Par lagerkvist biography examples
Lagerkvist wrote poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and essays of considerable expressive power and influence [ citation needed ] from his early 20s to his late 70s. One of his central themes was the fundamental question of good and evil, which he examined through such figures as Barabbas , the man who was freed instead of Jesus, and Ahasuerus , the Wandering Jew.
As a moralist, he used religious motifs and figures from the Christian tradition without following the doctrines of a church. He received a traditional religious education — he would later say, with little exaggeration, that he "had had the good fortune to grow up in a home where the only books known were the Bible and the Book of Hymns".
In his teens he broke away from Christian beliefs, but, unlike many other writers and thinkers in his generation, he did not become vehemently critical of religious beliefs as such. Though he was politically a socialist for most of his life, he never indulged in the idea that "religion is the opium of the people".
Pär Lagerkvist was a novelist, poet,
Much of his writing is informed by a lifelong interest in man and his symbols and gods, and in the position of Man both as individual and mankind in a world where the Divine is no longer present, no longer speaking. His anguish was derived from his fear of death, the World War , and personal crisis. He tried to explore how a person can find a meaningful life in a world where a war can kill millions for very little reason.
From The Eternal Smile on, his style largely abandoned the expressionist pathos and brusque effects of his early works and there was a strong striving for simplicity, classical precision and clean telling, sometimes appearing close to naivism. The content, however, was never truly naive. A Swedish critic remarked that "Lagerkvist and John the Evangelist are two masters at expressing profound things with a highly restricted choice of words".
In September Lagerkvist was elected a member of the Swedish Academy , succeeding Verner von Heidenstam on chair 8 in December the same year. The novel is based on a Biblical story. Jesus of Nazareth was sentenced to die by the Roman authorities immediately before the Jewish Passover , when it was customary for the Romans to release someone convicted of a capital offense.