes who, people were saying, might just as well have been awarded the Noble Peace Prize. And his social commitment and transnational activism, his support of Alfred Dreyfus and of ethnic minorities, such as Slovaks persecuted by the Hungarian regime, made Bjørnson a household name on the continent. Bjørnson’s home from 1875, Aulestad, quickly gained a reputation as a chieftain’s seat of goodwill. Opened to the public in 1935, Aulestad is one of Norway’s oldest and most complete house museums. However, marketing Aulestad in the usual way for similar poets’ homes – for instance, Dove Cottage and Orchard House – as a special site giving privileged access to the author, his work and fictional characters, proved

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another matter. When a campaign was launched in 1890 to save William Wordsworth’s cottage in the Lake District and turn it into a museum, it was promoted as a particularly inspirational, authentically Wordsworthian place, although the poet had lived there for no more than a few years. Because he had written some of his most beloved – Grasmere – poems in Dove Cottage, spokesmen described it as a place filled with sacred knowledge, where visitors could walk in the landscape celebrated by Wordsworth and, so to speak, enter into his poems (Atkin 2009). Louisa May Alcott lived for an even shorter time in the house that her father had bought after she had grown up. But she did write Little Women in Orchard House, her classic coming-of-age story, and to this day the museum in Concord, Massachusetts markets itself as ‘the Home of Little Women’. The narrative about Alcott’s factual family blends into a dramatization of the fictitious family we meet in her books. Unlike Wordsworth and Alcott, Bjørnson did not write any of his wellknown poems, dramas or prose fiction at Aulestad. How can the relationship between man and place be mythified and marketed to tourists if there is no help to be had from texts that readers identify with, and thus relies all the more on the poet’s heroic status? My main object in this chapter is to study the musealization of Aulestad: how Bjørnson and his home came to be constructed as ‘inseparable’ and predestined for each other, and how the museum has handled the dark side of its heritage. The second question results from Aulestad having been turned into a propaganda centre for the Nazis during the Second World War by Bjørnson’s own family. How does Nazism and the persecution of Jews tally with the image of the poet’s home as an auratic place of pilgrimage? The source materials under investigation span more than a hundred years, and were written by people close to Bjørnson (friends, family members and museum managers) and by representatives for the 1920s drive to secure Aulestad as a national property. They all contributed to establishing a distinctive Aulestad discourse, building on a myth of man, place and country overlapping with another ‘trinity’ consisting of man, home and people. Considering that it was the poet’s wife, Karoline Bjørnson, who actually created the home we visit, and who lived there much longer than her husband, another pertinent question in the investigation is what room the story about such an apparently indivisible relationship as Bjørnson and Aulestad’s leaves for the woman behind it. Their son Erling Bjørnson’s treason file, Nazi propaganda and employment of his father’s name and work to validate his own ideology likewise forms part of my material. Depending on knowledge of its history, Aulestad may elicit ambivalent or even contradictory associations, ranging from ‘chieftain’s seat of goodwill’

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to ‘Nazi lair’, and the authority of a one-sided – monolithic – presentation may easily be questioned.

Unity of the Man and the Place Twelve years after Bjørnson died, Aftenposten (the largest Norwegian daily at the time), invited the whole nation to help finance the purchase of his farm in the eastern part of Norway, about twelve miles north of Lillehammer. The Bjørnsons moved to Aulestad in 1875 after several years abroad. Having fallen out with former friends and associates over political questions concerning Denmark’s relations with Germany, exchanging Scandinavian solidarity for pan-Germanic leanings, Bjørnson wanted peace and quiet in the countryside, where he could dedicate himself to farming and to new friends close by. But very quickly the quiet and the expenses of running Aulestad got to him. He longed for action, and once more fell out with friends, now over religious issues. Pious neighbours could not follow him in a much-publicized break with the state church. Arriving at Aulestad, the forty-two-year-old Bjørnson was renowned as a former theatre manager, journalist and editor, a pioneering author in several genres, a public speaker and an easily excitable debater. Seen in retrospect, and given his volatile temperament, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that shortly after he declared his future as made for Aulestad (Hoem 2009: 595), Bjørnson repeatedly tried selling the place, the first time in 1877. During just a six-month period (January–June 1880), Aulestad was advertised for sale more than thirty times in one national newspaper (Dagbladet). A regional paper announced that Bjørnson planned to settle in Germany (Nedenæs Amtstidende, 21 February 1880). Over the years, Bjørnstjerne and Karoline Bjørnson spent more time away from Aulestad than actually living there, and for long stretches they stayed abroad for years on end without returning even during the summer. Consequently, the author mainly composed his work on the continent and not at Aulestad. Nevertheless, the connection between Bjørnson and Aulestad was from the very beginning characterized as natural and fated: the man and the place were ‘meant’ for each other, the poet residing as a chieftain on his seat in the centre of Norway, representing everything that was good about the nation. We see elements of the narrative developed in a travel reportage from 1880 by a visiting Swede, who notes that Aulestad had (already) attained ‘historic fame’ because of Bjørnson. But the reporter adroitly refrains from mentioning his efforts to get rid of the place.1 The following

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year yet another panegyrical reportage appeared in a Copenhagen weekly, signed by one of his admirers. Amalie Müller (later an esteemed writer under the surname Skram) claims that seeing him at Aulestad, residing there like a proud and independent earl, the visitor realizes how closely the poet is united with his native country (Skram 1982: 178). The first substantial presentation of Bjørnson and his home, published three years before the poet died, consolidates what we might call the Aulestad discourse, when his long-time friend and affiliate Johan Filseth maintains that Bjørnson and Aulestad were ‘inseparable’ and ‘inextricable’. As a consequence, the place itself was ‘historic’. Filseth moreover claimed that Bjørnson had sent out the major part of his writing from Aulestad, and that, except for ‘short interruptions’, he had lived there permanently from when they arrived (Filseth 1907: 2) – obviously stretching the truth to the extent of rewriting it. If he had mentioned that Bjørnson had moved to Paris in the autumn of 1882, and for five years only came home for one visit, the asserted inseparability might seem questionable, especially as the long absences continued during the 1890s and to the very end. As editor of a regional paper (Glåmdalen) and a prominent member of the community, Filseth championed both the man and the place. Buttressing the status of the latter by the fame and recognition of the former did not exactly have an adverse effect on local interests. Sold via Narvesen, a national chain of newsstands, his illustrated booklet in large format catered to a potentially large market. Once seen as somewhat of a rebel, Bjørnson had for decades been appreciated as more of a national ‘founding father’ by major sections of the population. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson og Aulestad (Filseth 1907) invites the reader into the poet’s country courtyard and into his house, showing photos of family scenes and interior decorations. Filseth describes Aulestad as one of the valley’s largest and finest farms, its owner a superman possessing purely admirable qualities. The portrait is hagiographic through and through, and contains nothing morally offensive, such as infidelities, public controversies or unfortunate investments – which were impossible for later biographers to overlook. Neither does it present anything that might undermine the mythologized relationship – efforts to sell, long absences and feelings of confinement. Filseth’s Bjørnson is a venerated and flawless paterfamilias who seemingly lived and wrote for Aulestad. Most fittingly, then, he also gets credit for all the refurbishments that turned the place into a cosy home and an exemplary farm. Despite Karoline’s tireless work indoors as well as outdoors, masterminding the extreme makeover as witnessed by the family

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(B. Bjørnson 1932; E. Bjørnson 1957), she merely appears in supportive roles as secretary and ‘good wife’ (Filseth 1907: 14). In Soldage paa Aulestad [Sunny days at Aulestad] (Boeck 1910), a Bjørnson eulogy published three years after Filseth’s, and shortly after the poet passed away, it becomes evident that the mystification of an organic bond between man and place may be seen as a form of rationalization. From his visits, the Danish author Christopher Boeck remembers Bjørnson as a regal giant with a personality that required a grand scenery. Simply from watching the poet at close hand did Boeck understand Aulestad’s importance for him and his work. Boeck delivers a circular reasoning. If Bjørnson is grand, he needs a grand scenery; then Aulestad likewise has to be grand, the logic seems to be. However, for Norwegians from other parts of the country, the nature around Aulestad does not necessarily stand out as more majestic than a multitude of other places. And for the locals, Aulestad might just as likely have reminded them of the coaching inn it once used to be.

Man and Nation, Home and People The intimate linking of geography and biography is equally explicit in the 1920s fundraising with the objective of buying Aulestad and turning it into a national property. The variables in the equation are now expanded to comprise the whole nation in the way indicated by Amalie Müller/ Skram. Originally, the initiative to save Aulestad came from a regional museum (De Sandvigske Samlinger, at Maihaugen in Lillehammer). An appeal to the government garnered sympathy but no money.2 The solution was to mobilize the public on a large scale, helped by the press. Announced in Aftenposten over the first four broadsheet pages on 4 November 1922, with the headline: ‘Aulestad skal sikres det norske folk som nationaleiendom. Folkeindsamlingen aabnes i dag’ [Aulestad must be secured for the Norwegian people as a national property. The popular collection opens today], the centrepiece in the campaign was a petition on the front page entitled ‘To the Norwegian People!’, signed by twenty-four luminaries. Representing the nation’s cultural, political and economic elites, the two women and twenty-two men appealed to everybody who owed a debt of gratitude to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. That meant apparently all Norwegians. Every man, woman and child ought to feel an obligation to save Bjørnson’s home and ‘chieftain’s seat’. No other country possessed a comparable memorial to their great son. Headed by prime minister Otto Blehr, the twenty-four signatories were convinced that once they

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had announced the initiative to raise money for Aulestad it would be a matter of fact, and would be effectuated at the latest by the poet’s ninetieth birthday on 8 December 1922. It was a question of honour, and what the people wanted, they claimed. The overall message conveyed in the mixture of motivations published by Aftenposten emphasizes a close and unique relation between Aulestad and Bjørnson – whether it was in the general feature article, the book extracts or the many declarations of support. But then anything else would have been impossible. Why would poor as well as rich let themselves be mobilized unless the writer’s house was an exceptional place that had to be saved – and as a national property at that. To justify the project, Bjørnson is defined as Norway’s greatest son and primary nation-builder, he and Aulestad are Norway. The imagined unity they constitute evidently epitomizes the nation, both spiritually and physically. People owed it to themselves, to the country and to Bjørnson to save his home, the argument went. It was simply a patriotic gesture to contribute in return for everything he had given to the nation: wonderful poems and stories, national pride, high ideals to strive for, and even the lyrics of the national anthem. The initiators furthermore stressed what an excellent deal this was, because Bjørnson’s widow had offered to sell for a low price, and the acquisition of Aulestad would secure an invaluable site of national heritage. We recognize several rhetorical components from the so-called Wordsworth Story, highlighted in Polly Atkin’s analysis ‘Ghosting Grasmere: The Musealisation of Dove Cottage’ (Atkin 2009). Both campaigns describe their particular poet’s house as a place of historic importance, filled with memories and sacred knowledge pertinent to the collective remembrance, and thus a site of worship. At the same time, they also market a business proposition, detailing the invaluable benefits to be had from the investment. An arsenal of positive epithets connected with Bjørnson’s name and with the author’s role are enlisted in the effort to persuade donors to contribute their mite. He was nothing less than a genius, a prophet, a hero and an uncrowned king. A lengthy extract from Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: Høvdingen [Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: The chieftain], by Gerhard Gran (1910: 3–4), professor of Nordic literary history, expands on Bjørnson’s sovereignty in a discourse typical around the turn of the century – a discourse proceeding from a cult of the leader, ruler, chieftain and commander related to Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (Carlyle 1841, Norwegian translation 1888). The worship of the great man reflects a patriarchal and nationalistic ideology

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dominating the public conversation in Norway until associations with the Third Reich’s Führer cult no longer made such language viable. Notwithstanding the timeliness – and now long-datedness – of their rhetoric, the advocates of acquiring Aulestad draw an endless time horizon, ‘for ever’ and ‘for eternity’, incarnated by the indivisible unity they are promoting. ‘The nation’s greatest man’ and Aulestad, ‘so wonderful and Norwegian’, where ‘his spirit resides’ and he was ‘never more … himself ’, ‘never more glorious’ (on the front page of the aforementioned Aftenposten, 4 November 1922), constitute an unrivalled combination: man, place and nation are one, and Aulestad may consequently be revered as the home of the national family. If Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage was praised as the home of all homes by its campaigners (Atkin 2009: 90), Aulestad a generation later appears as its Norwegian counterpart. The idealization of Aulestad in this sense takes place on several levels, in addition to it housing the man described as Norway’s most important and exemplary person. As Norway’s home of homes and home of the national family, Aulestad figuratively stands for the nation. Following this line of thinking, everybody may be seen as bound to preserve the metaphorical home of all Norwegians. Bjørnson was furthermore frequently characterized as ‘the poet of the home’, a writer who simply ‘loved’ his home and cherished true family values (Aftenposten, 4 November 1922). He also saw himself as such a ‘poet of the home’ (Amdam 1960: 235; Skram 1982: 179).

Not So Easily Done Aftenposten continued to advance the project during the following days and weeks along with newspapers around the country, printing updates about the amount of money collected, all kinds of initiatives to raise money and the many individuals, groups and institutions that backed the cause. The campaign made it across the Atlantic to the Norwegian settlements in the United States. Organizations and societies seemed to compete about having had a particularly close tie with Bjørnson and being favoured by him with poems and attention. Spokesmen for farmers, children, hunters, singers, teachers and emigrants among others declared that they therefore had the greatest debt of gratitude to pay (for instance, Aftenposten 11, 18 and 22 November 1922; Nordisk Tidende 23 November). Supporters likewise seemed to compete in the use of hyperbole and exclamation marks to underline their unreserved enthusiasm for the poet and for saving his home.

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In spite of the massive campaign, manifold backing and conviction that the proclamation of the initiative amounted to its accomplishment, money did not come rolling in. On the contrary, the collection went ‘pitifully slowly’ (Trondhjems Adresseavis, 24 November 1922). The initiators had obviously overestimated people’s willingness to convert non-committal sympathy into cash. These were hard times and, as critical voices pointed out, people were starving and lacking places to live themselves, and now they were expected to donate money for turning a perfectly good house into a museum that nobody would live in. One commentator compared author museums to the cultivation of religious relics (Dagbladet, 7 November 1922), and another called Aulestad an empty shell and claimed that Bjørnson’s true spirit resided in his writing. Left-wing papers protested against the conservative press for co-opting a poet they had previously attacked, and for using the fundraising to promote themselves and to create amusement for high society (Social-Demokraten, 7 November 1922, p. 4; Arbeidet, 1 December 1922, p. 4). The establishment may have adopted Bjørnson as their man, and as the greatest Norwegian of all; nonetheless, it took three and a half years to raise enough money to buy Aulestad – not just a month as had initially been envisioned. According to the settlement with Karoline Bjørnson, announced in Aftenposten and other newspapers on 9 July 1926, she could stay on as long as she wished. The widow kept Aulestad until her death in 1934 at the age of 98, and her history at Aulestad thus lasted twenty-four years longer than Bjørnson’s. Aulestad: Karoline og Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons hjem [Aulestad: Home of Karoline and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson] opened to the public the following year. It is one of Norway’s oldest, best-preserved and most authentic house museums; the interior is presented as the owners left it, as if they might return at any minute. The first and longest-serving curator was Else Bjørnson, granddaughter of Bjørnstjerne and Karoline, and daughter of their youngest son, Erling, who had taken over the farm years before his father died. Else Bjørnson was raised on what they called ‘lower Aulestad’, and the poet’s residence-turned-museum was located close by, on ‘upper Aulestad’. As Aulestad’s curator, Else Bjørnson managed a museum as well as a family legacy. She was careful to emphasize Karoline’s contribution and the justification of her inclusion in the official name (E. Bjørnson 1957). She thereby confirmed what her uncle Bjørn, the Bjørnsons’ eldest son, had noted in his memoir, that Aulestad was first and foremost ‘mother’s house’, an opinion condoned by Bjørnstjerne himself (B. Bjørnson

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1932: 15, 17). In the family, everybody agreed that Aulestad was a manifestation of her work, taste and design.

Aulestad at War Five years into the job, Else Bjørnson faced what must have been impossible challenges of a private and a professional kind when her father, one sister and a niece joined the NS (Nasjonal Samling [National Unity]), a Nazi political party supporting the German occupation of Norway during the Second World War, and the only party allowed to function at the time. After the war, all members of the NS were sentenced for treason, and they lost their civil rights – some for longer than others. A second son of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson also joined the NS, but he died before the war ended and so did not have to face the consequences like the other Nazi members of the family, spanning three generations. Erling’s daughter Aslaug Bjørnson was sentenced to six months in prison, having worked for the female paramilitary wing of the NS. She campaigned for the Germans and the Nazi cause, both in writing and at public meetings. Her daughter Bergljot came to school dressed in Nazi uniform, and when the other pupils reacted, they were reported to the authorities and threatened with being sent to a youth detention centre. The Bjørnsons had powerful connections everywhere, including Vidkun Quisling’s collaborationist government. Not feeling welcome at school, Bergljot joined the Nazified National Theatre as an actor. Compared to Erling Bjørnson, his daughter and granddaughter were minor Nazi offenders along with thousands of other Norwegians. But they both contributed to the negative implications of the museum’s name locally and nationally, giving Aulestad as their domicile at the treason trials. Erling, on the other hand, a Member of Parliament for the Farmers’ Party when the war started, was sentenced as a major Nazi to ten years in prison and to pay a substantial fine. He was sentenced for having engaged in extensive Nazi propaganda, for consorting with high-ranking Norwegian and German Nazis whom he entertained at Aulestad, for using his father and the family name to gain economic advantages, and for robbing his Jewish sister-in-law (widow of Bjørn, who was not a Nazi) of her rightful inheritance.3 According to the prosecutor, Erling Bjørnson had aided and abetted in the persecution of Jews. As an MP with a ‘grand and respected name’, representing a region where Aulestad and Bjørnson had a special and ven-

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erated standing, his actions were believed to have had disastrous consequences. In the verdict, pronounced on 24 January 1946, the judges refer to the Supreme Court’s sentence of Quisling and the expression ‘outrageous treacherous conduct’ as applicable also to Erling Bjørnson. His file in the national treason archive is voluminous, despite containing only some of the many articles he wrote in support of Germany, Hitler and the Nazi ideology – articles that first were broadcast as lectures on public radio or given at meetings, and then printed by news agencies and dailies all over Norway. A search in the National Library’s digitized stacks reveals how active Erling Bjørnson actually was (Egeland 2018a: 309–10). Helped by Nazified newspapers and news agencies, his impact area covered the whole country, and he kept up the propaganda throughout the war, praising ‘Hitler’s brilliant leadership’ (‘Hitlers geniale lederskap’) as late as May 1945 (Norwegian Radio, 2 May 1945; Adresseavisen, 3 May 1945, p. 3; Bergens Tidende, 5 May 1945, p. 3). The extent of Bjørnson’s activity is further reflected in the considerable amount of money he made on his articles, where he repeatedly invoked and quoted from his father’s work to strengthen his own advocacy of Germany as a stronghold against England, Russia, Communism and a world-embracing Jewish conspiracy. He agitated for Norwegian men to enlist as soldiers in the German army, claimed he was certain that his father would have consented with his Nazi beliefs, and even insisted that Bjørnstjerne would have been ‘delighted’ with Hitler. Hitler would have made him look confidently to the future and trust that justice would prevail (Aftenposten, 29 August 1944, p. 2). We may wonder on what grounds the son made such claims about his father. Erling Bjørnson’s treason file moreover documents the many ways he tried to cash in on his famous name and residence, both at home and abroad, being introduced in Germany as the son of the celebrated writer and great admirer of German culture. He had articles printed in German papers, participated at stately events, and received royalties from wartime productions of his father’s plays. During the treason trial, Erling Bjørnson did not repent anything. He was still a believing National Socialist, maintaining that he had wanted to defend home and country against Communism and the red danger from the East, and that he loved the German people, having spent his childhood in Germany with his father. Despite the long prison sentence, Bjørnson served no more than five months in custody, as he and his lawyers repeatedly asked for pardon, leniency and postponements. They pleaded old age and a weak constitution, and produced several health certificates declaring that he would not survive prison. Bjørnson was aged

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77 when the war ended, and he died in December 1959 at the age of 91. However, he did not succeed in having his fine remitted, and in the end paid the total amount. The public reacted strongly when learning that Erling Bjørnson did not have to serve his sentence. A visitor to Aulestad expressed consternation at discovering the convict walking around as a free man next door to the museum. The headline neatly sums up his newspaper commentary as well as the museum’s image problem: ‘Traitor as main attraction at the national site Aulestad’ (‘Landssviker som førsteattraksjon på nasjonalstedet Aulestad’, Friheten, 9 September 1946; Lillehammer Tilskuer, 11 September 1946). The protests were even louder in March 1949 when Bjørnson had an article printed in a Nazi publication, criticizing the treason trials and claiming that he and his associates had simply asked to be met with love and understanding. Again, he points to his famous name and at Aulestad, announcing a whole series of related articles (8. Mai, 21 March 1949).4 The press and Members of Parliament demanded a revision of Bjørnson’s medical situation, and questioned how a national traitor could continue acting like this (Dagbladet, 23 March 1949; Lillehammer Tilskuer, 24 March 1949; Arbeiderbladet, 9 May 1949). A new and more thorough doctor concluded that Erling Bjørnson was fit enough to serve his sentence. But it never happened. His treason file contains a sizeable correspondence from this period involving authorities on different levels. Local authorities feared that Bjørnson would make a nuisance of himself and become a martyr if they were to fetch him at Aulestad by force. They hoped the storm would blow over – as it eventually did. Erling Bjørnson kept his head low after all. Perhaps he listened to members of the family who, like his daughter Else, opposed the Nazi regime, and who also knew how destructive his demeanour was for them all. Slowly the public memories about the Bjørnsons’ Nazi wing and the negative associations evoked by Aulestad faded, at least outside the region. Nevertheless, people locally associated the names of Aulestad and Erling Bjørnson with his wartime activities for many years to come.

‘Holy’, ‘Royal’, ‘Historic’ How did the family and museum representatives react? Not surprisingly, they kept as quiet as possible about everything that might undermine Aulestad’s standing as the praiseworthy extension of an extraordinary person. When Else Bjørnson published the first book about the museum in 1957 – two years before her father died – she not only omitted the treason

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convictions and problems for the reputation of Aulestad in that connection. She also left out the conflict evolving around Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s intense relationship with another woman in the 1890s, a conflict so devastating that it almost tore the family apart. This was not the first time he had cheated on Karoline. Bjørnson threatened to leave, while the grown children, who sided with their mother, threatened to throw him out (Keel 1999; Hoem 2011; Egeland 2018b). A divorce would have been the end of Aulestad, the Norwegian home par excellence belonging to ‘the poet of the home’. Husband and wife patched up their marriage, and stayed away from Aulestad and Norway for a long time. The title of Else Bjørnson’s (1957) illustrated book, Aulestad: Karoline og Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons hjem [Aulestad: The home of Karoline and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson], corresponds to the official name of the place, thereby emphasizing that the place was a joint wife and husband project. The curator briefly notes that Bjørnson, owing to economic difficulties, tried to sell the farm, but abstains from telling how insistent his efforts were in 1877, 1880 and 1882. Crediting both her grandparents with an impressive number of commendable qualities, she classifies Aulestad as a ‘chieftain’s seat of goodwill’ (E. Bjørnson 1957: 77), situated ‘in the middle of Norway, in the valley of valleys’ (ibid.: 12), on ‘holy’, ‘historic’ and ‘royal’ ground (ibid.: 43, 74) in much the same vocabulary as the fundraisers in the 1920s. Bjørnson’s feelings for Aulestad complemented his feelings for Norway, a love that grew stronger year by year, and apparently irrespective of whether he was living there or not. All the gifts exhibited in the museum speak on the one hand of the many individuals and societies who wanted to express their gratitude to Bjørnson, and on the other hand of the community between the poet and his people. Poet, nation and place are still one. Conceding that he wrote ‘surprisingly few of his works’ at Aulestad, the curator hastens to point out that Bjørnson nevertheless conceived almost all of them there, and that the radiance emanating from Aulestad results from his personality. The position he took on political and social issues made him a ‘chieftain of goodwill’ and turned Aulestad into ‘the nation’s most famous farm’ (E. Bjørnson 1957: 77). Describing – or rather eulogizing – the different rooms, she has already praised the stream of articles and communications flowing from his study in reaction to ‘[e]very injustice, large or small, at home or abroad’. In short, Bjørnson ‘never’ spared himself (ibid.: 44) and ‘his compassion knew no geographical borders’ (ibid.: 74). To recommend the museum as well as the book, Else Bjørnson – or the publisher – summoned the greatest expert on Bjørnson and the lead-

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ing Norwegian professor of literature, Francis Bull. Bull writes in his preface that a visit to Aulestad will emerge as one of life’s truly festive occasions because of its unique and ‘Bjørnsonian atmosphere’ – an atmosphere that the curator had breathed herself from childhood onwards, and commemorates in the book. According to Bull, visitors for good reason feel they are treading on ‘holy ground’ and adopt a ‘devotional frame of mind’. He also commends Aulestad for appearing like a real home, untouched since the owners left, and not just an assorted collection of things. The gripping presence of the former residents makes visitors feel they can get close to the poet and have an unforgettably intimate experience (Bull 1957). Such a claimed spiritual presence could be said to constitute the quintessence of what a house museum and its spokespersons aim to market. We meet it when taking a guided tour of Aulestad. Reading Else Bjørnson’s book version of the same room-by-room presentation, visitors recognize the stories told about exhibited objects and the people who lived or stayed in the house.5 She persistently underlines the authenticity and special atmosphere pervading the place, and pays careful attention to style and interior decorating in a way typical of house museums. Karoline and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s house is portrayed as a model home, akin to how comparable American house museums, such as Alcott’s Orchard House and other examples analysed in Patricia West’s Domesticating History (1999), were sold to the public. Objects adorning the rooms at Aulestad involve numerous famous people, who likewise contribute to the reverential ambience that is aimed for. Else Bjørnson and Francis Bull echo one another in the religious tone they strike when describing the man and the place, and the aura that surrounds them. Their insistence on the inspirational mood and unique atmosphere of Aulestad once again resembles the musealization of Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage.

No More Room for the Wife An inclination to harmonize and smooth out problematic topics is not exceptional for Aulestad. The campaign to preserve George Washington’s Mount Vernon, was, according to Patricia West, ‘carefully crafted’ to suppress his large-scale slaveholding and to present the father of the nation more like a virtuous, home-loving farmer (West 1999: 26–27). Such strategies, however, are not in line with the present ideology for a museum sector aiming to accentuate taboos and difficult questions. Or,

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perhaps this policy merely involves confronting painful issues that concern others, and not the museums themselves. Whether Aulestad’s heritage should be considered troublesome or not, depends on the perspective. One may even avoid the issues I have pointed at altogether, which is basically what Aulestad has opted for. Perhaps they worried that Bjørnson’s long absences would appear contradictory to the inextricable union painted between the man and the place, and that infidelities would be judged inexcusable for a home-loving poet revering family values. Perhaps they feared that Bjørnson’s humanitarian legacy and ‘chieftain’s seat of goodwill’ would be jeopardized by his family championing the Nazi cause, converting Aulestad into a propaganda centre for Hitler. Regardless of reason, a harmonizing strategy may prove counterproductive in the long run, eroding the authority of the story promoted by the museum. Managers following Else Bjørnson have continued to purge the presentation of Aulestad and its inhabitants, particularly the poet himself. Meanwhile, Karoline Bjørnson’s accomplishments seem to have been downgraded. Like his predecessor did in 1957, Jacob Ågotnes signals his angle – although the opposite one of Else Bjørnson – in the title of his Aulestad book, I Bjørnstjernes hus [In Bjørnstjerne’s house] (1992). Operating on a first name basis with Bjørnson, the curator leaves out Karoline’s name and implicitly her position as co-resident with joint responsibility for the place. Despite scant documentation, Ågotnes pictures Karoline as a ‘jealous’ wife (ibid.: 14, 143, 157, 164) and he consistently characterizes the poet as ‘manly’, ‘attractive’, ‘dashing’ and ‘erotic’, to the extent that women of all ages fell for him (ibid.: 14, 152, 154). Ågotnes goes on to classify the extramarital relationship that almost destroyed the family as a kind of erotic passion that ‘many men of his age’ experience (Ågotnes 1992: 164), the more understandable because of Karoline’s growing deafness and suspicious mind, he implies. In a second edition of I Bjørnstjernes hus (Ågotnes 2014), sold at the museum, Bjørnson’s ‘erotic passion’ is further mellowed to an ‘Indian summer’, again qualified by ‘many men’ passing through the same (ibid.: 111). The positive analogies aroused by such a phenomenon as ‘Indian summer’ contrast decidedly with how Bjørnson biographer Edvard Hoem describes the consequences of the poet’s actions: Karoline broke down and wanted to die (Hoem 2011: 244). The public memory of Karoline Bjørnson has withered more than that of her husband. As a widow, and due to her white clothing, she was once called the nation’s ‘white queen’ (Aftenposten, 4 November 1922, p. 1; E. Bjørnson 1957: 41), and her travels to and from Norway were

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reported in the newspapers. Although never the reason for conserving Aulestad, her fading into the darkness of history has not exactly helped to strengthen the museum’s appeal. Rather than trying to fight oblivion, and promote Karoline as a case worthy of interest in her own right, the museum has apparently given in to the passage of time. On the official website, Karoline Bjørnson’s name has been deleted. In the digital age, Aulestad is presented as just ‘Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Home’. Although the official name of Aulestad remains unchanged, there is no room for his wife in the inseparable union of man and place – at least not in the logo,6 from which Karoline’s name has been deleted (Egeland 2018b).

What Now? Considering how little Bjørnson wrote at Aulestad, and the resulting difficulty in marketing the museum to literary tourists as a place to enter into his poems or identify with his literary characters, widening the target group to democratic-minded citizens generally can be seen as a sound strategy. But focusing on Bjørnson’s personality, his role as a nation-builder and humanitarian activist proved perhaps a somewhat limited and vulnerable foundation, too dependent on a collective memory of achievements since lost. These days very few would think of Aulestad as ‘holy’ or Bjørnson as ‘royal’. Whereas the Norwegian historian Ernst Sars, in 1902 nominated Bjørnson to the unquestionable sovereign in the ‘poetocracy’ governing Norway back then (Sars 1912), the literary nation-building is long over. Not only has his status as poetocrat (governing poet) crumbled, but likewise his position as an author. Bjørnson’s diminished status and relevance is reflected in insignificant book sales, reduced library loans, hardly any reading in classrooms, and fewer visitors to Aulestad. Now that Bjørnson, along with other classics over the last several decades, has lost much of his old nimbus, one may be inclined to think that it would generate more public curiosity if the museum faced the darker side of the Bjørnson–Aulestad story head on instead of sticking to a hagiographic formula that has lost its power. Judging by the number of books still being published every year about the Second World War, exhibitions that highlight Aulestad during the war, featuring both the Nazi propaganda and the anti-Nazi activities that took place there might trigger engagement. And why not investigate thoroughly how Erling Bjørnson had come to believe that his father agreed with him? The poet’s political activities might then be actualized – his support of Dreyfus and persecuted

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minorities, in addition to his admiration for Germany. Although the old house may not be suited to such activities, being only open to limited tours of the fully furnished rooms, the farm has several other buildings of different sizes that would be fit for experimental exhibitions. Should Aulestad continue as before, the prospects for Wordsworth, Alcott and their respective house museums look in comparison much brighter. An impressive number of Wordsworth and Alcott titles are still in print. Their works are widely read, studied and discussed, they figure on lists of the most popular writers and have passionate readers at home and abroad who come flocking to their museums. Searching the web, literary tourists can choose between competing tours and guided itineraries to their favourite author’s house. To spark and uphold interest, Bjørnson needs less hagiography and more conflict and drama than the official museum story has allowed for. Aulestad could, in other words, profit from including more of the ambivalence and contradictory aspects of its own history, and of the people who lived there.

Acknowledgements This chapter’s arguments and the research involved have been expanded on and further developed from two previously published works from 2018: ‘Aulestads besværlige arv: “Godviljens høvdingsete” og “nazireir”’, in Historisk tidsskrift 97(4); and ‘Bjørnson og Aulestad: “uadskillelige” og “uløselige”? Fortellinger om en dikter og hans hjem’, in Sakprosa 10(1). The author is grateful to both journals for their permissions to draw on these articles in this chapter. Marianne Egeland is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo. She has published books on Mexican literature, the Norwegian University Press, the biography as a literary and historical genre, and on the American poet Sylvia Plath. She has also written about ethics in literature, particularly in biographical and autobiographical texts, as well as about author museums and the novel as a genre.

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Notes   1. The reportage was originally published in the daily Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidende and extracts entitled ‘Indtryk fra en Norgesrejse’ [Impressions from travels in Norway] were reprinted in Bergens Tidende, 31 August 1880, p. 2. The translations, here and elsewhere in the chapter, are mine. For further citations and discussion of sources, the reader may consult my two studies in Norwegian: Egeland 2018a and 2018b.   2. Several newspapers reported on the initiative in September and October 1922 (for instance, Social-Demokraten, 7 and 16 September; Arbeider-Politikken, 14 September; Nationen, 8 September; and Tidens Tegn, 12 October).   3. Information and quotations are from the Bjørnson files in the treason archive (The National Archives of Norway): ‘Gudbrandsdal politikammer, Saker, Anr. 2501 – Erling Bjørnson, f. 19.04.1868’; and ‘Gudbrandsdal politikammer, Saker, Anr. 2554 – Aslaug Bjørnson’.   4. Old Nazis kept the paper going under different names from 1947 until 2003 (Folk og Land, 1952–2003), catering to a dwindling number of NS supporters.   5. One of Else Bjørnson’s successors remarked in 1998 that sixty years after she developed the tour plan, Aulestad guides were still following her instructions (Hauglid 1998: 62).   6. In emails to me (11 and 13 January 2017), a representative of ‘Stiftelsen Lillehammer museum’ explained that although the official name of the museum remained the same, the logo had been changed at the beginning of 2015, supposedly leaving no space for Karoline Bjørnson’s name.

References Ågotnes, J.E. 1992. I Bjørnstjernes hus. Oslo: J.M. Stenersen. . 2014. I Bjørnstjernes hus. Bergen: Bodoni. Amdam, P. 1960. Den unge Bjørnson: Diktningen og barndomslandet. Oslo: Gyldendal. Atkin, P. 2009. ‘Ghosting Grasmere: The Musealisation of Dove Cottage’, in N.J. Watson (ed.), Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 84–94. Bjørnson, B. 1932. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: Hjemmet og vennerne: Aulestad-minner. Oslo: Aschehoug. Bjørnson, E. 1957. Aulestad: Karoline og Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons hjem. Oslo: Gyldendal. Boeck, C. 1910. Soldage paa Aulestad: Minder om Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Copenhagen: H. Hagerups Forlag. Bull, F. 1957. ‘Forord’, in E. Bjørnson, Aulestad: Karoline og Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons hjem. Oslo: Gyldendal, p. 7. Carlyle, T. (1841) 1912. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Herbert S. Murch (ed.). London: Heath.

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Egeland, M. 2018a. ‘Aulestads besværlige arv: “Godviljens høvdingsete” og “nazireir”’, Historisk tidsskrift 97(4): 297–315. . 2018b. ‘Bjørnson og Aulestad: “uadskillelige” og “uløselige”? Fortellinger om en dikter og hans hjem’, Tidsskriftet Sakprosa 10(1). Retrieved on 16 February 2019 from https://doi.org/10.5617/sakprosa.5837. Filseth, J. 1907. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson og Aulestad. Kristiania: Narvesen Kioskkompagni. Gran, G. 1910. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: Høvdingen. Kristiania: Aschehoug. Hauglid, A. O. 1998. ‘Bjørnson, Norden og Europa’, in Litterære museer i Skandinavia. Workshop at Voksenåsen, 9–11 January. Ibsenmuseet, pp. 61–70. Hoem, E. 2009. Villskapens år: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1832–1875. Oslo: Oktober. . 2011. Syng mig hjæm: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1890–1899. Oslo: Oktober. Keel, A. 1999. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: En biografi 1880–1910, trans. P. Vold. Oslo: Gyldendal. The Nobel Prize. 1903. ‘The Nobel Prize in Literature 1903’. Retrieved on 16 February 2019 from https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1903/summary/. Sars, E. (1902) 1912. ‘Bjørnsons Plads i Norges politiske Historie’, in J.E. Sars Samlede Værker, vol. 4, Portrætter og essays. Kristiana/Kjøbenhavn: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, pp. 263–85. Skram, A. (1881) 1982. ‘Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson i hans Hjem’, in Ø. Anker and E. Beyer (eds), ‘Og nu vil jeg tale ut’ – ‘Men nu vil jeg også tale ud’: Brevvekslingen mellom Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson og Amalie Skram 1878–1904. Oslo: Gyldendal, pp. 172–79. West, P. 1999. Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Chapter 12

Housing World Literature The Norwegian Ibsen Museums Narve Fulsås

When Henrik Ibsen died in 1906, he was a world celebrity. Ever since he had moved back to Kristiania (‘Oslo’ since 1925) in 1891, he had been one of the capital’s tourist attractions; in 1898, the Danish critic Georg Brandes wrote about Ibsen that he was now ‘admired and worshipped by the Norwegians as the one upholding their world reputation’ (Brandes 1898: 183). The cult of authorship as well as literary tourism had been around for centuries but had, like tourism in general, been greatly stimulated by industrialized communications. It took ages to make Shakespeare’s home town Stratford-upon-Avon into a memory site, but by the nineteenth century it was experiencing mass tourism. In the Nordic countries, authors were well aware of the heritage potential of their residences. In 1899, the Norwegian novelist Jonas Lie wrote to his colleague Arne Garborg and advised him not to sell his property, referring to Finland where the homes of their two foremost writers, Zacharias Topelius and Johan Ludvig Runeberg, were about to be secured for posterity (Lie [1899] 2009: 1486). The first museum dedicated to a single person in the Nordic countries was H.C. Andersen’s House in Odense in Denmark, founded in association with the centenary of Andersen’s birth in 1905, and opened to the public in 1908. One might have expected, then, that preparations would have been made to do something similar for Norway’s literary world star. However, it took a hundred years before Ibsen’s last flat in Oslo was turned into an Ibsen museum, and it took his native town Skien fifty years to acquire his remaining childhood home for heritage purposes.

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In terms of acquiring ‘homes’ for museum purposes, then, there was a delay in the musealization of Ibsen. Surprising in some respects, this is actually typical of the history of many museums of writers, as there are combined circumstances of family involvement, property questions, urban planning, government support (or not), shifting authorial reception and many others. At the same time, the musealization of Ibsen on a more modest scale started almost immediately after his death. Such initiatives also encountered problems and obstacles, however. Here, I will highlight two continuing strands of tension and conflict that have framed Ibsen museum initiatives in Norway. The first emerged from Ibsen having been so thoroughly appropriated by ‘the centre’ – culturally, politically and socially. Ibsen’s canonicity and his status as ‘world literature’ had elevated him far beyond his ‘provincial’ Norwegian origins, and this posed challenges for those trying to reconnect him to these origins. Secondly, Ibsen’s ‘homeless’ life, the way he had created his position as an author, and even his dramatic work could all be taken as critiques of the idea of an ‘author’s home’ and of visiting his home as a way of connecting to his work. From the start, heritage initiatives on behalf of Ibsen raised questions about the memorial value of an author’s personal belongings, the distribution of memorial culture between the Norwegian towns where he had lived, and the relationship between Ibsen’s bourgeois life and his, as many would see it, ‘anti-bourgeois’ dramatic work.

The Disassembling of Arbins Gate When Ibsen moved back to Kristiania in 1891, he had been living abroad for twenty-seven years. His wife Susanna thought that their first apartment made her rheumatism worse and so in 1895 they moved to Arbins gate (Arbin Street), to a flat in the belle etage with a view to the palace and down towards the city’s main street, Karl Johans gate. From here, Ibsen would take his daily walks to Grand Café with rigorous punctuality until he suffered a stroke in 1900. After the playwright died in 1906, Susanna continued to live in Arbins gate for the rest of her life, until 1914. Their only child, Sigurd Ibsen, was positive to the idea of turning the apartment into a museum, and for a couple of months after his mother’s death he opened it to the public, with the author’s former maid showing visitors around (Romsaas 2006: 223). It was a rented flat, however; buying the property would cost more than the local authorities thought they could afford, no assistance was to be had from the state or from private sponsors, and there seems to have been

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no initiatives to organize public funding. The furniture was then split up. Sigurd gave his father’s study and bedroom to the city of Kristiania, the reading room to the Telemark County Museum in Skien, some 100 km south-west of the capital, and the dining room to Grimstad, another 140 km down along the coast from Skien. In Grimstad, the chemist’s shop in which Ibsen had worked in his youth and where he had written his first play, Catiline, had been restored, and a museum opened there in 1916 (Edvardsen 2006: 22). Being unable to show the rooms in their original location, the municipality of Kristiania deposited them at the Norwegian Folk Museum outside the capital. Here, the working room was reconstructed and displayed with all its original objects. The family was not at all pleased to see the bedroom furniture ending up in storage, and they let it be known that they would rather it be sent to Skien to be exhibited there alongside the library. The Telemark County Museum at Brekke in Skien had opened in 1909, and right from the start they had collected Ibsen-related objects (Haave 2009: 151–56). With the addition of the furniture from Arbins gate, the museum was able to make a separate Ibsen exhibition there in 1915. They gradually added new objects, so that by the 1930s the Brekke exhibition filled four small rooms. While financial concerns were obviously a main reason why Arbins gate was not turned into an Ibsen museum in 1914, there were not many other favourable circumstances either. Ibsen himself had not facilitated a seamless transition to a local or national memorial afterlife. H.C. Andersen, for instance, ended his autobiography with the honorary citizenship awarded him by his native town Odense, facilitating Odense’s claim on the writer. Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) is among those who built or furnished their houses with the deliberate intention that they later become museums; she even showed her home Mårbacka to visitors in her own lifetime (Bohman 2010: 29). Ibsen had made such a smooth transition difficult by his mobile life of ‘exile’ as well as by his perceived troubled relation to Norway. He had never cultivated any of his residences as a ‘writer’s home’, and after leaving Norway after the efforts of creating Norwegian theatres in the middle of the 1860s, he had not, like his contemporary Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910), identified with the cause of the nation. In 1882, Georg Brandes observed: he has lived as in a tent, among hired furniture which could be returned the day he decided to leave; since 1864 he has never put his foot under his own table or rested in his own bed. He has never settled down in a strict sense; he has got used

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to feeling at home in homelessness. … Even now, as a wealthy man, he feels no urge to own a house or a home, even less a farm and estate like Bjørnson. He is separated from his people, without any activity that connects him to an institution, a party or even just a journal or a paper at home or abroad – a lonely man.1

In a speech Ibsen gave in 1898, when his seventieth birthday was extensively celebrated, he stated: ‘[H]e who wins a home for himself in foreign lands – in his inmost soul he scarcely feels at home anywhere – even in the country of his birth’ (Ibsen [1898a] 1965: 333). In Arbins gate he only composed his two last plays, John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899). Ibsen had for a long time cultivated a strict separation of work and life. Visiting writers’ houses, readers want to materialize their literary experiences and/or engage with the authors as embodied beings with their biographical peculiarities (Watson 2006: 14; Hendrix 2015: 27). Ibsen had, however, long practised an elevated distance and built up an aura of remoteness and isolation. ‘Do like Ibsen!’, wrote his Swedish counterpart and rival August Strindberg to Bjørnson in 1884; ‘Place yourself in a corner like some other Moses on the mount, and speak only one word once a year, and speak cunningly so that no one understands what you are saying, because then the people will be down on their faces worshipping the Sphinx’.2 As suggested by Strindberg, Ibsen’s way of constructing the role of the author contrasted sharply with that of his contemporary Bjørnson. Bjørnson immersed himself in politics and all sorts of public matters, and became one of the major public figures in Scandinavia in the late nineteenth century; in national-liberal ideology he was constructed as nothing less than an incarnation of Norway (Fulsås 1999: 250–54). On Bjørnson’s death in 1910, an ardent observer of theatre and literature noted in his diary: ‘While everything Ibsen has given us, is contained in his works – he has given us nothing beyond them – Bjørnson’s poetry is just part of the abundance of his rich spirit that he has strewn over us, always with an open heart and open arms’.3 Furthermore, the monumental memory culture prevailing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also contributed towards elevating the great author above the mundane, something that did not facilitate an engagement with the author as an embodied human being. Monumentalism certainly influenced memorial strategies at the time of the playwright’s death. The most bizarre example is the sculptor Gustav Vigeland’s plan for a mausoleum on Ibsen’s grave in Kristiania, suggesting to Sigurd Ibsen a sarcophagus-like monument made larger than life. A model showed the writer’s coffin on a platform held by four naked

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men. Ibsen, partly covered by a cloak, had risen from the dead and was about to crawl out. Vigeland wanted the monument to be located on a rock forming the highest point of the graveyard: ‘From up there, all the other low-lying graves below will seem small, so distant as if seen through a diminishing glass’.4 Although this particular version was largely ridiculed, monumentalism also came in more modest versions. Sigurd Ibsen decided on an obelisk on his father’s grave. It had just an engraving of a miner’s hammer on it, alluding to the early poem ‘The Miner’, and the name ‘Henrik Ibsen’ – no years of birth and death. Later, the playwright’s grave would be flanked by those of his wife Susanna (1836–1914) on the one side, and Sigurd (1859–1930) and his wife Bergljot (1869–1953) on the other, all of them presented as finite beings with a delimited time on earth. Monumentalism may go hand in hand with antiquarianism, making it a ‘duty’ to preserve any reminiscences of great men and treating them as sacred relics. But as soon as magic gives way to disbelief, relics are degraded to trivialities, and the strategy backfires. When furniture from Arbins gate was on its way to the Norwegian Folk Museum, Ibsen’s old literary enemy Knut Hamsun used the occasion to deny them any cultural value. When trying to make a position for himself in the literary field in the 1890s, Hamsun had been a fierce critic of the symbolic capital bestowed on ‘the author’ (Rem 2014: 32–37, 48–51), and he could not resist this occasion to interfere. The furniture from Ibsen’s apartment was witness to nothing but Ibsen’s judgement on rooms and furniture, Hamsun stated, and one was superstitiously mistaken to think that there was anything peculiar to them ‘apart from ignorance’.5 The heavy, ‘overloaded’, interior style of the flat in Arbins gate, known in Danish-Norwegian as klunkestil, soon went out of fashion, and to Sigurd’s great annoyance the opening of the flat to the public resulted in newspaper opinions on the playwright’s bad taste. Sigurd Ibsen allegedly lost any desire to allow the public a view into their private lives: ‘I did not imagine that my father would ever be judged as an ordinary furniture dealer’.6

Obituaries and the Contested Ibsen Narrative Monumentalism certainly characterized the obituaries published on Ibsen’s death, while also showing that at this time there was still a struggle over the narrative framing of Ibsen memory culture. The obituaries all celebrated the ‘spiritual giant’ Ibsen. Each one emphasized the critical

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nature of Ibsen’s works and the controversy surrounding them, but contextualized them in significantly different ways. The conservative papers, Aftenposten (23 May 1906, p. 1) and Morgenbladet (23 May 1906, p. 2), both quoted from Ibsen’s letter to the Swedish–Norwegian King in 1866, when Ibsen in applying for an annual state grant wrote that the most important mission in Norway at the time was ‘arousing the people of our nation and urging them to think great thoughts’ (Ibsen [1866] 1965: 57). Highlighting this as Ibsen’s ‘calling’, the narrative centred around the themes of resistance, sacrifice and loneliness, placing ‘us’ in a position of boundless debt and gratitude to Ibsen. While the conservatives had been the most critical to Ibsen in the 1880s, it was Morgenbladet, in a remarkable reversal, that made the most of all the ‘resistance and ignorance, rejection and lack of appreciation’7 that Ibsen had faced at home. Only towards the end of the author’s life had ‘the people’ united in a common understanding of ‘what we owe him’. Morgenbladet even managed to blame unfavourable reception on the struggle for democracy and representative government: ‘Is it any wonder that a poet in his struggle for such high goals in petty times with its party divisions and its doctrine on the rights of the masses, in an intellectually obsolete and poor society, has often been misunderstood or has caused outrage? His works and thoughts have been ahead of the society for which he has written’.8 In Social-Demokraten (25 May 1906), the main paper of the Labour party, Ibsen was hailed as a combatant, polemicist and rebel, ‘the most revolutionary power of our time’.9 He was not a reformer of society, they admitted, as he presented no alternative programme. But while Ibsen in the conservative version had stood opposed to Norway, the social democrats saw him as an antagonist to the established society: Ibsen was ‘the most dangerous enemy of the bourgeoisie and the philistines’.10 The paper recalled that the conservatives had appropriated Ibsen after his play The League of Youth (1869) had ridiculed a liberal politician; but this all changed with the radical family tragedy Ghosts (1881), which the paper called ‘the turning point in Ibsen’s literary life’.11 The conservatives now had to realize that Ibsen was not their man after all, and even the liberals had to distance themselves from him. A third version of Ibsen was presented in Den 17de Mai (26 May 1906). This newspaper was dedicated to rural culture and the promotion of landsmål (language of the country/countryside), the written language codified in the middle of the nineteenth century, based on contemporary rural dialects and Old Norse. After Ibsen, in Peer Gynt, had castigated

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Norwegian pettiness and cowardice, the paper argued, he had found that such defects existed not just at home and among the peasants, but also ‘higher up and further out’. Ibsen was no friend of the outwardly shining but inwardly rotten ‘culture’. Hedda Gabler was ‘a typical flower of the European fields of culture – a flower that might shine but that lacks fragrance and the capacity to bear fruit’.12 Here, Ibsen was the critic of the supposedly ‘high’, but in reality decadent, so-called European culture. Both Den 17de Mai and Social-Demokraten acknowledged that Ibsen had struggled financially and artistically during his time in Norway, but both also underlined the fact that he had enjoyed the financial security of an annual state grant from 1866. Neither were his hardships as severe as many would have it, claimed Den 17de Mai. Their cultural hero, A.O. Vinje, the literary pioneer of landsmål and a one-time collaborator of Ibsen, had fared far worse, while Ibsen in his later years had been honoured and celebrated like no other writer. The conservative construction has definitely been the most successful one, and particularly in the way it has managed to ‘un-home’ Ibsen from Norway and his Scandinavian audiences. To Morgenbladet (23 May 1906, p. 2), Norway was ‘intellectually obsolete and poor’. Aftenposten stressed the difficulties facing writers and artists in Norway at the time Ibsen left for Italy, a country they called ‘the native soil of culture and art. … Down here, under lighter circumstances, under a brighter sky, all the poet’s capacities and powers unfolded’.13 Norway was, in other words, not a literary space, nor hardly a cultural space at all. Norway and other parts of Scandinavia were not recognized as the contexts of origin of Ibsen’s drama; his ‘world literature’ was something happening elsewhere, in the wider and brighter circumstances of ‘Europe’. What this narrative silenced, was Ibsen’s extraordinary success in his home market, preceding his international breakthrough. To cultural elites of a ‘peripheral’ country, however, this strategy had a double advantage. The conservative opposition to Ibsen could be collectivized and rewritten as ‘Norwegian’ ignorance, and then he could be reappropriated as belonging to ‘high’, ‘European’ culture, a sign of cultural and social distinction at home. In the obituaries, only the conservative papers applied the term ‘world literature’. They did not do it in Goethe’s original sense, where world literature signified an intensified international circulation of journals, texts and ideas; they rather used it in order to place Ibsen in a canon of classical, universal, ‘high’ works. In sum, this meant appropriating Ibsen for bourgeois culture.

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Authenticity, Home and ‘Memory Madness’ While Ibsen lived a seemingly ‘homeless’ life, his work too could have been a potential source for criticizing the idea of the author’s house as a proper site for literary memory. In Ibsen’s Houses: Architectural Metaphor and the Modern Uncanny, Mark Sandberg argues that the playwright performed a more and more radical critique of the idea of ‘home’ – with all its redemptive associations with authenticity, rootedness, continuity, family and safety. When his most famous heroine, Nora, comes to understand her home as a ‘doll’s house’, it becomes uninhabitable, but the implicit critique in this drama still depends ‘on a comparison with a fuller, more authentic form of home’ (Sandberg 2015: 69). In the next play, Ghosts (1881), ‘home’ has already become close to a dirty word. In The Master Builder, written a decade later (1892), Hallvard Solness dreams of building ‘comfortable, cosy, light-filled homes’, while having accepted the impossibility of such a thing for himself (ibid.: 102). In Ibsen’s last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), the sculptor Arnold Rubek wants his wife Maja to rephrase ‘our lovely, new house’ into ‘our lovely new home’. Maja dismisses him: ‘I prefer to say house. Let’s leave it at that’ (Ibsen [1899] 2014: 240). Maja, argues Sandberg, is one of very few Ibsen characters who seems to be able to see housing ‘as a temporary, contingent arrangement’, with no sense of loss or disillusionment – a rare figure of ‘unburdened unhomeliness’ (Sandberg 2015: 117–18, 199). Ibsen’s discourse on ‘home’ stood in sharp contrast to the one surrounding the folk and open-air museum movement in Scandinavia, which was developing at the same time. One of the foremost museum entrepreneurs in Norway, Anders Sandvig, said of his ambitions in 1904: ‘[I]t was not to be a museum that I built, but homes, real homes’ (quoted in Sandberg 2001: 38). On visiting his assembly of relocated rural houses at Maihaugen outside Lillehammer, the visitors should be given the impression that ‘here is a place I’d like to live!’ (ibid.: 40). It is no small irony, then, that Ibsen’s last apartment was disassembled, and parts of it reconstructed in folk and regional museums in Kristiania and Skien. Taking Ibsen’s criticism of home seriously, one response to writers’ museums could have been to welcome intentionally theatrical, ‘contingent’ and ironic approaches. However, this was not the line taken by museum critics, quite the contrary. Ibsen’s criticism of the values of domesticity never won much of a following in his own time (Sandberg 2015: 123–25), and the massive uprooting and dislocations of people in Europe in the twentieth century were not accompanied by the downfall of the ideals of home but rather by its opposite – a renewed ‘idealization

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of domesticity’ and ‘nostalgia for the home’ (Mazover 1999: 90, 212, 227–28, 318). Criticism of museum initiatives tended to come from the liberal newspaper Dagbladet. This paper largely identified itself with the ‘cultural-radical’ tradition initiated by Brandes, Ibsen and the authors belonging to the ‘Modern Breakthrough’, but the paper was also firmly committed to the ideas of home and authenticity. When Ibsen’s working room in 1914 was on its way to the Norwegian Folk Museum, the later long-term editor of Dagbladet, Einar Skavlan, called it ‘memory madness’ (Skavlan 1914). He was not against taking care of the room, but the ‘sacredness of the place’ (stedets hellighet) had to be respected: ‘If the room is to be preserved, it ought to be out of piety, out of respect for the atmosphere of the place. It was here that Henrik Ibsen worked, these were his windows, here is where he sat looking out at people’.14 Removing it, one might as well do it thoroughly, Skavlan ironized, with a painted view and Ibsen dolls sitting by the desk and laying in the bed (ibid.). Hamsun predictably joined Skavlan on ‘memory madness’, although Hamsun thought that if the worst was to happen, the Folk Museum might be the best place after all (Hamsun 2009: 125). Dagbladet also brought an early critical report on Grimstad’s Ibsen museum. The people of this region of the country had never been particularly interested in literature, the correspondent stated: ‘Neither does the good town really deserve any intimate association with the concept or name of Ibsen. The town’s great-grandfathers annoyed the great poet too much for that’.15 A deficit on home qualities was also held against Skien. In the early 1950s, newspapers reported that one of Ibsen’s childhood homes, Venstøp outside of the town – where Ibsen had lived from 1834, when he was 6 years old, until he left for Grimstad in 1843 at the age of 15 – was to become a museum. Dagbladet was highly critical, arguing in an article entitled ‘Ibsen museum where Ibsen thrived the least’ that ‘the years at Venstøp were without any doubt the most painful in Ibsen’s life. He was uprooted from his childhood environment in the town and ended up in pure poverty in the countryside’.16 To Dagbladet, an author’s house museum ought to be a real home.

The Trouble with Skien The relationship between Ibsen and Skien had for a long time been a troubled one. The last time Ibsen had visited his native town was in 1850, and even after returning to Norway he never went back. In 1891, just a

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few months before his return, Skien held an ‘Ibsen party’ on his birthday to celebrate the opening of a new festivity centre, for which Ibsen thanked the organizers (Ibsen 1891). In 1898, however, Skien received no thanks for their contribution to his seventieth birthday celebrations, mainly because Ibsen on this occasion gave up sending individual expressions of gratitude, and resorted to a printed address (Ibsen 1898b). Even so, a local newspaper made an issue of the way he seemingly distanced himself from Skien (Haave 2017: 209). In 1903, an Ibsen monument was unveiled, and the town sent the playwright a telegram. There was much resentment when the writer did not answer again, but by this time Ibsen had had several strokes (Mosfjeld 1958). The playwright met his sister Hedvig, who lived in Skien, just once after his return. Their relation seems to have been sympathetic, however, despite religious differences, and Ibsen warmly received Hedvig’s daughter Anna when she stayed in Kristiania. Hedvig would later, after the death of their younger brother Ole in 1917, unequivocally state that the main reason her eldest brother never came back to Skien was his dislike of the revivalist religiosity that had shaped not just her and Ole’s life, but the lives of so many of his old acquaintances, as well as the town in general (Haave 2017: 220). Moreover, a major fire seriously damaged the town in 1886, including destroying Stockmanngården where Ibsen had been born. According to Edmund Gosse, who met Ibsen on his visit to Norway in 1899, the playwright was happy about it: ‘“The inhabitants of Skien,” he said with grim humour, “were quite unworthy to possess my birthplace”’ (Gosse 1912: 9). Anyway, the fire and the loss of the author’s first childhood home severely restricted Skien’s capacity to make the town into a literary tourist destination (Haave 2017: 191). Subsequent economic and social developments in the region contributed to widening the gap between the playwright and his home town. From the late nineteenth century, both Skien and other parts of Telemark were heavily industrialized and became Labour strongholds. The educated middle classes were relatively small, and among them were more engineers than high school teachers (lektorer). Relatively few went on to take a secondary education (Kjeldstadli 2014: 52, 73–75). We might single out three distinct cultural environments in Telemark, and ‘Ibsen’ sat uneasily with all of them. In the industrialized Telemark – largely shaped by the Norwegian company Hydro – the working class formed a strong ‘camp’ with a tight and differentiated net of organizations, and with the primary school being almost the only common ground between upper and lower classes. Upper Telemark was a region of small and scattered rural

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communities. It had been a main treasury of the national ‘folk culture’ collected in the nineteenth century, and it was a stronghold of landsmål. In this area, too, as opposed to many other rural regions, Labour became a major political force. A third tightly organized culture formed around lay religiosity, where Telemark had been in the forefront ever since the revivalist movement joined by Ibsen’s siblings and childhood friends in the 1850s. In some communities, such congregations had a working-class following and they were as opposed to ‘elite culture’ as the socialists (Gulliksen 2014: 250–53; Rovde 2014: 152–54). On Ibsen’s death, as we have seen, Social-Demokraten and Den 17de Mai had tried to make Ibsen fit both industrial and rural Telemark, but these two representations of Ibsen soon lost ground. The association of Ibsen with ‘high’, bourgeois culture was only enhanced by canonization and the institutional settings for the preservation of literary culture. Even so, an Ibsen Association, Ibsenforbundet, was founded in Skien in 1948, initiating a new stage in the heritage ambitions associated with the dramatist. Headed by Einar Østvedt, Ibsenforbundet embarked on an ambitious memorial programme, encompassing protection of Ibsen-related memories and traditions, performances of his plays, public lectures, raising a dignified monument and publishing an Ibsenårbok (Ibsen Year Book). Østvedt insisted he did not want to make Skien into a Norwegian Stratford-upon-Avon, probably referring to the ‘industrial’ scale of tourism associated with Shakespeare’s birthplace (Østvedt 1955). In 1950, Oskar Mosfjeld published his book Henrik Ibsen og Skien: En biografisk og litteratur-psykologisk studie, focusing on Ibsen’s childhood, for which he was awarded a philosophical doctorate. Mosfjeld denied that the poet had been hostile to or indifferent to Skien. On the contrary, he claimed, citing Ibsen’s niece Anna Stousland, no one could tell Ibsen anything about Skien that he did not know already (Mosfjeld 1949: 180). Although receiving much criticism, Mosfjeld’s book clearly contributed to filling the gap between the author and Skien with history, and tying Ibsen ‘more strongly to his native town’.17 Østvedt was a high school (gymnas) teacher with a doctoral degree, and he had represented the conservative party (Høyre) in local politics after the war. On his side, he had former Labour politician and foreign secretary Halvdan Koht, who had himself grown up in Skien and who was a historian as well as an Ibsen editor and Ibsen biographer. There were also other Labour representatives among all the distinguished names of the members of Ibsenforbundet (‘Medlemmer’ 1953), but clearly it had an ‘elitist’ aura. After a decade, Østvedt complained that Ibsenforbundet had initially found little resonance in Skien, and that it took years until

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Skien recognized the great privilege of being Ibsen’s native town (Østvedt 1959b: 122). In 1951, an op-ed in the local Labour newspaper stated that ‘what we miss is the major support for allowing Skien to become Ibsen’s town’, with a reference to Stratford-on-Avon.18 One of Ibsenforbundet’s and Østvedt’s major achievements was the takeover of the property Venstøp. Revealing to Halvdan Koht that the landed proprietor (godseier) Herman Løvenskiold had given 156,000 kroner to buy Venstøp and that restoration would cost an additional 50,000, Østvedt thought that the figures should not be made public (Østvedt 1956), probably to avoid public outrage over such use of money. Venstøp opened as an Ibsen museum in 1958. The Brekke collection too had expanded into a complete flat, opened in 1956. It even realized Einar Skavlan’s dystopian vision of inauthenticity by including a full-length puppet dressed up in Ibsen’s promenade clothing, with overcoat, boots and top hat. Østvedt wanted to connect Ibsen’s fictional world directly onto Skien. His triumphant contribution in this respect was the claim that he had ‘found’ the attic of The Wild Duck at Venstøp: ‘It was during a visit to the Venstøp attic some years ago that the connection between this and the symbol-laden attic in “The Wild Duck” suddenly stood crystal clear to me. … The correspondence between reality and poetry is here close to absolute congruity’.19 Almost the entire plot of The Wild Duck unfolds at Venstøp, Østvedt concluded (Østvedt 1959a: 104). His ally Harry Fett, former national antiquarian (riksantikvar), was more interested in the remains of the old town environment at Snipetorp. This was the town of The League of Youth, he insisted, and like Østvedt he turned it into a theatrical space in which he invited visitors to encounter Ibsen’s imaginary characters. Located underneath ‘chamberlain Bratsberg’s’ distinguished estate one would find ‘Madame Rundholmen’s licensed premises … It might well be near the house of Daniel Hejre’s worn-out sarcasms’.20 Fett wanted to promote ‘Ibsen’s Norwegian theatre’ as a characteristic pendant to ‘the great classical efforts in this area, the Greek, the English, the French’.21 Snipetorp should be preserved, he insisted, as a monument to ‘the place of origin of the Norwegian coastal town’s world theatre’.22 As to the domestic qualities of Venstøp, where the family had moved after Knut Ibsen experienced financial difficulties, the agents of memory were ambivalent. Countering the criticism from Dagbladet, Østvedt thought that Ibsen’s years at Venstøp had been happy ones, and that the father’s business setback and the family’s declassing could surely not have ‘overshadowed the fact that the stylish house was beautiful and filled with

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intimate well-being’.23 The literary scholar Francis Bull, on the other hand, consistent with his historical-biographical approach, advocated that it was actually at Venstøp that Ibsen had felt the consequences of declassing and, ‘at the same time, an increasing coldness between the parents. He learned what he mentions in his notes for “The Wild Duck”, that “children’s first and deepest pains are the family pains”’.24 This phase of the memorial offensive in Skien, then, was characterized not just by a wish to highlight the town as the playwright’s birthplace and to recreate Venstøp as an author’s home, but also by an ambition to project Ibsen’s fictional world onto it.

Appropriating Ibsen for Oslo From time to time, initiatives were taken to secure Arbins gate in Oslo for the public and make it into a representative Ibsen museum (Edvardsen 2006: 22–24). In 1938, the journalist Odd Medbøe launched the idea of acquiring Ibsen’s old flat, now used for offices, and turning it into a combined museum and academy, inviting international scholars, translators and dramatists (‘Ibsen-Museum og akademi’ 1937). The tramway director and head of the Oslo area association for tourism traffic thought that entrance fees would justify the costs. It came to nothing, however, allegedly because the Folk Museum, being positive at first, decided not to release their Ibsen furniture after all (Medbøe 1990). In 1964, the minister of cultural affairs in the Labour government, Helge Sivertsen, responded to a call to restore Ibsen’s apartment in Arbins gate by saying that memorial protection regarding art and artists should primarily be about preserving the works of art and making them accessible: ‘It ought to be pure exceptions to make museums out of artists’ homes. However, I think much points towards the flat in Arbins gate being one such rare exception’.25 This has been seen as a turning point in the political commitment to support writers’ museums in Norway (E.H. Edvardsen, quoted in Grepstad 2018: 22). During the following decades, however, little happened, and the 1970s and 1980s are quiet decades on the Ibsen museum front. One factor contributing to this may have been the currents of aesthetic formalism dominating academic discourse at the time. These currents may not have influenced broader perceptions of literary museums but they may have contributed to less academic backing for museum initiatives. In the first part of the century, the ‘historical-biographical’ approach dominated in Norway, most prominently represented by Francis Bull. He would always line up in support of heritage

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initiatives. By the 1970s, such backing from literary scholars could no longer be taken for granted. When a new campaign for Arbins gate started in 1990, one leading Norwegian Ibsen scholar, Bjørn Hemmer, was publicly sceptical, thinking that Ibsen would have protested against ending up in a museum (Bentzrud 1990). At a conference on literary museums in Scandinavia in the late 1990s, the journalist and author Henrik Wivel still made a firm case for keeping the private away from serious engagement with literature. He told the audience that he had deliberately stayed away from Selma Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka when writing Lagerlöf ’s ‘literary biography’. When finally visiting her home-turned-museum, and among other things hearing a recording of Lagerlöf ’s voice, Wivel was emotionally overwhelmed, realizing that he could not have composed his biography with the same kind of consistency ‘if I had known her voice, the room and the house from where it came, and had had its echo in my ears’.26 Even so, or perhaps for that reason, he insisted that such experiences should be considered regrettable transgressions. By visiting artists’ houses or writers’ homes, he claimed, we ‘cross a threshold, eliminate a difference and move into private terrain whose concealed secrets by closer inspection turn out to be, if not banal, then at least prosaic or even outright embarrassing, painful and far-toohuman’.27 Wivel in the end dismissed the epistemological value of both biography and museum: ‘[W]e hardly have a better understanding of the art by knowing something about an artist’s life. Just as we do not get wiser by visiting the artist’s house’.28 At this time, a new wave of heritage initiatives overran such puritanism. In 1990, the actor Knut Wigert started a successful campaign for Arbins gate. Norway had been awarded the Winter Olympics, to be held at Lillehammer in 1994, and nation branding was a priority of foreign policy. Norway was facing a series of national anniversaries as well as several authors’ jubilees, among which the centenary of Ibsen’s death in 2006 was the most prominent. Tourism was expanding and becoming more diversified, and one response to the demands from new types of tourists was a boom in the establishment of authors’ museums all over Europe (Hendrix 2008a: 1–2; Watson 2009: 5; Bohman 2010: 24). There was an academic offensive as well, with a new Centre for Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo, a new critical edition of his writings and a new major biography. Wigert’s proposal met with heavy protests from Skien and Grimstad, who stood to lose parts of their collections. Now there was political and public backing for the Oslo initiative, however, and after intense negotiations Skien and Grimstad gave in. The state bought furniture that had

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been sold at home and abroad, and in 1992 a meticulous restoration process started. In 1994, the museum opened to the public, and after a short closure in 2005 it reopened again in 2006, containing, according to the museum’s home page (www.ibsenmuseet.no) in 2018, ‘Henrik Ibsen’s home, restored with original interiors and an exhibition presenting Ibsen’s life and works’. By the end of 2018, this exhibition was again closed, this time in order to build a theatre stage in the backyard and an expanded museum exhibition, scheduled for reopening in 2022. At the entrance of the new museum, the public are met by a statue of the author showing an Ibsen who has climbed down from his column to sit on it and meet them at eye level, clearly indicating an end to monumentalism and a will to invite and engage with the audience. Neither were there any reservations about accommodating the public’s curiosity for the private. The museum published a book, A Thing or Two About Ibsen, with reflections on the writer’s life and work through a range of specific objects that he had possessed, including trivial and intimate belongings like his razors and his bathtub. Such authentic objects were, as Harald Hendrix notes, ‘clearly considered to be privileged media able to communicate in a convincing manner essential aspect[s] of both Ibsen’s life and work’ (Hendrix 2015: 29). The new museum was hailed as finally bringing Ibsen ‘home’, in several respects. First, it appropriated Ibsen for Oslo. Answering the protests from Grimstad, the leading conservative politician Lars Roar Langslet held up against the southern coastal town that Ibsen had spent some important but ‘partly depressing’ years there, and to which he never went back. He welcomed Grimstad and Skien promoting themselves as ‘Ibsen towns’, but it would be, he claimed, ‘a forgery to pretend that it was these two towns that he had been most strongly connected to as a mature writer’.29 He thought the objections from Grimstad indicated ‘a very parochial quarrel’,30 and right from the start, the planned Ibsen museum in Oslo, with Langslet on its board, called itself Nasjonalmuseet Henrik Ibsen – today just Ibsenmuseet (The Ibsen Museum). Secondly, the reassembling and restoring process was committed to the idea of Arbins gate as home, as shown in the film Ibsen’s Bathtub: The Restoration of Henrik Ibsen’s Apartment by Erling Borgen (2006). The bathtub was traced to a farm where by the 1990s it was being used outdoors as a drinking trough for cows, and in the film we follow the work of restoring this and other objects, furniture and interiors as closely as possible to their original states. The film is a tribute to all the remarkable knowledge, technical competence, care and enthusiasm that went into the restoration process. It documents how this striving for authenticity involved a series

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of reflexive compromises between restoration, preservation and modernization: New copies with fresh colours or worn-out originals? Modern electric lighting or original and more hazardous light sources? However, the film also demonstrates how this work of authenticity was ideological as well as technical: it did the work of ‘homing’. The film suggests that with every piece of inventory that fitted into its original place, with every fragment of original colour or tapestry uncovered, with every piece of information on textiles found, Ibsen moved home again, little by little. The film wanted to show, in the words of its producer, ‘the extraordinary story of how Ibsen’s soul and furniture return to his home’ (DVD jacket, quoted in Hendrix 2015: 30). The work of homing Ibsen to this apartment meant appropriating him for bourgeois architectural culture, and thereby, unintentionally it seems, at the same time heightening a sense of tension between life and work. While appropriating Ibsen for Oslo, the new museum largely adopted the received Ibsen vs. Norway narrative. In the introduction to A Thing or Two About Ibsen, Langslet uses Ibsen to ask ‘us’ about Norwegian provinciality. We are allowed to feel proud of Ibsen, he writes, but ‘[w]e ought to be asking ourselves, in a self-searching Ibsenian manner: What is our relationship to the great man? Is it the same old story of Ibsenian greatness and Norwegian smallness?’ (Langslet 2006: 11). The museum exhibition texts displayed until 2018, when the museum was closed for renovation, indicated that the answer was ‘yes’, by implying that his modern drama started as an international event, only belatedly to be recognized at home. Under the heading ‘The World Scene’, the visitors were informed that ‘[w]hen A Doll’s House was published, Ibsen enjoyed international acclaim – but this was chiefly among radical artists and intellectuals’. There was no mention of the immediate and extraordinary book market and theatre success of A Doll’s House in Scandinavia, and the fact that A Doll’s House reached a wider audience than any of his previous books. The exhibition text, on the contrary, claimed that it was ‘[o]ut there in the “wide world” that he gradually tasted success, and developed into the Ibsen who is renowned throughout the world’. Under the heading ‘Home and Away’, visitors read that ‘[i]n Ghosts and other plays, the freedom of the world outside is set in sharp contrast to the constrictions and darkness of Norway, with its puritanism and introverted way of life’. This narrative also informed the guided tour as well as the selected quotations that in 2006 were moulded into the pavement along Ibsen’s daily walk to the Grand Café, the so-called ‘Quotation Street’ (Sitatgaten, created by artists Ingrid Falk and Gustavo Aguerre). Homing Ibsen to Oslo, then, was accompanied by reaffirming his alienation from Norway.

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The Impossible Homecoming At the same time, Ibsen’s troubled relation to Skien continued. Today, Skien obviously uses Ibsen extensively. There are several monuments to him, and his name turns up all over the town. Alongside Ibsenmuseet there is Ibsenhuset (The Ibsen House), the town’s culture centre of 1973 and Teater Ibsen, the regional theatre. However, the distance associated with class has not gone away with the decline of industrial capitalism; in some ways it may even have been reinforced with the emergence of new forms of mass culture and with class being more bound up with lifestyles and cultural preferences than with work. Theatre directors have complained that it is ‘impossible’ to play Ibsen in Skien (Gulliksen 2014: 297). There are competing narratives about the origins of Ibsenhuset. In one version, Ibsenhuset is one of the main achievements of Ibsenforbundet, ‘the biggest project’ in the society’s history (Nygaard 1974: 152). In another version, the one presented on the municipality’s home pages, the credit is primarily given to the trade unions (Skien Bibliotek [undated]). The article on Østvedt in the Norwegian National Dictionary of Biography notes that Østvedt, towards the end of his life, was troubled by health issues as well as by the mayor of Skien indicating that the trade unions ought to have as much credit for Ibsenhuset as Ibsenforbundet and Østvedt (Aanderaa 2014). In 2014, when Norway celebrated the bicentenary of independence and constitutional government, the local newspaper Varden invited its readers to nominate the most important person from Telemark – ‘important’ either by having made an impact in and outside the county or by having contributed to form it. The newspaper’s own list, presented initially, had Ibsen on top, but among the more than nine thousand readers responding, Ibsen ended up number three behind the industrialist Sam Eyde, the founder of Hydro, and Gunnar Sønsteby, a hero of the Second World War resistance (Aulie 2014). A local politician and former cabinet minister argued strongly in favour of another politician and once prime minister, Gunnar Knutsen, maintaining that although Ibsen was definitely the most famous it was more important to have ‘made decisions’, to have ‘accomplished something’ and to have ‘built the country’ (Jakobsen 2014). It is not unique that local and national canons of history and culture might look rather different from how the outside world perceives them, but such an attitude suggests that Ibsen continues to be perceived as too big for his native county and, correspondingly, that the ‘world’ of world literature is a world that Skien and Telemark still struggle to feel at home in, and perhaps never will.

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Canonization need not by itself rule out local affinity, however. Of the three Telemark environments, the landsmål region has been the most productive in literary terms. While no major working-class literature emerged from the county (Rovde 2014: 153–54), its upper part produced one of the foremost Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, Tarjei Vesaas. Vesaas went far beyond any notion of ‘native’ or ‘folk’ literature to become a main representative of post-Second World War modernism, and he is widely translated. However, two crucial circumstances connected and continue to connect Vesaas inextricably to Telemark: his residence in his native Vinje is generally seen as his ‘writer’s home’ and he wrote in landsmål. With Ibsen, there is neither a corresponding home nor a linguistic attachment. On the other hand, local rivalry has also contributed to nourishing local interest in Ibsen. Asked in 1960 by the newspaper Fædrelandsvennen (9 July) if people from Skien visited the Grimstad museum, the local guide said that they did, but they were always offended and envious. In 1954, there was outrage when a US tourist map had marked Grimstad as ‘Ibsen town’ but omitted Skien. From Grimstad, the signature ‘S.B.’ responded that they had never intended to make a tourist attraction, just to honour Ibsen, whereas Skien had done nothing and only now had discovered that there was publicity and money to be had from using the playwright (S.B. 1956). In the 1990s, it proved highly controversial when the local museum management finally adopted a ‘national’ perspective and let go of the reading room and bedroom furniture to the new Oslo museum. Part of the compensation given to Skien was a research position. In this position, Jørgen Haave has scrutinized the evidence for Ibsen’s local and family history, and he has contributed to dismantling the literary part of Østvedt’s memorial strategy. Østvedt and Fett tried to project Ibsen’s imagined worlds onto architectural structures in Skien, an effort as old as literary tourism itself, but material banalities can result (Hendrix 2008b: 17), and a more modest antiquarianism may be a wise strategy. One of the things a childhood home can do if it is in a seemingly un-literary location, like the one in Skien, or the house of the first literary compositions, like the pharmacy in Grimstad, is to reopen the teleology of authorship to historical contingency. From the teleology of the author perspective, such places easily fill the narrative function of limitations and resistance that the hero has to overcome to become what he was always intended to be. In a historical perspective, they remind us of a time when no one had any idea of ‘Ibsen’ – while when he lived in Arbins gate, the entire world was all too aware of it. Biography has the

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formal problem of inevitably projecting backwards onto the youth what we already know about the grown individual. The less an author’s childhood home makes excessive literary claims, the more effectively it may counterbalance the ‘biographical illusion’ and do its contingency work – and the more emotionally powerful it can be to visit it.

Author’s Home Museums: Contested Sites of Literary Memory The Ibsen heritage has been contested right from the start and in numerous respects. Should remaining houses, furniture and private belongings of an author be conceded any public value and be preserved at all? Where should they be preserved? How should Ibsen memory culture be distributed between Skien, Grimstad and Oslo? Does a ‘mature’ author’s house have a higher memorial value than a childhood home? Does Ibsen belong to bourgeois culture or should he be remembered as one of the fiercest critics of this culture? Did he find a true home in his bourgeois flat in Arbins gate – despite denying his dramatic characters such a thing? Does an author’s house museum need to be a ‘home’? There are no obvious answers to these questions, and they will continue to be contested. One concluding critical observation can be made, however, concerning the continued influence of the Ibsen vs. Norway narrative on memorial practices. We have seen that museum developments since the 1990s have moved the pivot of memorial culture associated with the playwright from Skien and Grimstad to Oslo, from the ‘province’ to the ‘centre’. This shift has been accompanied by a reproduction of the narrative about Norway as a provincial limitation and of Ibsen’s modern drama as emerging in ‘Europe’. The price for identifying Ibsen as ‘world literature’ seems to be that he must be de-nationalized. This represents an apparent paradox in terms of cultural nationalism but it makes sense as capital-building. The centre of a ‘peripheral’ country can use its ‘world author’ to transcend the ‘provincial’ nation and appear as a cosmopolitan space. Ibsen museums in Norway, then, have been assigned a task that has been conceived as contradictory: to house world literature in a country that is perceived as a literary periphery. Claiming that one’s literature is not national but world literature is unnecessary in large nations; they take this to be self-evident. This also suggests, however, that ‘national’ and ‘international’ are not essential qualities but distinctions produced in struggles for cultural legitimacy. Museums should, then, be self-critical in using such oppositions, and arguably should contribute to ques-

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tioning them. Ibsen museums could, for example, show that Ibsen did not meet ‘Europe’ only when leaving Norway, but highlight both the linguistic and literary interconnectedness in Scandinavia and how the ‘national’ and the ‘international’ were already intertwined and present in Norwegian theatre and literature in the 1850s. The Nordic countries were always pronounced ‘import cultures’ and had to conceive their own contributions in transnational terms. Conversely, living abroad did not mean writing primarily for foreign markets. Expanding the scope to include reading, performance and reception, Ibsen museums could show that Ibsen’s modern drama very much responded to demands in Scandinavian home markets while he was still an obscurity elsewhere. At the same time, they could explain the advantages of living abroad for a writer from a ‘small nation’ where literature was of immediate and great public interest (Fulsås and Rem 2018). The ‘national’ and the ‘European’ were, in other words, inextricably intertwined throughout Ibsen’s career, and should not be constructed as a zero-sum game. Ibsen museums could contribute to making Ibsen national, Scandinavian and international all at the same time if they took a more critical view of the received master narrative.

Acknowledgements Alongside the participants of the TRAUM project I want to thank the University of Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities and Wolfson College for hosting me in the Easter Term of 2018 while writing the manuscript for this chapter. Narve Fulsås is Professor of Modern History at the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway. He has published on Norwegian cultural and intellectual history in the nineteenth century, and he edited introductions and annotations to Ibsen’s letters in the critical edition Henrik Ibsens skrifter [Henrik Ibsen’s writings] (2005–10). With Tore Rem he has written Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of a World Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and edited Ibsen in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

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Notes Translations from the various Scandinavian languages are mine.   1. ‘han har levet som i et Telt, mellem lejede Møbler, der den Dag, Afrejsen bestemtes, kunde sendes tilbage; han har fra 1864 af ikke sat Foden under eget Bord eller hvilt i sin egen Seng. Til Ro i strængere Forstand har han ingensinde slaaet sig; han har vænnet sig til at føle sig hjemme i Hjemløshed. … Selv nu som formuende Mand føler han ingen Trang til at eje Hus og Hjem, end mindre Gaard og Grund som Bjørnson. Han er udskilt fra sit Folk, uden nogen Virksomhed, der forbinder ham med en Institution, et Parti eller endog blot et Tidsskrift eller Blad hjemme eller ude – en enlig Mand’ (Brandes [1882] 1898: 59).  2. ‘Gör du som Ibsen! Sätt dig i en vrå som en annan Moses på berget och tala ett ord en gång om året, och tala listeliga så att ingen förstår hvad du säger, ty då ligger folket på sina ansigten och tilber Sfinxen!’ (Strindberg [1884] 1961: 184).  3. ‘Mens alt, hva Ibsen har gitt oss, rommes i hans verker – han har intet gitt oss utover dem, er Bjørnsons diktning kun en del av hans rike ånds overflod, som han med alltid åpent hjerte og åpne hender har drysset ut over oss’ (Knagenhjelm 2019).  4. ‘Deroppefra synes alle de lavt nedenfor liggende Grave smaa, saa fjærne som om man saa dem gjennem Formindskelsesglas’ (Vigeland 1906).  5. ‘man tar overtroisk feil når man mener at det er noe annet særmerke ved dem enn vankundighetens’ (Hamsun 2009: 125).  6. ‘Jeg trodde ikke at min far noen sinne skulle bli bedømt som en alminnelig møbelhandler’ (quoted in Rudeng 1998: 48).  7. ‘Modstand og Uforstand, af Underkjendelse og Miskjendelse’ (Morgenbladet, 23 May 1906, p. 2).  8. ‘Kan det undre, at en Digter i sin Kamp for saa store Maal i en liden Tid med dens Partisplittelse og dens Lære om Massens Ret, i et aandelig talt aflægs og ringe Samfund, ofte er bleven mistydet eller har vakt Vrede?’ (ibid.).  9. ‘vor tids mest revolutionerende kraft’ (Social-Demokraten, 25 May 1906). 10. ‘bedsteborgernes og filistrenes farligste fiende’ (ibid.). 11. ‘vendepunktet i Ibsens literære liv’ (ibid.). 12. ‘Ein typisk blom fraa den europeiske kultur-engi – ein blom som kan blenkja, men som er utan ange, og utan evne til aa setja frukt’ (Den 17de Mai, 26 May 1906). 13. ‘til Kulturens og Kunstens Hjemstavn, til Italien. Hernede, under lettere Forhold, under en lysere Himmel, udfoldedes alle Digterens Evner og Kræfter’ (Aftenposten, 23 May 1906, p. 1). 14. ‘Skal værelset opbevares, maa det ske av pietet, av ærbødighet for stedets stemning. Her var det Henrik Ibsen arbeidet, dette var hans vinduer, her sat han og saa ut paa menneskene’ (Skavlan 1914).

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15. ‘Den gode by fortjener igrunden heller ikke at indgaa nogen videre intim forbindelse med begrepet og navnet Ibsen. Dertil har byens oldefædre ærgret den store digter formeget’ (Bakke 1918; see also ‘Fra Sørlandet til Telemarken’, Trondhjems Adresseavis, 27 July 1916, p. 4). 16. ‘Ibsen-museum der hvor Ibsen likte seg minst’; ‘Årene på Venstøp var uten tvil de bitreste i Ibsens liv. Han ble revet ut fra sitt barndoms miljø i byen, og endte i den reneste fattigdom på landet’ (Dagbladet, 7 March 1952, p. 5). 17. ‘knytte Ibsen sterkere til fødebyen’ (Mosfjeld 1958). 18. ‘Det vi savner er den store oppslutning til å la Skien bli Ibsens by’ (Erhard 1951). 19. ‘Det var under et opphold på Venstøploftet for noen år siden at sammenhengen mellom dette og det symbolmettede mørkeloftet i “Vildanden” med ett stod lysende klart for meg. … Sammenfallet mellom virkelighet og diktning nærmer seg her den absolutte kongruens’ (Østvedt 1959a: 100). 20. ‘Madam Rundholmens skjenkestue … Gjerne i nærheten av huset med Daniel Hejres fallerte spydigheter’ (Fett 1956: 164). 21. ‘Ibsens norske teater som en karakteristisk pendant fra vår tid til de store klassiske innsatser på dette området, det greske, det engelske og det franske’ (Fett 1952). 22. ‘hjemstedet for den norske kystbys verdensteater’ (ibid.). 23. ‘overskygge den kjensgjerning at det standsmessige huset var vakkert og fullt av intim trivsel’ (Østvedt 1959b: 126; see Haave 2018). 24. ‘og samtidig en voksende kulde imellom foreldrene. Han lærte det som han nevner i opptegnelser til “Vildanden”, at “børns første og dybeste smerter, det er familjesmertene – det pinefulde i hjemmets forhold”’ (Bull 1956). 25. ‘Det må bli reine unntak der ein kan lage museum av kunstnarbustader. Men eg synest det er mykje som talar for at husværet i Arbins gate blir eitt av desse få unntaka’ (quoted in Hovden 1964). 26. ‘hvis jeg havde kendt hendes stemme, det rum og det hus, hvorfra, den kom og haft dens ekko i mine ører’ (Wivel 1999: 13). 27. ‘overskrider man en tærskel, ophæver et skel og bevæger sig ind på privat territorium, hvis gedulgte hemmeligheder ved nærmere eftersyn viser sig at være om ikke banale, så prosaiske eller også direkte pinlige, pinefulde og alt-for-menneskelige’ (ibid.: 16). 28. ‘vi næppe forstår kunsten bedre, hvis vi ved noget om en kunstners liv. Ligesom vi næppe bliver klogere af at besøge kunstnernes huse’ (ibid.: 18). 29. ‘en forfalskning å late som om det fremfor alt er disse to byene han var knyttet til som moden dikter’ (Langslet 1990). 30. ‘den svært så lokale kranglingen’ (ibid.).

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References Unprinted Sources Fett, H. 1952. Letter to E. Østvedt, 27 June. Letter Collection 707. National Library of Norway, Oslo. Knagenhjelm, A. 2019. ‘27. April 1910’, in J.G. Arntzen (ed.), Artur Knagenhjelm: Dagbøker 1882–1937. Oslo: Jon Gunnar Arntzen / Ad Notam forlag. Retrieved 17 May 2018 from http://akn.forlags-it.dk/?p=kron&v=1910-04-27. Østvedt, E. 1956. Letter to H. Koht, 6 April. Letter Collection 386. National Library of Norway, Oslo. Skien bibliotek. [undated]. ‘Skien biblioteks historie | Skien’. Skien kommune: Skien bibliotek. Retrieved 3 June 2018 from http://skienbibliotek.no/?page_id=5878. Vigeland, G. 1906. Letter to S. Ibsen, 30 May. Letter Collection 200. National Library of Norway, Oslo.

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. 2018. ‘Bløffen om Ibsens kjøkken’, in O. Grepstad (ed.), Forfattarens Skriftstader. Oslo: Samlaget, pp. 74–121. Hamsun, K. 2009. ‘Om Ibsen-værelsene’, in Samlede verker, Vol. 27, ed. L.F. Larsen. Oslo: Gyldendal. Hendrix, H. 2008a. ‘Writers’ Houses as Media of Expression and Remembrance: From Self-Fashioning to Cultural Memory’, in H. Hendrix (ed.), Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–11. . 2008b. ‘The Early Modern Invention of Literary Tourism: Petrarch’s Houses in France and Italy’, in H. Hendrix (ed.), Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. New York: Routledge, pp. 15–30. . 2015. ‘Literary Heritage Sites across Europe: A Tour d’Horizon’, Interférences Littéraires/Literaire interferenties 16: 23–38. Hovden, K.A. 1964. ‘Gjenreis Henrik Ibsens heim i Oslo!’, Dagbladet, 3 November, p. 6. Ibsen, H. (1866) 1965. ‘Letter to the King, 15 April 1866’, in E. Sprinchorn (ed.), Ibsen: Letters and Speeches. London: MacGibbon & Kee. . 1891. ‘Mottaker: Axel Borchgrevink’. Henrik Ibsens skrifter. Retrieved 10 October 2019 from https://www.ibsen.uio.no/BREV_1890-1905ht|B18910331ABo. xhtml. . (1898a) 1965. ‘Speech at the Banquet in Christiania, 23 March 1898’, in E. Sprinchorn (ed.), Letters and Speeches. London: MacGibbon & Kee. . 1898b. ‘Mottaker: Ukjente mottagere’. Henrik Ibsens skrifter. Retrieved 10 October 2019 from https://www.ibsen.uio.no/BREV_1890-1905ht|B18980331NN_Da_ det.xhtml. . (1899) 2014. When We Dead Awaken, in The Master Builder and Other Plays, ed. T. Rem, trans. A.-M. Stanton-Ife. London: Penguin. ‘Ibsen-museum og akademi i Oslo’. 1937. Aftenposten, 21 December, No. 538, p. 2. Jakobsen, L.B. 2014. ‘Terje [Riis-Johansen] vil ha Gunnar’, Varden, 11 April. Kjeldstadli, K. 2014. ‘De tre samfunn’, in O. Rovde and I. Skobba (eds), Telemarks Historie etter 1905. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, pp. 15–84. Langslet, L.R. 1990. ‘Ibsen og Grimstad’, Dagbladet, 11 December, p. 4. . 2006. ‘Ibsen’s Prominence – and Ibsen’s Possessions’, in A.-S. Hjemdal (ed.), A Thing or Two About Ibsen: His Possessions, Dramatic Poetry and Life. Oslo: Andrimne, pp. 7–11. Lie, J. (1899) 2009. Letter to A. Garborg, 21 January 1899, Jonas Lie: Brev, ed. A.G. Holm-Olsen. Oslo: Novus, pp. 1485–86. Mazover, M. 1999. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. London: Penguin. Medbøe, K. 1990. [Interviewed in ‘Rom for Ibsen i Arbinsgate?’], Morgenbladet, 8 February, p. 25. ‘Medlemmer’. 1953. [Ibsen]årbok 1953: 115–16. Mosfjeld, O. 1949. Henrik Ibsen og Skien: En biografisk og litteratur-psykologisk studie. Oslo: Gyldendal. . 1958. [Interviewed in ‘Oppgave for myndigheter og befolkning: La oss gjøre Skien til Ibsen-byen’], Telemark Arbeiderblad, 15 March, p. 46. Nygaard, J. 1974. ‘Ibsenforbundet 25 år’, Ibsenårbok 1974: 148–54. Østvedt, E. 1955. [Speech quoted in ‘Fortidsforskerne har stort utbytte av oppholdet i Nedre Telemark’], Telemark Arbeiderblad, 20 August, p. 12. . 1959a. ‘Mørkeloftet og Miljøet i “Vildanden”’, [Ibsen]årbok 1957–59: 93–108.

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. 1959b. ‘Ibsenmuseet på Venstøp og Ibsenmonumentet i Skien’, [Ibsen]årbok 1957–59: 121–40. Rem, T. 2014. Knut Hamsun: Reisen til Hitler. Oslo: Cappelen Damm. Romsaas, J. 2006. ‘Dining with the Ibsens’, in A.-S. Hjemdal (ed.), A Thing or Two About Ibsen: His Possessions, Dramatic Poetry and Life. Oslo: Andrimne, pp. 219–23. Rovde, O. 2014. ‘Venstreborg, sosialdemokratisk dominans og bølgjer frå Høgre: Telemark som politisk region’, in O. Rovde and I. Skobba (eds), Telemarks Historie etter 1905. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, pp. 129–96. Rudeng, E. 1998. ‘Suvenirer og Suvenirproduksjon’, in Litterære museer i Skandinavia: Seminar på Voksenåsen, Oslo, 9.–11. Januar 1998. Oslo: Ibsen-museet, pp. 45–60. Sandberg, M. 2001. ‘Ibsen and the Mimetic Home of Modernity’, Ibsen Studies 1(2): 32–58. . 2015. Ibsen’s Houses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. S.B. 1956. ‘Hvorfor har Ibsens fødeby neglisjert hans minne? Skiensavis forarget over at Grimstad-Museet er blitt en attraksjon’, Fædrelandsvennen, 20 November, p. 5. Skavlan, E. 1914. ‘Mindegalskapen og Ibsens Arbeidsrum’, Dagbladet, 23 April, p. 1. Strindberg, A. (1884) 1961. Letter to B. Bjørnson, 4 May 1884, in Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons Brevveksling med Svenske 1858–1909, Vol. 2, eds. Ø. Anker, F. Bull and Ö. Lindberger. Oslo: Gyldendal, pp. 182–84. Watson, N.J. 2006. The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. . 2009. ‘Introduction’, in N.J. Watson (ed.), Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–12. Wivel, H. 1999. ‘“Kunstnernes huse” eller distancens lidenskab’, Litterære Museer i Skandinavia. Oslo: Ibsen-museet, pp. 11–19.

Epilogue

Author Museums and Democratization Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke

Literary scholar Harald Hendrix and others have shown that the phenomenon of visiting writers’ houses is part of a long tradition, reaching back to the sixteenth century in Italy, when readers began to show interest in their favourite authors’ private lives and the places they lived in. Literary tourism and the ritual of visiting poets’ graves and homes can be traced back to classical antiquity (Watson 2006: 32; Hendrix 2009: 14), and the first publicly maintained authors’ houses we know of are William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) birthplace in Stratfordupon-Avon and Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) house in Leipzig, which both opened to the public in the 1840s (Emery 2012: 9). Changes in how we conceive author museums may have happened since then, in different ways and at different paces, but author museums have nevertheless continued to provide novel insights into writers’ lives and works. Today it is not only literary fans, authors and scholars who visit these museums. Schoolchildren also go to literary museums – for example, the Petőfi Literary Museum in Budapest – to learn about national literary canons; with star architects having begun to build such museums, now people interested in sensual and out-of-the-ordinary architectural expressions also visit them; and author museums can often be part of a standard tourist itinerary catering to mass tourism and to local recreation. Literary museums are increasingly used as places for information dissemination to young people, and this raises questions about their potential for didactic practices. Many author museums are part of the genre of single-artist or personality museum, but as our var-

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ious cases illustrate, this museum type may have many different functions, and despite their history as sites of apotheosis, are firmly rooted in today’s museum landscape and are subject to present concerns such as democratization. In the present volume we have followed Nicola Watson’s (2020) recent monograph on the functions of various objects and spaces within the writer’s home museum, in giving more attention to it primarily as a museum, rather than as part of literary tourism. We have included discussions of a wider range of museum genres and modes, and on the overlaps between author’s home museums, author centres, literature museums and other forms of literary exhibition, along with the way in which different elements and curatorial strategies in literary museums interact with contemporary visitor expectations, practices and interpretations. The volume has extended museological interests in multidimensionality and representation to include author museums to a greater extent. In the English-language research tradition on author museums, literary scholars have dominated the field, and there are few references to museological theory or to literary museums outside of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy. A focus on the house museum genre, with its preserved and reconstructed interiors, has meant that the study of literary museums and exhibitions outside home museums has not received much attention; for one exception, see Alison Booth’s report on the themed attraction Dickens World in Chatham (Booth 2009: 156–59). There has been little focus on detailed exhibition analysis or on ongoing transformations in literary museum practice. However, in this volume we have tried to answer the need for more research into author museums, both because it broadens our understanding of these museums as agents in national and international culture politics, and because the study of author museums provides new perspectives and poses new questions that researchers within museum studies have been interested in investigating. An example of such a question would be that posed by the embodied experiences and emotions evoked in the author museum (see, for example, Dudley 2010 and Watson 2019). We suggest that author museums may be promising cases for researchers interested in the history of the senses, affect theory or embodied experience. The contributors to this volume show how the architecture of a museum building, how the way objects are arranged inside the exhibition, how authors are evoked and communicated, and how a museum’s rhetoric is designed, will make visitors feel particular emotions, provoking them or giving them a feeling of homeliness and belonging. As the various chapters in this volume illustrate, author museums can be

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approached in a highly interdisciplinary fashion, by museologists, historians, and literary scholars. As the concept of genre has become less normative and more differentiated, scholars have become more aware of the various functions an author museum may have. The English-language research has mostly focused on pilgrims and fans of the author as the main target group of author museums, yet many contemporary visitors may not even have read the works of the author concerned, or only to a small extent (but see Booth 2009: 160). However, the tradition of pilgrimage, celebration and memorial around the musealized homes of national and intellectual heroes has been challenged in recent decades. A private home is no longer a prerequisite for the establishment of an author museum, and new museum and exhibition types have emerged with literary starting points: author centres, literary museums, literary exhibitions, theme parks, transnational author museums, and so on. This expansion of the author and literature museum genres in a postmodern world has made them less marginal in the museum landscape. Today, new museums dedicated to authors and their literature continue to be created and opened to the public. This tells us that although these museums reach back to the sixteenth century in Italy, they have also managed to renew themselves and thus stay relevant in a changing world. In the present volume we have addressed two major forms of transformation: firstly, various varieties of expansion (into new genres, architectural/geographical spaces and curatorial dimensions); and secondly, changes in politics (historical and societal contexts). We would argue that these two themes come together in a third, that of democratization and the question of whom a writer ‘belongs’ to. Today, that question might have many answers, not only literary elites and enthusiasts or fans, but also schoolchildren, general readers and tourists, admirers of both historical and new architecture and interiors, as well as people just looking for a day out. Furthermore, do author museums today belong to nations or to local communities or to the whole world? Do they also belong to museum professionals and academics? Democratization informs the development of new forms of access and involvement, but also a focus on new kinds of people in author museums: different kinds of author and different stages of the author’s life and work, or other household members and actors in literary production. An increased focus on literary works rather than authors’ lives, and on the intangible as well as the tangible, will inevitably bring with it a shift of attention towards the consumers of those works: the readers, who constitute a much larger, and in some respects a more representative social group than

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do the authors. The gradual global spread of author museums as a genre also emphasizes the need to think of them as catering for different cultural needs and expectations. Democratization also raises questions of what is supposed to happen at an author museum: a sublime experience, a sacred ritual, an enlightenment of learning, a recreative form of entertainment, a confirmation of various forms of identity, uncanny hauntings, or even debate, critique, provocations and possible dethronings. To talk about the democratization of author museums is to connect the development of author museums to larger societal changes within the development of modernity, as more and more groups of people in society have been franchised and made visible/audible in the public sphere. This dimension of author museums underlines the importance of understanding their roles as the societies around them undergo major transformations, such as has happened with the fall of colonial powers, apartheid and communism, and with the gradual relativization of national essentialisms. The expansion of the author and literature museum genres, and the question of how to exhibit author and literature in a global world, has gone hand in hand with democratization processes in other parts of the museum landscape. In Kyoto in 2019, the theme of the twenty-fifth general conference of the International Council of Museums was ‘Museums as Cultural Hubs – The Future of Tradition’ (ICOM 2019), and the key term ‘cultural hubs’ sums up the proposal for a new official definition of museums (Sandahl 2019a) discussed at the conference, a definition stating the aim of museums, as ‘polyphonic spaces’, ‘to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary well-being’ (ICOM 2020). According to this ideal, the community is invited into the museum and the museum is embedded in the social landscape. Our examples of old and new functions of the author museums above can be compared to functions of museums in general, or their aim to ‘bring people together in purposeful convening, to exchange ideas, to create a sense of belonging and identity, to build empathy, understanding and sensitivity towards differences, to promote reflection and critical thinking, and to create spaces for reconciliation’ (Sandahl 2019b). Jette Sandahl, who when she wrote this was chair of the ICOM Standing Committee for the Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials, also pointed to the necessity for museums to provide different solutions to the diverse – and changing – needs created by the global spread of museums (ibid.). Looking at them all together, the contributors in this volume give new insight to how author museums respond to different desires based on where they are situated, at what time they became public institutions, and for whom they were built.

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Author museums can become a node in a network involving the local community. This goes, for example, for author centres in Norway and for the Olive Schreiner museum in South Africa. More rapid and drastic democratization in some societies may require radical changes in author home museums. Some negotiate new historical narratives and cultural memories while being used as a place for sociopolitical dialogue, while others such as Sol Plaatje’s museum in South Africa focus on the historical, which may allow less room for a more democratic present (see also Lande 2018). Like other museums, author and literature museums have become more interactive in their technical design. They have partly shifted their focus from exhibition to dissemination activities via schools and the internet, and they give more attention to visitors. Forthcoming quantitative studies (for a preparatory study, see Nath and Saha 2017) show that recreation and not only pilgrimage plays an important role as a motivation for some contemporary adult visitors to author museums, which increasingly have to communicate with visitors who take on the roles of ‘discoverers’ and ‘facilitators’ (for example, somebody taking family members on a day out), who may not have read the author and the literature on display (see also Herbert 2001). Changed patterns in the financing of museums have reinforced democratization processes; the legitimacy of museums is now based on their accessibility, bringing with it an increased emphasis on profiling, place-branding, signal architecture and attracting more visitors. This ties in well with the wide-reaching academic interest in the didactic aspects of literary museums and exhibitions in the German-speaking countries, where researchers in recent decades have investigated the possibilities of how literary exhibitions and museums can be used in education and learning (e.g. Wehnert 2002; Dücker and Schmidt 2011) and discussed how literature may be communicated outside the museum, in and through surrounding landscapes (Roeder 2004; Rupp 2008; Zifko 2013). Today, technological changes have facilitated the crossing of borders between the insides and the outsides of museums, making them even more porous than before. Hardly any author museum today can neglect the potential that the new media offer for interpreting authors and literature. New technical solutions not only allow for novel ways of experiencing and communicating literature and its authors, but their implementation in museums may also be a necessary step if they wish to attract young ‘digital natives’ into the museum. Again, involvement is a question not only of the choice of themes, but also of material practices in the author museum.

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Ulrike Spring is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oslo. While working on this book, she was also affiliated as Professor II to the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. She works on museum history, exhibition analysis, and nineteenth-century Arctic history, in particular on expeditions and tourism. She was the leader and co-coordinator (with Johan Schimanski) of the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums (2016–19) and leads the research group Collecting Norden (2021–22). She has co-edited a special issue of Nordisk museologi on ‘Communication Processes in Author Museums’ with Johan Schimanski (2020). Johan Schimanski is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on borders in literature, Arctic discourses, and literary exhibition practices. At present he leads a NOS-HS workshop on Temporalities and Subjectivities of Crossing. Recent co-edited volumes include Living Together (co-editor 2019), co-edited with Knut Stene-Johansen and Christian Refsum, and Border Images, Border Narratives (2021), co-edited with Jopi Nyman. With Ulrike Spring, he was co-coordinator of the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums (2016–19), and they have co-edited a special issue of Nordic Museology on ‘Communication Processes in Author Museums’ (2020). Thea Aarbakke works at the Women’s Museum in Norway. She is Project Coordinator for ‘There She Goes Again’, a project about gender representations in Norwegian museums in relation to collections and exhibitions. While working on this book, she was affiliated to the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and the University of Oslo. Aarbakke holds a PhD in Museology, and was doctoral fellow in the research project TRAUM – Transforming Author Museums (2016–19). In 2020 she defended her dissertation on contemporary author museums in Norway dedicated to Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun and Olav H. Hauge.

References Booth, A. 2009. ‘Time-Travel in Dickens’ World’, in N.J. Watson (ed.), Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 150–63. Dücker, B., and T. Schmidt (eds). 2011. Lernort Literaturmuseum: Beiträge zur kulturellen Bildung. Göttingen: Wallstein. Dudley, S. (ed.). 2010. Museum Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things. New York: Routledge.

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Emery, E. 2012. Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881–1914): Privacy, Publicity, and Personality. Farnham: Ashgate. Hendrix, H. 2009. ‘From Early Modern to Romantic Literary Tourism: A Diachronical Perspective’, in N.J. Watson (ed.), Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 13–24. Herbert, D. 2001. ‘Literary Places, Tourism and the Heritage Experience’, Annals of Tourism Research 28(2): 312–33. ICOM. 2019. ‘ICOM Kyoto 2019’. Retrieved 20 November 2020 from http://icomkyoto-2019.org. . 2020. ‘Museum Definition’. Retrieved 16 November 2020 from https://icom. museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/museum-definition/. Lande, D.R. 2018. ‘Reading Sol Plaatje in Kimberley: A South African Author Museum’, South African Journal of Cultural History 32(2): 47–60. Nath, A., and P. Saha. 2017. ‘A Theoretical Positioning of Self and Social Identities as Antecedents in Cultural-Experiential Tourism’, Academica Turistica 10(2): 115–28. Roeder, C. 2004. ‘Schauplatz Buch. Literarische Spaziergänge als kreative Ortserkundungen für Kinder und Jugendliche’, in V. Frederking (ed.), Lesen und Symbolverstehen: Jahrbuch Medien im Deutschunterricht 2003. Munich: kopaed, pp. 19–36. Rupp, G. 2008. Spessart als Text: Analyse und Aneignung einer Landschaft. Hanau: CoCon-Verlag. Sandahl, J. 2019a. ‘The Museum Definition as the Backbone of ICOM’, Museum International 71(281–282): 1–9. . 2019b. ‘Editorial: The Museum Definition as the Backbone of Museums’, Museum International 71(281–282): [no pagination]. Watson, N.J. 2006. The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. . 2020. The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watson, S. 2019. ‘Emotions and Materiality: Introduction Part III’, in S. Watson, A.M. Barnes and K. Bunning (eds), A Museum Study Approach to Heritage. New York: Routledge, pp. 295–97. Wehnert, S. 2002. Literaturmuseen im Zeitalter der neuen Medien: Leseumfeld – Aufgaben – Didaktische Konzepte. Kiel: Ludwig. Zifko, T. 2013. Literatur lokalisiert: Museologische Überlegungen zur Präsentation von literarischen Texten mit besonderer Bezugnahme auf das Designkonzept des Projekts ‘Steirische Literaturpfade des Mittelalters’. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang.

Index Aanderaa, Dag, 311 Aarbakke, Thea, 18, 21, 26–27, 35, 45, 136–53, 173n4 Aareskjold, Solveig, 64n12 Aasen, Ivar, 42, 51–54. See also Ivar Aasen Centre Abbotsford, home of Sir Walter Scott in Scotland, 14–15, 89 abstraction, art of, 189–91 Actor-Network Theory (ANT), 17–18; book collections and, 137, 139, 140, 144 Adair, Joshua G., 21 aesthetic spaces, 10–11 Aftenposten; Bjørnson home museum at Aulestad, 279, 281, 282, 283, 284, 286, 290; Norwegian Ibsen Museums, 300 agency, 142, 151, 208, 240, 242–43; Chinese author museums and, 231; defining agency, 231; gender and, 269–70; Ingrid Ekelöf ’s agency, 171; ‘literary veneration’ and, 224; local initiative and, 201; materiality and, 139; multilevel agency, 217; network metaphor and, 140; space and, 168 Ågotnes, Jacob E., 290 Aguerre, Gustavo, 310 Alcott, Louisa M., 278, 289, 292; Little Women, 278. See also Louisa M. Alcott Museum All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Monuments (VOOPliK), 206 Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love, 162 Alt, Franz, 80n1 Alts, Rudolf von, 73–74, 80n1 ALVIN Platform for digital collections, 174n8 Andersen, Hans Christian, 295, 297 Anderson, Benedict, 25–26 Anderson, Gail, 38 Arany, János, 87, 93–96 Arany, László, 94 Arbeider-Politikken, 293n2 Arbins Gate, disassembling of, 296–9 architecture; architectus verborum (‘architect of words’), 40; Aukrust Centre in Alvdal, 35, 42, 51, 53; of author museums, 35–38, 41, 58; of author museums, study of, 38; centre concept and, 38; contemporary author monuments, 61–63; Garborg Centre in Bryne, 35, 36, 37, 57–58; Hamsun Centre

in Hamarøy, 35, 36, 37, 43–47; Ivar Aasen Centre in Ørsta, language in concrete, 35, 36, 37, 51–54; literature and, 39–40; memory policy and, 62; new buildings for old authors?, 41–3; Petter Dass Museum at Alstahaug, 35, 36, 37, 48–51, 62; place and aura, 59–61; Prøysen House in Ringsaker, 35, 36, 37, 59; remembrance and, 40–41; Sigrid Undset’s Home and Garden at Bjerkebaek, 35, 36, 37, 54–57, 62–63; writing architecture, 40–41 archives; metaphors and metonymies of, 167– 71; National Archives of Norway, 293n3; writers’ houses as texts and media, 157–59 Assmann, Aleida, 157, 167, 246 Association of Hungarian Literary Memorial Houses (MIRE), 102n3 Atkin, Polly, 15–16, 278, 282, 283 Atwood, Margaret, 157 Auden, W.H., 15, 18, 23, 123–4, 154 Aukrust, Kjell, 42, 51; Aukrust Centre in Alvdal, 35, 42, 51, 53 Aulestad. See Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson home museum Austin, Paul M., 208 authenticity, 9, 93, 115, 128–29, 142, 219, 306; aura within author museums, 60; buildings and impression of, 125–26, 289; integrity and, 216–17; Norwegian Ibsen Museums and, 302–3; of place, genius loci, 54; privileged authenticity of past times, 7; striving for, reflexive compromises and, 309–10 author centres (forfattersentrer), 10; architecture of, 36–67. See also architecture author museums; academic literature on, 3; Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and, 17–18; authenticity and aura within, 60; author presentation, location and, 14–15; authors and works, relationship between, 12–16; backgrounds of, variety in, 42–43; Biedermeier period (1814–48), 11; books and papers collections in, 18; canon of authors constituted through, expansion of, 25–26; conception of, changes in, 320; controversy, dealing with, 24–26; definition of, 1–2, 8–10; delayed musealization

328 of Ibsen, 25; English-language research tradition on, 321; establishment of, 1, 6–8; exhibition of literature, 18–19; expansion, transformation through, 5, 6–19, 322; family and servants, neglect of roles of, 22; female authors, museums dedicated to, 21; founding of, variety of circumstances surrounding, 42–43; functions of, 5, 11–12, 23–24; functions of objects and spaces within, 321; Gedenkstätte (‘memorial site’), 9; gender in, non-representation of, 20–21; Global North, museums dedicated to authors from outside, 21; global phenomenon, 2; grand buildings, national icons and, 25; identity building, 22–24; influence of, 1; labelling of, 41; lesser-known authors, growth of museums celebrating, 23; literary communication (literarische Kommunikation), exhibition of, 17; literary museums, information dissemination and, 320–21, 324; literary scholars and, 3–4; literature, exhibition of, 16–19, 177–93; local community involvement with, 324; location of (and politics of who gets one), 20–22; material semantics approach (Materialsemantik) to exhibition, 17; motivating forces for building new museums, 41–42; multidimensional aspects of, analysis of, 13; musealized homes of writers, 8–9; in Norway, geographical distribution of, 61–62; in Norway, plans for additional museums, 63–64n5; Ort der ratio (‘place of rationality’), 9; ‘person museums’, Bohman’s perspective on, 62; Personalmuseum (‘personality museum’), 9; politics, transformation and, 5, 19–26, 322; polyphonic spaces, museums as, 323; remembrance, memory policy, architecture and, 62–63; research on, 2, 3–4; research possibilities for, 321–22; role of, 2; selection for, imbalances in, 20–21; selffashioning projects, 14–16; site-specificity of, 60–61; spaces and places of, 10–12; staging strategies, 14–15; tangible and intangible, relationship between, 12–16; technical design and interactive nature of, 324; territorial anchoring and, 60–61; transformations, potential for, 1, 3; Wien Museum, 11–12; writer’s home museums, functions of objects and spaces within, 321. See also author centres; literature museums; Transforming Author Museums (TRAUM) project author museums, centres and exhibitions, specific. See Aukrust Centre; Beatrix Potter’s Garden; Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson house museum; Daniel Owen exhibition; Dickens World; Franz Michael Felder Museum; Garborgsenteret; Ivar Aasen Centre; Hamsunsenteret; Lai He Museum in Zhanghua; Lin Yutang Memorial

Index Library; Louisa M. Alcott Museum; Lu Xun museums; Mori Ōgai memorial museums; Mo Yan Literature Museum; Natsume Sōseki memorial museum; Norwegian Ibsen Museums; Olive Schreiner House Museum; Petőfi Literary Museum; Petter Dass Museum; Selma Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka; Prøysen House; Schiller House; Seichō Matsumoto memorial museum; Sigrid Undset’s Home and Garden; Sol Plaatje Museum; Wien Museum (Grillparzer Apartment); Wordsworth museum authorship, 6, 9, 35, 39, 41, 44, 57, 102, 180, 189; cult of, 295; female authorship, 271–72; media events and, 115–16; place and, relationship between, 59–60; teleology of, 312 Bachelard, Gaston, 63n2 Bäckmann, Ida, 120–21, 132n11 Backmann, Reinhold, 73, 75, 80n9, 80n11 Banksy (street artist), 102n2 Baranauskas, Antanas, 219 Barthel, Wolfgang, 9, 16, 179 Barthes, Roland, 47 Baudelaire, Charles, 100 Beatrix Potter’s Garden (National Trust), 272 Beavin, Janet H., 183n2 Bellman, Carl Michael, 162 Benedek, Anna, 6, 12, 83–104, 106 Beniuševićiüté, Yulia (‘Žemaité’), 219 Benjamin, Walter, 61, 100, 163 Bennett, Tony, 4, 5 Bergens Tidende, 286, 293n1 Berger-Fix, Andrea, 179 Bergström, Gunnel, 159 Berling, Gösta, 110 Bers, Anna, 11 Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, 58 BIBSYS, 142 Biedermeier period (1814–48), 11 Biliünas, Jonas, 219 biographical museums, 4, 25 Birznieks-Upïtis, Ernests, 218 Bjørnson, Aslaug, 285, 293n3 Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne, 22, 23, 24, 25, 277–79, 284–85, 291–92, 297–98; Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: Høvdingen (Gran, G.), 282; man and place, unity of, 279–81; nation, man and, 281–83. See also Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson home museum Bjørnson, Else, 280–81, 284, 285, 287–89, 290, 293n5 Bjørnson, Erling, 278, 285–87, 291, 293n3 Bjørnson, Karoline, 278, 279, 280–81, 284–85, 288, 290–91, 293n6 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson home museum at Aulestad, 277–93; Aulestad: Karoline og Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons hjem (Bjørnstjerne, E.), 288; Aulestad discourse, distinctiveness of, 278–9; Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson og Aulestad

Index329 (Filseth, J.), 280; controversy of, 24–25; difficulties for home museum campaign, 283–5; Else’s presentation of Aulestad, purging of, 289–90; Erling Bjørnson, traitorous wartime behaviour of, 285–7; extramarital relationship, 290; future for, 291–2; goodwill towards, 277–8, 288, 290; heritage of, troublesome nature of, 277–93; home and people, 281–3; humanitarian legacy, 290; I Bjørnstjernes hus (Ågotnes, J.E.), 290; man and nation, home and people, 281–3; man and place, mythification and unity of, 278–81; positivity of home museum campaign, 282–3; public memory of Karoline Bjørnson, withering of, 290–91; reputation of Aulestad, problems for, 287–9; spiritual presence, claim for, 289; Soldage paa Aulestad (Boeck, C.), 281; Vidkun Quisling and, 285, 286; wartime Aulestad, 285–7 Blaumanis, Rüdolfs, 218 Blehr, Otto, 281–82 Bloch, Grete, 73 Bodin, Helena, 15, 18, 20, 21–22, 139, 154–76 Boeck, Christopher, 281 Bohman, Stefan, 4, 14, 22, 41, 54, 62, 297, 308 Bonnevier, Katarina, 119, 129 Bonniers Litterära Magasin, 160 book collections, 136–51; Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and, 137, 139, 140, 144; BIBSYS, 142; Bjerkebæk Museum book collection, Sigrid Undset and, 140–50; Collecting, Curating and Researching Writers’ Libraries (Oram, R.W. and Nicholson, J, eds), 138; curator at Bjerkebæk, meeting with, 146–8; Digital Library System Oria, 148–50; guided tour at Bjerkbæk, 142–6; librarian at Bjerkebæk, Digital Library System Oria and, 148–50; Nobel Foundation, 140; perspectives on, 137–8; Sigrid Undset’s personal collection at Bjerkebæk, 136–7, 140–42; UNIT (Directorate for ICT and Joint Services for Higher Education and Research), 137; unpacking collections, 139–40; Unpacking the Collection (Byrne, S. et al.), 139–40; writer’s book collections, 138–9 Booth, Alison, 3, 7, 8, 15, 16, 22, 106, 107, 321, 322 Borgen, Erling, 309–10 Boston, Lucy, 8 Botev, Hristo, 200 Bourdieu, Pierre, 231 Boye, Katin, 159 Brandes, Georg, 295, 297–98, 303, 314–15n1 Brecht, Bertolt, 173n4, 191 Brezhnev, Leonid, 202, 206–7 Brigadere, Anna, 211 Brontë sisters, 271–72 Büga, Kazimieras, 220 Bukkemoen Minkara, S., 129

Bull, Francis, 289, 307–8, 316n24 Bunn, David, 269 Byrne, Sarah, 139, 142 Cappelen, Bodil, 173n4 Carlyle, Thomas, 282–83 Cederblad, Johanne Grieg, 120, 122, 124–5, 133n13–14 Certeau, Michel de, 13 Charles XII of Sweden, 110, 111 Chen Xiaoming, 249n9 Cheremshyna, Marko, 215 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (‘G.K.’), 149 Chinese author museums, destabilizing power of, 229–51; agency, 231; Chinese Committee for Literature Museums (CCLM), 247; Chinese Writers’ Association (CWA), 249n9; Communist Party of China (CPC), 234, 235, 239, 243; Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), 243–44; The Economy of Prestige (English, J.), 236; hypercanon, Damrosch’s notion of, 230; ideological shifts, museums and, 229–30; image as rhetorical device, 231; instrumental function of museums, 229–30; interest in museums, 229–30; Lai He, clashing literary establishments and, 242–4, 248; Lin Yutang and System of Rehabilitation, 245–8, 248; Lu Xun and System of Administrative Ranking, 237–42. 248; Mao Dun Literature Prize, 249n9–11; Mao Zedong and, 229, 237–38, 242, 249n12; Mo Yan and Prize System, 232–7, 248; museum displays, analysis of, 231–2; National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (NMMCL), 234, 243, 244; National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL), 243, 244; Nationalist Party of China (GMD), 243; objects, actions of, 231; obscurity of Chinese literary establishment, exposure of, 230–31; Peoples Daily, 250n24; People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Prize for Outstanding Literature and Art, 236; People’s Literature Magazine, 249n9; Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), 238; singularization of objects, 231; visibility of obscurity, 231 Christensen, Hans Dam, 3–4 Clarke, Anna, 139 Clason, Gustaf, 117–18 Clason, Isak Gustaf, 117–18 Colaiacomo, Paola, 14, 15 commemoration, 9, 215, 225n4, 243, 248; canons of, reformulation of, 207; ‘centre concept’ and, 38; collective commemoration, 229; contemporary author monuments, 61–63; Gedenkstätte (‘memorial site’), 9; identity formation and, Grillparzer in Vienna City Museum, 77–78; literary commemoration, 220–22; sites of, 75. See also memorialization; remembrance Confucius, 238 Cradock, situating Schreiner in, 264–70

330 Cronwright-Schreiner, Samuel Cron, 266–67 Cvirka, Petras, 214 Dagbladet; Bjørnson home museum at Aulestad, 279; Norwegian Ibsen Museums, 303, 306 Dallinger, Petra Maria, 18 Damrosch, David, 230 Daniel Owen exhibition in Mold, Wales, 11 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 14 Dante Alighieri, 200 Darwin, Charles, 8–9 Därzińš, Emïls, 218 Dass, Peter, 42, 48–51, 62; Nordlands Trompet (Peter Dass poems), 48, 50. See also Petter Dass Museum Davidson, Patricia, 258–59 democratization; financing author museums and, 324; transformation of author museums and, 5, 20, 21, 22, 322–23 Den 17de Mai, Norwegian Ibsen Museums in, 300–301, 305 Denton, Kirk A., 229 Derrida, Jacques, 188; Specters of Marx, 109–15 Dickens World in Chatham, 321 Didžiuliai, Liudvika and Stanislovas, 219 Digital Archive at PIM in Budapest, 84 Digital Library System Oria, 148–50 digitized recordings, enlargement of exhibitions with, 86 Ditlevsen, Viggo, 64n11 Donici, Alexandru (‘Alecu’), 222 Douglas, Jennifer, 158, 168 Dreyfus, Alfred, 277, 291–92 Duan Yong, 247 Dudley, Sandra, 5, 321 Dumas, Alexandre, 14 Duncan, Carol, 4–5, 49 Duyar, Gürdal, 161 Dvergsdal, Alvhild, 181–82 Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von, 79 Egeland, Marianne, 10, 19, 22, 23, 25, 277–94 Ek-Nilsson, Katarina, 119, 120, 121, 132n9 Ekelöf, Gunnar, 12, 14–15, 18, 21, 139, 154, 157–63, 165, 167, 168, 169, 171–72; Diwan Trilogy, 160; En röst, 165; En självbiografi, 165; Partitur, 165; Turkey, productivity on travels to, 160; Turkey, scattering of ashes in River Pactolus in, 171. See also Gunnar Ekelöf Room Ekelöf, Ingrid, 21, 154–61, 162–63, 168, 171– 72; metamorphosis from Nini Flodquist to, 159; tasks of widow as archivist, 163–67 Ekelöf, Suzanne, 155, 161 Ekner, Reidar, 161, 165, 174n8 Elkan, Sophie, 117, 119, 121, 125, 132n10 Emery, Elizabeth, 15, 320 Eminescu, Mihai, 200 English, James, 236 English-language research tradition, 321

Index Eriksson, Hege Maria, 64n10 Erll, Astrid, 158, 162 Ernst, Wolfgang, 126 Etsy, Jed, 269 Falk, Ingrid, 310 Falkberget, Johan, 63–4n5 Fedkovych, Yuriy, 216 Fehn, Sverre, 51–54, 64n7, 64n10 Felcher, Anastasia, 19, 23–24, 199–228 Felder, Franz Michael, 11 female authors, 121, 271; museums dedicated to, 21 feminist theory, 4, 21 Feszty, Árpád, 90 Fett, Harry, 306, 312 Fezer, Jesko, 186 Filseth, Johan, 280–81 Findeisen, Raoul, 245–46, 250n22–3 Flodquist, Nini (Ingrid), 159 Flodquist, Nun (Gunhild), 159, 161 Fløgstad, Kjartan, 50–51 Fontane, Theodor, 183n5 Forgách, András, 100; No Live Files Remain, 100 Fortunati, Vita, 14 Forty, Adrian, 39, 40 Foucault, Michel, 166 Franko, Ivan, 215 Franz Michael Felder Museum Schoppernau in Vorarlberg, 11 Freding, Thyra, 129 Fröhlich, Katharina and sisters, 68, 70, 74, 79 Frunchak, Svitlana, 216 Fulsås, Narve, 19, 25, 295–318 Galan, Yaroslav, 221 Gao Xingjian, 236 Gaomi as fictional setting in Mo Yan’s works, 232 Garborg, Arne, 26, 43, 295 Garborg, Arne and Hulda, 10, 57–59, 125–6 Garborgsenteret in Bryne (author centre), 10, 11, 35, 36, 37, 57–58 García Márquez, Gabriel, 232 Gaskell, Elisabeth, 149 Gathenhielm, Lars, 110, 111, 113 Gedenkstätte (‘memorial site’), 9 gender, non-representation of, 20–21 Genette, Gérard, 158, 169 genre; author home museums and, 11; concept of, 322; expansion of author museum genre, 12; author museum genre denomination and, centrality in German-language research, 9; ‘Homes and Haunts’ book genre, 7 Gfrereis, Heike, 12, 16, 184, 189 ghosts, 105–33; author museums, ghostly strategies in, 106–7; author museums, interwoven layers of voices in, 109; author museums, liminal and phantasmic spaces, 107; ghost in the museum, 113–16;

Index331 ‘Ghosting Grasmere: The Musealisation of Dove Cottage’ (Atkin, P.), 282; ghostly associations, cautious handling of, 106; ghosts, how do they work?, 109–13; ghosts, how they speak at Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka, 116–27; ghost tourism, 106, 108, 126; Hamlet (Shakespeare, W.), 109, 110, 112, 132n3; Homes and Haunts (Booth, A.), 106; Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (Howitt, W.), 107; The Löwensköld Ring (Lagerlöf, S.), 108, 110–12, 114; Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden (Lagerlöf, S.), 117, 123; popularity of, 105–6; Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness! (Lagerlöf, S.), 112; Specters of Marx (Derrida, J.), 109; staging ghosts at Mårbacka, 127–31; Värmland, ghost tourism in, 108; Visit Värmland, 114, 130. See also Selma Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka (home museum) Glåmdalen, 280 Glossy, Karl, 71–72, 80n6 Glück, Franz, 76 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 77, 200, 301; Egmont, 77 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules, 14 Good, Owen, 99 Goodman, Tanya, 271 Gorenburg, 201 Gorky, Maxim (Alexey Peshkov), 204, 209, 225n4 Gosse, Edmund, 304 Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidende, 159, 293n1 Graf, Emily, 19, 21, 23–24, 139, 229–54 Gran, Gerhard, 282 grand buildings, national icons and, 25 Grepstad, Ottar, 41–42, 52, 60 Grillparzer, Franz, 10–11, 68–79; Ahnfrau, 77, 80n3; complex and contradictory nature of Grillparzer, 69–70; Deutsch-Schreiner’s perspective on Grillparzer, 73, 74–75, 77; King Ottokar, his rise and fall, 70, 71, 77; Sappho, 77, 80n3 Grillparzer Apartment. See Wien Museum (Historical Museum of City of Vienna) Grillparzer society, 71–72 ‘Grillparzer Week’ in Vienna (January 1941), 73 Guan Moxian, 234–35, 249n6 Guan Moye, 232 Güngören, Erkal, 161 Gunnar Ekelöf Room in Sigtuna, 154–74; ALVIN Platform for digital collections, 174n8; archives and writers’ houses as texts and media, 157–59; archivist, tasks of Ingrid as, 163–67; Brita Wigforss, influence of, 156, 157, 158, 159–60, 163, 165–66, 167, 168, 172–73; duplicate archive in Gunnar Ekelöf Room, 154–56, 171–72; Home Archive, 155–6, 157, 158, 163, 165,

166, 168–9, 171–73; memory of Gunnar, activities of Ingrid and, 171; metaphors and metonymies of archives, 167–71; Partitur (Ekelöf, G., Ekelöf, I., ed.), 165; remembrance, between forgetting and, 161–63; En röst (Ekelöf, G., Ekelöf, I., ed.), 165; Sigtuna, house on Stora Malmgatan in, 160–61; Sigtunastiftelsen (Sigtuna Foundation), 154, 155, 156, 157, 171, 172; En självbiografi (Ekelöf, G., Ekelöf, I., ed.), 165; Uppsala University Library, 171, 172 Haave, Jørgen, 297, 304, 312, 316n23 Hähnel-Bökens, Barbara, 179 Hamsun, Knut, 10, 43, 45–46, 138, 181–82, 299, 303, 315n5; Hunger, 46; Mysteries, 46 Hamsunsenteret on Hamarøy (author centre), 10; architectural sculpture of, 35, 36, 37, 43–47; configuration of, 45–47; fenestration of, 45; location of, 44–45; weak elements of, 47 Hancock, Nuala, 16 Hansen, Lis, 17 Hanssen, Arvid, 64n11 Harr, Karl Erik, 64n6 Harrison, Rodney, 139 Haugdal, Elin, 6, 10, 20, 25, 35–67, 142–3 Hauge, Olav H., 10, 26, 138, 173n4. See also Olav H. Hauge-senteret Haugen, Paal-Helge, 63n4 Haworth Parsonage, Brontë sisters and, 89, 107, 271, 272 Hazard, Erin, 15 Hemmer, Bjørn, 308 Hendrix, Harald, 90, 93, 142, 158, 169, 320; author museums, expanded spaces and changing contexts of, 3, 6, 7, 8, 14, 15, 17, 20, 22; ghostly voices in author museums, 106, 125, 127; housing world literature, Ibsen Museums and, 298, 308, 309, 310, 312; new architecture in author museums and centres, 35, 39, 42, 54 Henning, Michelle, 148, 149 Hetherington, Kevin, 144 Hevrøy, Stein A., 138 Hill Top, home of Beatrix Potter in Lake District, 272 Hirsch, Solveig, 181–82 Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien (1888), 70–71, 80n3–8, 80n13, 81n14–15. See also Wien Museum Hitler, Adolf, 286 Hochkirchen, Britta, 16–17 Hoem, Edvard, 279, 288, 290 Hoffmann, Anna Rebecca, 9–10, 13, 17, 78 Holl, Steven, 40, 43–44, 45, 46–47 Holloway, Julian, 105, 106, 116, 123, 124 Holm, Christine, 9 Holmebakk, Carl-Viggo, 56–57 Holmes, Mary, 108, 121

332 home’; discourse of, Norwegian Ibsen Museums and, 302–3; people and, Bjørnsonmuseum at Aulestad and, 281–3 Home Archive, Gunnar Ekelõf Room and, 155–6, 157, 158, 163, 165, 166, 168–9, 171–73 Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean, 4–5 Hornstein, Shelley, 40–1, 61 Hou Zongkai, 249n6 Howitt, William, 107 Huang Xuanfan, 243 Hügel, Hans-Otto, 179 Hurdley, Rachel, 169 hypercanon, Damrosch’s notion of, 230 Ibsen, Bergljot, 299 Ibsen, Hedvig, 304 Ibsen, Henrik, 19, 25; appropriation for Oslo of, 307–10; Catiline, 297; Den 17de Mai, 300–301, 305; death of, 295, 296; A Doll’s House, 302, 310; Ghosts, 300, 302; grave of, 299; Hedda Gabler, 301; Ibsen’s Houses (Sandberg, M.), 302; John Gabriel Borkman, 298; League of Youth, 300, 306; The Master Builder, 302; ‘The Miner’, 299; musealization of, delay in, 296; obituaries and contested narrative on, 299–301; Peer Gynt, 300–301; seventieth birthday speech (1898), 298; Skien, relationship with city, 303–7; SocialDemokraten, 300, 301, 305, 315n9–11; When We Dead Awaken, 298, 302; The Wild Duck, 306, 307. See also Norwegian Ibsen Museums Ibsen, Kurt, 306–7 Ibsen, Sigurd, 296, 298–99 Ibsen, Susanna, 296, 299 Ibsenårbok (Ibsen Year Book), 305 Ibsen Museum in Grimstad; Catiline (Henrik Ibsen play), 297; Dagbladet, 303; Ghosts (Henrik Ibsen play), 300, 302. See also Norwegian Ibsen Museums Ibsen Museum in Oslo; Arbins Gate, disassembling of, 296–9; Ghosts, 300, 302; ibsenmuseet.no, 309; Ibsen’s Bathtub: The Restoration of Henrik Ibsen’s Apartment (film by Erling Borgen), 309–10; John Gabriel Borkman, 298; Oslo, appropriation of Ibsen for, 307–10; A Thing or Two About Ibsen, 309, 310; When We Dead Awaken, 298, 302. See also Norwegian Ibsen Museums Ibsen Museum in Skien (Venstøp); Dagbladet, 306; Einar Østvedt and, 305–6, 311, 312; Henrik Ibsen og Skien (Mosfjeld, O.), 305; Ibsenårbok (Ibsen Year Book), 305; League of Youth, 300, 306; Skien, Ibsen’s troubled relationship with, 303–7; The Wild Duck, 306, 307. See also Norwegian Ibsen Museums identity building, author museums and, 22–24 image, 77, 126, 205, 207, 216, 278, 287; construction of, 230; cover image, 169–71;

Index definitive image, 115; landmark architecture, image imprinting of, 61; of Lu Xun, tailoring of, 238–40, 242; national image, 62; past, conjuring up authentic image of, 106; as rhetorical device, 231; ‘spatial image’, 178, 183 Inglis, David, 108, 121 interdisciplinarity, 3, 150, 174, 180–81, 183, 321–22; interdisciplinary working, 188–89 International Council of Museums (ICOM), 1, 191, 193n7, 323 Irving, John, 69, 77; The World According to Garp, 69 Ivar Aasen Centre in Ørsta; configuration of, ‘line’ in the landscape and, 53; language in concrete, 35, 36, 37, 51–54; ‘scenographic’ elements, 52–53 Jackson, Don D., 183n2 Jacobsen, J.P., 159 Jakobson, Carl Robert, 210 Jakobson, Roman, 13, 109, 115 Jeffery, Thomas, 265 Jókai, Mór, 90 József, Attila, 87, 96–97 József, Etus, 97 Kafka, Franz, 72–73, 98 Kalevipoeg (Kreutzwald, F.R.), 210 Kamel, Susan, 186 Karelo-Finnish SSR, 209, 217–18 Karinthy, Frigyes, 91 Karoo, locating Schreiner across the, 264–70 Kastberger, Klaus, 18 Kemény, Zsófi, 95 Keskiner, Zafar, 161 Kilger, Gerhard, 177–78 King, Coretta Scott, 257 Kjær, Johan Albert Julius, 141 Klassekampen, 64n12 Kmoniceck, Elfriede, 81n16 Knausgård, Karl Ove, 97; My Struggle, 97 Knutsen, Gunnar, 311 Kobler, Tristan, 178, 184–85, 188, 189 Kobylianska, Olha, 216 Koht, Halvdan, 305, 306 Koidula, Lydia, 210 Kolas, Yakub, 218, 220 Kollar, Elke, 16 Korff, Gottfried, 1, 183 Krane, Borghild, 141, 149 Krauss, Rosalind, 46–7 Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold, 210; Krévé, Vincas (‘Mickevićius’), 219–20 Kristensen, Marius, 122 Krushchev, Nikita, 202, 206 Krylov, Ivan, 222 Labrouste, Henri, 58 Lagerlöf, Erik Gustaf, 116

Index333 Lagerlöf, Selma, 13, 14, 21, 108–13, 116–31, 132n1–2, 132n4–5, 132n11, 297, 308; Jerusalem I, 113; Liljecronas hem, 127–8; The Löwensköld Ring, 108, 110–12, 114; Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden; The Saga of Gösta Berling, 108, 113, 117, 129; Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!, 112. See also Selma Lagerlöf’s Mårbacka Lagerroth, Ulla-Britt, 129 Lai He, 21, 248, 249–50n13, 250n17; clashing literary establishments and, 242–44; National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature and National Museum of Taiwan Literature, exhibits in, 242, 244, 248; The Steelyard (Lai He), 244 Lai He Museum in Zhanghua, 242 Lande, Dana Ryan, 19, 21, 23, 24, 125, 255–76 Landgren, Bengt, 165 Lange-Greve, Susanne, 187–88 Langslet, Lars Roar, 309–310 Larsson, Lisbeth, 116 Latour, Bruno, 137, 139, 140, 231, 242 Lavransdatter, Kristin, 54 Law, John, 137 Lefebvre, Henri, 13 Lejeune, Philippe, 92 Lenin, Vladimir I., 203 LHBTQ+ movement, 20–21 Li Oufan, 239 Lichtwark, Alfred, 177, 183n1 Lie, Jonas, 295 Lie, Tanja, 53 Lin Yutang, 21, 139, 243, 248, 249–50n13, 250n24; The Importance of Living, 245; My Country and My People, 245; system of rehabilitation and, 245–48; The Vigil of a Nation, 245 Lin Yutang Memorial Library, 139, 246 literarische Gedenkstätte (‘literary memorial site’), 9 literary communication (literarische Kommunikation), exhibition of, 17 literary languages, founding fatherhood of, 200 literary memory, author home museums as contested sites of, 313–14 literary museums; dedicated to Russian authors, 201; information dissemination and, 320– 21, 324; in USSR, overview on, 202–7. See also author museums; literature museums; Sovietization of literary museums in Western borderlands (1940–1979) literary tourism, 320; development of, 7; early days of author museums and, 6–7; history and phenomenology of, 7–8; landscapes and fictional settings, connections between, 8; maps as text for, 98–100; Norwegian Ibsen Museums and, 295. See also Watson, Nicola J.

literature; adolescents and learning about, 84–85; architecture and, 39–40; heritage landscapes of South Africa and, 270–74 literature, exhibition of, 177–93; abstraction, art of, 189–91; author museums, 16–19; departure point, 180–83; genuine artworks and, 191–92; inspiration for thought, 189–91; interdisciplinary working, 188–89; multidimensionality, embrace of, 187–88; redefinition of design process, 186–87; scenography, 177–78, 180, 183, 184, 186, 188–89, 192–93; ‘Shaping Stories’ (Kobler, T.), 178; The Topology of the Intangible (DASA), 178; transformation as process beyond visual appearance, 183–85; transformation of literary museums, 177–80; transformation process, challenges to, 185–92; Zeissig’s perspective on, 18–19 literature museums, 6, 9, 12, 20, 41. See also Amazwi South African Museum of Literature; National English Literary Museum; National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature; National Museum of Taiwan Literature; Museum of Modern Literature; Schiller National Museum in Marbach; Petőfi Literary Museum local and national narratives, meeting points for, 255–60 local community involvement with author museums, 324 location of author museums (and politics of who gets one), 20–22 Loos, Adolf, 80n2 Lori, Pierre, 14 Lotman, Yuri M., 162, 167 Louisa M. Alcott Museum (Orchard House) Løvenskiold, Herman, 306 Lowenthal, David, 113 Lu Xun (‘Zhou Shuren’), 21, 232, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249–50n13, 250n22; ‘Diary of a madman’ (Lu Xun), 238; system of administrative ranking and, 237–42 Lu Xun museums, 237, 239, 248, 249–50n13; museum in Beijing, 234, 237, 245–46; museum in Shanghai, 237; museum in Shaoxing, 237, 239–40; museum in Xiamen, 239–42 Lukacs, György, 102n4 Lund, Niels D., 14, 41, 60, 62, 63n3 Lundgren, Ellen, 120, 129 Luts, Oskar, 218 Lutsevich, Ivan (‘Yanka Kupala’), 215, 218, 220 LY Arkitekter, Oslo, 44 Lyon, Petra, 155 Maćiulis, Jonas (‘Maironis’), 219 MacKeith, Peter, 44, 45 MacNeil, Heather, 158, 168 Maddern, Jo Frances, 114, 126 Maèiulis, Jonas (‘Maironis’), 219 Makhanda ka Nxele, 260–61

334 Makhotina, Ekaterina, 203, 218 Malmsten, Bodil, 159 Malraux, André, 190 Mandela, Nelson, 255, 263 Mandel’shtam, Nadezhda, 167, 172 Mandel’shtam, Osip, 167 Mann, Thomas, 220 Mao Dun Literature Prize, 249n9–11 Mao Zedong, 229, 237–38, 242, 249n12 Markstedt, Louise, 161 material semantics approach (Materialsemantik) to exhibition, 17 Matsumoto, Seichō. See Seichō Matsumoto memorial museum Mbeki, Thabo, 264 Medbøe, Odd, 307 Media Archives at PIM in Budapest, 86, 87–88, 101 Meinrad, Josef, 77, 81n16 memorialization; architecture and memory policy, 62; memorial exhibitions, changing spaces of, 86, 101–2; memory, illusions of, 96–97; ‘memory madness’, Skavlan’s notion of, 303; memory process, participation in, 88–91; of Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) literary heritage, 222; realism, memorial culture and, 7; transformation of memorial spaces, 87–88. See also commemoration; remembrance Metz, Christian, 191 Meyer, Harald, 2 Michelet, Jules, 126 Mickiewicz, Adam, 200, 214, 215, 218 Mitchell, W.J.T., 231 Mo Yan, 21, 232, 238, 242–43, 248, 249n2, 249n6, 249n8; Big breasts and wide hips, 232; ‘Black beach’, 236; Gaomi as fictional setting in, 232; Frog, 232, 235–36; The Garlic ballads, 232; Life and death are wearing me out, 232; Pow!, 232; prize system and, 232–37; Red sorghum clan, 232; Sandalwood death, 232 Mo Yan Literature Museum, 232–237 Mo Yan Research Society, 232 Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), 221–22 Morgenbladet, 300, 301 Mori Ōgai, 10 Mori Ōgai memorial museums in Tokyo and Tsuwano, 10 Morris, William, 14 Mosfjeld, Oskar, 304, 305, 315n17 Mosskin, Peter, 159, 161, 162 Müller, Amalie (‘Skram’), 280, 281, 283 multidimensionality; embrace of, exhibition of literature and, 187–88; multidimensional aspects of author museums, 13 musealization; Ibsen, delay in musealization of, 296; musealized homes of writers, 8–9 museology, 2, 3, 102; Chinese museum displays, analysis of, 231–2; Critical

Index Museology, 4; expansion of, 4–5; New Museology, 4; person museums, Bohman’s perspective on, 62; traditional art and, room for, 84 Museum of Modern Literature, 12 museum purposes, acquisition of ‘homes’ for, 296 Mykolaitis-Putinas, Vincas, 220 narrative expansion, landscapes of, 270–74 Nath, Atanu, 324 National English Literary Museum (NELM) in South Africa, 259, 261 National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (NMMCL), 234, 243, 244 National Museum of Taiwan Literature (NMTL), 243, 244 National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), 73 National Trust (UK), 272 Nationalist Party of China (GMD), 243 Natsume Sōseki memorial museum in Tokyo, 10 Nazi affiliations of Erling Bjørnson, 285–7 Néris, Saloméja, 219 Neundlinger, Helmut, 15, 18 Tsar Nicholas I, 202 Nicolaysen, Bjørn Kvalsvik, 64n12 Nobel Foundation, 140 Nora, Pierre, 88, 92, 162 Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 38, 63n1–2 North, Julian, 7 Norway; geographical distribution of author museums in, 61–62; Nasjonale turistveger, 64n13; National Archives of, 293n3; National Dictionary of Biography, 311; plans for additional museums, 63–64n5 Norwegian Ibsen Museums, 295–316; acquisition of ‘homes’ for, 296; authenticity, 302–3; authorship, cult of, 295; Dagbladet, 303, 306; ‘home’, discourse of, 302–3; Ibsen as world celebrity, 295; Ibsen’s Houses (Sandberg, M.), 302; impossible homecoming, 311–13; literary memory, author home museums as contested sites of, 313–14; literary tourism, 295; ‘memory madness’, Skavlan’s notion of, 303; musealization of Ibsen, delay in, 296; obituaries, contested Ibsen narrative and, 299–301. See also Ibsen, Henrik; Ibsen Museum in Grimstad; Ibsen Museum in Oslo; Ibsen Museum in Skien Nyugat, 102n1 Olav H. Hauge-senteret in Ulvik, 10 Olive Schreiner House Museum in Cradock, 21, 23, 24, 125, 255–75, 324; outpost of Amazwi South African Museum of Literature, 260–64 Olsson, Anders, 165 Oma, Tarald, 64n12

Index335 online platforms, communications through, 83–84, 85–86 Oom, Anna, 117 Oram, Richard, 138, 145, 150 Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), 221 Orosz, Eva-Maria, 10–11, 68–82, 127 Ort der ratio (‘place of rationality’), 9 Orzeszko, Eliza, 214 Oslo, appropriation of Ibsen for, 307–10 Østvedt, Einar, 305–6, 311, 312 Oterdahl, Jeanna, 119–20 Owen, Daniel, 11 Pallasmaa, Juhani, 45, 63n1 Palm, Anna-Karin, 21, 108, 116–21, 131, 132n7, 132n11 Paton, Alan, 259; Cry the Beloved Country, 259 Peléda Lazdynū, 219 People’s Daily, 250n24 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Prize for Outstanding Literature and Art, 236 People’s Literature Magazine, 249n9 person museums, Bohman’s perspective on, 62 Personalmuseum (‘personality museum’), 4, 9 Petkevićaité-Bité, Gabrielé, 220 Petőfi, Sándor, 12, 86, 90, 94, 95, 200 Petőfi Literary Museum (PIM) in Budapest, 12, 83–103; Association of Hungarian Literary Memorial Houses (MIRE), 102n3; audiences, keeping in touch with, 84, 101; communication and announcement of new events, 83–84; Digital Archive at, 84; digitized recordings, enlargement of exhibitions with, 86; János Arany bicentenary, 93–96; literary tours, 98–100; literature, adolescents and learning about, 84–85; Media Archives at, 86, 87–88, 101; memorial exhibitions, changing spaces of, 86, 101–2; memorial spaces, transfotmation of, 87–88; memory, illusions of, 96–97; memory process, participation in, 88–91; online platforms, communications through, 83–84, 85–86; remembrance, autobiography and, 91–93; My Struggle (Knausgård, K.O.), 97 Petri, György, 87, 99–100 Petter Dass Museum at Alstahaug; configuration of, 48–50; time continuum and ‘transformative power’ within, 50; transparent cave of, 35, 36, 37, 48–51, 62 Phelan, James, 256, 274n1 Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, 4 Plaatje, Sol, 272, 275n4, 324; Mhudi, 272. See also Sol Plaatje Museum in Kimberley Poe, Edgar Allan, 123 Poesch, Janina, 178 politics, transformation of author museums and, 5, 19–26, 322 polyphonic spaces, museums as, 323 Popperwell, Ronald, 138

postcolonial theory, 4 Postiglione, Gennaro, 51 Pötschner, Peter, 76 Potter, Beatrix, 8, 272; The Tale of Tom Kitten (Potter, B.), 272. See also Beatrix Potter’s Garden Potter, Harry (J.K. Rowling character), 128 Praz, Mario, 14, 15 Prøysen, Alf, 43, 59 Prøysen House in Ringsaker, 35, 36, 37, 59 Pu Songling, 233; Strange stories from the Liao Studio, 233 Pushkin, Alexander, 200, 202, 204, 211–12, 216–17, 218, 221–22, 223 Pushkin, Grigory and Varvana, 212 Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), 238 Quisling, Vidkun, 285, 286 Ragana, Šatrijos, 220 Rainis, Janis, 211, 218 Rancière, Jacques, 114 Reifenscheid, Beate, 183n7 Rem, Tore, 299 remembrance; autobiography and, 91–93; disremembrance and, processes of, 25; in experience of a building, 40–41; between forgetting and, 161–63; memory policy, architecture and, 62–63. See also commemoration; memorialization Rigney, Ann, 14, 22 Ristolainen, Mari, 223 Röhrig, Géza, 94–95 Ross, Ivan, 128 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 89–90, 102–3n5 Rozentāls, Janis, 218 Ruin, Hans, 126 Runeberg, Johan Ludvig, 295 Russia; cultural nationalism of (1930s and 1940s), 223; literary-centred cultural orientation in, 200; quasi-sacred status of writers and poets in, 201 Saha, Parmita, 324 Salfellner, Harald, 98 Sandahl, Jette, 2, 323 Sandberg, Mark, 302 Sandel, Cora, 63–4n5 Sandler, Stephanie, 204 Sandvig, Anders, 302 Sars, Ernst, 291 Sauer, August, 73 ‘S. B.’ (1956) in Fædrelandsvennen, 312 scenography; exhibition of literature, scenographer’s perspective on, 192–93; literature, exhibition of, 177–78, 180, 183, 184, 186, 188–89 Schärer, Martin R., 189, 190 Schiller, Friedrich, 320 Schiller House in Leipzig, 320 Schiller National Museum in Marbach, 12

336 Schimanski, Johan, 13, 26, 105–35 Schirach, Baldur von, 73 Schlaffer, Hannelore, 179 Schlag, Eberhard, 178 Schoeman, Karel, 265–66, 268 Schoene, Janneke, 17 Schramm, Stuart R., 249n12 Schreiner, Olive, 21, 24, 125, 255–56, 259–60, 264, 324; situation in Cradock and locating across the Karoo, 264–70; The Story of an African Farm, 259–60, 267, 268, 269; Thoughts on South Africa, 267. See also Olive Schreiner House Museum Scott, Sir Walter, 14, 15, 121. See also Abbotsford Seichō Matsumoto memorial museum in Kitakyushu, 10 Selma Lagerlöf ’s Mårbacka (home museum), 13, 14, 106–14, 116–31 Shakespeare, William, 148–9, 200, 295; birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon, 320; Hamlet, 109, 110, 112, 115, 132n3 Shanghai Literature, 233 Shen Peng, 233 Shepard, Jesse, 21 Shevchenko, Taras, 200, 218, 222 Sigrid Undset’s Home and Garden at Bjerkebæk, 18, 247, 251n25; architecture, 35, 36, 37, 54–57, 62–63; personal book collection at, 136–37, 140–50; remembrance and expression in, 54–55; visitor centre, functionality of, 56 Sigtunastiftelsen (Sigtuna Foundation), 154, 155, 156, 157, 171, 172 Simmel, Georg, 13 site-specificity of author museums, 60–61 Sivertsen, Helge, 307 Skavlan, Einar, 303, 306 Skien, Ibsen’s troubled relationship with, 303–7 Skjelstad, Rolf, 58 Smuul, Juhan, 218 Snøhetta architects, 48 Soares, Bruno B., 2, 4 Social-Demokraten; Bjørnson home museum at Aulestad, 284, 293n2; Norwegian Ibsen Museums, 300, 301, 305 Södergran, Edith, 162 Soja, Edward, 13 Sol Plaatje Museum in Kimberley, 272, 324 Sommar, Carl Olov, 157, 161, 171 Sōseki, Natsume, 10 South Africa, author museums in, 255–75; Amazwi South African Museum of Literature, 256; apartheid era legacies, 258–59; Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, 270; architectural changes in heritage sites, 261; artefacts, interpretation and representation of, 257; Department of Arts and Culture, 257; Freedom Park in Pretoria, 270; historic house museums, roles of, 257–58; history in South Africa,

Index complicated nature of, 256–57; Ikhamanga Hall, 256, 263–64, 269–70, 273–74; literary heritage spaces, evolution in, 255–56; literature and heritage landscapes, 270–74; local and national narratives, meeting points for, 255–60; Mpumalanga Heritage Museum near Durban, 270; narrative analysis, 256; narrative expansion, landscapes of, 270–74; National English Literary Museum (NELM), 259, 261; postapartheid tourist routes, 259; Rainbow Nation, renaming of South Africa as, 258; Red Location Museum, 261–62; Staging Solidarity (Goodman, T.), 271; The Story of an African Farm (Schreiner, O.), 267, 268, 269; Thoughts on South Africa (Schreiner, O.), 267; Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 271; Voortrekker Monument, 261; ‘WHITES ONLY Bench’ (Vladislavić, I.), 256–57; Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, 270. See also Olive Schreiner House Museum; Schreiner, Olive Sovietization of literary museums in Western borderlands, 199–225; Alexander Pushkin, 200, 202, 204, 211–12, 216–17, 218, 221–22, 223; All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Monuments (VOOPliK), 206; Chkalovskaya kommuna (Chkalov commune) newspaper, 225n3; cultural liberalization of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, 202; cultural sainthood, 200; de-Stalinization and Literary museums’ network expansion (1953–79), 217–22, 224; Ivan Lutsevich (‘Yanka Kupala’) and, 215, 218, 220; Josef Stalin and Stalinism and, 204, 206; Kalevipoeg (Kreutzwald, F.R.), 210; KareloFinnish SSR, 209, 217–18; Leonid Brezhnev and, 202, 206–7; literary languages, founding fatherhood of, 200; literary museums dedicated to Russian authors, 201; literary museums in USSR, overview on, 202–7; memorialization of MSSR literary heritage, 222; Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), 221–22; Nikita Krushchev and, 202, 206; Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), 221; regional cultural icons, symbolic appropriation of, 200–201; Russia, cultural nationalism of (1930s and 1940s), 223; Russia, literary-centred cultural orientation in, 200; Russia, quasi-sacred status of writers and poets; in, 201; ‘Soviet ethnophilia’, 201–2; Soviet mentality, adoption of, 199– 200; Soviet Union, territories incorporated into, 199; state-sponsored atheism, 201; TASS (Russian News Agency), 209, 225n3; Trujenik (Hard worker) newspaper, 225n3; veneration of authors, 199, 223; Western borderlands, literary museums in wartime and late Stalinism (1940–53), 202–7, 223 Spring, Ulrike, 13, 26, 105–135, 173n1

Index337 Sruoga, Balys, 219 staging strategies, 14–15 Stagnelius, Erik Johan, 162 Stalin, Josef (and Stalinism), 204, 206, 207–17 Steenkamp, Alta, 261 Stefanyk, Vasyl, 215 Sternfeld, Nora, 180, 186, 192 Stiebel, Lindy, 259 Stousland, Anna, 305 Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace at, 320 Strindberg, August, 14, 120, 124, 298 Su Yongyuan, 240 Sun Huibin, 234 Svanberg, Fredrik, 140 Svarstad, Anders Castus, 141 Svarstad, Christianne Undset, 141 Svarstad, Hans Benedict Undset, 141 Svarstad (née Neraas), Christianne Undset, 141, 142 Tammsaare, Anton Hansen, 210, 218 tangible and intangible, relationship, 12–16 TASS (Russian News Agency), 209, 225n3 Taylor, R., 50 technical design and interactivity of author museums, 324 territorial anchoring, author museums and, 60–61 Teßmann, Levke, 17 Thompson, Leonard, 258 Tidens Tegn, 293n2 Tilvytis, Teofilis, 220 Todorov, Tzvetan, 112 Topelius, Zacharias, 295 The Topology of the Intangible (DASA), 178 transformations; challenges in transformation process, 185–92; literary museums, transformation of, 177–80; potential for author museums, 1, 3; transformation as process beyond visual appearance, 183–85 Transforming Author Museums (TRAUM) project, 23, 26–27, 131, 132, 151, 193n4, 274, 325 Trodahl, Ole Serenius, 64n12 Trujenik, 225n3 Tuglas, Friedebert, 218 Turkey; productivity of Gunnar Ekelöf on travels to, 160; scattering of Ekelöf ashes in River Pactolus in, 171 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond, 258 21st Century magazine, 249n9 Ukrainka, Lesya, 216 Undset, Sigrid, 18, 21, 42–43, 54–57, 62–63, 136, 139–40, 247, 251n25; Fru Marta Oulie, 140–41; Jenny, 141; Kristin Lavransdatter, 141; Olav Audunssøn, 141 UNIT (Directorate for ICT and Joint Services for Higher Education and Research), 137 United States, museum landscape in, 4

Upïts, Andrejs, 211, 218 Uppsala University Library, 171, 172 Valanèius, Bishop Motiejus, 220 Van Meurs, Wim P., 217 Vanslova, E. G., 199, 203, 209, 225n2 Värmland, ghost tourism in, 108 Veidenbaums, Eduards, 218 Vesaas, Tarjei, 312 Vestly, Anne Cath, 63–4n5 Vezér, Erzsébet, 102n4 Vigeland, Gustav, 298–99, 315n4 Vilde, Eduard, 210 Visit Värmland, 114, 130 Vladislavić, Ivan; ‘WHITES ONLY Bench’, 256–57 Völkel, Otto, 73 Voronina, Olga, 201 Vujacic, Veljko, 203, 204 Wachtel, Andrew, 200 Waldstein, Maxim, 201 Walpole, Horace, 14 Warnecke, Jan-Christian, 178 wartime Aulestad, 285–7 Watson, Nicola J., 35, 68, 89, 90, 98, 142, 242–43, 257–58, 271–72, 298, 308, 320, 321; author museums, expanded spaces and changing contexts of, 3, 5, 6, 7–8, 8–9, 13, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22; The Author’s Effects, 15, 106, 107, 321; ghostly voices in author museums, 106–8, 114, 125; Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, 7–8, 14; The Literary Tourist, 7–8, 106, 257–58 Watzlawick, Paul, 177–78, 183n2 Weeks, Theodor, 211, 218 Wehnert, Stefanie, 187, 192, 324 Weigel, Helene, 173n4 Weil, Stephen, 273 West, Patricia, 289 Western Han Dynasty (202 BCE – 9 BCE), 233 Wien Museum (Historical Museum of City of Vienna), 11–12, 68–81; Ahnfrau (Franz Grillparzer drama), 77, 80n3; Burgtheater in Vienna, 77; Grillparzer Apartment (1941– 57), 73–75; emotions, staging reliance on, 74; ‘typical old-Viennese interior’, 75; Grillparzer Apartment (1961–2019); aspects of history of mentalities, 75–78; historical preservation, high standards of, 76; Grillparzer presentation upcoming, outlook for, 78–79; Grillparzer Room (1888–1941), 70–73; meticulous reconstruction of, 70–71; presentation of, success of, 71–73; ‘Grillparzer Week’ in Vienna (January 1941), 73; Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien (1888), 70–71, 80n3–8, 80n13, 81n14–15; identity formation and commemoration, Grillparzer in, 77–78; identity of national poet, perpetuation of, 69; King Ottokar, his

338 rise and fall (Franz Grillparzer drama), 71; museological aim, 68; National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), 73; Period Rooms, 69, 76–77; Sappho (Franz Grillparzer drama), 80n3; Spiegelgasse 21 in Vienna city centre, apartment at, 68; The World According to Garp (Irving, J.), 69 Wigert, Knut, 308 Wigforss, Brita, 156, 157, 158, 159–60, 163, 165–66, 167, 168, 172–73 Wigforss, Harald, 159 Wilson-Costa, Karyn, 20 Witcomb, Andrea, 38, 149–50 Witz, Leslie, 259 Wivel, Henrik, 308, 316n26–8 Woolf, Virginia, 16 Wordsworth, William, 278, 289, 292 Wordsworth museum (Dove Cottage); ‘Ghosting Grasmere: The Musealisation of Dove Cottage’ (Atkin, P.), 282

Index Workman, Liz, 123 writer’s book collections, 138–9 Writers Union in China, 233 writing architecture, 40–41 Wu Jianmin, 249n6 Xu Chun, 249n3 Young, Linda, 264 Zankl, Franz Rudolf, 3 Zeissig, Vanessa, 16, 18–19, 129, 177–96 Zemgulys, Andrea, 3, 22 Zhu Xiangqian, 249n9 Žukauskas-Vienuolis, Antanas, 219